“You”—he looked at Plum—“you, I don’t know. Maybe you are bored. Maybe you are in love with him?” Plum waved that one off frantically, a full-arm gesture: No, abort, abort. “But you, Quentin, you I understand. You are like me. You have ambition. You want to be great wizard. Gandalf maybe. Merlin. Dumb-bell-door.”

He spoke softly and, for him, gently. He drank, then cleared his throat and spat wetly into a handkerchief, which he stuffed into the pocket of his robe. He’d been living alone for a long time.

Did he? Quentin thought. Want to be a great magician? Was that the truth? Maybe it used to be. Now all he wanted was to be a magician period. He wanted to break an incorporate bond. He wanted Alice back. But truth was seeming pretty relative at this point. Truth was a substance soluble in lichen vodka.

“Sure,” he said. “Why not.”

“But you will not be great. You are clever, yes—you have good head.”

He reached over and rapped on Quentin’s head with his knuckles.

“Don’t do that.”

But Mayakovsky was unstoppable, a drunk best man hell-bent on giving an inappropriate toast.

“Fine head. Better than most. But sadly for you there are many heads like it. One hundred. One thousand maybe.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” No point in denying it. He leaned against the cool, oiled metal of a drill press. It felt reassuringly stable, an ally at his back.

“Five hundred,” Plum said generously. She boosted herself up on a table. “Be fair.”

“You will never be great. You know nothing of greatness. You want to see? I will show you greatness.”

He waved his arm expansively at the darkened workbenches, and all through the room metal and glass stirred and glowed and came alive. Engines moved, wheels turned, flames lit.

“This is my museum. Museum of Mayakovsky.”

And he showed them what he’d built in the long Antarctic winters.

Mayakovsky’s workshop wasn’t just a marvel, it was a library of marvels. It was a catalog of answered prayers and impossible dreams and holy grails. Suddenly Mayakovsky was a showman, ushering them grandly from table to table: here was a perpetual motion machine, and a pair of seven-thousand-league boots. He showed them one drop of universal solvent, which no vessel could contain and thus had to be kept magically suspended in midair. He showed them magic beans, and a pen that would write only the truth, and a mouse that aged backward, and a goose that laid eggs in gold, silver, platinum, and iridium. He spun straw into gold and turned the gold into lead.