by Lyndsay Faye
Not this again, he thinks, now hearing Trudy in every argument Claude is making.
“There’s the whole third floor of the townhouse, yours for the asking again,” Claude points out.
“I’m not asking, though,” Benjamin returns icily. “You could get five or six grand a month easy subletting it. Hell, I should sublet it—that’s my new job, all figured out. Forward me the rent checks.”
While Jackson applauded Benjamin’s bid for independence, Trudy never comprehended why her precious son, newly arrived back from a year of post-undergrad studying moral philosophy in Wittenberg, Germany, wouldn’t want to return to the family manse. Horatio recalls the contrast well—his own mum in London fiddling with Skype and never looking directly into the camera, his dad grinning at him from across the ocean. So awfully proud of what you’ve achieved, they said, all aglow. It wasn’t very English of them to big him up like that over Columbia. But then again, they are activists. Socialists. His mum wove her own macramé in the seventies, and his dad supplied the hashish. Meanwhile, Trudy Dane questioned why Benjamin didn’t have dinner with them and did he need his ski equipment?
“Trudy needs you to consider being a present part of the family again. You haven’t even stayed the night since you started grad school,” Claude persists. “What, five years ago?”
What a trusty messenger you’re being.
“Eight,” Horatio puts in, because Claude really is being horrible without meaning to.
“Time flies when you’re having fun,” Benjamin growls. “Literally. Perception shifts according to sensory stimulus, emotion, and attention. For instance, when I’m not around you, time just whizzes.”
“Sure, eight years,” Claude agrees reasonably. “Listen, what do you say about you coming home for a bit? It would mean a lot to your mother. I could even pick up the payments for this place.”
“Yeah, quick thing, did you not notice that I too have this family’s money?”
“Not that I really get the appeal, all the way up here in the Heights, no elevator, no mail room . . .”
“What’s worse than hives? Leprosy,” Benjamin says through his teeth. “The sight of you gives me fucking leprosy.”
Hiding a smile, Horatio glances through smudgy glass at the opposite brick buildings and at the fenced-in trees fluttering dappled shades of silver and green. Benjamin when sad and stricken is excruciating. Benjamin when riled like a hyperactive puppy though is rather brilliant.
Claude rests his palms on his hips. “Don’t you think it would be better for everyone if we all pulled together?”
“I sorta think you guys are pulling together enough for everyone.”
“Benny, we’re all on the same team here.”
“If teamwork involves banging my mother, then consider me benched.”
“All right, that’s enough, isn’t it?” Horatio chimes in, dismayed. Claude may be acting as Trudy’s drone, and he may shrug at matters of life and death, but he isn’t a monster. The kettle shrieks as Horatio shuts off the gas.
Claude holds his hands up. “I came with a peace offering and you’re not in a place right now to receive it. But I do want to remind you that I’m family, and—”
“As if I can ever forget you’re my uncle for as much as a single second!” Benjamin explodes. “Were you having an affair all this time? Is that it? Were you—”
“Right, ta very much for the box of sundries, but you ought to clear out, Mr. Dane,” Horatio suggests, abandoning the tea mugs.
“Do you see this guy right here?” his friend snarls, pointing. “He’s extremely loyal, to a fault actually, anyway my point being that I am about to request that Horatio beat you to a quivering pulp.”
“Um, that is not in line with compassionate daya, or with nonviolence, or really anything in my belief system,” Horatio objects.
“That’s cool. You’re a good enough person that you’re probably going to achieve nirvana this time around anyway.”
“Well, I don’t care to risk it, if it’s all the same to you?”
“You hear that, Uncle Claude? The only reason Horatio isn’t punching you is because it’s against his religion. That is how shitty you are.”
Claude looks genuinely downcast. “Just . . . I hope you find some good things in the box, all right, kiddo? It’s stuff from Jackson’s New World’s Stage office, and your mom was too upset to look.”
