by Lyndsay Faye
Ben is incapable of meeting his father’s pixelated eyes any longer. His hands are palsied.
Can Horatio tell, is he watching?
He’s always watching.
Remember?
Ben tucks the traitor appendages under his legs. Corruption. He knows the feeling intimately. He once read an article about Armageddon and how it wouldn’t be by drowning in polar ice, or a super-germ, or even the Sun dying, it would be by insect extinction, all the
M A N Y
A N T S G R A S S H O P P E R S F L E A S M O S Q U I T O E S
B U T T E R F L I E S F L U T T E R B Y E S
DWINDLING DISEASED
DYING
AND THEN THE SEAS WOULD ROT AND THE ANIMALS WOULD STARVE
AND CARCASSES WOULD LITTER THE FORESTS THE STREETS
NOT FOOD FOR GENTLE SOFT FLIES MAGGOTS WORMS
SIMPLY
LEFT
ALONE
Pull it the loving fuck together, your dad is still talking.
“ . . . sensation of being the center of a conspiracy.” Jackson doesn’t look threadbare yet, and Ben battles the illusion he’s watching time flow in reverse. “But what is it they say—you’re only being paranoid if they aren’t out to get you?”
Jackson’s hair is more silver than blond, why didn’t Ben notice that before? He wears a grey cashmere V-neck (on his goddamn body, not wrapped around his stupid shoulders like Uncle Claude, that limp lizard dick), and Ben recognizes the sweater as a Christmas gift he bought years ago at Saks.
“I hope I’m wrong.” Jackson sips his drink. “And I probably won’t need to make any more of these . . . confessions. It just feels like someone is always watching. I can’t shake it. It’s driving me up the wall.”
A brief black flash, dark matter massing, then the screen flicks back to life the way his father never can. It’s just a preview image now, the stubborn ridges of Jackson’s forehead furrowed with doubt. The man who taught Ben how to ride a bike in Central Park, who yanked him away from that speeding cab so hard when he was six that his arm hairline-fractured, who spit hardened plastic platitudes about tough love and pull yourself together and be a man about it when he first—
Never mind about wanting to die, not now.
He outlived his old man, after all.
“ ‘More is unknown than known,’ ” Ben quotes, dizzy with grief.
“Beg pardon?”
Ben grinds his palms into his eye sockets. “Dark energy comprises sixty-eight percent of the universe, dark matter twenty-seven percent.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Under five percent of the universe is normal, physical matter, so it isn’t really normal.” Ben’s voice shakes as badly as his hands. “This, you, me, Manhattan, civilization—this is barely possible, statistically speaking. Almost everything in our reality is invisible, untraceable. We’re surrounded by Plato’s fifth element. Aether. Quintessence. We ourselves are the most unlikely beings we’ve ever discovered.”
“Um, yes. But what does dark matter have to do with your father?”
“It has to do with the insane percentage of the universe that’s utterly unfathomable and yet here’s my own dad telling me he was murdered, and I don’t know what to do.”
“Benjamin.” His friend’s voice rings steady but frightened. “I’m afraid you aren’t making any sense.”
Horatio is comfortingly solid and Earl Grey–smelling, leaning with his shoulder against Ben’s quaking one, and Ben knew, he fucking knew it wasn’t suicide, but it should have been an accident. This is a game of Clue on a bad LSD trip.
Uncle Claude? With the pill bottle? In the bedroom?
“It’s like he was here,” Ben whispers. “Asking us to, I don’t know. Avenge him, maybe.”
Horatio slips his thumbnail between his teeth. “This is completely barking, Benjamin. Why did your father record a series of messages implicating your uncle in his own murder, then leave it in his office, only to be delivered by the killer? None of it’s sensible.”
“Truer words,” Ben says and laughs.
“Not to shift topics, but when did you last eat actual calories?”
Ben springs to his feet, charmed by Horatio’s concerns, but his dad
wouldn’t have died on purpose
couldn’t have died on purpose
so here is the perfect explanation
although one that has them both
staring in unseeing bafflement
at the walls.
Their walls were once hideously white. As if they lived in one of the sleek gallery spaces where Lia exhibited. Ben has always detested white walls, that tabula rasa, the impersonal starkness. No worse fate was possible than being locked in a white room with himself. So when Ben found three huge slabs of plywood in the trash area, he screwed them into the wall. That’s . . . quite industrial, I didn’t know your aesthetic ran to warehouse chic said Horatio, and Ben laughed and whipped out one of the Sharpies he’d just purchased and wrote on the rough veneer:
“I didn’t know your aesthetic ran to warehouse chic.”—Horatio
Half the time when we’re being hilarious, we’re drunk, Ben explained. Now I’ll never forget anything you say.
The bigger man had suddenly become fascinated by the meager contents of their fridge. Over the years, the plywood background filled with letters into words into clauses into sentences that were never placed in that order previously, even considering the approximately 1.5 billion global English speakers and the myriad English speakers marching down the vast time line before them. Ben found it wildly beautiful, setting down moments that would otherwise be lost to tequila.
