by Lyndsay Faye
He knows Benjamin tastes like bitter lemon. He knows he smells like a freshly snapped spring twig. He knows how the ceiling arches its spine whenever he walks into the room. He could glut himself on all of it.
“Were you as pure as they say?” Horatio asks his statue softly. “Or did you ever want something so badly it was killing you, too?”
Rishabhanatha doesn’t answer. The teaching god’s contentment lends Horatio peace. Benjamin may think time is a flat circle, but that doesn’t mean Horatio wants his life to be spent orbiting the drain of infatuation.
“Benjamin!”
Linking his fingers, he pulls them over his head in a stretch. Just as well Benjamin should still be sleeping, after yesterday. Yesterday was . . . well, it was not fruitful. Horatio remembers Paul Brahms as a fast, fretful turtle with a shell-like skull. He has darting eyes, clear and deep and brown, like his daughter’s—though Lia seemed drawn to those in distress, while Paul spends so much time actively avoiding hurt that he’s ridiculous enough to attract it anyhow. Mourning bursts into his gaze occasionally, and something else Horatio has never put his finger on. Paul is a good egg, the glue holding together New World’s Stage, and the absolute bane of Benjamin Dane’s existence.
Benjamin reacts to Paul the same way he reacts to cheap perfumed detergents.
Paul ushered Benjamin into a small conference room yesterday afternoon and explained that whereas once Jackson Dane saw obstacles and razed them, he now had started firing cannonades into empty space. Where once he shrewdly avoided his enemies, he suspected his own board of directors.
“It was, I tell you, Ben, not pretty,” Paul’s nasal voice informed them. “Your father, rest his soul, he always had that edgy streak under all the bounce and bluster. So at first when he said that there were these forces acting against him—”
“Which forces, specifically?” Benjamin interrupted.
“But that’s the issue, Ben. There weren’t specific forces.”
“He’s dead.” Benjamin flashed an axe-bright smile. “Ergo there were specific forces. Unless this was, like, Murder on the Orient Express and everyone my dad ever met was trying to ice him.”
Paul placed fatherly hands on Benjamin’s arms. Horatio thought Benjamin’s shoulders might lodge in his ears.
“Ben, the last time you visited, when we spoke—”
“The last time we spoke I was lit up like a twenty-four-hour pharmacy!” Benjamin shook him off. “Are you really saying that you watched my dad record himself figuring out he was going to get murdered, then he got murdered, and the two things have, like, nothing in common?”
“That level of anxiety, Ben, it wore on him.”
“Yeah, imminent death is stressful. Like having a long commute, or a roommate who won’t take out the trash.”
“Ben, your dad? These problems were longstanding and he was taking so many medications. I’m sure you can empathize with that situation, right?”
Matters went rather downhill afterward.
Horatio sits up blearily. Sheets pool in his lap. His friend then asked Paul whether he had any other useful comments about substance abuse, which was remarkably cruel even for Benjamin. Of course he apologized instantly, which was the most infuriating part; his amends were so sincere that you felt culpable supposing you didn’t forgive him. But Paul was useless by then, repeating I have the benefit gala to think of and I just truly don’t know how to help you with this, until Benjamin literally threw his hands up.
“You’re going to compile every detail you can pertaining to the relationship between my dad and my uncle,” he said flatly. “Whether Dad once wore mismatched socks or Uncle Claude ordered the wrong bagels. Report back. And if you make this about my meds again, I will be bringing you to the board. Which is, at least fractionally, me.”
They walked back to the flat, lazy July lightning flickering. They’d hardly begun to discuss what to do next before Benjamin curled up on the couch like a cat, and Horatio dragged his jet-lagged bones into his old room. After throwing a blanket over the man who caused the slick, half-thrilled, half-frightened feeling in his stomach. Naturally.
Because I am an incalculable, incurable idiot.
But that was yesterday, and this is now.
