The King of Infinite Space

by Lyndsay Faye

  “Oh bollocks, please excuse me . . . I’ll just—”

  “Come in, you perfect and I do mean perfect idiot.” Ben beckons to him. “Pull up a box of branded napkins, we’re having a hen fest.”

  “A what?”

  “A chin-wag. Just sit down.”

  Horatio casts about for a seat. He slips off his hair band, unconsciously redoing it, deeply uncomfortable. When he does settle onto a half-emptied pallet, he looks like a giant asked to get comfortable on a folding chair, and Ben laughs helplessly.

  “What?” Horatio demands, embarrassment making him irritable.

  “Nothing. You make everything better.” Ben pulls a Klonopin out of his pocket, says, “To mental health, cheers,” and swallows fabricated tranquility.

  Horatio now looks annoyed rather than ashamed, and Ben counts it as a win.

  “Hey there, Horatio. Good to see you. Gotta get back to these boxes.” Ariel levers to his feet.

  “Tell me it’s all going to be OK, Ariel.” Ben sighs, retrieving his phone to check the time.

  “ ’S the one thing I can’t do. Because it won’t be, in the end. But you can sure fight like hell to live the best you can till you get there.”

  Ben is about to compliment Ariel on just how dark that bit of optimism is when he registers that his cell reads 1:27, and Horatio’s tailoring appointment is at two.

  “Vincentio! Shit.” He jumps up, hands already steadying. “Thank you, Ariel. Seriously, I owe you. For the information and for the . . . the other stuff. Thanks.”

  “Don’t think I ever did let you down yet, Benny, and I don’t plan to start.” The world’s finest doorman taps his pen against his furrowed brow in a salute while Horatio, looking adrift, rises almost as soon as he sat down.

  “Let me know if you think of anything else?”

  “Ear to the ground, as always.”

  “Constant vigilance.” Ben breaks a brief, back-clapping hug with Ariel and then moves to hustle his colossally broad-shouldered friend toward the door. “Good lord, man, you’re like some kind of Indian lumberjack without the flannel. Bye, Ariel! Give Paul Brahms hell for me, please.”

  They aren’t even around the reception desk yet when Horatio plants his feet. Which stops Ben because the laws governing mass versus momentum are not to be mucked with.

  “Do you mind informing me what on earth that was?” Horatio sounds angry, but Ben feels vibrating currents of worry.

  “Er, a smallish meltdown. Eeeeensy teensy.”

  “Caused by?”

  “I was questioning Ariel after questioning Rory and Garrett while you questioned Paul. How is every little thing with Paul?”

  Horatio rubs at his neck. “He’s fine. But I’ve something to tell you—an idea, of sorts.”

  “Fantastic!” Ben exclaims. “Inform me en route to your fitting, we haven’t completed the double-oh-seven aspect of this outing.”

  “Horatio Ramesh Patel!”

  Ben and Horatio turn, startled.

  “Ben!” Trudy Dane tugs off huge Versace sunglasses. “Oh, honey, I was so . . . thank god, just thank god. Hello there, Horatio! It’s wonderful to see you so unexpectedly.”

  “Precisely what I was thinking,” the man who called out to Horatio says with visible glee.

  This newcomer is about the same size as Ben’s mom, and his amber cat’s eyes glow with intelligence. His hair is pure white, his three-piece navy suit patterned with a tiny chalk pinstripe, and several threaded needles stick through his lapel like a corsage. Why he’s beaming at Horatio Ben can’t imagine, but Horatio’s shocked expression and Trudy Dane’s sudden appearance send spiders down his forearms.

  “I—er—Robin?” Horatio stammers.

  “Aren’t you certain?” the little man questions happily.

  “Yes, of course I am. Robin. What a surprise. Hullo, Trudy.”

  Ben’s mother embraces his friend in a miasma of designer perfume. She next angles toward her son, pretends to see hesitation when there’s mainly surprise, decides to be hurt, then pretends not to be hurt, all in about 1.4 seconds.

  “Hi, Mom,” Ben says, fighting the urge to clap.

  Robin is pumping his hand next. “The reason my mate Horatio came to New York! For you can be no other. Chuffed to meet you, chuffed absolutely to bits.”

