by Lyndsay Faye
He’s back, Horatio must have forgotten his keys, and now that he’s returned Ben can give him a preview of his speech at the gala tomorrow but firstly throw himself over the event horizon beyond which even light can’t escape and kiss him until they’re both—
Paul Brahms waits in the hall.
“You are, like, so deeply not who I was expecting that the disappointment can’t be computed,” Ben reports. “It is an impossible quantity, it is not Lebesgue measurable, how let down I am—the equation will only come out to zero or infinity.”
“Hey there, Ben,” Paul ventures, peering into the apartment. “What a week and no kidding, am I right? I’m sorry I haven’t had as much free time to follow up with you as you think you deserve. Am I interrupting anything?”
“Iiiiiiitty-bitty nervous breakdown. No big.”
“And we have privacy?”
“I am as free as a quantum particle.”
“Oh, good. May I come in?”
Paul carries a messenger bag. A sickly sheen coats his brow, as if a cue ball were suffering a fever, but then again Paul never looks well the day before the gala. And this is the first without Jackson.
“It’s, uh, surreal that it’s all going to go down tomorrow without him,” Ben offers.
“What’s that, Ben?” Paul looks up, almost startled.
“My dad. Jackson. I miss him, too.”
“Oh.” Paul chuckles. “Really, I can’t imagine.”
“Imagine what?”
“Missing him the way you must.”
Paul returns to the middle distance as if he hadn’t been interrupted.
What would Horatio do? Tea, yes. He’d make tea.
“So,” Ben calls from the kitchen. “Tell me every single thing that’s ever gone south between my dad and my uncle.”
Paul brandishes a folder. “I always hate to disappoint you, even though, let’s face it, that happens pretty much whenever we see each other, right? But no, I’m here for another reason.”
A prickle of unease crawls over Ben’s scalp. It’s the exact opposite of the sensation Horatio left behind with his lips; if Horatio is a proton, Paul is an anti-proton. Ben drops two brown-flavored bags into the ubiquitous New World’s Stage mugs. As he sets them down, Paul smiles crookedly.
“Boy, here’s a trip down memory lane—what, twelve years ago? That was when we moved the gala from midtown to the Financial District, really got the thing moving. And what’s yours there, five years back? You took Lia on that trip to the Finger Lakes, collecting foliage for her Inferno project. What a show that was, eh?”
Ben sets his tea down. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. They never talk about Lia—especially not anymore.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “It, yeah.”
Lia built a living room filled with secondhand furnishings. But on fire. She and Ben took a car, scoured sleepy hamlets for foliage in impossible bandwidths, colors so saturated they hurt the retinas. She cured them in water and glycerin and coated every surface with preserved leaves in hellish colors, unusually silent. Even for Lia immersed in work.
“What’s that?” Ben nods at the folder, desperate for a topic shift.
“Oh, it’s the board sign-off for the gala’s insurance rider. One second, I must have a pen someplace, everything has been so topsy . . . ah! Goodness, it’s not leaky, is it? Whew. Just signature here, and then initial here, please. Thank you! I always say, these events are—”
“Ninety-five percent preparation and five percent perspiration.” Ben finishes with a flourish. “I hear you’re worried about the theatre’s money. Do tell.”
Paul’s lips tilt as he slides the folder back in his bag. Ben has seen a similar expression before: benign, ass-kissing, mostly directed at Jackson Dane.
Now it’s a smiley face pasted onto a withered bag of skin.
“Sure, why not tell you?” Paul settles back into the cushion. “Jackson’s more experimental forays have been driving New World’s Stage into the concrete. Poor guy, always trying to outrun having been born in Texas. Desperate to escape the taint of the fortune he was born with. One more artsy show that gets on Masterpiece Theatre and is hari-kari for the box office and he’ll be accepted by the Manhattan theatrical establishment? Despite the fact he’s not an East Coaster or a Los Angeles import? Please. That was never going to happen.”
Having never thought of his dad this way, Ben frowns. Having never heard Paul speak this way, he leans closer. It’s like turning on his radio and finding it set to a random Christian rock station.
“Paul, are you all right?”
“Much better, thanks, Ben.”
“Since . . . ?”
“Since you sent me your gala presentation. I’d have seen it anyhow, of course, the techs know not to incorporate content without my signing off on it. Your skipping the middleman was awfully gracious, though. Obviously, I can’t let you go through with it.”
Thoughts audition in Ben’s brain, are rejected as unsuitable.
“It would deeply upset your mother,” Paul continues. “It would wreak havoc with our theatre company, don’t mistake me, but your mother has been through enough, don’t you think?”
OUR theatre?
Are you in love with my mother?
“Holy shit, are you in love with my mother?” he blurts.
Paul’s teeth show briefly. Neat, small rodent teeth, teeth for scavenging and for self-defense. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for your mother, but that takes the form of making her life easier. Nothing more, and god forbid ever anything less. She’s a queen, Benny. You never understood that.”
“Shit, shit, shit, you are.”