“Benjamin, we’ve plans to hatch.” Horatio shuffles into the living room, pulling a heather-grey T-shirt over his head. “Though cheers for conceding that the human body requires basic maintenance.”
His friend is not on the couch.
Rapping on Benjamin’s door, Horatio promptly throws it wide. Every wall is obscured by the bookshelves that were his friend’s one admission he owned what could be termed a “library.” Horatio finds nothing save books, a sleek triangular turntable, the 1960s Silvertone Teisco shark guitar with the teal patina Benjamin treats like his own child (the 1954 Sunburst Gibson is in its case in the closet, and whenever it makes an appearance they are all in very deep trouble), a small amp, a thrift store desk with the latest MacBook, an antique clock from his mum, Trudy, and the cactus named Thelonius that Lia gave him.
Horatio’s belly flips, a fish on a dry shore.
He is out of the flat after throwing on yesterday’s trousers.
The air shoves back, a hot damp against his shoulders. It should have rained last night. Construction workers clatter on the corner. Horatio wonders how many secrets lie fallow here. Champagne bottles swigged by mobsters, a Dutch girl’s tortoiseshell comb. He doesn’t know where he’s going. There’s the park nearby, any number of them, really, and the Columbia campus, and what if Benjamin isn’t in any of them, what if Horatio held his friend’s hand in the back of a cab and love doesn’t matter, after all?
When Horatio narrowly dodges a bus outside Bernardo Brothers Café, his neck crawls with fear. But there Benjamin slouches under the ballooning green ash tree, on their favorite bench. Naturally—because he’s a free New Yorker without any obligation to keep Horatio apprised of his whereabouts.
And I’m a bloodsick muppet.
Horatio nevertheless reads Benjamin’s mobile screen from over his shoulder.
“Please tell me you know what you’re doing reading texts from Lia, you complete tosser,” he begs, sinking down beside him.
Benjamin doesn’t look up. “Uh, I know what I’m doing?”
“Perhaps state it in the form of, um, a statement?”
A French bulldog approaches, resplendent in a kinky spiked collar. Horatio watches as it moves along. It looks so easy, the moving along, but truly traveling is the hardest thing in the world. Horatio could take tiny step after tiny step, and still. He would carry Benjamin and Benjamin would drag Lia, and Lia weighed as much as Australia, the beautiful creature.
“Have you already breakfasted?”
Benjamin waggles his coffee cup.
“How lovely.”
Horatio opens the bag Benjamin proffers to find another coffee and a poppy seed bagel with cream cheese. Resigned, he crosses his legs. It’s astonishing, in a way, how a man who is clearly running on fumes, drugged to the tits, obsessed with his ex, and investigating his father’s alleged murder still has the generosity to foresee that Horatio would be not merely addled with worry, but hungry as well. And to deposit himself exactly where Horatio could walk (or run) in a straight line to find him.
It’s actually very easy to love the man. Even if he’s never believed that.
“I had such shitty dreams last night.” Benjamin’s eyes are still bloodshot, but his skin looks less like wax paper.
“Regarding?”
“Lia. Stop that, I’m fine. Lia, yeah, and also the guy who used to do custodial work at the old theatre before it burned. I’m sure I told you about him before.”
“The immigrant janitor who kindled your interest in riddles?”
“Whoa. Dude, if you ever run dry of, like, every genuinely interesting person, you ca
n write a biography of me. Sleeping has been . . . intense lately.”
“Er, yes, you told me you dreamt about your father’s portrait burning.”
“Yeah. It was just soooooooo visceral. Brains are crazy complex mechanisms for being lumps of water and fat. Anyway. These dreams feel like I’m actually with, you know. People.”
“Like this head custodian?”
Benjamin nods, eyes distant. “Ancient guy from someplace where the bus stops have bullet holes. Jórvík Volkov. He did the most amazing magic tricks. Cards, coins, numbers, knots. He was, like, maybe a leftover from some Siberian circus, can you imagine—wooden carts with blue and red and gold paint, trailing horse shit through empty frozen tundra.”
