By the syrupy golden light of the evening sun projecting through the open window, Buscán carefully wiped glass tumblers with a towel, placing each carefully on the shelf in turn. The intricate patterns and engravings intrigued him. None of the glasses matched another, as if they had been collected from yard sales over time. Buscán didn’t know whether yard sales were common in this country.

He glanced toward the window frame, where his roommate Pensó reclined in a wooden kitchen chair, reading a book. The word “mágico” on the cover caught Buscán’s eye just as he wiped a glass and a thought struck him.

Sounds of children playing outside wafted through the window, mixing with the more distant cacophony of automobile motors and horns that sounded somehow exotic and different from the same sounds back home.

“Tengo una problema en mi cerebro”, Buscán said. “Porque estas vasos y ese libro.”

Pensó slapped the book together in resig­nation and rode the chair back to level, its sturdy feet clacking on the tile floor of the third story apartment.

“First, ‘problema’ is masculine”, he corrected in English. “It’s ‘un problema’. I appreciate that you attempt to speak Spanish, but if you have something to say, maybe we go to English. Yes? What’s on your mind, friend? Something about glasses, books, and mental problems?”

Buscán, who avoided using his real name as often as possible, sighed. “Sorry. I don’t know enough vocabulary to converse in Spanish.” He pointed at Pensó’s book. “I think I finally realized my problem with books about magic.”

“You told me you don’t like them”, Pensó shrugged. “That’s enough, my friend. You prefer the milk chocolate and I like the dark. There is no accounting for taste.” He smiled helpfully.

Buscán nodded slowly. “Yes... But I often try to determine why my tastes are as they are. And it just struck me. In every book or story I’ve read that contains magic, there is no backstory, no explanation for the origin of the magic. How it came to be.” He wiped another ornate glass and set it on the shelf.

Pensó stood and took one of the clean glasses Buscán had finished drying. Eyeing the angle of the sunlight to determine the lateness of the day, he poured a measure of cheap wine from a nearby bottle, and held the bottle toward Buscán as if offering some.

“Sure”, Buscán said, wiping the last washed glass and presenting it. He heard light and joyful music faintly in the distance, somehow harmonizing with the nonmusical sounds of the city.

Pensó poured, then set down the bottle. He leaned against the counter, a bit too close for Buscán’s comfort, but Buscán made an in­ten­tional effort not to pull away. He had noticed that personal space wasn’t as big a concern here as he was accustomed to. Now that he’d fled his home country, he made up his mind to adopt new customs, like standing un­com­forta­bly close to this handsome young man he definitely wasn’t attracted to.

They each sipped slowly.

“Okay”, Pensó finally, said, gesturing toward his book. “In this one, the magic is in dusty old books. Recipes, spells, incantations. Also it is in inherent in some ancient objects. The older wizards pass on the knowledge to new ap­pren­tices. Is that not enough of an origin story for the magic?”

Buscán shook his head. “No. And that’s exactly what I mean. The books always talk like someone has always known about it. But I ask myself: ‘Who found it first?’ What I mean is, at some point in the history of that uni­verse, someone had to have stumbled upon it, right?”

“Perhaps”, Pensó admitted. He sipped again. “Or maybe in that universe it was always ongoing. Maybe its beginning was not like our beginning, with our Big Bang and evolving from tiny rodent ancestors. Maybe in the universe of the book, people and magic have always been.”

“Oh.” Buscán thought for a moment, sipping his wine. “I never thought of that.”

“But you thought of something”, Pensó pointed out, tapping his glass with one finger. “You said the problem had to do with glasses. That part of your Spanish was clear enough.”

“Ah.” Buscán held up his glass. “Yes, as I was drying them, I had this thought: ‘What if these were magic glasses?’ ”

Pensó raised an eyebrow quizzically. “I’m an associate mobile phone sales­person, not a mind reader”, he pointed out. “What if they are magic glasses?”

Buscán pointed at the shelf. “There are ten unmatched glasses, eight on the shelf and two in our hands. What if one or more of them were imbued with magic somehow? Let’s say that one of them had a special power, so that any time someone filled it with—” he glanced around “—this wine, and then drank it, it would add a day to that person’s life.”

“Okay.” Pensó eyed Buscán carefully, sipped some more. “And...”

Buscán’s eyebrows crowded together as he tried to recover the rest of his fleeting thought. “Ah! The question is, how would we ever know? Some day, when I eventually do die, there would be no way to know that I died sixty days — give or take — later than I should have, and certainly no way to know it was because of these magic glasses rather than some other cause.”

“It’s true. You would never know”, Pensó agreed. “In your entirely hypothetical and somewhat ridiculous scenario, one has no way of knowing one’s originally scheduled date of death, so one would never know if that date has already passed.”

“Exactly!” Buscán said triumphantly. “And I hope this isn’t rude to say, but you speak English very well.”

“Thank you”, Pensó replied, dipping his head. “I have practiced for many years.”

