the flames are hot...

“My point is—are you remembering feelings you had in a different life? Or are you actually feeling them, here, in this life?”

“I’m—I’m feeling them.” He felt his cheeks turn hot, because—he was feeling them. He’d buried them in the quest, but since it had ended, he had felt almost nothing else except how much he wanted Eliot’s company, all the time, and his smile and his laugh and the light in his eyes, and a kind of closeness with him he really only half-remembered knowing but desperately craved to discover anew, and also to suck his dick.

It was, like, embarrassing how bad he wanted that last one.

Something must have shown on his face, because Julia smiled, warm and a little amused. “Okay. So—maybe you lead with that.”

“I see.” Quentin nodded. “You’re saying—I have to prove to him it would work in this life, too.”

“You could try that,” she said, nodding. “Or—I was actually thinking, maybe just tell him how you feel?”

Quentin shook his head. “I’ve already blown my first shot at this. This time, my argument has to be ironclad.”

“Okay. I do understand why you feel that way. But, Q—it can’t be ironclad. Life doesn’t work like that. We can’t see the future.”

“Oh my god.” He felt a shudder like he was the cartoon lightbulb shining above his own head. “That’s it. Jules, you’re a genius.”

“Aw, thanks.” Julia batted her eyes, then frowned. “Wait—what’s it?”

“Probability magic. That’s exactly what I have to do.”

“Hmm. Interesting. I like the creativity? But—”

“We can’t see the future,” Quentin said, “but if I put together a spell and assemble a set of potential futures and a critical mass of them show that Eliot and I would be a successful romantic coupling, then he’ll have to admit I’m right.”

“And you’re sure that’s going to happen.”

“Why wouldn’t it?” He shrugged. “I know you don’t know him super well, and on the outside we seem really different because he’s, like, hot and really cool and great at parties, and I’m the opposite, but—opposites attract, right? Alice and I were, like, un-opposites, and that was, you know, shitshow central after, what, a couple weeks? And it does turn out that Eliot and I are just super compatible, long-term. So—so maybe we don’t get together in all possible realities, like, there are probably some where we don’t even meet, for starters, or where one of us gets hit by a car or something, but—logically speaking, based on the evidence, I feel highly confident that in a significant majority of the universes where we have the opportunity, we make productive use of it. And, again, once Eliot sees that, he would basically have to be an idiot to keep holding out.”

“Uh huh. So—there are no bad ideas in brainstorming, but—I’m just not sure that really addresses the fundamental issues that…”

“Do you think Fogg will let me access the library even though campus is still locked? I mean, whatever, it’s thanks to us he still has a fucking school, so—he better—”

“Q, I really think—”

“Thanks for listening.” He gave her a quick hug, energized by his new mission. “You always have the best ideas.”

At the center of their [the secessionists'] strategy was a highly orchestrated effort to appeal directly to nonslaveholders by casting the decision over secession as one in which their future (and not just that of the planters) was at stake. To that end, old moderates-turned-fire-eaters built their own propaganda machine, an organization called the "1860 Association," formed in September 1860 by the Charleston merchant, Robert Gourdin, and a handful of men from the wealthiest planter families in the low country. They were a propaganda group functioning as a revolutionary club. The purpose, they boldly announced, was to prepare the South in the event of the "accession of Mr Lincoln and the Republican Party to power," and, specifically, to prepare, print, and distribute tracts and pamphlets "designed to awaken" the people of the slave states to a conviction of their danger and to urge the necessity of resisting Northern and federal aggression. The 1860 Association aimed, that is, to unify the public opinion of the state and the South behind secession as the proper response to the election of a "Black Republican" president. By the fall of 1860 every newspaper in the state, including the traditionally moderate Charleston Courier had fallen in line. The Association published and distributed all over the South some 166,000 pamphlets, all within the few months surrounding the presidential election. Tellingly enough, they specifically commissioned a pamphlet on the problem of the nonslaveholding voter.

Tract No. 5, James D. B. DeBow's The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Nonslaveholder, met the challenge head-on, offering an aggressive argument about how nonslaveholders "were even more deeply interested than any other in the maintenance of our institutions and in the success of the movement now inaugurated ... [for] the political independence of the South." The value and dignity of white men's labor in a slave society formed the crux of DeBow's appeal: "No white man at the South serves another as a body servant, to clean his boots, wait on his table, and perform the menial services of his household. His blood revolts against this and his necessities would never drive him to it." But just for good measure he finished with a threat, offering a dystopian image of the post-emancipation South as a scene of sexual and racial degradation that the rich white man would escape by emigration, but that nonslaveholders and their families would have to endure. DeBow's pamphlet was a virtual handbook for politicians and editors crafting the populist appeal, and it was recycled heavily through the fall of 1860 in local newspapers and speeches.

As fire-eaters formulated their strategy for the secession campaigns, the state's nonslaveholding majority were a powerful spectral presence. Daniel Hamilton, the U.S. marshal for Charleston, put the matter bluntly in private correspondence to Congressman William Porcher Miles. "Mark what I tell you," he wrote Miles, "when the battle comes in earnest, when talking is at an end and we find ourselves fairly embarked on a contest which will shake the world, you will find an element of great weakness in our own non-slaveholding population." It was a grave mistake to have brought the contest "upon the question of slavery" to a government controlled by a popular majority. "Think you that 360,000 slaveholders, will dictate terms for 3,000,000 of non-slaveholders at the South.--I fear not, I mistrust our own people more than I fear all the efforts of the abolitionists." Hamilton's fear that secession had been staked out on the wrong ground found powerful echo in the Upper South, a place he clearly--unlike most of his peers--already had in mind. In North Carolina, C. B. Harrison, fretting about how to carry the masses, declared that "secession in favor of slavery alone won't do." In December 1860 he eerily predicted that secessionists would prevail only when the doctrine of federal force was introduced and the issue changed from slavery "to popular liberty." Such anxiety about the plain folk was not often openly acknowledged in South Carolina, but Hamilton's view of nonslaveholders as the weakest link figured centrally in fire-eaters' aggressive propaganda campaign and electoral strategy in the critical fall of 1860.