by Lyndsay Faye
“Who is it?” Horatio questions.
“Yeah, Ben Dane here. No, it’s totally fine.”
Vincentio does something abstruse with a tape measure diagonally across Horatio’s back.
“Oh, did you?” Benjamin’s chin jerks toward the ceiling. “That’s fantastic. Or I hope it might be.”
Who is it? Horatio mouths again, batting Vincentio away as the tailor swoops to encircle his neck for a collar measurement.
Benjamin ignores him. “And this is your cell number? Can you please just tell me what sort of . . .” Benjamin’s lips purse in frustration. “Fine. Right, six o’clock, One-thirtieth Street. I’ll wear a silver backless catsuit with a gardenia pinned to the top of my ass crack. Fly a red kite if you need to abort the mission.”
Another pause.
“The code phrase is ‘shake it like a Polaroid picture.’ ”
The line goes dead. Horatio, unsurprised, waits.
Ben smiles with a face drained of all humor. “How does a rendezvous with Detectives Norway and Fortuna sound? They’ve discovered something.”
“Oh my god. Six, you said? That’s only a couple of hours.”
“Yep, and they don’t seem like they want it known they’re meeting us. So down at the riverbank by all those park benches and barbecue grills on the Upper Upper Upper West Side.” Benjamin winks absently. “We used to spend ages walking that bike path. Remember?”
Horatio does remember.
He stops breathing. Because he recalls the last evening they visited the Hudson particularly well. There was a salmon-pink skyline like an arsonist’s bedtime story and the faint drone of weather helicopters, both screaming danger, danger.
Nobody listened.
Horatio wonders when his heart is going to snap irreparably. It is not made of kindling, and the organ always springs back, recovers. However, if he has learned one thing from Benjamin, it’s that nothing is indestructible.
Entropy will win out. Time, and time again.
* * *
• • •
The Hudson shoreline doesn’t smell like timber, seldom smells like fish, never smells like strips of venison drying in the sun anymore. The new economy has no aroma. It’s steel and glass cathedrals erected to worship numbers. But Horatio loves history, chronicling individual lives. He loves the fact that salt brine still drifts along the riverbank the way it did when Canarsie tribes slipped through the glimmering trees. Sitting on this bench, he can picture them, like the afterimage of a too-bright lamp.
Benjamin rails at the police officers nearby on the grass, and Horatio ought to help but Horatio cannot be useful anymore. Partly because he’s as pissed as a newt. And partly because this is Benjamin at his bloody worst, ranting rapid-fire vituperation, and Horatio can do nothing to put the brakes on.
Benjamin gets to do this by himself, again.
You ruined it.
But it was already ruined. A long time ago.
Horatio pushes his thumbnail against the picnic table hard enough to make it bleed. It’s better than the knife that’s been stuck between his ribs since they arrived. He listens to Norway and Fortuna report several outlandish discoveries, but nothing is filtering, really.
There’s just the familiar caressing wind of a summer’s night on a riverbank, and Horatio is absolutely fucking finished.
Detective Barry Fortuna lifts his palms like stop signals. “Hey, kid, you gotta cool off here. I ain’t saying that this cold case shit necessarily had anything to do with what happened to your old man. It just . . . we had questions, yeah? There been more investigations buzzing around your theatre than we’d like, speaking geographically. Weren’t never a police matter, but plenty of insurers asking questions when the old building went up in smoke. Never-identified body in the rubble, which was a police matter, bet your ass, but never amounted to nothing and nobody came looking for anybody. Jack squat to go on. Now we connect a few dots and see that these missing kids all those years back was from the same neighborhood. Finally, your dad’s suicide—”
“Call it that again and I’ll have you turned into a traffic control agent. In a Walmart parking lot,” Benjamin seethes.
“You see what I’m up against here?” Fortuna grumbles to Detective Ying Yue Norway.
“This is insane,” the Dane heir spits out. “It’s not possible.”