“It wasn’t the fact of the boa constrictor, it was coming to terms with the guy using it as a scarf.”—Ben
“I just want to collect all the tourist photos where we happened to be in the background and use those for our family album.”—Lia
“But I don’t understand. When Jesus comes back, is that meant to be as a baby, or an adult man?”—Horatio
“Do you remember saying that?” Ben nods up at the wall. “Telling Lia, ‘You are on track to be the Captain Ahab of the idealized al pastor taco’?”
“It was an awfully long time ago.”
“Yeah, but that’s permanent marker. Like, unchanging. Eternal. Sorta.”
Present-day Horatio looks wrecked. He folds himself into a better lotus position, flinching at a twinge.
“You should rest,” Ben advises. “This is not really, like, technically your circus. It’s my primates, bought and paid for.”
“After that? Don’t wind me up, I haven’t the patience. We should call the police.”
“Um, I talked to the police during their initial investigation.”
“Well, you might have said so!”
Ben’s skull is a bell and his mind is a clapper. Throwing aside the curtains, he shoves open scraping windows.
Let there be light.
“The light from our sun is obviously from an active star, but it’s only morbid romantics who claim the stars you see at night are so distant they’re already dead,” Benjamin notes. “The vast majority of the visible ones are alive and kicking. What’s sadder is that stars are born all the time that we’ll never see. We’ll die long before their light reaches us. If a star shines in the sky and nobody sees it, does it still combust? How’s that for poetic melancholy?”
“Benjamin,” Horatio groans. “Please, just. What did the police tell you?”
Ben strains to remember. Four weeks ago, four minutes ago. What was it he just took, Xanax over seeing Uncle Claude, that cystic ass pimple? Adderall, he needs Adderall. He flips open his storage box again and ignores the distress blurring his friend’s features like static over a radio tune as one drives farther
into the wilderness.
“The guy’s name was Detective Fortuna, old school type, red sauce Italian,” Ben reports after he dry swallows. “Girthy. Earthy. Underarm sweat stains as his main accessory. Guest starred on The Sopranos, that kinda cop.”
“And what did he think?”
“I kept screaming at him to, like, prove it wasn’t suicide. He thought I was out of my mind.”
To be fair, this was immediately after his dad’s passing, and there were a lot of drugs involved, prescriptions squandered so freely that Ben marched to the Columbia campus and the ass-numbing plastic chairs of Brownie’s Café and his favorite drug dealer, a white kid from the Hamptons who’d been catering to vacationers since he was, like, wearing light-up sneakers. Brownie’s was a staple of Ben’s twenties. You descended a spiral staircase inside Avery Hall, traversed the architecture gallery, and dove down into a white-walled bunker smelling of falafel. The ideal place to buy illicit benzos. And to kiss Lia on one of her last visits to campus before Ben graduated, his fingers tangling in her fairy forest of curls, her laughing and cut it out and god, you’re just bones, I’m buying you a sandwich and I have an installation to get back to.
Something brushes Ben’s shoulder and he jerks.
“Sorry, I’m so sorry!” Horatio steps back. “You, um—may I use your mobile?”
Ben hands it over.
“Indian or Thai?”
“You’re the vegetarian, is either one any easier?”
“They are equally vegetable-focused, which you are generally well aware of, when your brain isn’t actively on fire. You were saying, about the cop?”
Ben recalls the comprehensive runny cow tit who was Barry Fortuna as the new pill metabolizes too slowly far too slowly. “He thought I was certifiable, and, like—oh yeah, he took special objection to the fact I employ ‘like’ as an interjection. He said he’d broken his kids of the habit, and I replied that the use of pause words is simply an indicator that your brain is going faster than your mouth, so that wouldn’t have been a problem for any of his offspring.”
Horatio settles on the sofa as he taps in their delivery order. “And this fellow didn’t take a shine to you? How extraordinary.”
“Not everyone appreciates me, and I very often agree with them.”
There were all those people at school, for instance.
And then at school again.
And again.
Everyone except for Lia really, not until Horatio, and Lia isn’t here.
Ben takes his cell phone back when Horatio extends it, not remotely curious about food. Wanting to see something else, though. Clicking open his messages—don’t——don’t——don’t—he finds Lia’s most recent communications. They aren’t very long.
But he reads. And he reads. And he reads.
“Benjamin?”
Horatio sounds like he’s directly above him. Ben rips his attention from the screen. The Adderall is kicking in, so screens are now
d e l i c i o u s c a t n i p f o r t h e e y e.
“Do you often, um . . .” Horatio’s pupils glitter, wet-pavement-on-Fifth-Avenue black. “It’s none of my business, of course. Well. Look, do you . . . often read messages from her?”
Ben jabs the screen blank.
“Because you weren’t reading them, before,” Horatio continues helplessly. “I know you never deleted messages from her, but—”
“Lia? We’re not doing names now?”
“Yes, Lia. But you didn’t, I mean to say, look at them very often?”
“Define often?”
“For god’s sake, Benjamin.”
“No!” Ben growls. “I don’t often read text messages from my beautiful and brilliant ex-fiancée, I save them for when my dead dad just returned from the grave like a zombie—no sorry, that’s impossible, he was cremated and his remains interred at Trinity, I was there—but my point is, that, like, just happened, so I genuinely wish she could figure this bullshit out with us but I’m putting my cell phone away now. Are you happy?”