Buscán went on, “Maybe I was supposed to die last week, on the way home from quitting that dishwashing job, but because I’ve already used—” he looked at the shelf and chose a glass at random, pointing to it “—that glass ten times, then I won’t die for a few more days.”

“I think I understand your frustration with the glasses”, Pensó said, draining the last of his wine and noting that the golden light was turning gray and fading fast. Streetlights were coming on outside, and more sources of music had added their voices to the first. “What I don’t understand is why this means you don’t like stories about magic.”

Buscán nodded, thinking. “Okay, I’m just using the glass as an example. But it could be anything. A magical stone. A stone, out in the forest, has been holding onto magic for billions of years. Anyone who possesses that stone will never get sick. That’s just the in­herent magic of that particular stone. But no one has ever found it yet, because it’s covered by dirt, or underneath a tree root or some­thing. Or maybe someone did find it, but they used it to fill a crack in a stone bridge many years ago. No one’s ever carried that stone with them long enough to note its power, so no one knows what it can do.”

“Sure”, Pensó agreed. “Maybe that stone is out there right now. Maybe there are a thousand of them. Or maybe some of them were owned at times, for other reasons, and their owners never realized it was the magic stones keeping them healthy.”

Buscán began to look frustrated. “My point is that all the magic in these books is like that, or would have been like that in the real world. How could anyone discover that magic in the first place? What trial-and-error test could one apply? Would you have ten people drink from store-bought glasses every day of their lives and ten other people drink from the ones you thought were magic, and see which group has the longer average lifespan? No one would even think to do such a test. Or with the stones... Do you gather random stones and place them in hospital rooms, recording which patients recover and which ones don’t?”

“You appear frantic, my friend”, Pensó cautioned, but Buscán ignored him.

“How could anyone be the first to discover that mixing an eye of newt with a lizard’s leg, specifically in a cauldron — as opposed to a pot or skillet — would bring about a specific magical outcome?”

“Ah, you’ve read Macbeth”, Pensó said, brightening.

“What? No, I’m not familiar with French literature”, Buscán responded irritably. “I just heard those in a movie. I only mean that in the stories someone already knows this stuff, but it’s never told how they found out to begin with. Was someone just walking around, holding a newt’s eye for unrelated reasons, and accidentally dropped it into a boiling cauldron that already contained a lizard’s leg, and — wham! — magic happened? And then they wrote down exactly what occurred and what they mixed with what else, and tried it again to make sure it worked? And then copied the recipe into an old book of spells that some teenager would find in an abandoned house four hundred years later to accidentally raise the dead?”

Pensó shrugged and remained silent as he poured a bit more wine into his own glass and sat back down by the window. He lit a ciga­rette and leaned through the frame so the smoke would waft outward.

Buscán waited. Briefly, it occurred to him that he’d never seen Pensó empty that cheap wine bottle, or buy a new one, yet they sipped from it every evening. The thought dissolved when Pensó finally replied.

“Someone told them?” Pensó suggested with another shrug. “Someone older always knows the old magic. They told the next person about the newt and the lizard parts.”

“Right, but go backward”, Buscán urged. “Back before that older person. They learned it from an even older one, sixty years earlier, I suppose. And who taught that old person? An older one? That’s no answer, is it?”

Pensó grinned and turned back. “You take this far too seriously, my friend. They are simply fun tales for most people. A few believe the magic is real and there’s no harm in their beliefs. Accept the universe in each story as it is told to you.”

Buscán looked at the floor, shaking his head. “I can’t, Pensó. I can’t ‘just accept it’. With­out the story of how it came to be, of who found out about it first... Without some sensible background, there’s no premise for the rest of the story.” He seemed to deflate, having reached the end of what was bothering him.

“The premise is that someone is telling a story”, Pensó said quietly. “Some of us like to think of the story’s background as lost in the mists of time.”

Buscán sighed, swallowed the last of his wine, and said goodnight.

* * *

After he heard Buscán settle into bed, Pensó stepped out onto the balcony to smoke. Another man was on the balcony to his left, staring placidly into the night. He looked remarkably like Pensó, perhaps a few years older.

“I hear your new friend talking all the time”, the man said. “Talk talk talk. But I can’t understand him. The English is too fast. What does he say?”

Pensó grinned. “He is upset that magic books don’t explain how the magic began.”

The older man laughed heartily. “Did you tell him the legend of the magic glasses?”, he asked. “The ones that give eternal youth.”

“Of course not”, Pensó said. “But it was odd — he almost guessed for himself.” He took a long swallow, draining his glass a third time that evening. “But he is American, escaping the horrors in the north. He didn’t even notice how old these glasses are. He probably thinks they look unusual because we locals are in­capable of buying normal, modern glasses.”

Both men laughed again.

“He’ll notice eventually”, the older man said when the laughter faded.

“True”, Pensó agreed, stubbing out his cigarette. “If he stays here long enough, drinking from these same glasses, the effects will someday be apparent.“ He stood, ready to turn in for the night. “But even I didn’t notice my lack of aging until nearly sixty years had passed. It was another forty years before you and mom explained it was due to the glasses.”