He doesn’t sound one iota like Benjamin dismissing stupidity, oddly. He sounds like Benjamin rejecting something painful, something he doesn’t want to face.
He’d sound that way if you said, “I love you and always have,” for instance.
“I understand that our line of questioning itself is automatically distressing,” Norway soothes. “But it’d be remiss not to contact you. See if you can recall any information for us that we’d not have asked you as a child regarding these cold cases.”
“So, what, my dad . . . he was tied to decades-old missing persons cases? He was a psycho? He torched his own theatre with some mortal enemy inside and then years later lost his marbles?” Benjamin hisses. “What the fuck are you trying to tell me?”
“Nothing at all. You’re leaping to conclusions.” Detective Norway lifts a birdlike shoulder. “We only wanted to know what you might have heard. Twenty years ago.”
The voices dissolve. There were seven missing children. Three of them linked for certain, all girls. They went to schools near the World’s Stage Theatre, the old one. Horatio tries to concentrate, but why should he? Benjamin is right—this can have nothing to do with the Danes. And Horatio all but attacked the champagne after Benjamin informed him where they were off to and is now incapable of thought other than I can’t be here.
“Horatio. What the hell, man?”
Horatio looks up. Why is there so much salt on the breeze? It isn’t 1670, the New World isn’t lush and wild, Haarlem isn’t a bloody Dutch fishing village. His eyes sting.
It must be the salt.
Benjamin pulls his marionette strings tighter. “Right,” he says to the cops. “Right, I will be in touch.”
“Is everything, uh, good with your pal?” Detective Fortuna questions.
“Does it look good? I am dealing.”
“If you think of anything,” Norway says, nodding, “you know where to find us.”
“Jeez, whaddaya figure is up with this guy?” Fortuna gestures at Horatio with a meaty hand.
“Say one more word about him and I swear to god I will end you, and it will not be quickly,” Benjamin says in the poison-sweet tone.
“C’mon, Barry,” Ying Yue Norway sighs. “We passed a halal cart. I’ll teach you tact over a gyro.”
The detectives shake hands with Benjamin. The detectives depart. Turn toward the towering green iron staircases. Horatio’s eyes drift over the waves where the great steamers used to flock with shipments of sugar and silks and people and—
“Hey. You.”
Horatio’s eyes still burn, but they’re dry now. He isn’t built for openness. Nor for this sweet pinkening of the skyline, just like before, just like a year ago. Maybe time really is a flat circle. He’s on a merry-go-round in a hell he doesn’t even believe in.
He laughs, shoving his brow into his fists.
A hand drops to his shoulder. “OK, we are just—what’s happening? This is scary. Scary is generally my job.”
Horatio shakes his head.
“Horatio, goddammit. Look at me.”
Instead he looks over the water as the sunset ripens, cherries and peaches and nectarines and plums. He can’t be here. He flew halfway across the world last time.
Horatio takes a slow breath. “Um, we were here last summer. This month. Right around this hour, as I recall. We always did like twilight.”
Benjamin deflates against the park bench, realization flooding his sharp features.
Horatio folds his h
ands together very very hard. “Did you not care, or did it not occur to you?”
“I . . . Jesus Christ. The latter. Of course the latter.”
Horatio swallows. “So you actually want to talk about this?”
“Now that I understand . . . yes, god yes. Yeah.”
“You don’t want to talk about the cold cases instead?”
“Absolutely not,” Benjamin rasps. He still sounds like he’s hiding key information. “That . . . that can wait, I have to make sense of that first, and I’ve put this off long enough. I might be a moron, but I’m not cruel.”
“Actually, you don’t know how to avoid being cruel,” Horatio notes.
The ensuing silence is small. The way tragedies are often scaled in miniature, as simple as a last breath or a first kiss. Benjamin is cruel because he doesn’t understand cruelty in the first place—he thinks intentions count for everything. He can only be cruel the way an animal would be cruel, or a deity. All impulse and no regard until afterward.