  “This is a friend of yours from London?” Ben asks Horatio.

  “No! Um, not in so many words. We met on the plane, actually.”

  Ben swings quizzical eyes to his mother, who is affecting an unaffected martyr expression. She wears a grey sheath dress with an angled neckline. It probably cost the same amount as a used car, and it’s her Mom means business look.

  “Robin is an event coordinator, Benny,” she says with exquisite softness. “He’s here to help with the gala, in a broad sense.”

  “Neato. And in a narrow sense?”

  “Robin also works as a wedding coordinator.” Trudy blushes, and it looks very nearly genuine. “He’s here to help me, too. Your . . . my new husband and I, that is.”

  “Oh. My uncle daddy Claude, you mean. Epic.”

  “Wait, wait, wait!” Agitation radiates off Horatio, and Ben wants to tap Morse code into his palm, find out what’s wrong. “What on earth are you doing consulting with Trudy Dane? Is that why you spoke to me so freely?”

  “Wasn’t aware of your association up until now, was I, my darling duckie?” Robin coos. “Anyway, life? Just a series of coincidences, innit? Can’t put ’em in a novel, nobody’d believe it, but reality? Improbable events, all day every day.”

  There’s something distinctly off about him—not malevolent exactly, but chaotic. In a weird way, this guy feels like entropy, and Ben fights an irrational shiver.

  “But pleased to inform you that my business in New York is all growing clearer by the instant.” Robin weaves his fingers together, smiling from ear to ear. “Well, sorry to say that I really must dash. Positively marvelous luncheon, Ms. Dane, and I’ll get you my notes posthaste.”

  He leans forward to shake Horatio’s hand. He shifts to Ben’s. Ben stops breathing.

  Robin sports a cravat, immaculately tied. Its pattern is deftly hand-stitched, an ivory length of cloth with tiny pointed wild strawberries. It resembles an elongated scarf. The one that Ben remembers so clearly didn’t have green vines, these tendrils of leaves and serrated foliage, did it?

  No.

  It didn’t.

  But the one Ben remembers with a pang like a lightning strike absolutely—beyond any possible shade of a shadow of doubt—belonged to Lia Brahms.

  LIA

  The only single women widows now or brides

  Half married to the breeze. We lie to stay together.

  We lie to make do. . . .

  —Terrance Hayes, “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin”

  Lia feels sluggish, dusty. So out of practice that she’s dirtying her own paper. Leaving finger smudges in thick grey smears.

  This new piece (she pictures a performative installation, her real body tangled up in the tree with the demon looming over her) is stuck in the sketch phase. How did she progress beyond that before she was this corroded hull of an artist? How were her dreams assembled into floral wire and fabric and fresh cuttings?

  She needs to explore her own darkest artistic period. Excavate the tomb.

  The previous afternoon bloomed beautifully. She learned about the powers of waters from various sources (ocean, rain, river). Maw-maw showed her how to infuse homemade candles to attract creativity (patchouli, yarrow, lemon verbena). But her true assignment was sketching Jessica Kowalski’s bouquet after determining with Moma its exact composition. While serving everyone vanilla-scented coffee, Mam’zelle announced that they’d deliver their product to a particularly swank Financial District event space at a fete Jessica
and her dick ex were both attending. It was crucial that Jessica give the “apology” bouquet to Jeremy herself, in public, she reiterated.

  That sounded melodramatic to Lia, but she coaxed blooms and grasses from the page with colored pencil anyhow. Pretending that she believed magical floral arrangements were perfectly normal—not to mention real. She wasn’t sure anymore. She didn’t even know whether or not she cared, it all suited her so perfectly, like finding a lamp-lit candy cottage in the midst of a devouring forest.

  When she presented her finished rendering, all three sisters applauded, and Lia felt her face light up like a hearth fire.

  Today, Lia sits in her snug chamber on the third floor of the flower shop sifting through her files. Her room is ghostly ivory under the thick chair rail, sporting wallpaper with golden trellises above. Straight out of Oscar Wilde’s interior design magazines. The air conditioner rattles encouragement. There’s barely room to sleep—just a bed and a glass table and one skinny dresser, with space to scooch between the bed and the wall. It ought to feel claustrophobic. But it’s like a nest or maybe even a womb.

