The King of Infinite Space

by Lyndsay Faye

  Barry Fortuna pulls his sandwich closer. “You know what, I should introduce you to my partner, Detective Norway. You might get on better. Norway took some interviews right after the body was found.”

  “When can that happen?”

  The woman—perhaps Chinese American, but Horatio never likes to guess—turns around with a folder in her hand. She’s sharply attractive, with severely defined red lips and a cutting chin-length bob.

  “Detective Ying Yue Norway,” she says. “What did I tell you about lunch before noon, Barry? Next it’ll be breakfast cigars.”

  “Oh.” Benjamin has the presence to look contrite as he shakes hands. Clearly he didn’t foresee anyone of Asian descent being called by the name of a Scandinavian country. “Sorry, Detective Norway.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m not Norwegian.”

  The detective pushes her partner’s sandwich aside with obvious censure to lean on the desk. Everywhere Fortuna spills over, Norway is trim. Her hair is as dark as her partner’s, but naturally, rather than from what Horatio assumes to be a can of spray paint. If a new drama titled CSI: Flushing or CSI: Elmhurst were proposed, they would hire Ying Yue Norway.

  “What kind of grief are you giving these two, Barry? He just got a prescription for his blood pressure,” Norway adds apologetically. “He says it’s genetic, I say it’s his daily dose of mortadella. Makes him irritable. What can we do for these gentlemen?”

  “It’s the Dane kid, come again about the suicide. They have tapes now, of Dane senior saying his life was threatened.”

  “Tapes? Do you see a cassette deck on this camera?” Benjamin sniffs.

  “We never met during the initial investigation, Mr. Dane. I think you dealt solely with my partner here. But in the course of my questioning, I found your father to be highly respected. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Since Benjamin is mute, Horatio says, “We deeply appreciate it.”

  “Are you his partner?”

  “Yeah. Kinda. Not as such,” Benjamin answers as Horatio spiritually sinks into the floor.

  “So.” Norway frowns. “I spoke with at least half a dozen parties. The fact that the substances found in Jackson Dane’s system were prescribed to him, and that he had a history of anxiety—”

  “Well-founded anxiety,” Benjamin adds dryly.

  Norway nods. “But under the circumstances, although his death was certainly unexpected, there was no reason to look into it further.”

  “Mice.” Fortuna unwraps a corner of his sandwich. “The old man pegged his brother in the tapes, Ying.”

  “Believe me, if I had seen anything, I would have said something. Kind of our slogan, you know,” Norway adds with gentle irony. “But there was nothing to say this wasn’t self-inflicted, and the bereaved were against our digging any further. I was ordered off your lawn.”

  Benjamin gestures, the cuff looking impossibly weighty. “What do you mean, the bereaved? You were asked to stop looking into this? By whom?”

  Detective Ying Yue Norway angles her shoulders back. “I would have thought this was a decision the entire family was privy to.”

  “Yeah, I am the least privy person. Who told you to stop investigating Dad’s murder?”

  “Your mother.” Norway rubs her chin. “And since there was no evidence of its being a murder, we complied. Who else do you imagine would have the authority? Your mother, Trudy Dane.”

  BENJAMIN

  What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.

  —Blaise Pascal, Pensées

  No no no, this is not me fixating, this is not mania or any of the things your eyebrows are broadcasting, because goddamn it, Horatio, you have magnificent eyebrows and they are mocking me.”

  Horatio’s jaw spasms. “Um, just. Explain to me why it’s such a great notion to descend on your mum immediately instead of giving this a think first.”

  Ben yanks in a lungful of tar. A measurable amount of chaos is tamed by inhaling sizzling particles of poison.