Horatio places both palms on the pine table. The dirty river wind in their hair, the dirty street exhaust on their skin, the dirt under their shoes. Eventually they’ll find a way out of this.
Or they won’t. Every story ends, but they don’t always end happily.
“Benjamin, I—I cannot sit here and not have it mean anything.”
“I know that.”
“Then why are you so confused?”
“Because I do know, before you came back I might have just guessed, but I’ve known for a few days, and it crushes me.”
“How could this possibly crush you?” Horatio shouts.
His favorite human stands up to pace. “OK, OK, let’s start at the beginning. That night we . . . when it finally happened, like this thing the stars spelled out and courteously wrote in English, ‘Ben and Horatio love each other and will ultimately do the sexing,’ we . . . you remember?”
Horatio closes his eyes.
Yes, you consummate cock, I remember where I was when all my dreams and nightmares came true.
One year ago. They were pissed, to begin with. A little. Not nearly as much as Horatio is now. Only a shared Viognier bottle over fresh pasta, then a pair of whiskeys so they wouldn’t have to leave the restaurant, abandon the silk ribbons of wind. All the sharp corners sanded off their inhibitions. It was the sort of perfect-weather night that saddens New Yorkers because there are only ten or twelve per year. The city becomes an hourglass, precious grains lost every instant.
So they visited the waterfront greenway along the Hudson. Benjamin monologued about how David Gilmour’s guitar effects sound like listening to music inside an endless cave, comparing it to Yayoi Kusama tricking the eye with infinity mirrors.
And Horatio loved him. He just loved him, and the night was still young and so were they, and the lights on the river were shining and so was Benjamin, and an orchestral breeze struck up, and then they were holding hands.
Aaaaaand that, Benjamin concluded, is why recording engineers should be the rock gods, not the dudes who can shred the hardest or even the ones with the tightest pants.
Glancing down at their fingers, he smiled and began swinging them.
You are ridiculous, he announced.
It sounded like I love you to Horatio, and every time he replays that night, it still does.
So when they had thoroughly exhausted the topic of illusory sound engineering, from Pink Floyd to Pat Metheny, and the wafts of cut grass and Dominican barbecues had mingled into one savory scent, they climbed the next set of stairs. Benjamin hailed a cab and their fingers were still laced, so when they arrived home, Horatio took his Fate by the shirt collar and kissed Benjamin in the stairwell and learned he tasted like lemon peel, and like wine, and like the sharp golden edges of the leaves shuddering under the streetlights.
Horatio’s heart was in his throat, but Benjamin didn’t pull away. Once inside the flat, Horatio pressed his smaller friend’s back into the wall, gripping the ropes of hip muscle and just inhaling him, and it was Benjamin who touched the bulge at the front of his trousers, which made Horatio gasp, which made Benjamin laugh, and if all that was natural, wasn’t it also natural for Horatio to slide to his knees and press his face against soft denim and for Benjamin to say I take it you’re not seeing anyone right now and you would look so fucking amazing with my cock in your mouth and then for Benjamin to have his knuckles carding thickly through Horatio’s hair and finally fisting, clutching.
Just when his friend had slumped half a foot and Horatio thought he might disintegrate, Benjamin whispered, Hey hey, no—shh, you’re OK, come over here. They collapsed on Benjamin’s bed. He kissed Horatio’s throat and said, Albert Bandura first demonstrated the cognitive process of purely observational learning in nineteen sixty-one—I’m gonna give it a whirl, yeah? Just. I’ll do what you were doing.
“I recall, yes.” It comes out colder than Horatio means it to.
“So . . .” Benjamin screws his eyes shut. “And, and I know we didn’t talk about it afterward, that I just. I let everything go back to normal because I thought it could. Or no, because I wasn’t thinking at all. I was, I don’t know. I wanted the dust to settle . . . But if I’d known, I wouldn’t have done what—Horatio. I love you, I do.”
Horatio’s hands form fists. “Mutual, I’m sure.”