“Sounds ghastly, to be honest.”
“But legit, right? Jórvík said all he wanted after ‘these long, cold times’ was to make kids smile. Lia tried to learn card sharping, but you know her, too many tells. Meanwhile I picked up a book of shell games, which led to math puzzles, which led to Lewis Carroll’s unfinished Curiosa Mathematica, which led to an affinity for mortality, humanity, philosophy, and the absurd, which led to the unequivocal success story before you. Cheers, Jórvík.”
“You’ve not spoken of him to this extent.”
“Yep, Jórvík never came back after the first theatre burned, but the questionably documented ones needed new gigs. He’s probably mopping something somewhere.”
“What was so shite about this dream, then?”
Benjamin shakes his head. “I don’t know, just. It was terrifying. It’s always nice to see Lia again, but. Yeah.”
Crumpling the foil wrapper, Horatio sinks a neat shot into the rubbish bin.
This track calls for immediate shifting.
“Right, here’s what’s cocked up most thoroughly regarding the case, from what I can tell. You think it out of character for your dad to have . . . aided his own demise. Very good. Paul Brahms thinks he was managing his paranoia and met with a sad accident. We have evidence left behind electronically by your father—let’s call him a material witness—suggesting actual foul play. Meanwhile, neither of us are sleuths.”
His friend scowls. “A biographer and a philosopher? You unearth the secrets of the human soul and I lay bare the mysteries of the cosmos. We’re, like, the best dynamic detective duo ever to be formed.”
“Benjamin, you are aware that you’re ridiculous, I hope?”
“You always pronounce ‘brilliant’ wrong here in the States.”
“Oh Christ, not this early in the morning.”
“We should have iconic looks. I’ve got this mourning cuff, that’s kinda edgy. Or emo, I can’t tell. Maybe add a jaunty scarf for me, a hat for you. What kind of hat do you want?”
“Um, no hat.”
“You don’t have your hang of our dialect back yet, I said what kind of hat?”
“Benjamin, we don’t know what we’re doing!” Horatio exclaims.
“Sooooo untrue.” Benjamin beams. “We found my dad’s ghost tapes and we weren’t even looking for them.”
Horatio closes his eyes. “I can’t win. Arguing with you is like arguing with gravity.”
“Pretty damn easy, then. One bro jumping in the air just whupped the ass of an entire mid-sized planet’s gravitational force, literally a child can do it. What you mean is that gravity always comes back, and then it always wins. Like me.”
Horatio contemplates planting a kiss on Benjamin’s mouth, or a punch. Either would prove satisfying.
“Fine, fine!” Benjamin chuckles. “Killer summary, very police procedural. I think it wasn’t suicide, Paul thinks it was an accident, Dad said it would be a murder.”
“Yes, exactly, but we’re both too close to this problem to actually see it.”
His friend freezes like a startled rabbit. “The coastline paradox.”
“The what, yes?”
“Hoooo boy, I couldn’t see it before, but you’re totally right!”
“Please speak English, or American, just not . . . not Benjamin, I can’t cope. What are you on about?”
“The coastline paradox!” Benjamin rubs his hands in glee. “You’re so brilliant, dude, I owe you. It’s impossible to get the same results twice regarding a coastline’s length if you use multiple units. Let’s say, hypothetically, I measured Manhattan’s coastline in inches, and then I measured it in centimeters, I’d end up with two completely different figures. And the closer zoomed in you get, the longer it gets. I’d end up with a solid length using miles but a batshit insane length using molecules. The math involves geometry and fractals, which none other than Benoit Mandelbrot described as beautiful and damn hard.”
And there’s the title of your biography. Ta very much for writing it for me.
“So the closer we look, the more complexity this will inevitably develop.” Benjamin frowns. “Examination on a microscopic level will produce results increasing in convolution while they narrow in scale. What unit do we need to use to measure this coastline, Horatio? It’s OK, that was rhetorical, I’ll tell you, because you’re brilliant brilliant brilliant. We need a much blunter tool.”
