by Lyndsay Faye
“But fifty quid?”
His dancing eyes slow from a jig to a waltz. “What’s fifty quid? If they’re enough a part of you, you’ll stand by them, come hell or high water. I’d back the underdog for love over a sure thing for money any day, even when all hope is lost.”
Horatio wonders whether they’ve started the air circulating quite yet.
“Sudden trip?” Robin asks, his eyes back on his sewing.
It’s not a very impressive deduction; Horatio rubs at his chin and finds dark stubble. His coffee-warm eyes are already hollowly set, but he knows the amiable pouches beneath are swollen. With a prominent nose curving like an hourglass and a shoulder-length spill of black waves, he knows he’s embracing the suffering-academic trope a bit too literally.
“Um, yes, I suppose it is sudden.”
This is the loudest person he has ever encountered on an airplane; surely the man’s breaking an unwritten code. But inwardly, Horatio winces. This isn’t the least bit sudden. He hadn’t gone to the funeral last month, hadn’t broken into a run that tore the sound barrier, hadn’t leapt clear across the Atlantic. He’d waited to be called for, and that burns hot trails of shame along his neck.
“And what about you, then?” If he won’t shut it, Horatio wonders whether Robin can be redirected. “Business? Dare I say sport?”
“Never know which it’ll end up being.”
“How extraordinary.”
“Oh, I am extraordinary. A regular pukka sahib, you’ll find me.”
Horatio freezes, spellbound by mingled feelings of secondhand embarrassment and mild umbrage.
“Did it again, didn’t I?” Robin exclaims, lowering his needle. “Just a turn of phrase, not the first time I’ve put my foot in it and no offense meant, Mr. Patel—Horatio?”
Mollification ritual complete, Horatio sighs. “Quite. Well, there’s chutnification for you.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Sorry, um . . . Indian diaspora. Viral linguistics.”
A shake of the head.
“Salman Rushdie, the author? He coined the term in Midnight’s Children.”
“More of a talker than a reader myself.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
Horatio hopes that this reply is rude enough to rebuff the stranger entirely. When the irksome tit swings a chummy knee toward him instead, Horatio ponders the odds of a pleasanter flight if he asks to sit next to the coffee-stained woman. His necktie paws at his throat like a puppy, and he tugs it off with severely quashed rage when he realizes that he wore it in anticipation of who might, just might, meet him at John F. Kennedy airport.
You forwarded all the flight details.
Just didn’t have the bollocks to pose the question.
“Event planner. That’s what you were asking, wasn’t it? Freelance event planner, mainly weddings. But you, you’re a horse of a different feather.” Robin nods at Horatio’s seat back, which cradles two books, a laptop, and a legal pad. “Writer, eh? Work or hobby?”
“Oh, I’m an assistant professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. This is my doctoral dissertation. I mean, it’s going to be.”
“Topic of choice?”
“An in-depth biography on the Right Honorable Keith Vaz.”
“The story of a politico with a taste for sex without using a jimmy? Why write anything about his life, let alone in depth?”
Because he’s a high-profile British Asian in government, and the Sunday Mirror outed him for shagging male prostitutes and bribing them with cocaine, and he was still bloody married afterward, and it’s all cracking, cracking mad, and I’m drawn to flawed stories about cracking madmen.
Horatio shrugs. “Dad’s a social worker with the NHS, and Mum volunteered for Sadiq Khan’s run at mayor of London. So I’m predisposed to politics, I’ve a knack for words, and I’m keen to teach somewhere and spend the rest of my time publishing books on . . . well, the rest of my time as a biographer. It’s an old-fashioned word, but the best description.”
Robin nods sagely. “Written in your DNA, eh?”
“You could say that. It’s in the blood, I suppose.”
“Is it?”
“Er, I’ve just said so.”
“No hiding from what’s in the blood, is there?”
Robin finishes the knot he’s tying with a neat flick. He tucks the jacket beneath the seat back, triple folded. Attendants in neatly pressed polyester uniforms march up and down the cabin, patting things as if they’re stroking the flanks of a mechanical steed.
“Listen, friend,” the little man says more intently. He brandishes a sleep mask with cat ears and Horatio blinks in disbelief. “Hear me out for a mo’ and I’ll be off to dreamland like you flipped a switch. But I have a . . . let’s call it a sixth sense about people. Care for some free advice?”
“Er, is there any way of declining?”
Robin chuckles, snapping the feline mask onto his forehead. He seems an impish creature. One who might materialize before the throne and offer fathomless wealth, eternal life, the Moon, and only remember to mention later that by the by he wants oceans of blood for his trouble.
“Obviously a great whopping load of feelings tied up in this trip for you, eh? Sleepless nights, gnawing at your thumbnail . . .”
Horatio stops.
“Not pretending to know what’s the matter, am I, but there’s no hiding from the blood, carry it about with us, don’t we, hearts pumping away, we lug it everywhere, gallons of the stuff, and if you ask me . . .”
“Um, I didn’t.”
“You’re in danger, me duck.”
“Of what?”
“Of yourself,” Robin whispers conspiratorially. “Bloodsick, you are. Well on your way to being a terminal case.”