  Granted, he’s adding to the world’s overall disorder and speeding the eventual cold death of the universe. You can’t unsmoke a cigarette. But it’s a small, achievable goal, and it’s something to do with the hands that both want to rub his mom’s smooth perfumed arms pleading what are you doing, but also a bit just a bit want to wrap around her swanlike neck and

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  Ben eyes the ghost of his last breath. “Why put off till tomorrow what can send you into an emotional abyss today? If I go now, I don’t have to go tomorrow . . . if I don’t want to do it tomorrow, it has to be now . . . but if it isn’t now, I still have to do it tomorrow.”

  Anyway, Ben is so glad to be drinking afternoon beers with Horatio that the thankfulness joins the smoke, searing in his chest. When they initially discovered the rooftop was unlocked, they promptly improved on its Overflowing Ashtray Utopia aesthetic. Kiddie pools happened for five summers running, but their favorite features were year-round: a moldering patio umbrella branded CAMPARI and a trio of lawn chairs. The oasis smells of baked blacktop and the trash cans Lia filled with lavender and ivy. Her chair currently hosts a cooler and a container of mixed fruit Ben supposes Horatio bought out of witless optimism.

  It looks less empty that way.

  They used to come here, just Ben and Lia, to sip cocktails out of red Solo cups. Watch their planet’s personal star exploding above the horizon like some gorgeous galactic disaster. Once in the dead of night he locked the door and convinced her to spread her thighs open and was on his knees for an hour. Benjamin can’t even look at water tower, housing project, fire escape, rooftop garden without seeing Lia’s regal nose silhouetted, laughing at some crack he just made about the cult of Pythagoreans agreeing it was only healthful to screw women in the wintertime.

  Benjamin listens to the chemicals upping the tempo of his lungs a poco a poco. Like siphoning stimulants into a metronome.

  “Yeah yeah, there’s a reason I no longer live with Mamma Dane, yet she’s the obvious next person of interest. You could always do those work things—I don’t need a chaperone to talk to my own mom.”

  “Anyhow,” Horatio segues coolly, “not two hours ago you said you were too close to this problem to measure it, something about coastlines, and now you want to give Trudy the third degree. Your mum.”

  “I know who she is to me biologically.”

  “And emotionally?”

  “She runs me in circles like a show pony.”

  Lighting a new cigarette with the butt of his spent one, Ben endures the sour flicker on Horatio’s face. Two entire cigarettes, Jesus, just look at you knocking all these tasks off the to-do list this afternoon. Somehow he managed to forget how much his friend’s care

  ~ ~ ~ ~ R A D I A T E S ~ ~ ~ ~

  like a retro neon diner sign.

  “OK, we’re no longer talking coastline paradox. This is now Brunelleschi’s vanishing point, and the zero mark—the dimensionless speck, the impossibly smooshed compressed coordinate that allowed for three-dimensional illusion on a two-dimensional canvas after all those ghastly pictures of flat baby adult Jesus during the medieval period, the black hole of the art world drawing everything into its infinite gravitational pull—is Mom. So I need to talk to her.”

  Ben shoots a cheerful*manic smile at Horatio. He’s aiming for confident*jaunty but it lands somewhere between forced*deranged and sickly*pinheaded. It’s distressing, because either he’s getting a nicotine rush or causing Horatio distress is making him nauseated.

  “You know that if you just go tearing in there, she’ll have you by your bollocks.” Horatio pulls two more bottles
from the cooler. “The NYPD isn’t going to call off a murder investigation just on the widow’s say-so, though in the case of what looked like an overdose, I can see why they might be prevailed on to keep quiet. But what good reason could she have had to do such a thing?”

  “She had a square football field of reasons. But she only needed two.”

  OK sure Ben was not at peak operating capacity after his father died and yes granted sometimes processing grief is a bullet train going in a circle to no place and yeah possibly that meant he wasn’t really there for his mom but he remembers the

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  of paparazzi cameras outside New World’s Stage as his mom left an emergency board meeting dressed in jet-black Chanel like a Kennedy, and the yells of the Page Six maggots, and the way Trudy looked sitting on the couch with that lingering urine aroma Uncle Claude as she said, white-faced but weirdly happy,

  courthouse ceremony // I know it’s sudden but it feels so natural // didn’t want the tabloids making something filthy out of true human affection // agree not to say anything just yet // will always and forever love your // wanted so much to tell you—

  “Which two reasons were paramount, then?” Horatio queries.

