“You’re in one.”
“But a big one. Like a university.”
He shakes his head.
“Magic is artisanal. You apprentice. One at a time. You’ll teach somebody, too, one day. I’ll make you promise before you leave here.”
“Somebody must have a school.”
“Workshops go on in some actual universities. Grafted to them, working veiled. Antioch College in Yellow Springs is a fine example. They had three users in the faculty at one point. They made students they wanted to teach magic get accepted in other fields, fields they taught in the system.”
She remembers her embarrassing introduction to that town, how she hurled herself into a bathtub, off the wagon, and at a toilet.
“Andrew went there?”
Michael nods.
“Studied Russian. And more.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“There’s talk every few years. But everyone’s scared. Three’s the most users it’s wise to gather at one place for very long.”
“Why?”
“Something changes.”
“So nobody ever tried to found a big, dedicated university?”
“Schools were founded. Couple of times.”
“What happened?” she says, absently touching the leaves of the dead tree.
“Different things.”
“Bad?”
“You could say that.”
“Tell me.”
“Most successful one was in England, started in the 1580s. Hid in plain sight. In Deptford, just down the river from London. Did some big things. You know how Spain could never seem to land an armada? It wasn’t just once. They tried three times, got swamped by storms three times. That was no accident.”
“And?”
“They kept killing each other. The survivors determined that too many users together makes it turn dark. They agreed to separate.”
Now she just looks at him. There’s more, and she wants to hear it.
“Last big one was France, outside Paris. Between the wars. Like a dozen users, thirty or so students. They exchanged oaths of fraternity, made loyalty and friendship more important than the magic, drummed out anybody who seemed greedy. Called themselves The Order of the Duck. I saw pictures. Real cute with the short pants and tall socks, even berets and sacks of baguettes, like the stereotype.”
“And then?”
“Something came and killed them.”
“A demon?”
“Sort of. Hitler.”
She furrows her brow.
“Couldn’t they fight, or hide?”
“Can’t fight an army. And it’s hard to hide from other users.”
“Hitler had users?”
He looks at her.
She remembers a picture she saw of Adolf Hitler, surrounded by wide-eyed adorers, all of them half mad. Hitler calm in the middle of the storm of madness. They were looking at him like they were starving for something, something in his words and eyes, something only he could give them. They were addicted to him.
“Oh my God,” she says. “He was one.”
Michael nods.
“Only the very luminous can make it out, but those tapes of him ranting in German? I’ve listened to them. It’s not German. It’s not a human language at all. Something taught him those words. Something he conjured. And you can only hear it for a moment. Because it starts to work on you, starts to sound like German. And if you speak German, it starts to sound like the truth.”
She goes pale.
Wonders what she’s gotten herself into.
Wonders if she wants to know these things.
Thinks it’s too late.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “It’s not all rotten. Now fix the tree.”
She looks at one stone leaf.
She plucks the leaf. Holds it by the stem, holds it up to the sun. So thin opaque light filters through it, lights up its veins and capillaries. You could almost shave with its edges.
She’ll need a word.
Ancient Greek is best for stone.
“Pneuma,” she says.
“Ezasa,” she says.
It liked pneuma better.
It tingled.
She concentrates on the part that glows with the sun behind it, sees the glow turning maple-green.
“Pneuma,” she says again, and breathes on it, as if kindling fire.
Green glows where her breath touched the leaf, starts to creep out toward the edges as fire would creep on paper.
“Ah! Ah!”
The leaf is almost a leaf again.
“Hurry,” he says.
She understands.
She touches the leaf to the rest of the tree, watches the green catch, spread. She blows on it as one would blow kindling, watches it move from leaf to leaf, revivifying the sapling until at last it trembles in the breeze again, at last the sapling winks back into life. Exists again. It wasn’t there, and then it was. As her father had been there, and then gone, in the length of a breath.
75
The beautiful girl furrows her brow, looking at her phone. The handsome man sitting across from her at the hip Lincoln Square sushi restaurant says, “Everything okay?” She nods, still looking into her palm, but the furrow remains. She pockets the phone.
“Sorry. I know that’s rude,” she says, still not looking at him, but she’s said it before, and still keeps checking her phone. When she does this, he doesn’t know where to rest his own eyes. Sometimes on her cleavage, sometimes on the restaurant’s expensive-looking water feature. He knew she would be high maintenance; she looked high maintenance strolling down Clark Street with a bag full of shoe boxes and mustard-yellow pumps, but he took a sheet from his sketch pad, drew a flower on it, wrote down his information, and left it under her windshield wiper anyway because she also looked smart. Girls who aren’t that smart can be fun, but they’re not impressive. This might be the most impressive girl he’s ever brought to Fugu Sushi.
He’s brought seventeen girls to Fugu Sushi.
He calls ahead to get the window seat. Figures everybody wins because he gets a nice view, the restaurant looks hip because he looks hip, and the server always gets twenty-five percent. Twenty percent makes a server happy, twenty-five gets you remembered. The staff remembers him.
Not the way he thinks, though.
They call him manwhore, as in “I’m cut for the night, you’ve got manwhore.”
Always a two-top.
Always by the window.
Staff sympathies turned decidedly against him when, on companion number eight, he left his website and e-mail address for the waitress, along with a pen-and-ink sketch of an octopus (he had dined on tako that night), which he had prepared in advance. He managed to do it while helping that evening’s date put her coat on, did it with the skill of a cardsharp.
The waitress showed everyone the octopus, and now an octopus-like wave of the fingers means manwhore. Thus, pointing at oneself and waving the fingers, with a gently repulsed lip curl, means “I’ll take manwhore.” The bartender’s in on it, too. Finger wave followed by cup-to-lips uptilt gesture means, “What are manwhore and the young lady drinking?”
The exotic-looking number seventeen, sipping Bride of the Fox sake, would have already figured out manwhore’s deal except that she has been too distracted by computer problems to vet him pre-date, and, tonight, so distracted by her phone that she’s not plumbing his charmingly self-deprecating monologues for sincerity or spontaneity.
“If there’s a problem and you need to call it an early night, I understand,” he says. He knows that’s what he’s supposed to say, but he doesn’t want an early night—he wants to get her back to his loft, put on Portishead and send a finger up under that orange suede skirt to test his theory that small-boned women are tighter and full-lipped women are wetter.