What exactly had happened last night? What had he done? His memories were all wrong. The events were like a dream—they had to be—but they didn’t feel like a dream. And this room wasn’t a dream. A crow cawed loudly outside and immediately stopped, as if it were embarrassed. There was no other sound.

From where he lay he took stock of the room he was in. The walls were curved—the room was in the shape of a section of a circle. The outer wall was stone; the inner was taken up with dark wooden cabinets and cubbies. There was a Victorian-looking writing desk and a dresser and a mirror. His bed was tucked into a wooden alcove. There were small vertical windows all along the outer wall. He had to admit it was a highly satisfactory room. No danger signs yet. Maybe this wasn’t a complete disaster. At any rate it was time to get up. Time to get it over with and find out what was going on.

He got up and padded over to a window. The stone floor was cool on his bare feet. It was early, a misty dawn, and he was very high up, higher than the tops of the highest trees. He had slept for ten hours. He looked down on the green lawn. It was silent and empty. He saw the crow: it drifted by below him on glossy blue-black wings.

A note on the desk informed him that he would be having breakfast with Dean Fogg at his earliest convenience. Quentin discovered a dormitory-style bathroom on the floor below, with shower stalls and rows of capacious white porcelain sinks and stacks of neatly folded scratchy white institutional towels. He washed up—the water was hot and strong, and he let it blast him till he felt clean and calm. He took a long pent-up acid-yellow piss in the shower and watched it spiral down the drain. It felt deeply weird not to be in school, to be on an adventure somewhere new, however dubious. It felt good. A mental meter in his brain was totting up the damage that his absence would be wreaking at home in Brooklyn; so far it was still within acceptable limits. He made himself as presentable as possible in his day-old, slept-in interview suit and walked downstairs.

The place was completely deserted. He hadn’t expected a formal reception, exactly, but he had to wander around for twenty minutes, through empty hallways and drawing rooms and classrooms and out onto terraces, before the white-gloved butler who’d served him his sandwich yesterday finally found him and deposited him in the Dean’s office, which was surprisingly small and mostly taken up by a presidential desk the size of a panzer tank. The walls were lined with an assortment of books and old-looking brass instruments.

The Dean arrived a minute later wearing a light green linen suit and a yellow tie. He was brusque and peppy and showed no sign of embarrassment, or any other emotion, relating to the scene the night before. He had already had breakfast, Fogg explained, but Quentin would eat while they talked.