by Lyndsay Faye
“Vengeance is a dish best served cold, but rice noodles are not,” Horatio mutters.
“Vengeance? Huh, I’ve never heard of a philosopher bent on revenge, but there’s a first time for everything. And Paul Brahms is going to help me send my uncle to the deepest hell I can find.”
Ben already has tape affixed to his scrawled message for the delivery man. He leaves the door open but forgets to look behind him. He is on the cusp of shouting back over his shoulder when he hears a light curse and the rattling of keys, and Ben’s grin when he steps outside is brighter than the sun-soaked summer clouds.
* * *
• • •
The New World’s Stage Organization offices—management department, human resources, ticketing, and the priceless historical archive—are south of the physical theatre, in Times Square. They soar like a melody through the orchestra of street traffic, the yells and sirens and chatter of cabbie radio that Ben grew up with. There are days when he hears almost everything in music. These times aren’t unpleasant, just loose and languid. A homeless man on 56th wearing a placard reading NO ONE IS COMING FOR YOU shrieks at passing cars while far above them on countless sills, pigeons coo filthy lullabies to one another.
Ben is clarity personified now, every fiber willing their cab forward. It doesn’t even need an engine. Inertia doesn’t stand a chance against the power of his resolve. He can hear his dad, in a rare show of genuine praise, the day Ben graduated from the Philosophical Foundations of Physics program at Columbia.
I knew you had it in you, Benny. We might not always see eye to eye, but you’re just about as sharp as they come, and accomplishing something like this is goddamn bullheaded.
You’ve done us proud.
“What do you intend to ask Paul Brahms?” Horatio’s dark head slumps against the cab window.
“What don’t I intend to ask him, after he’s seen these?” Ben waves the digital camera in a grim circle.
At West 44th Street, he shoves cash through the driver’s partition and they land on the pavement between a dirty-water-dog cart and a caricaturist who is accidentally making all of his subjects appear Asian. That the man himself is decidedly not Asian but rather sports enormous Rasta locks is puzzling but then swishwhish they are through the revolving doors and clipclop ladies in corporate heels glide across the marble and thrumwahwaaaaaaoh croons the instrumental version of that hit song from their world premiere stage production of Labyrinth.
“Hey, Benny, how’s that music career coming?” calls Ariel from behind the security desk.
Ariel Washington has worked here for thirty years and thus gets a pass on calling him Benny. As Ben stops to shake hands, Ariel’s face folds into about a hundred chestnut wrinkles. When he was twelve years old and obsessed with playing guitar, Ben had the misguided notion of asking Ariel, whose family was Nashville royalty, how to crack into the jazz business. It turned out that being a session player required more than a good ear, a phenomenal brain, a few hours of practice a week, and a thrift store hat treated with Febreze.
“I’m, like, hitting the big time any second now.”
“Don’t let me die before seeing my Benny live at B.B. King’s!” Ariel winks.
“You remember my friend Horatio? I asked you to shoot him that message?”
“Sure, sure. Missed your face around here, man.”
Horatio smiles. “Um, likewise. And thank you for writing, truly.”
“Not a problem, I could always see how tight the two of you was. You musta been in my Benny’s band, that it? Trombone? Trumpet?”
Ben replies, “He’s an eighteen-karat hide hitter.”
“Beg pardon?” Horatio starts to laugh.
“You play the drums, dude. So, Ariel! Do you know where Paul—”
“Ariel! What a relief, I tell you, I was catching the elevator and you’re off your shift at four and here it is, only ten minutes left for me to find out did you make sure that the donations from the Lauder family for the gala auction are in the front of the mail room?”
The new voice is high-pitched, Brooklyn-born, and airy, as if the speaker just crested a peak.
“Never mind, Ariel.” Ben pastes on a smile. “Hi, Paul. I need to talk to you, OK?”
