Meanwhile Quentin and Alice plugged away at their mandatory senior theses with steadily diminishing enthusiasm. Alice was attempting to isolate an individual photon and freeze it in place, halting its headlong light-speed flight. She constructed an intricate trap for it out of wood and glass, interwoven with a hellishly complex spherical tangle of glowing indigo gramarye. But in the end nobody was quite sure whether the photon was in there or not, and they couldn’t figure out how to prove it one way or the other. Privately Alice confessed to Quentin that she wasn’t totally sure either, and she was genuinely hoping the faculty could settle it one way or the other, because it was driving her insane. After a week of increasingly fractious debate that settled nothing, they voted to give Alice the lowest possible passing grade and leave it at that.
For his project Quentin planned to fly to the moon and back. Distance-wise he figured he could get there in a couple of days, straight shot, and after his Antarctic adventure he was pretty solid on personal warmth spells. (Though they weren’t his Discipline either. He’d just about given up on his Discipline.) And the idea had a certain Romantic, lyrical savor to it. He took off from the Sea on a bright, hot, humid spring morning, with Alice and Gretchen and a couple of the more sycophantic new Physical Kids to see him off. The protection spells formed a clear bubble around him. Sounds became distorted, and the green lawn and the smiling faces of his well-wishers took on a surreal fish-eye warp. As he rose, the Earth gradually changed from an infinite matte plain below him to a radiant, bounded blue sphere. Overhead the stars came out and became sharper and steelier and less twinkly.
Six hours into the trip his throat suddenly clamped shut, and iron nails stabbed his eardrums. His eyeballs tried to pry themselves out of their sockets. He had drifted off, and his improvised space bubble had started to fail. Quentin waved his arms like a frantic conductor,
He reversed course. He considered hiding out for a few days and just pretending he’d gone to the moon. Maybe he could score some moon dust off Lovelady, present it as evidence. The air got warmer again. The sky grew lighter. He relaxed as a cocktail of relief and shame filled him, one generous part of each. The world spread out again underneath him: the fractally detailed coastline, the blue water textured like beaten metal, the beckoning claw of Cape Cod.
The worst part turned out to be walking into the Great Hall for dinner that night, two days early, with a sheepish yeah-I-fucked-up grin plastered on his face, which was sunburned a flaming red. After dinner he borrowed Alice’s key and retreated to the Prefects’ Common Room, where he drank too much sherry, sipping it alone in front of the darkened window, even though all he could see was his own reflection, picturing the Hudson River moving past in the darkness, sluggish and swollen with cold spring rain. Alice was studying up in her room. Everybody else was asleep except for a lone weeknight party that was racketing on in one wing, spinning off drunk students in pairs and groups. When he was thoroughly smashed on self-pity and alcohol and the dawn was threatening to leap up at him at any moment, Quentin walked gingerly back to his bedroom, climbing the spiral steps past what used to be Eliot’s room. He weaved a little bit, swigging directly from the sherry bottle, which he’d liberated on his way out.
He felt his intoxication already turning into a hangover, that queasy neurological alchemy that usually happens during sleep. His abdomen was overfull, swollen with tainted viscera. People he’d betrayed came wandering out from the place in his mind where they usually stayed. His parents. James. Julia. Professor March. Amanda Orloff. Even old dead Mr. What’s-his-name, his Princeton interviewer. They all watched him dispassionately. He was beneath their contempt.