  Ben shakes his head, fighting the static. “Sorry. First, if she let the police investigation drag on, fallout from an official inquiry could potentially have negatively impacted New World’s Stage’s investors. Second, fallout from the whole marrying-my-uncle thing. Which is disgusting. She must have paid half the city’s bloggers not to out them. No, not even we have enough money for that—they can’t have found out yet.”

  Horatio nods, a piece of hair escaping the knot at his neck. “You told Ariel to tell me. I imagine several lawyers must be well aware. Who else does that leave?”

  “I don’t know, but Mom keeps texting me hints that the benefit gala is, like, capital-I important, imploring me to speechify. Asking whether my black-tie options fit, which lets her take a dig at my eating habits simultaneously. Speaking of which, can I pay for your tux to be airmailed?”

  “Airmailed? My god. I don’t even own a tuxedo, remember?”

  The look Horatio gives him is so concerned and about his memory of all things. Ben is an idiot, he realizes. It’s been going on practically since they met, but he doesn’t know anymore how to be the center of devotion so loud that it tolls from bell towers. May I remind you that I’m breakable, but do break me if need be . . . I’ve never owned a tuxedo. Lia didn’t care for Ben like this. She loved passionately in her concentrated, cerebral way—immersed in her art, preoccupied with dissecting her own psyche on a petri dish. To Horatio, Ben is the sun. Ben acclimated so quickly after meeting the man that he stopped registering it, this deluge of love, the way the smell of a simmering pot vanishes after half an hour or so. He’d always told himself

  It’s OK

  This isn’t cruel

  Because I love him back

  I love him too

  And if we both know that

  Really know it

  Then it’ll be fine somehow

  Despite the fact

  He might not have

  All the rest of it

  I’ll love him so much

  I’ll make it fine

  But now Horatio has been gone for a year and Benjamin has lived without him. It’s like sharing a space with a neutron star—threeish solar masses squeezed into a radius of approximately twelve and a half miles, its gravity crushing protons and electrons into unfathomably minute particles.

  We are really really really going to need to talk about What Happened.

  “Yes, I know you don’t have a penguin suit.” Ben coughs, abashed. “Since it’s my dumpster fire, may I pay for a killer tuxedo? Please?”

  “Ta very much, but no.” A wrinkle forms above his hourglass nose. “I could probably—”

  “Nope. I’ll call Vincentio.”

  “Right, then, we’ll fight about whoever the hell Vincentio is later.”

  “Vincentio is my tailor and the most authentic human I’ve ever met other than you.”

  “Um, lovely. What function does your mother want you to perform at the gala, exactly?”

  “We can find out when I see Mom.”

  “When we see her.”

  Horatio’s smile feels like John Coltrane’s “I’m Old Fashioned,” and the stray lock of hair keeps bashing him in the eye, and Ben thinks that he doesn’t belong in the same world as this man, and best to face that and decide for about six seconds to make somebody else happy even if that can’t be sustained indefinitely. Sustaining something indefinitely is impossible—it violates the law of conservation of energy, which would matter less if you completely eliminated dissipative forces like friction and were left with only smooth surfaces to create power for mechanical work from nothing. It was a pipe dream of scientists for centuries. But unfortunately, there is always friction. And thus making Horatio happy forever isn’t in the cards.

  “OK,” Benjamin says, as a gift. “Come have a tea party with Mom and me.”

  “OK,” Horatio agrees, relieved.

  Ben puts out the second cigarette barely smoked, a second gift. “My family is a disaster of, like, Chernobyl proportions. I’m going to sprout a third eye. Can we pretend that your friend isn’t a massive tool and that I asked you all about the Patel clan maybe yesterday?”