“Of course not,” Horatio snaps.
He goes to refill the kettle, his back looking freshly defeated. Ben detests ruining Horatio’s endless good nature. Horatio once asked what he was thinking about and Ben said whether it would be subversive or masturbatory to write my own funeral dirge for solo guitar and his friend barely spoke to him for two days.
“I’m sorry. Again.” Ben winces. “You’re talking to someone fraying apart. I’m that sweater from the Weezer track. Pull the wrong thread, and I’m a pile of yarn.”
Horatio rubs the base of his skull.
“There are shittier things to be.” The silence is worse than the fighting. “Yarn can even, you know, become a sweater again. It wouldn’t be like forcing every atom of carbonation back into a Coke bottle, or turning all the magma from a volcano into its original rock, things that go against the arrow of time itself. Somebody dedicated, a totally epic knitter, could repair you. If they were very patient, and forgiv—”
“All right, Benjamin.”
“But I’m saying—”
“I hear exactly what you’re saying, you mad twat.”
Ben sags in relief. The apartment grows quiet, which sounds much better than silence. That was a near escape with the phone screen and the Adderall, but with the drug fully kicking in, Ben feels the familiar euphoric sensation like being sprinkled with gentle petals all along the back of his neck and he begins to calm and to
F
O
C
U
S
We can re-knit the yarn.
We can still be fine.
“All right. Tell me more about the World’s Stage woes, I only read a few tattler articles online,” Horatio suggests. “The gossip rags claimed it as a major cause of his depression. Jackson was the chairman of the board, Trudy was president, and your uncle Claude executive VP, correct?”
“Yep, and I have a big chunk of votes, too. Essentially Mom wanted more commercially viable productions and Dad wasn’t having it. He hated what Times Square turned into, like Disney vomited all over it and nothing is risky anymore except for touching somebody in a giant Elmo costume because that shit can get you instant syphilis.”
“If not something even more arcane. Apoplexy.”
“Right? Lockjaw. As you are well aware, the Danes have oodles and scads and kajillions of dollars. But Dad always resolutely refused to support the theatre with oil money after it was founded. Total point of pride with him. Donors, sure. Patrons, bring it. Box office success, hallelujah with praise hands. But to him, following its initial creation, using, like, family moolah to keep the theatre afloat would have meant it was a jerk-off vanity project when all he ever wanted was a world-renowned production company.”
“Yes, I recall. Someone even once suggested it in my presence during some fundraiser or other and he answered, ‘Raising money is one thing. But I don’t take handouts, not even from myself.’ ”
“Nailed it. Anyway, Dad wanted to do a new adaptation of Goethe’s Faust, for example, a super-dark one with freaky marionette puppetry that sounded outstanding, and Mom had a whole cadre of people who wanted to do Annie Get Your Gun but with, like, not just white people.”
“My goodness.”
It wasn’t that Jackson Dane was a visionary—he was simply a ruthless businessman trying to build a creative legacy without compromise, a man who blended the timeliness of The Public Theater with the renown of the Lyceum Theatre, and he could rake in millions on a musical version of Kerouac’s On the Road supposing he cast Adam Driver as Dean Moriarty.
Ben folds all his fingers together. “Just so you know, I can think now.”
Horatio produces more tea. The man is a loaves-and-fishes miracle when it comes to stewed herbal beverages. “So, what thought is most pressing
?”
Ben bounces on his toes. “You were so so so right, Horatio.”
“Er, which bit?”
“These videos fail to achieve, as you would definitely not put it, the full shilling. Because Dad would have rooted out the culprit and destroyed him, and since we know he considered that puckered pig anus Uncle Claude the likeliest suspect, if he’d had any evidence whatsoever, he’d have cut him into so many pieces that the roaches wouldn’t even get a light nibble.”
Horatio blows on his tea. Ben attempts to emulate him, cogitating.
Action.
Do something.
Anythingdosomethinganythingdosomething
The time has come
The walrus said
To chop the cabbages
And avenge the kings.
“How hungry are you, like exactly?”
His friend actually face-palms, which Ben loves—Horatio claims to have picked it up in America, but it suits him. “You’re having me on.”
“Cut it out, man, you paid for whatever-it-is on my account, which means it’s technically my food. Looky here, I’m writing this note and I’ll have the delivery guy buzz my neighbor and I’ll text Eduardo that it’s for us and then eventually we eat something, OK?”
“Why do I get the feeling that you’ve been putting off your next meal for several weeks?”
“Because you’re a clever clever boots. Do they say that over there? We don’t say it over here, so they have to, I guess.”
“But where, and why must we go right now?” Horatio begs.
“To the offices of the New World’s Stage Theatre. To interrogate the man who knows everything, the guy behind the guy behind the curtain behind the guy, Paul Brahms, my almost father-in-law.”
Ben’s blood shines cold and mercurial in his veins. Horatio helps a great deal, so does Adderall, and this is a puzzle—and what is Ben better at than investigating the most profound mysteries of the universe?
