If he’s bluffing, call it. If he’s not, what the hell are you going to do about it?

“Maybe you should turn us in,” Quentin said. “I mean, if it comes out that we were here, you could lose your job.”

“Maybe I should.”

Mayakovsky stood up and went to a cabinet and rummaged through it. He took out a bottle of something clear, without a label.

“I want you out of my house,” he said. “I will make a portal.”

—

But then, instead of throwing them out, Mayakovsky lapsed into a funk. He sat back down at a table in the corner and started drinking. After a few minutes he offered the bottle to Plum.

“Dreenk.”

Plum sniffed, took a sip, coughed, wiped her mouth and handed Quentin the bottle.

“Dreenk,” Plum said.

It smelled like radiator fluid.

“Christ,” he said. “What is this?”

That got a rare laugh from Mayakovsky.

“Antarctic moonshine.”

It wasn’t a very reassuring answer. What could possibly grow here that you could even ferment? Lichens? He hoped it was lichens. The alternatives seemed even worse.

Mayakovsky lapsed back into silence. He seemed to feel no need to even acknowledge their presence anymore, though Quentin noticed he didn’t leave them alone either. He and Plum exchanged flummoxed looks. Mayakovsky didn’t seem to want to talk about incorporate bonds. They tried to engage him in small talk about life at Brakebills South, but he was impervious to banter.

“Are you related to the poet?” Plum asked him.

“Nyet.”

Mayakovsky added something snarly in Russian, probably about poets.

So Quentin and Plum compared notes about their experiences as blue whales, gossiping about the various pods they could remember, while Mayakovsky stared at the wall and drank steadily and mechanically. He brought out a loaf of dark bread and some pickles but he didn’t eat, just picked the loaf up every few minutes and sniffed it and put it back down. How long was he going to let this go on? Well, Quentin wasn’t going to help him. He was going to drag this out as long as he had to, to the bitter end. He wasn’t going to give up, not until Mayakovsky made him.

The Antarctic light outside was like an interrogator’s lamp, steady and without mercy. It felt like they were the last three human beings on earth.

As much as he openly despised them, Mayakovsky couldn’t seem to bring himself to banish them either. Maybe he was lonelier than he let on. Eventually he got out a chess set, with one pawn replaced by a knob from a cabinet. First he destroyed Quentin, then he beat Plum twice, the first time with some difficulty, the second time after three quarters of an hour and by the narrowest of margins. Quentin suspected Plum of pulling her punches.

Maybe Mayakovsky suspected too. Midway through their third game he stood up abruptly.