  The snuffed cigarette pleases Horatio more than the question. So does Ben taking his usual lawn chair, their feet almost touching. Horatio talks—the funding for his dad’s social work program for elderly veterans is shaky, his mum is saving to have the kitchen improved. Ben nods in all the right places and snorts when Horatio describes his gran leaving her purse in the fridge and the eggplant on the countertop.

  They sit for an hour, make a run to Bernardo Brothers for another sixer. Shadows lengthen and Lia’s shade slips among the ghosts of telephone wires and satellite dishes, the imprint of her footsteps stamped on the concrete. They share their rooftop

  yellow lorry slow

  nowhere to go

  but oh that magic feeling

  nowhere to go

  until there actually is somewhere to go and Ben pointedly reminds Horatio that he never showered and by the time the water flows, Ben is already texting:

  please don’t kill me but mom will talk way more if I go alone

  Plus after a moment’s thought:

  tell me a country of origin and I’ll bring back cuisine within a couple hours promise

  The door closes soundlessly. Ben didn’t live with a consummate alcoholic for five years without learning a trick or two about escaping detection. Lia was an artist (read: brilliant) and a perfectionist (read: meticulous) and a star pupil (read: wily). She could buy a mini bottle or five in the ten minutes it took Ben to wash his crevices.

  Horatio doesn’t deserve to get ditched like that, but some of the things between Benjamin Dane and his mother can exist in the fragile space between Benjamin Dane and his mother alone.

  * * *

  • • •

  Crude chatter of middle schoolers clustered around an ice cream truck. Smells from the bagel shop, the churned detritus of the 86th Street subway grate, the window boxes of seasonal flowers Lia knew all the names of. Standing outside their door, Ben can see Jackson Dane six years ago, striding down the curved stone steps between the lions’ heads, hailing a cab on his way to the New World’s Stage offices.

  The Dane townhouse is too familiar—nothing whatsoever is different. Everything has changed.

  If you weren’t well aware that ice, water, and steam were all identical, if they weren’t all such everyday sights, it w
ould look like astonishing black magic as they shifted. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t all

  Ben’s hands shake, but this thought always grounds him. He shoves them in the pockets of the jacket he threw on over his Kill Ugly Radio T-shirt. Mostly to reassure himself he has both Adderall and Klonopin at the ready.

  One never really knows with Trudy Dane.

  He lets himself into the foyer of grey marble with its grand staircase and fiddle leaf fig trees. From deeper in the townhouse, Joni Mitchell softly sings “Coyote” with Jaco Pastorius flitting around her guitar chords like an insect flirting with a porchlight. To Ben’s right is the formal dining room with its huge bay windows. To his left is the living room no one ever really lived in, unless Ben was doing what his dad called “tormenting” the grand piano.

  Or sitting on it, staring out the window to see if the kids from school had run out of eggs yet. Or hiding under it. Or bleeding under it. Or . . .

  “ . . . and I’d hate to leave it where it was, so I need to go to the offices,” comes Uncle Claude’s voice from down the echoing hallway toward the kitchen.

  Ben isn’t thinking as he

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  under the massive musical instrument that once protected him from eighty-pound bullies. Ben listens from his lair wedged between the piano’s seat and its housing, on the carpeting replaced every three years with a fresh fall of fairy-tale white.

  “But do you know what specifically Paul’s upset about?” Trudy’s voice follows Uncle Claude’s toward the front door.

  “Just what we’re all upset about, pumpkin. Jackson’s death, our getting married so suddenly. Ben’s attitude, his mental health. Your son’s not familiar with the policy of sparing the messenger, I guess. Even after I told him the box was from you.”

  Pumpkin. Ben longs to spit up a catlike amount on the snowy carpet. Claude sounds affectionate toward his mom, genuinely. He’s reporting back to her, accurately. Ben loathes him, nevertheless.