“Maybe she was actually just too distracted, looking at your tiny misshapen—”
“OK, I’m going.” Claude shoots a meaningful look at Horatio. “I’m real glad you’re back, Horatio. Keep an eye on this one, will you?”
“Always,” Horatio answers, newly irritated.
“Please do let the door hit you in the ass on the way out,” Benjamin adds.
When Claude has vacated, Horatio makes the slide of the dead bolt audible. Turning, he watches as Benjamin fishes a pill bottle out of a lidded linen storage box on the bookshelf. The fact that his friend’s brain operates as part philosopher, part scientist, and part torture device is obvious to most everyone. But outsiders have no idea the lengths the Dane heir goes to in order to make sense of the world around him.
“Don’t look like that, it’s just Xanax,” Benjamin snaps.
“Good.”
“Gooooooooo on,” the smaller man drawls, crossing his legs and sinking to the arrow-patterned rug.
“Nothing.”
“You are not-saying something, chummy chummy matey. It’s super annoying.”
Still, Horatio hesitates. “But it was, er, worse than Xanax just afterward, I take it? Because Ariel wrote me, and he said you were not . . . well.”
His friend looks somehow both impish and tragic. “I don’t remember, I was on too much weed and alcohol and Klonopin and occasionally coke other than the usual Adderall and antidepressants.”
“Benjamin,” Horatio says helplessly. As if invoking his name will heal it somehow.
The smile vanishes. “You could think of it as, like, removing a threat to myself. And the danger was, you know. Between my ears.”
Fetching a pair of scissors to deal with the box and gathering up the mugs, Horatio joins his friend on the floor. The familiar hot pinprick of mingled guilt and anxiety sizzles in his chest.
It isn’t your fault that he’s obsessed with death. Death is objectively fascinating, after all.
And Benjamin’s father just passed, so morbidity surrounds him.
No, morbidity surrounds Benjamin when he’s ordering trash pizza, or waiting for the subway, or breathing air.
Death will end everything Benjamin’s ever loved, and he flirts with this like a drunk left alone at a bar. Why does death seem so particularly spellbinding to you? Horatio asked once, sharing whiskey straight from the bottle as the midnight traffic painted neon graffiti on their walls. Benjamin cackled and said, It doesn’t seem particular, it is particular, because we can only do it once. It’s not like I can say, hey Horatio, remember how it went that time I died?
Horatio wants to take his friend’s heart and wrap it in sunlight and goose down so that Benjamin is never battered again by all the shocks that humanity is so naturally subjected to.
“Maybe I’m being stupid.” Benjamin tosses the pill bottle from hand to hand. “I mean, I know I said Dad would never, but. Take me for example.”
Horatio passes his friend the tea. Tea ought to solve more than it does, he reflects. Tea made by someone who loves you, specifically.
“Last year, I was teaching at Fordham talking Socrates, I had that side gig at the Henry Street Settlement, and I still thought about dying, like, nonstop because there were these kids, Horatio, and they wanted to know why.”
“Why?”
“Why they’d been raped, why their mom was a crackhead, why their dad never came home from Iraq. And philosophy has a metric fuckton
of questions, sure, but answers are pretty lean on the ground. There was like, nothing I could say, and I felt like a complete waste of oxygen. I just put one foot in front of the other, but. It’s not supposed to be this hard.”
“No,” Horatio agrees, raw and ragged. “It isn’t.”
Benjamin warms to his subject. “It’s commonly thought that if your life is difficult, if you’re in pain, that’s when you want to pull the trigger. A person living under a bridge might get sick of it, right? Meanwhile a joint study found that the American states with the most life satisfaction were also the ones with the highest suicide rates.”
Horatio sips his Earl Grey.
“Suicide is about saving everyone from the burden of fucking carrying you,” Benjamin concludes, shrugging.
“I rather thought it was a chemical disorder?”
“Yep, yeah, that, too. But it’s also removing yourself from the equation because you are a comprehensive drain.”
“You make a difference.”