  An overstuffed black portfolio rests on the coverlet. Lia settles against the wall and unzips.

  “What the fuck?” she exclaims.

  She hasn’t opened this in the two years she’s been here, but Lia knows the exact chronology of her installations and stores them accordingly.

  They are severely disordered, not to say completely gone to shit. She meant to study her Elegy for a Life Lost project, which coincided weirdly with her engagement, because something about the new piece reminds her of that show. The one that was held in the biggest gallery yet, when she was twenty-six. But the Elegy pictures are scattered among photos of wisteria waterfalls and an airplane made of lilies. It’s like some kind of morbid infection.

  You did not go through my art portfolio, Lia thinks grimly at the sisters downstairs.

  Did you?

  BUTTERFLY BUSH: Effective in protection charms, hiding, privacy, or barring entrance to a sacred space.

  She separates Elegy from the rest. Twelve caskets, ordered at a steep discount online but still costing five figures. From a Kickstarter and from Ben, who blew raspberries on her belly till she agreed and then made her call him “Benicio DeMedici” for a week.

  Lia discovered that coffins come in golden champagne and ice pink, like nail polish. Twenty-gauge steel, cherrywood, Rocky Mountain pine. Lia displayed one a week over twelve weeks within seasonal bowers, her nude body reposing inside, a crown of blooms tangled in her briar-patch hair. She provided items to toss on her as guests passed through. SWEETS TO THE SWEET: FAREWELL the sign read. Petals, herbs, good clean dirt, like at a funeral—also empty mini-bottles, gum wrappers, chicken bones from her lunch that afternoon.

  Trash. Which is what people become when they’re no longer people.

  She began with January, half-dozed in a walnut casket bedecked with bare tree branches, gardenias, and holly while people chucked debris at her. The next week was for February, so the vessel was eighteen-gauge steel dressed in greying grasses, hyacinth, waxflowers. Full circle to December reposing in a riot of blood-red poinsettias. New Yorkers attended for three months, showering her with rosemary sprigs and fast-food wrappers. Every time, it was beautiful for the first participants and revolting for the last.

  A few critics found it lovely, still fewer brilliant, some achingly sad. “A Pre-Raphaelite’s adolescent wet dream, devoid of any irony or taste,” that one was memorable.

  You’re a line of music, Ben answered when she asked on week six what he thought of her corpse disappearing under wadded paper napkins. I could transpose your melody into any key, hum it at any tempo, and still know you.

  After the ninth showing, he said, Since you’re striking this display tomorrow anyhow, may I fuck you right into these whaddaya call them, lilacs? Destroy them? Thematically appropriate, am I right? And a week later, I kept a handful of those petals we mashed into the casket lining. I’m, like, trying to dry them out, keep them. But they’re completely soaked. In both of us.

  An aura of mingled mischief and terror haunted her boyfriend, and it didn’t take Lia long to infer there was a cunning plan afoot. She wouldn’t have put it past Ben to propose to her while in the coffin. He was that ridiculous. But no, after the show closed, he bribed his way into the Hayden Planetarium, spread out a lavish midnight picnic under the model solar system, and affixed the engagement ring to a bookmark in The Language of Flowers by Henrietta Dumont (first edition, 1851).

  Fucking enough of this. Back to work.

  When Lia forks her fingers against her hairline in frustration, she wants her mom’s scarf again and sends her arms burrowing into bedclothes looking for it. Sensitive fingertips scrabble through the goose down.

  No kerchief. She needs it, really needs it.

  It tethers her. Lia dives under the bedskirt like a gopher.

  “Shit!” she shrieks when her hand touches liquid.

  She scrambles backward. No scarf, what the fuck, what the fuck?

  “OK.” She holds glistening fingers up. “OK.”

  Odors slither into her nostrils. Rosemary, clove, a thrum of the savagely ancient. It takes a few sniffs to place this backwoods-ritual aroma, but it’s always been in the room, she realizes.

  “Camphor,” she decides. “OK. It’s cool. Everything is cool.”