“Meaning?”
Benjamin’s eyes gleam emergency-siren blue. “Meaning he who rights the wrongs and orderlies the disorderlies, Detective Barry Fortuna. C’mon, we can walk to his precinct from here. I’ll even give you time to comb your hair, since you apparently ran out of the house. Don’t say I never did anything for you, OK?”
I grant forgiveness to all living beings. May all living beings please forgive me. I have friendship with all living beings. I am hostile to nothing and no one.
Horatio matches Benjamin’s jaunty stroll. He’ll change at the flat. He’ll have another coffee. Benjamin will calm down. Surely?
He trudges onward, the day barely begun and already exhausting. The endless jagged teeth of fractals and the countless sharp waves of coastlines nipping at the edges of his mind.
* * *
• • •
Detective Barry Fortuna is not impressed by the digital camera.
Horatio palms the hair he forgot to comb earlier. He can’t help fidgeting. Horatio always feels like a terrorist when he walks into American police stations. The cops look at him perfectly blandly, but he still looms enormous and embarrassed.
“So about these videos.” Benjamin’s smile turns serpentine.
“Yeah, about these.” Fortuna adjusts a creaky swivel chair.
“What do you think of them?”
“See, that’s one approach. But you’re the one brought ’em in. What I gotta ask is, what do you think of them?”
Benjamin stares, disbelieving. Detective Fortuna shrugs. The gesture owns a certain bullish eloquence.
It’s just past eleven and a footlong sub sandwich rests on Fortuna’s desk. The meal resembles its owner: saggy but solid, dense with occasional bright bits, leaking at the corners. Fortuna’s watery brown eyes are so sunken that there are mere folds where eyelids should be, and his shoe-polish-toned hair is thinning.
“Any time I get fresh evidence, I gotta consider the source. Now, your old man was losing his edge, on plenty of dope for it, too. Sure, sure, the legal kind.”
This dynamic, Horatio thinks, is all wrong for protect and serve, not to mention courtesy, professionalism, respect but it is entirely understandable for an NYPD officer and Benjamin Dane. His friend reeks of privilege, was illegally high throughout the beginning of the investigation. Fortuna studies Benjamin with the sluggish cunning of an iguana.
“I get you barging in here ready to call this a murder, but that there’s how you see it. And if somebody else brought that camera to me, I’d be wondering, huh, how are they seeing it?”
“Your investigative methods are truly groundbreaking.”
“How do you see the recordings, Detective?” Horatio intervenes politely.
The sleuth aims hooded eyes at him. “These here remind me of my aunt Giuliana.”
An exquisite spasm of annoyance warps Benjamin’s face as the air conditioner drones to life, rustling the papers tacked to a corkboard. A map of the Upper West Side, takeaway menus, a couple of suspect sketches that only resemble the same human being in that all the requisite features are present.
“My aunt Giuliana was always hassling us about mice, God rest her. Mice in the kitchen, mice in the basement. She made the best baked ziti in history, no bullshit. This woman, though? Mice on the brain. Me, here I am a uniformed cop, Zia Giuliana, I would say, don’t send me on another search for mice what ain’t real.”
“OK excellent, and there were no mice,” Benjamin prompts. “Can we please—”
“Oh, there was mice all right.” Detective Fortuna allows his impenetrable eyes to descend. “In the carport what they renovated in nineteen-eighty-eight.”
Horatio pauses. “So . . . you give this new evidence some credence, then?”
“I ain’t saying that, either. There was equal chances of there being mice or no mice, on account of there weren’t no evidence of them other than her say-so.”
A slender Asian woman in a neat grey suit enters, heading for the filing cabinet.
“Did you for real just apply the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat to mice in the garage?” Benjamin’s face lights up. “These mice were in a quantum mechanical superposition, and by committing the action of looking for them, you forced the universe into there either being or not-being a pest issue at your zia Giuliana’s?”
“Nice one, Barry,” comments the woman shuffling through papers.