“Young man, do not—”
“Oh god, Paul, that is just a, that is a mess. And I don’t even have to go over your head to make this gala slideshow happen, I am over your head in, like, every way. It’s happening.”
“Not on my watch, Ben.” The sweat on Paul’s brow has evaporated. “I say the word, it all goes away. And I plan to.”
“What the hell happened to you?” Ben demands. “I don’t understand.”
“No. No one understood. But you especially didn’t, you pathetically self-obsessed asshole.”
Ben stares, aware of nothing but
w h i t e n o i s e
white noise is not simply soothing sounds but is defined by the oscillation of the sound wave//if created in a studio an engineer would play every frequency audible at identical low volume//producing the same effect on the ear as white light has on the eye.
“I understand your confusion, I really do,” Paul continues. “It wasn’t ever easy acting this way. The boor who’s triple-checking equipment, studying every ledger, but your father wasn’t very easy to control, you understand. He was as headstrong as you are, maybe. Trying to get what he wanted. What Jackson didn’t have was subterfuge.”
Air slithers in and out of Ben’s lungs. “And, uh, what you wanted? How’d you end up with that?”
Paul smiles a viper’s smile. “Studying.”
“Studying what?”
“Absolutely everything. Especially if it had to do with Jackson or Trudy or Claude Dane.”
“You . . .” Ben tries. It doesn’t work out.
“Or Ben Dane, for that matter. Anyhow. They need me back at the theatre. I really don’t have long, I’m always telling you that, but you never listen.”
Ben’s chest feels tight. “My dad . . . What the hell, Paul, you stopped a robbery in an alleyway and my dad gave you a new career. You. I thought you were best friends. You fought for the company together, you, Jesus Christ, I think you love my mother, why would you try to own them?”
“Do you think you know what it feels like to be powerless?”
“Of course I do.”
“You don’t have the first clue, you spoiled modern aristocrat,” Pau
l spits. “Lia and I were about to lose our home after Laura passed, about to be in a shelter. We’d suffered for years trying to save her, and all we had to show for it was misery. Do you know what any kind of hunger other than aesthetic suffering looks like?”
Ben has forgotten how sounds are formed.
It’s something to do with waves.
If a tree falls in an empty forest,
it doesn’t make a sound,
it makes waves,
and it requires ears for the waves to become sounds,
what no one thinks about is that
the animal experience is the key difference
between sound and mere oscillation.
Ben is experiencing Paul Brahms, master manipulator, expound on his nefarious career, and he thinks a tree falling on him would probably feel similar.
“I recognized your father at the bar where I’d stopped to have one drink before heading home to my daughter with enough groceries for two more days.” Paul’s voice could save the polar ice caps. “Jackson liked dives, always did. The worse the neon flickered and the more cleavage the staff showed, the better, even in a five-thousand-dollar suit. You could practically smell it on him too—part of the reason none of the stage elites around here ever gave him the time of day. When he finished his beer, I followed him. I had management experience, did theatre in college—I thought I could beg for an usher job, anything. Jackson getting mugged in that alley was the turning point of my life.”
“You were telling the truth all those times,” Ben breathes. “That, that crap about not controlling your feet. You saved Dad because he was influential and you were desperate. If he’d just been some random—”
“I’d have called the cops.” Paul checks his wristwatch. “From four or five blocks away, probably. But since the victim was your father, I couldn’t leap into that crack between walls fast enough. It worked, too.”
“What—but how?”
“Do you know what you can accomplish if you’ve read the entire biography of another human being?” Paul muses. “Well, I’ll tell you, Benny, the answer is anything. Jackson liked cheap beer and cheaper women. He would have sold his soul to get Philip J. Smith or Thomas Schumacher or any of the real Broadway power brokers to invite him to golf. He was ashamed of the fortune I would have killed for to save my daughter, my wife. He was paranoid and suspicious, increasingly, and Trudy and I were forced to run things with Claude’s help. He was disturbed. Where the hell do you think you inherited it?”
At least part of what Paul says is true. Ben remembers his dad getting snubbed by Disney, watched him crumple RSVPs declining the Danes’ invites to donor weekends. Ben just worshipped him too ardently for it to register.
“He was a willing enough ally once you nudged him in the right direction. I never even had to tell him that his wife was sleeping with his baby brother practically since their wedding day. Something to do with Claude being charming, I’d wager, Claude being decent, Claude being normal.”
“She wasn’t,” Ben husks. “You—”
Paul opens the satchel again, pulling out a sheaf of monochrome photographs. He spreads them on the coffee table in a careless smear.
trudy hotel door
sunlight claude palm tree
hand claude trudy face touch
gesture concrete hair
skin light
trudy claude trudy claude
No matter how much Ben wants it not to be true, it was his first thought after they married, his first after Jackson accused his own brother in the videos. That this relationship between them was longstanding. And that certainties Ben had always trusted were lies.
“Why would you possibly have these?”
“Insurance,” Paul replies. “Your entire family abhors the notion of a scandal—if they ever tried to oust me, well, I had leverage.”
“So I guess you killed my father for them?” Ben’s flesh crawls.