  Lia investigates with her phone light. She doesn’t find a strawberry scarf, but she excavates a camphor bowl marked with tinier and tinier pentagrams within a larger pentagram on the lip. Neat. The water inside—fresh, no dust—covers three coffee beans, a star anise pod, a bag of Lipton, and a sodden cigarette. Separate from this hoodoo soup are seven black hen feathers bound with twine, a rabbit’s foot, and a dried bouquet of yarrow, eucalyptus, and sage.

  Lia sighs.

  YARROW: For bravery in the face of adversity; also powerful in the Chinese I Ching or Book of Changes divination method, and in the regional American South, to haunt your dreams with the one you will marry.

  EUCALYPTUS: Protects from jinxes and repels enemies to such an extent that it will work mojo on both external threats and on yourself, if you are your own enemy.

  SAGE: Women’s strength, wisdom, and the courage to follow through on that wisdom when confronted with danger; protection against the Evil Eye.

  A rap at the door disturbs her investigation.

  “Yeah, come in.”

  Moma enters, snakelike torso on display between ripped blue jeans and a black halter crop top. When she sees the bedside table, her brows arch, thumbs tucking into empty belt loops.

  “Well, what you got there, baby girl,” she remarks. It isn’t a question.

  “There’s magical shit under my bed.”

  Moma smiles with eyes and nose only. “I’ll be damned.”

  “Maybe. That’s the general line people take on witchcraft, you know.”

  The bowl, the herbs, the shared dreams—when did it all begin? Should she be amused or terrified? Lia reflects on a fire-gutted theatre cold enough to burn her skin in Ben’s nightmares, on a slant-smiling boy who technically had everything and really had no one but her. At least, until Horatio came along. Sweet, perfect Horatio, whom she adored, with his kind eyes and his gluttony for punishment.

  Because Horatio loved Ben too, and Lia in another way altogether, and he preferred to have both of them gracefully than nothing at all.

  Her and Ben, though. It was always peculiar. She’s read about people having psychic connections, I heard his voice the very instant he died type of stuff, I knew she was in trouble, Rochester screaming for his Jane. Lia has talked Ben down from crippling panic attacks simply via text message. He once found her passed out in a Chelsea hotel lobby she’d never visited before.

  Maybe—just maybe—it’s all real. According to her ex, quantum theory states conclusiv
ely that observation of one particle enacts an instantaneous effect on a distant joined particle, beyond light speed, beyond what’s possible. But conversely, Isaac Newton himself (alchemist, magician, Ben always used jazz hands when evoking him) juggled biblical texts into proving beyond any doubt Christ would return in 1948.

  Science isn’t everything. Neither is magic, clearly.

  Lia’s heart flutters, winglike, in the cage of her ribs.

  Moma laughs, tossing her head. “Where you get that kinda fool idea? I’m no witch, me. Nor none of my sisters.”

  “But you did stick a bunch of herbs and a camphor bowl and a bunny foot and a bundle of black chicken feathers in here.”

  “Not me.”

  “Fine. The three of you together?”

  Eyes twinkling like holiday beads, Moma lifts her shoulder.

  “Putting dead twigs under my pillow can’t change my subconscious, not really,” Lia protests.

  Moma agrees, “True enough.”

  “The people who pay you so much believe what they’re getting is powerful. That makes it powerful, the placebo effect.”

  “Can’t cure nobody saving their faith in us burns strong.”

  “Right, so you can’t be witches.”

  “Ain’t that what I been telling you?”

  Lia can’t help but smile. “Yes, but people who do sneaky incantation shit are at a higher risk for drowning, burning-at-the-stake type of obituaries.”

  “Nobody alive can kill the three sisters saving the three sisters they own selves, and that’s gospel.” Twisting a few braids around her wrist, Moma adds, “Same’ll go for you too, I think, your fate in no hands but your own.”

  “My own? You’re kidding. I just found a bunch of shifty talismans, and I’m pretty sure they’re meant to have an influence.”

  “ ’Course they are, baby.” Moma comes a few steps closer. “You done been taught what all this, that, and t’other signify now. There ain’t no malice in these herbs, so what’s so sinister? Same as putting a bag of lavender in your underpants.”