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Alex reached for her phone to check the time, hoping it wasn’t much past three. If she could get washed up and into bed by four, she’d still be able to get three and a half solid hours before she had to be up and across campus again for Spanish. This was the math she ran every night, every moment. How much time to try to get the work done? How much time to rest? She could never quite make the numbers work. She was just scraping by, stretching the budget, always coming up a little short, and the panic clung to her, dogging her steps.
Alex would have happily settled for less than Yale. Darlington was all about the pursuit of perfection, something spectacular. He didn’t know how precious a normal life could be, how easy it was to drift away from average. You started sleeping until noon, skipped one class, one day of school, lost one job, then another, forgot the way that normal people did things. You lost the language of ordinary life. And then, without meaning to, you crossed into a country from which you couldn’t return. You lived in a state where the ground always seemed to be slipping from beneath your feet, with no way
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“Just by having a good time?” “By trying to. Look around. What do you see? People in costumes, horns, false jewels, adorning themselves in tiny layers of illusion. They stand up straighter, suck in their stomachs, say things they don’t mean, indulge in flattery. They commit a thousand small acts of deception, lying to each other, lying to themselves, drinking to the point of delusion to make it easier. This is a night of compacts, between the seers and the seen, a night when people enter false bargains willingly, hoping to be duped and to dupe in turn for the pleasure of feeling brave or sexy
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“Do you know what my mother said?” Turner asked. “She told me there’s no doorway the devil doesn’t know. He’s always waiting to stick his foot in. I never really believed her until tonight.”
Alex expected Lance to protest, try to bargain, maybe even threaten them. Instead, he just sat there, his big body frozen like a stone idol beneath the fluorescent lights. He didn’t say a word when Turner knocked on the door and the guard came to fetch them, didn’t look up when they left. He’d been to the jungles of the Amazon, explored the markets of Marrakesh. He’d seen into the mysteries of the world, but the mysteries of the world had taken no notice of him, and after all of it, he’d still ended up here. The doors had closed.