Gritting his teeth, Horatio pictures the aftermath of the best and cruelest orgasm of his life. Because it was from sodding Benjamin Dane, and Benjamin was sloppy and sweet and choked twice and said, Jesus, sorry, I guess learning according to modeling alone isn’t ideal. And as Horatio already knew from party nights when their flat was carpeted in aluminum and glass, Benjamin was a cuddler. Which had happened several times with Lia in the pile too, the trio as happy as they could imagine being, but never in this context, oh, never like this.
And then the next morning. An empty bed and a note from Benjamin on the kitchen counter.
Ha ha, whoa man, hell of a night. I guess you can put another notch in your bedpost, but I want mine to be extra big, OK? Even if I was complete crap. We can find you a bassist at that concert later, I have it on good authority bassists always know what they’re doing. If you see Lance, tell him that our kitchen faucet is just a dribble again and to pull his head out of his ass.—B
“I lasted a month with everything back to the way it was,” Horatio whispers. “Then I couldn’t anymore. I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye, Benjamin. You were owed that much.”
“Please don’t talk about debt, I owe you—”
“You owe me nothing!” Horatio all but screams. “Or else how could you treat me this way?”
The silence echoes along the park. If Benjamin is right, and time is really a dimension, then people can hear this silence in Egypt, in Rome, in the Renaissance, a thousand years from now.
“I never meant to hurt you of all people,” Benjamin says, horrified.
“Well, then maybe you shouldn’t have fucked me of all people.”
His friend has no answer to that.
“Goodbye, Benjamin,” Horatio tells him. Standing, he heads down the riverfront.
“Horatio, please come back here!”
He doesn’t. This trail is as ancient as the first native tribes. He isn’t the first to follow it, and he won’t be the last, this tracing the flow of running water, this choosing to walk away.
BENJAMIN
What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, and excruciating inner learning for life and self-expression—and with all this yet to die.
—Søren Kierkegaard
It is the morning before the annual New World’s Stage Benefit Gala, and Benjamin Dane is not drunk.
He was drunk though, spectacularly, which made the tone of his texts pretty widely varied. They started at midnight, when Ben was so wracked over Horatio that he hadn’t thought about death (his own, anyway) in a record-shattering four hours.
Horatio I know I deserve to be used as a ball in one of your soccer footie matches and kicked all over the pitch (field? court?) but please say something
Nothing. No response.
No concept in the Western world is more terrifying than zero, Ben thought, opening a bottle of Lagavulin at 12:16 a.m.
Mathematicians took centuries to accept the void; it was detested by all save occult scholars. Add zero to any number and the number remains unchanged. Add zero to itself ad infinitum and it never grows. Multiply something by zero and shitnuggets, you’ve erased the whole board. Divide a number by zero and watch your own brain leak out of your nostrils as you conceptualize infinity. Zero skull-fucked the axiom of Archimedes and flipped double birds to the Aristotelian universe.
Radio silence from Horatio was incomparably shittier.
There was zero scotch in this World’s Stage mug, but now there is SOME scotch, Ben thought. Blessed, blessed coffee mug.
Naturally, an hour later, he texted again while twitching their curtains aside to scan for a large man with his shoulders slumped:
OK so I ordered cold noodles, mu shu, red curry tofu, sushi without the fishies, samosas, veggie enchiladas, falafel, a mezze platter, and two pizzas I need your help
And then:
bad joke I know I don’t need your help and you might be through with that gig anyway but seriously I’ve never been this ashamed of myself
Followed swiftly by:
yes that was about me being ashamed but see I noticed right away ha ha whoops and now this will all be about you, I promise, I’m begging here
Benjamin tried to pace himself on the Lagavulin—with literal pacing, cleaning the apartment, arranging a gluttonous vegetarian takeaway feast. He finalized his PowerPoint for the gala and shot the file off to Paul Brahms. That should have felt like the final stretch of a marathon but felt like . . . nothing.
