But one afternoon a few weeks after he arrived, as he sat at his desk, his watery blue eyes trailing over words of consummate power written centuries ago with a pen made out of a hippogriff feather, Penny found his mind wandering. His large, usually lineless brow crinkled. Something was sapping his powers of concentration. Was he under attack, maybe by a rival researcher? Who would dare! He rubbed his eyes and shook his head and focused harder. But his attention continued to drift.
It turned out that Penny had discovered in himself a weakness, a flaw he never would have suspected himself of in a thousand years, an age to which, with a few careful modifications that he would look into when he had the time, he had every intention of living. The flaw was this: he was lonely.
The idea was outrageous. It was humiliating. He, Penny, was a stone-cold loner, a desperado. He was the Han Solo of Oslo. He knew and loved this about himself. He had spent four interminable years at Brakebills surrounded by idiots—except for Melanie, as he privately referred to Professor Van der Weghe—and now he was finally free of their incessant bullshit.
But now Penny found himself doing things for no reason. Unproductive things. He stood on a concrete dam near his farmhouse and threw down rocks to break up the thin crust of ice that formed on the outflow pond. He walked the mile and a half to the center of town and played video games in the windowless video arcade back behind the pharmacy, stuffing his mouth with stale gumballs from the gumball machine, alongside the no-hope, dead-eyed teenagers who hung out there and did the exact same thing. He made awkward, inexperienced eyes at the underage clerk at the Book Bin, which actually sold mostly stationery and greeting cards, not books. He confided his troubles to the miserable pod of four buffalo who lived on the buffalo farm out on the Bar Harbor road. He thought about climbing over the fence and petting one of their huge, wedge-shaped heads, but he didn’t quite have the nerve. They were big buffalo, and you never knew what they were thinking.
That was September. By October he had bought an herb-green Subaru Impreza and was making regular trips to a dance club in Bangor, swigging from a fifth of vodka on the passenger seat (since the club was all ages and didn’t serve alcohol) as he drove the forty-five minutes through trackless pine forests. Progress on his research project had dwindled to almost nothing, a couple of hours a day of listless leafing through old notes punctuated by generous breaks for online porn. It was humiliating.
The dance club in Bangor was open only on Friday and Saturday nights, and all he did there was shoot pool in a half-lit lounge area off the main dance floor with other creepy male loners like himself. But it was in that half-lit lounge on one of those Saturday nights that he spotted, to his secret consternation and even more secret relief and gratitude, a familiar face. It was a hard face to like, the face of an emaciated corpse that hadn’t been particularly attractive even in life, with a horrible pencil mustache on its upper lip. It belonged to the itinerant salesman Lovelady.
Lovelady was in the dance club in Bangor for approximately the same reason that Penny was there: he had run as far away as he could from the world of Brakebills and magic and then gotten lonely. Over a pitcher of Coors Light and a few games of pool, all of which Lovelady won handily—you don’t spend a lifetime trafficking in fake magical items without picking up a few real skills—they exchanged stories.
Lovelady depended heavily for his livelihood on luck and the gullibility of strangers. He spent most of his time trolling the world’s junk shops and estate sales the way longline fishermen troll the ocean. He accosted the emotionally vulnerable widows of recently deceased magicians and loitered on the outskirts of the conversations of his wisers and betters, keeping his eye out for anything that had value or that might plausibly be made to appear to have value. He had spent the past few months in northern England, in a studio apartment over a garage in a dreary suburb of Hull, trying his luck in antique stores and secondhand bookshops. His days were spent on buses and, when he was really down on his luck, on an ancient one-speed bicycle he borrowed without permission from the garage, which he wasn’t supposed to have access to.