“Oh!” Paul Brahms looks up from a clipboard, on which rests a cell phone he’s tapping. The same hand also cradles a pen. Both hands hold pens, oddly. “Hello, Ben. And oh my god! Horatio Patel, really so nice to see you, I never dreamed—Ariel, those boxes are in the front of the mail room, so anyone authorized can pick them up without a problem, do you remember taking care of that?”
“Sure do, Mr. Brahms.”
“Because the auction coordinator a couple days back said that she was looking for, let me see, I have it here or I did a second ago, for Pete’s sake—yeah, it was the Englander package, and she needed the glass pieces for the photo promo?”
Ariel’s face scrunches tolerantly.
“And she looked and looked, and thank god finally found it, but there just isn’t any time left, we have five days, and I always say this kind of thing is ninety-five percent preparation and five percent perspiration—”
Ben mouths the saying in chorus to Horatio.
“And the Lauder packages are crucial, so we are sure they are in the front of the mail room?”
“Anyway, Paul.” Ben coughs.
He’s experiencing the awful feeling he always gets around Lia’s father, that nagging biting itching bitching suspicion that maybe-just-maybe Ben is a horrible person at heart. Because there isn’t really anything wrong with Paul.
Ben wants to strangle him anyhow. And literally always has, since the day Jackson hired him. Ben has so much practice battling the urge to choke Paul Brahms to death that he could have any neck in the world spread out before him—Kid Rock’s, whoever wrote the Kars4Kids commercial—and be able to walk away without so much as an itch on his pinkie finger. Something in the neutral stare that might be calculating anything or everything behind it, something in his pathological insistence on going his own pace, something in his appearing almost willfully ridiculous, makes Ben homicidal.
“Like I mentioned, we need to see you immediately. Ideally that would be now. It’s kinda what the word classically means.”
Paul’s brows wriggle above his horn-rims. He’s bald as a cue ball and ricochets off things nearly as much. Not unhandsome, not rude, not visibly remarkable except for his capacity to flit around like a moth that doesn’t care whether or not the light is even switched on. Somehow, every detail ends up perfect anyway. It makes Ben insane. Neatly dressed in slacks and a striped button-up, Paul purses his lips in a way Ben hates much more than he should, a way that means:
My concern for this dear deranged boy should be expressed in private, uselessly and also at tremendous length.
“OK, sure, Ben, what do you say I maybe just knock a few minutes off before I meet with the Playbill people and, Ariel, those Lauder packages are—”
“So far in the front of the mail room, you could mistake them for outside,” Ariel answers.
“Oh lord, but that’s not going to work at all, they’re not actually in the hallway, surely?”
“Nope.” Ariel serenely taps his pen against the sign-in sheet.
“Because it would be—”
“They’re not in the hallway, Mr. Brahms.”
“Oh, thank goodness. All right, so, Ben and Horatio, could you both just please sign in to the buil—”
Ben takes Paul by the arm, frog-marching him. He tolerates the old bastard, and he even enjoys his care and company sometimes, but he would give his eyeteeth for just one go at bashing Paul’s head in like the egg it resembles.
“What’s this about?” Paul squeaks.
“About the fact my dad didn’t commit suicide.”
“Again?”
“I don’t t
hink that’s technically possible. Or rather, temporally possible. So, still. Still didn’t commit suicide.”
“No, I mean, when we met those several times just after Jackson passed, you were . . .”
Paul pauses, embarrassed, and hides it by pretending to get a text message from a still and silent phone.
Yes, I realize I was off my fucking rocker but when you trail off that obviously, you might as well have written a poignant short story, published it in The New Yorker, and handed it to Horatio for review.
“Now I have videos, Paul,” Ben soothes. “Videos from Dad. Turns out that actually he was murdered. Is that pretty crazy or what? Anyway, I have these, these clips he took. About who he thought was responsible, and we’re going to make the son of a bitch suffer like no one has ever suffered in human history.”
Paul polishes his glasses, gazing owlishly at them. “Is this evidence you’re talking about recorded on a small Sony digital camera?”