“Well. Thanks, but that’s not accurate.”
“You make all the difference in the world to me,” Horatio volleys.
Benjamin’s assessing face appears, the one where he realizes he accidentally mucked with someone’s head. And this is where his innate kindness factors in, and it’s heartbreaking to watch. Benjamin sometimes looks terrified of infecting people with his own pathologies. When in fact he’d give ten years off his own life just to know that his loved ones would carry on happily until they were a hundred and three.
“I don’t know why you’re telling me all of this,” Horatio says with a sigh.
“It’s interesting.”
“It’s hurtful.”
“Good god, why?” Benjamin genuinely wants to know, the wanker.
“Because it’s not fucking theoretical for me, it’s a genuine nightmare,” Horatio snaps.
“Oh!” Benjamin lifts his tea, a peace offering, blowing on its surface. “That was not meant to distress you. I’m sorry.”
Horatio remembers Benjamin in his dorm, cross-legged on the floor exactly the way he is now, sorting through black plastic milk crates of vinyl albums. He kept lobbing musical opinions at Horatio without expecting replies, and Horatio was happy to provide none. Music is everything Benjamin loves wrapped into one; it’s mathematics and harmony and philosophy and feeling, and here he was, unaccountably trimming his record collection.
Oooooh snap—every Brit loves The Clash, yeah? Good. Man, Daptone killed it when they recorded Back to Black, and if I weren’t already with a stupidly hot crazy artist type, I would have so massively crushed on Amy Winehouse. Ugh, Parliament, Mothership Connection, how hard do I love thee? So, sooooo hard. These go in your pile, man.
Horatio wanted to know why, supposing these were Benjamin’s favorites, he was now gifting them.
I dunno, I like you—you’ve got soul, or something. Depths. And anyway, I won’t be needing these for that much longer. My internal clock is very . . . loud.
Horatio promptly made plans with Benjamin, this brighter-than-daylight creature who wanted so perversely to die, every single evening for the following week. They moved in together shortly thereafter. Horatio fantasized about heroic rescues, emergency services calls, even mouth-to-mouth that led to more carnal activities (in his guiltiest, most deeply shameful moments). And then he learned that fiercely burning beings naturally exist in the darkest depths of space.
That is the habitat of stars going supernova.
“I sorta, um, did just say I’m sorry. Should I say it again?” Benjamin offers without a hint of sarcasm.
“It’s fine, it only . . .” Horatio stumbles over the right words. “Um, I’m not attempting to censor you.”
“You just don’t enjoy me waxing on about the harrowing nature of pushing a rock uphill.” Benjamin smiles in encouragement. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy after all, even though nothing he does matters.”
“No, I . . .” Horatio feels woefully wrong-footed. “Some things do matter.”
“Which ones?”
“Loving someone matters.” Horatio shouldn’t be subjected to this conversation. “Not, er, not being loved, a person can be loved all day and up and down and sideways and that can still not make a difference. I mean that loving someone else, when they’re more important to you than you are, that ought to matter.”
Benjamin’s brow furrows.
Horatio hastens to cover the silence. “But I know it sometimes matters in the wrong way. If you feel like the people you love are better off without you. Then it matters . . . backward. Christ, I’ll shut it. I’ve always believed love makes a difference.”
“Are you paraphrasing Corinthians or the Beatles?”
Horatio laughs. And then Benjamin does too, because that is how this works. They just need to brush the dust off, get back in the hang of this. His friend scrubs his hand through blond hair again, on the brink of something. He reaches for the black leather cuff, unbuckling, and everything is still fine till Horatio sees a scar. A vertical one, on his friend’s wrist.
“Oh god,” Horatio exhales.
Benjamin only squints in commiseration. The bastard.
Horatio considers in due course storming out of the flat, succumbing to jet lag and curling up on the rug, thanking his friend for being honest, or possibly throttling the love of his life himself because he’s beautiful, can’t he see that he’s beautiful, and this is all a fucking bad dream.