Paul’s face lights, a sickly fluorescent-green satisfaction. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course not.”
“Then Claude did murder him?”
“I’d say I hate to break this to you, but the pair of you always did deserve each other—both utter wastes of skin with delusions of grandeur. Your dad either overdosed by accident or design.”
“You bastard. In those clips he said that eyes were always on him, he said it directly fucking to you.”
Ben flashes back to his dad’s videos and his gut boils.
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.
Jackson was speaking straight to his own shadow governor, completely unaware that he was right.
So the paranoia wasn’t paranoia. As for the death, though . . . Ben understands not everything has a reason. Just because Spinoza argued that something could never come out of nothing doesn’t mean that there’s a motive behind every action. Determinate cause leading to a dramatic effect could be murder or suicide, sure. It could also be a pharmaceutical error or a coincidental overdose.
Meanwhile, numb fear inks across his heart at the look on Paul’s face.
“Jackson was ruthless and so am I, in my own way,” Paul says when he sees the penny drop. “Except in your father, you admired it, and I don’t imagine you’ve ever admired me in your life. That’s all right. I’m through giving a damn over being treated like some idiot lackey by my daughter’s former fiancé.”
The leather bag opens once more, and now there’s a gun in Paul Brahms’s hand, and Ben has no choice but to laugh hysterically.
“We’re going upstairs.”
“Wait, what? Why?”
“Benjamin, for once, you’re going to do as I tell you.”
The trip up to the rooftop passes in a blur. This is another dream, it has to be. Descartes worried himself raw over whether life might simply all be a dream. Ben once told Horatio about this and his friend replied that it could get a lot worse.
Chin up, in the Hindu Vedanta worldview, we’re all just scraps of Brahma’s dreams, which rather pisses on the notion of autonomy altogether.
The dream-roof is exactly as he and Horatio left it. Chairs, cinder blocks, the brick housing projects. Pigeons wheel above them, heedless and graceful. If he’s dreaming, or even if it’s Brahma dreaming, their dreams are incredibly detailed to include such individually painted birds.
“I don’t suppose saying ‘please don’t do this’ will help?” Ben attempts as adrenaline crawls up his throat.
Silence. Paul gestures him to the edge of the rooftop, where Ben can see the sidewalks stretching away in their great grey grid.
“If you’re going to murder me, why and why here?”
“I’m not murdering you, I’m helping you fulfill a dream,” Paul sneers. “You’re trampling the system I’ve built, poking your nose in everywhere. As to why we’re up here, because I can shut the door and no one will find you for a week. The gala will run as planned, and you finally get your eternal peace. Hereditary depression and insanity, they’ll suppose. It isn’t even a lie. Won’t it be wonderful to cover what I did with the truth?”
“Lia wouldn’t want you to do this!” Ben attempts. “Lia—”
“Lia isn’t here.” If Paul could slay him with a look, Ben would already be dead. “All you do is make people miserable. I want you to comprehend that, before the end. Your mother, your father, my only child, and you vowed to make her happy and she disintegrated right in front of your fucking eyes.”
“That—I—no, that wasn’t my fault, not entirely, do you remember the janitor from back—”
“Nothing is ever your fault,” Paul says, disgusted. “You were given everything, and you tried to shove it all down the garbage disposal. So did Jackson, always preening about the theatre supporting itself. I’ve despised you for longer than I can even calculate, but I’m happy enough to do you this final favor. You don’t want to exist anymore? I can arrange that.”
Death, when contemplated, can look like temptation.
Death, when unasked-for, looks like being damned.
Paul raises the weapon. Ben’s hand shoots out, and muscles
clench and grip and wrench and tighten
and then Ben registers a bang followed by a scream he suspects is his own voice.
Paul isn’t moving. His eyes are open, though, clear as the morning sky reflected in them, as he reclines in a warm and ever-widening pool of blood.
LIA
In New York, when a tree dies, nobody mourns that
it was cut down in its prime. Nobody counts the rings,
notifies the loved ones. There are other trees.
—Sarah Kay, “The Oak Tree Speaks”
The morning of the New World’s Stage gala, Lia stands in a puddle of hose water on 28th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, watching humanity flow around her.
I am a river rock, she thinks as pedestrians slip by.
I am smooth and cold and collected.
Following the meeting with Jessica, who dazedly accepted all proposals and even liked the ludicrous amount of lavender, they hastily quit the National Arts Club. Mam’zelle muttered something about en taxi. Moma glared at the iron fence defending Gramercy Park. Lia knew she only imagined it as sinister, but a flock of roosting pigeons burst forth from a neighbor’s rooftop, soaring overhead like spies.
LAVENDER: Mistrust or request for reassurance in the Victorian era, imports caution moving forward. Was given to soldiers going into imminent battle.
“We’ll send instructions, chouchou,” Mam’zelle said, tapping away at her phone.
“Ready the flowers for us, yes?” Moma pressed her arm as a yellow cab rolled up. The driver stopped at the smallest flick of Mam’zelle’s frosted pink manicure.