Several impossibly slow instants pass before the lead bullet of this question nails Ben in the chest.
“You . . . you knew about this?”
“Well, all things considered, sure thing, Ben, I had to have known about them.” Paul replaces his glasses. “Your old man, may his memory never be forgotten, didn’t know much about technology. It was surprising, coming from a guy with his grasp of—”
“Your. Point. Please,” Ben grates.
“Look, I’m terribly sorry, but this isn’t news to me.” Paul spreads a speckled hand over his heart. “I took the videos.”
LIA
The wait is just about over, the breath
of intervention ragged.
—Kamilah Aisha Moon, “Coup in Progress”
Lia ventures into the realm where the wolves roam free.
Neon-lit bodegas with sleek, evil refrigerators. Bars where pretty people offer conversation, escape, have another? Plastic people who can have two, six, eight drinks and then walk away without ordering a ninth and a twelfth.
She traverses the savage backwoods most people think of as 90th and Broadway.
This is the stupidest place you could possibly go.
BITTERSWEET: A fruit-bearing vine. Cut three of its climbing branches and twine them to repel enemies, or use them to cross a foe’s path after dark.
Lia worries at the braid of twigs in her dress pocket.
When Lia was still an artist—not in the sense that she saw the world around her in color and form, in squalor and splendor, but in the sense that people paid her for art—she wanted new things. New friends to debate, new techniques with glue and needle. New ways of interpreting the feelings she kept locked in the smooth spherical marble in her chest.
Lia doesn’t want new things anymore.
She wants comfort, thick socks with a hole starting in the big toe. She used to spend entire days walking the streets with Benjamin. They’d debate over how to cut across Central Park under a vermillion May sunset (forest or duck pond), which Village to wander through (East or West). By most standards, an idyllic existence.
And if Ben ranted for an hour about how jumping off their fire escape would be a hilarious answer to the Kantian argument that people’s innate value lies in their capacity to choose, well.
Nobody’s perfect.
And if six spare mini bottles of Tanqueray were hidden in various purse niches for an Emergencies Only scenario that somehow ended up always happening, well.
Life isn’t perfect, either.
CAMELLIA: Our destinies are forever inextricably linked.
In these lonelier times, the yearning for the rote is strong. So this evening, instead of reading or sketching while the three sisters flutter like a silken breeze, Lia wanders around the Upper West Side wearing her mother Laura’s scarf.
Just stick your head in the lion’s mouth, sure. Check if he’s been flossing.
FIVE✴FINGER GRASS: Lucky for the gambling tables, drawing money, and can be used to help travel safely and prevent the loss of self.
The commonplace is a thousand thousand times more precious than the rare. These slender trees witnessed five-year-old Lia forking overcooked spaghetti into her mouth. Watched through their window as Dad wept silently onto his plate. This coffee shop casting a golden coin of light onto this bench was where Ben met her between classes. She’d bitch about the price of art, how everyone should have access, everyone should scrape the feelings from their rib cage with a paint knife, and he’d listen as if Lia were Frida Kahlo.
The old Lia is reemerging. She’s known it since the dreams with Ben started. The Lia who felt everything, fenceless, no traffic lights, attacked open-ended projects with passion and clarity and rolled-up sleeves. The one Ben used to love. Still might love, even.
Ben used to say that everything possible is so, in one corner of the multiverse or another.
Just someplace we can’t ever get to.
She reaches the City Diner on 95th Street, where the tall old man with the hairnet works. Lia and Ben would laugh hysterically over eggs and hash and spinach pie, guessing his country of origin. Nothing worked—the waiter was as nationless as the air. They tried to draw him out with loud talk of soccer, or observing whether he ate any pork products. Lia eventually created Bulvmania and the game changed—hours expended crafting their imaginary country.
That’s what we were, Ben and me.
An imaginary country. No army, no navy, no ramparts.
Population: 2.
Ben might not even be in New York. He could have flown to Chiang Mai for a curry or taken a Metro-North train to inspect the Hudson River.