“When?” Horatio reaches out, unthinking. Benjamin doesn’t move. The scar is raised but smooth, like a little strip of bone jutting through pale skin, and this touch feels more intimate than any of the far more sordid ones they’ve exchanged.
“Almost six months ago.” Benjamin to most would sound clinical, but Horatio hears the strain. “Uncle Claude might be a fly on a warm smear of dog shit, but he was right about my, like, altered schedule earlier. Before that I was productive, two entire jobs for the philosophy of physics degree holder, whoopee and felicidades and praise baby Jesus, and then, well. Ha.”
“I should have been here,” Horatio states miserably. “In every conceivable way.”
“Hey, I did . . . very selfish things before you left. We should maybe even talk about those, yeah? Drunk. We’d want to be drunker than this. But anyway, you could have completely ghosted me, but I needed you, and you essentially said where and when would you like to have me? That was you being amazing.”
“I’m not at all amazing.”
“You don’t get to decide whether or not you amaze me. You don’t deserve any of this drama, you deserve a nice cottage where you, I dunno, keep bees and have fresh wildflower honey with your tea. Can we just get back to the part where you don’t need to be angry at you, and I don’t need to be quite as angry at me, either?”
“But you aren’t—it’s not like that for you anymore, is it?” Horatio pleads. “You aren’t still—”
“No.” Even if it isn’t a promise, Horatio will interpret it that way, because otherwise he’ll bloody well fall apart. “I’m back in the saddle, my friend, there are ranges to ride once more and I’m riding the shit out of them. Now hand me those scissors. I’ll use them exclusively for approved purposes. Sorry, sorry, kidding! Let’s see what Uncle Claude just dragged over here.”
Horatio hands them over. His friend puts the cuff back on, burying the evidence, hiding the clues. Only Benjamin could have a conversation about attempted suicide and then breeze straight into sorting through his late father’s junk drawer. Horatio’s head pounds and they haven’t even discussed why Horatio fled back to London in the first place. Apparently they’re skipping that part save for Benjamin admitting I did very selfish things before you left.
The contents of the box are, at first, predictable.
There’s a picture of Benjamin and Trudy, Benjamin in black cap and gown, graduating summa cum
laude from NYU, his mother with platinum shoulder-length hair and the lazy smile she wears for the camera. She has the same clean features as Benjamin, an artful creature of Botox and powder and Chanel. Then a Lee Child novel with a bookmark midway through that makes his friend flinch, because life shouldn’t stop in the middle of an unfinished story. A nearly empty bottle of cologne Benjamin sniffs morosely, a lint brush, a shoehorn, and then his friend pulls out a sleek digital camera.
At first, he numbly scrolls through photos. But then he opens the video files and a voice that neither of them expected ever to hear again fills the room.
“This is probably the last of these I’ll get to make,” Jackson Dane says to the camera.
Horatio swings himself around to Benjamin’s perspective, bumping his shoulder. Benjamin’s hand shakes. He rests the camera on his knee.
“I did what I could,” Jackson says lowly, “but I still must have failed, if anybody is watching. I hope it’s not my son, Ben, and then again I hope that it is, because I don’t know that anyone else would believe me. Claude says I need to see a professional, Trudy says I need a vacation, and Paul says I need to sleep more. Whoever finds this, give it to Ben, please?”
Jackson stops, struggling for words, then looks straight into the lens. “I think that someone is trying to murder me. And the only person who has the kind of access I’m talking about is my own brother. Claude Dane.”
BENJAMIN
If there really is a complete unified theory that governs everything, it presumably also determines your actions. But it does so in a way that is impossible to calculate for an organism that is as complicated as a human being. The reason we say that humans have free will is because we can’t predict what they will do.
—Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
It’s crazy sounding, I know,” Jackson says near the end of the first chronologically recorded track (thus the last viewed). “And so far it’s only this feeling I have, of corruption. Like a tar pit guzzling down everything that touches it.”