When Horatio parts his lips to ask what in hell this prat is talking about, nothing emerges.
He doesn’t know what bloodsick means. But he’s monumentally sick at heart, and his mind plunges deep into a river of images of Benjamin. Benjamin stirring dolsot bibimbap at The Mill, half-smiling as the beef and egg and rice mingle, salty steam hissing upward. Benjamin listening to something Lia just said, laughing at the skies. Benjamin gripping his sandy blond hair so hard his knuckles whiten as he drops his jaw and screams, and screams, and screams.
Oh fuck all, not that night. Any night but that one.
Benjamin that first morning at Columbia. Horatio fluttery over studying European History, Politics, and Society, his shadow superimposed over those of Kiran Desai, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg. Benjamin starting his master’s as well, only in Philosophical Foundations of Physics. Brisk river-bright September breeze larking through the campus, a birdsong day, a screw-top-bottle-of-wine-and-a-blanket-in-Morningside-Park day, his future best friend motionless outside Pulitzer Hall staring down at his wristwatch as if it held every secret ever kept and saying absently to Horatio—a total stranger—an odd combination of incredible words.
I’ll be late for my first class, I think, but it’s gonna feel sweet to be a student again, have that structure. I was off for two months and losing my goddamn mind, you feel me? Time is only there because we notice it’s passing. We create these markers to know where we are, entirely based on perspective. That’s nuts, right? Trying to perceive empty time is like trying to judge a mile in the desert with just your eyesight. That’s why people locked in solitary go rampantly bananas. God, I’m late for General Relativity and Black Holes and grad school is already saving my ass.
Robin snaps the ridiculous cat mask over his eyes.
“Did you mean heartsick?” Horatio asks.
Robin yawns. “Could have done, but no. Sorry, friend. Might have been able to help if we’d met earlier, but it’s . . . metastasized. Heartsickness degenerates into bloodsickness, and bloodsickness is one of the leading causes.”
/> “Of what, for god’s sake?”
“Why, tragedy, of course.”
The eerie little man inserts a set of foam earplugs and within three seconds is snoring.
But it happened last month, Horatio thinks helplessly. Tragedy’s already struck like lightning from the blue.
He knows, however, that tragedy is nothing like lightning. Horatio made the mistake of mentioning to Benjamin long ago that lightning never struck twice, following the first time Lia landed herself in hospital, and the only two things that comforted him were Horatio’s presence and intellectual tangents. Only Benjamin could ground feelings by hurtling his brain into the aether like a Frisbee, and Horatio could pinpoint the exact instant when his one true et cetera escaped the confines first delineated by Newton. The sad, soft stare of the prophet tinged with the electric crackle of the hermit. Well, after all—Isaac Newton was also a magician. Horatio loved Benjamin so much whenever he looked that way that he himself would forget every law in the book, including gravity.
No no no no, lightning discharge is made of between threeish and thirtyish separate strokes. Whenever you get hit by lightning, you’ve already been hit, like, a fucking dozen or so times by definition. People should say lightning never strikes once.
Horatio changes his mind. Tragedy is a very great deal like lightning.
A month ago, Benjamin Jackson Dane’s father, Jackson Jefferson Dane, was found dead in the bedroom he shared with his wife of some forty years, Trudy Dane, on the third floor of their Upper West Side townhouse. Eyes wide and empty as fishes’ dreams. The toxicology report concluded he died of organ failure due to ingestion of multiple painkillers, alongside the generic sertraline his wife asserted he had been taking for years to treat mood swings and anxiety, and a hefty dollop of Xanax. Jackson Dane was sixty-two; his wife, Trudy, sixty; and his only son, Benjamin Dane, thirty.
An in-depth examination of the New World’s Stage books soon revealed that key donors had recently departed. And their last production, a gender-swapped version of The Bacchae, hadn’t exactly rained pennies from the fly system. Which must have been ungodly depressing.
Horatio knows all of this from what Benjamin still calls “the Google machine.” When he’d first heard, he rang Benjamin twice. Both times, his friend’s high, expressive voice announced cheerily, “Hey, it’s Ben! If you really want to leave a message then sure but you could just text me and save us both some time, and time, that is the most precious commodity in the universe. Don’t just toss that shit around like you have an endless supply. You do not. Thanks, I’ll get back to you soon. But in a text.”
Ending the call each time in silence made Horatio disgusted enough with himself he wanted to peel his own skin off and toss it in the nearest skip. He was not cowardly. Cowardice was just another word for selfishness, and his family had practiced Jainism for literally centuries, the function of souls is to serve one another. But Horatio imagines that if you fled the love of your life following a misguided, drunken one-night stand, voicemails were not the done thing.
And if only that were all of it.
Two weeks thereafter, Horatio opened Facebook to discover via private message that Trudy Dane was already remarried: to Claude Dane, her brother-in law. The marriage was conducted in secret at City Hall, but that didn’t stop theatre employee Ariel Washington from sending him a darkly worded your friend is not in the best place.
He’d received a text not ten minutes later:
what ho cheerio giddyup see I still speak the Queen Mother’s English you daft left goolie you
Followed by:
asked Ariel to give you the latest gossip from the Dane family because typing it will make my hand fall off
And the next day:
have you bought the happy couple a butter dish yet?
