He was drunk enough that he did something he’d always wanted to do, which was to slap Mayakovsky back. With his grizzly hide it was like slapping a crocodile. Mayakovsky broke out in his sulfurous yellow grin.

“There it is!” he shouted. “Again!”

Quentin slapped him again.

With no warning Mayakovsky threw his thick arms around Quentin in a big Russian bear hug. It was hard to follow the emotional about-face, but Quentin went with it. Why not? Over Mayakovsky’s shoulder he saw Plum watching them round-eyed—she looked like she was trying to teleport herself out of the room through sheer force of will. But fuck it, why shouldn’t two men hug each other in a basement in the middle of Antarctica? He patted Mayakovsky’s back with his free hand. This poor fucking guy.

And Quentin’s father was dead. Who else was he going to hug? This must be what having a family is like, he thought. This must be how people hug their parents. Good old Mayakovsky. They weren’t so different after all.

“I am a dead man, Quentin. This is my grave. I bury myself here.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Quentin said. “It’s stupid. You can break the bond. You can come back anytime. Come with us!”

Mayakovsky pulled away. He held Quentin at arm’s length.

“You keep your shit world! You hear me? You keep it! I will stay here. I am done!”

He patted Quentin’s cheek.

“It is over for me. You are a pathetic mediocrity, but you are braver than me. You will not end like Mayakovsky. It is not over for you.”

He held out the bottle. Christ, Quentin thought they’d finally finished it, but there it was, practically full again. He must be refilling it by magic.

Quentin didn’t remember much after that. Later he would have a hazy recollection of Mayakovsky singing and laughing and weeping but it all got mixed up with the lichen-flavored dreams he had after he passed out, and he could never separate the fact from the hallucinations. In his dreams, at least, they sat on the floor of the workroom, passing the bottle around, and Mayakovsky told them about how he’d been there in the Neitherlands too, when the big blue gods returned and tried to take their magic back. How he’d fought them, alongside the dragons, how he’d ridden bareback on the great white dragon of Lake Vostok. How he’d smashed the bell jar over the Neitherlands with lightning and thunder from his own hands.

—

The next morning Quentin woke up in his own bed. Not in Brakebills South, in his own bed back in the Newark Airport Marriott. He had no memory of how he got there. Mayakovsky must have sent them back through a portal after all, the same way he’d sent Quentin back to Brakebills after the race to the South Pole.