But it’s the most likely out of anywhere on earth that he’s here.
She feels the pure transgression of this foray lodged in her chest, nestled between her legs. Ben used to belong to her and then he didn’t anymore and she shouldn’t be within any of his space at all, but she could hardly leave the planet, could she? She could hardly leave New York, could she? She’d dissolve into stardust, which was what Ben always insisted she was sculpted from.
And here’s the side street, yes. She floats through the honey-thick night air into a pretty Episcopal church on 101st. Next comes a much less pretty flight of stairs with its green paint flaking, into a concrete-floored basement, and onto a rusting metal folding chair.
A swift progression into what she deserves.
The room, as ever, smells like a janitorial war zone. Windex vs. subterranean windows. Lysol spray vs. Goodwill sofa. No side is winning, nobody is ever winning. A huge sign reads SOBRIETY IS NOT AN ANCHOR IT’S A PAIR OF WINGS. Someone drew what Lia considered a very stylishly rendered cock and balls on it once and instead of replacing the poster, they just tore that corner off.
She crouches, willing herself invisible. Which won’t work, of course, not when she came to an AA meeting run by a man she and Ben have known for nearly two decades. Not when she likes Ariel Washington enough to want to be brutally honest.
“OK, everybody.” The deacon smiles like he’s laying his hands on their foreheads, his dark skin crinkling kindly. “Congratulations to each and every one of you for being here. Now. My name is Ariel and I’m an alcoholic.”
Hi Ariel, everyone choruses.
The meeting progresses. One man’s addiction is sentient and appears as a chameleon with wily rainbow camouflages. A lady weeps about her grandfather biting her infant son after the toothless baby chomped on the bastard during bath time. Another woman’s mother used to punish her by making her kneel on a cheese grater. A rawboned auntie type in her sixties pulled a knife on her ex, but apparently because she’s Puerto Rican, not because she’s an alcoholic—she’s that too, but claims credit for not having swung a blade before, because of the whole Puerto Rican thing. The stories shouldn’t blend together, not when they’re about things like walking twenty blocks with a glass shard spearing the sole of a f
lip-flop. But they do.
It doesn’t spare her the usual mantra.
Nothing ever really happened to you.
Once upon a time, an elderly immigrant from Eastern Europe named Jórvík worked for the first World’s Stage Theatre. The one that burned like hellfire. He wielded a janitorial broom with soft grace, wore a simple, clownish smile, and liked to perform small magic acts he brought from the old country. Ben and Lia were his devoted natural audience. For Ben, it was flashy showers of coins, disappearing wristwatches. For Lia, it was subtler—card tricks, her favorite. But the old man never used a deck. Instead, he spread in his gnarled hands the miniature mass-printed school portraits of other little girls her own age. Ones with braids, ones with freckles, snub noses, cornrows, missing teeth.
Pick a card, any card . . . and I will make for it to disappear.
There are no excuses for the things that you’ve done, Lia thinks.
“So then this guy he calls me, right, and I know not to pick up, I know it,” a youngish woman laments. Pixie haircut, sparkly pixie nails, liquid eyeliner swooping like pixie wings.
Ariel nods, understanding. He understands everything at the World’s Stage corporate offices too, and Lia can’t count how many times she and Benjamin have separately broken down with him in the mail room over some new transgression of hers or dark thought of his.
Of course, the mail room isn’t an AA Room. The point of these Rooms is to say out loud, in solidarity, I too fucked a raccoon for heroin.
“And this guy’s ‘hey, just want to hear your voice,’ and this guy, he hit me, you know?”
They know. This person has been coming to the identical AA meeting for four years.
“And see, that’s when I got it.” The girl nods, pushing cat’s-eye frames up her thin nose. “The clicker.”
Lia fights a smile. What’s her name, Franny? Frances? Whatever her name, she doesn’t know the term kicker. And she has told the Tale of the Clicker so many times she might as well be a ballpoint pen.