Still Horatio said nothing. Not up until get here please I think I’m losing my mind. That prompted a brief heart attack and Horatio’s response:
Oh god no, of course you aren’t losing your mind. I’ll be there as soon as I can.
And then, a few minutes later:
I didn’t know you wanted to see me again. But I ought to have done.
And finally:
I’m so very sorry, Benjamin.
The wounds we inflict on our own opinions of ourselves are past solving, Horatio decides.
Then he decides to get royally smashed.
Swallowing the last of his fourth scotch, Horatio does his utmost to rest. His eyelids buzz and his shoulders twitch as he tumbles toward sleep only to be yanked back, over and over again, by his own very present waking failures.
You weren’t there for him. You said you’d be there for him always, always isn’t conditional. It doesn’t matter how you parted ways, you sack of shite, and now look at you.
Look at all the things you aren’t that you imagined you would be.
* * *
• • •
When Horatio wakes, the plane has already landed. Light streams in through lewdly spread shades. Overhead compartments yawn open as if likewise startled from sleep. The small fellow—Robin of the cat mask, of the portentous diagnoses—is nowhere to be found.
The rote procedures of Immigration and Customs take place behind a sheer plastic curtain of weariness. Reality ripples. He’s here for personal reasons, he tells the squat woman with the steel-wool hair. No, he doesn’t have any fruits, he tells the razor-burned man with the Flatiron Building nose. Horatio’s ankles are the wrong circumference, and his limbs feel like Cheestrings, which for some perverse reason Americans call string cheese.
He’s half sleepwalking toward the taxi queue from baggage claim when he glimpses the man he never expected to see again except in the sort of dreams that leave him brittle and drenched. Oh-so-very-British dreams, his dick receding, abashed, terribly sorry about all this fuss, and his heart spreading like a net under a suicidal jumper, here, love, I’ll catch you, tear holes in me, I was made for this, can’t you understand?
Benjamin slouches back and forth. A thick, expensive-looking black leather cuff encompasses his right wrist. The Nirvana T-shirt he’s wearing is rumpled but Horatio knows it’s clean, Benjamin is always neurotically clean, and the dark jeans over his Converse lack much to work with in the way of structural support. This implies that Benjamin is living off Klonopin, Adderall, and sporadic forays into gourmet markets for sushi. He looks like an expensive catastrophe—which would be exactly accurate if he weren’t also absurdly funny, and ungodly brilliant, and recklessly devoted.
Benjamin Dane spies him. Sharp chin, sharp nose, sharp attentiveness, sharp shards of sea-glass glittering under his friend’s lashes, sharp thoughts like sunlight sparking off breakers. The softest heart in the world, underneath all of that. Benjamin purses his lips in a grateful, worried way and the entire airport comes crashing down in an operatic tidal wave.
I really do need a life vest, Horatio realizes.
Strangers glance at the very large Gujarati Londoner wordlessly enveloping the wiry flaxen American, and something hot and sweet spills into Horatio, like tea pouring into a beloved mug.
“All right,” he sighs. “Yes, this is . . . Um, good.”
“How was your flight?” Benjamin pulls back.
“Fine. I slept a bit. You don’t care about any of that, though.”
Benjamin grins. “Nope. I mean, I care about you. I just don’t do small talk. Don’t make me sound like a dick, man. But right now I’m caring about a number of other things. The number being, like, laaaaaaarge. As an integer.”
“I am aware.”
“Hefty.”
“Yes, substantial. I’m very sorry, Benjamin.”
“For what?”
“Your loss, to begin with,” Horatio replies, helpless and ashamed.
The emptiness in his friend’s expression echoes cavernously. “Yeah, that’s old news. Funerals migh
t be sad and stuff, but funerals are inevitable, right? Look at all these people, their cells decaying, bones drying out, arteries clogging. That was like watching a dog sniff a tree—unavoidable. Or watching a dog die, come to think of it, they do that too, I was kind of getting lost in the wrong simile there, sorry.”
“Not a bother.”
“Anyway, dying is easy peasy, but remarrying after you lost your first husband this quickly? That is the shit that truly impresses me. Are you hungry?”
“Er, not parti—”
“Good.” Benjamin pivots, striding for the revolving doors. “Because my new stepdad is also my uncle, so we have a lot to talk about. My family life is entirely, royally fucked.”
BENJAMIN
A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.
—Albert Einstein, Letter to Robert Thornton, 1944
Ben props his elbow on the lip of the cab window while Horatio checks his email post-flight.
The bigger man pretends to work, death in the family couldn’t be helped well I guess you’ll just have to suck it won’t you the kids can teach themselves about the Anthropology of Kinship. But Horatio keeps glancing at Ben in little sips like Ben is a very very nice whiskey and that’s fine, Ben likes Horatio, he loves him actually, he’s never been ashamed of that, they even slept together on one memorable if experimental occasion, and even this strained flat-fare cab ride from JFK to Manhattan is totally fine as long as Horatio is being good and gentle
here
right here
here
motherfucking present and accounted for
