by Lyndsay Faye
“We all knew what poor Jackson was suffering through,” Claude continues. “Still. Those tapes though, what a nightmare. Suspecting things like that about me of all people. Paul’s been so upset about the gala, of course he didn’t look through a box of junk from Jackson’s desk, but to think I delivered these crazy conspiracy theories straight to Benny . . . what a complete mess. Paul called me not five minutes after Ben’s visit, of course. Now we’re just looking at damage control.”
Ben bites his lip, tasting pennies. This tracks with what he knows so far—why would Uncle Claude, that rancid gallbladder, deliver videos implicating himself in a murder? And if Paul never believed Jackson was in danger, why wouldn’t he immediately warn the new happy couple about the mistake? What Ben still can’t get at is the meat of the matter. Claude doesn’t seem remotely concerned about this new evidence other than for Trudy’s feelings. Which means either Jackson Dane was out of his mind, or that Claude Dane is a criminal genius.
“Poor Ben.” Trudy sighs. “He’s always been so far in his own sad, sweet head. He was two years old before he spoke—I thought dear god, what is wrong with him, what is wrong with me—and then he announced, ‘I don’t like banana, please.’ ”
“It’s awful to think about you so unsure of yourself as a mom.”
Get the fuck out of my house, you caked-on oven scum. And thank you for being kind to my mother.
“It wasn’t Ben’s fault he was so difficult, Claude. Brilliant people are always difficult. Not to flatter myself, but you wouldn’t believe the trouble I had at school in rural Texas before I learned how to bleach my hair. I have no idea what to do about my own son, and it breaks my heart.”
“Which is why I’m going back for another talk with Paul. Anyway, I need to see him about our gala plans.”
“The poor thing. He’s impossible when it comes to delegating, he oversees everything from swag bags to ice sculptures. Sometimes I wonder what that man doesn’t know.”
Having never thought of this, Ben presses his teeth into his lower lip. Paul does know almost everything there is to know about his family. Ben’s pill problem, his mom’s alcoholism, his dad’s depression. They’re all tangled up like sailors’ knots technically a knot is only a circle embedded in a three-dimensional Euclidean geometric space with Paul as secret keeper a knot invariant is a descriptor for knots that look topically different but are mathematically identical and the possible values of crossings and bridges for the knots Ben is faced with at present don’t even get into the Alexander polynomial of the knot please please god please make Ben suspect that if Paul weren’t also an idiot, he could solve this whole mystery over a Dunkin’s coffee.
So why the hell won’t he?
“Are you sure we’re doing the right thing, Claude? I feel off-kilter, like a thunderstorm’s coming.”
His mom is correct. There’s been something in the air since Ben’s father died, something toxic and stifling. He’s shocked the flowers in all the sidewalk planters are still alive. It’s tangible, the rotting taste.
“I’m serious,” Trudy murmurs. “I wake up sick with worry every morning.”
“But you love the gala! Come on, we have to put a brave face on this. What are you wearing?”
“I don’t even care.”
“Hey, hey there, pumpkin. It’s going to pan out fine, I promise. How old were you exactly when you started bleaching your hair?” Claude’s voice lowers suggestively.
Ben blocks out the next fifteen seconds through sheer force of will. Goodbyes are exchanged. Saliva, too. The front door closes.
He breathes, resetting the rhythm of his lungs. Listening. Trudy kicks her ballet flats off in the hallway, leaving them there. The fridge door opens. Wine glugglugglugglugs into a fancy stemless wineglass because Trudy likes both the opulence of Riedel and the youth of drinking from an expensive fishbowl.
Crawling out from under a grand piano is never dignified, Ben reflects.
He heads for the kitchen, pours himself an equally hefty glass of Sancerre but in a coffee mug, and follows his mother into her sanctum sanctorum.
“Hey, Mom.”
Trudy whirls around, clutching figurative pearls. Ben almost smiles. She’s highly theatrical—but she actually does that without thinking when she’s startled, touches her slim neck in an antediluvian Southerner’s gesture.
“Where’s Uncle Papa?”
“Benny,” she breathes. “Honey, you startled me!”
“You asked me over.”
“That was weeks ago!”
“But the texts were vague about any exact time.”
“I’ve been worried half to death.”
“Whew! At least you didn’t get all the way there, in that case.”
Ben samples his drink. The sitting room at the back of the brownstone’s first floor, speaking of time, is an ode to the fourth dimension. Steel clocks, bejeweled clocks, wooden clocks. Portico clocks suspended in arches, ships’ clocks with nautical grips for elfin helmsmen, dial clocks from four separate centuries. Oddly, they bother him today. He generally finds them soothing, like taking an Ambien or thinking about being cremated. Look one way and there’s a painted grandfather clock, look another and a porcelain timepiece representing an entire English garden.
Found that gorgeous little gal stuck behind a counter at a junk store in Johnson City, Texas, while the car shop was fixing my flat, his dad used to boast. Surrounded by army surplus and Mickey Mouse mugs. But she’d taken this set of clocks and shone ’em up so pretty, anyone could see they were her pride and joy. Boy did I get her number quicker than an eye can blink.
Of course, that was before the sweeping off of feet, the successful modeling career, the business degree, the transition to powerhouse socialite. Currently she’s head to toe lululemon in dusty pink, with her buttery hair swept up and her blue eyes wide. Ben’s mother burns so richly, she turns everyone in the room into an insect. When she slides her arms around him, he can’t help relaxing into a haze of tuberose.
“My poor sweet boy, I heard that Claude delivered some of your father’s office things. I didn’t know how to deal with them, and you weren’t answering. I had no idea how you were feeling about . . . the situation between Claude and me. I had to get your attention.”
Ben steps back. “My attention was gotten.”
Trudy takes him by the elbow, puzzled. “What is this you’re wearing?”
“Oh. It’s a chunk of Dad’s signature belt. Wedding rings seem to have lost their significance, so I sorta thought I’d do what I could to make up the deficit.”
His mother’s face goes carefully blank.
“What a, what a surgical choice of words, Benjamin. Here I’ve been devastated, taking comfort where I can find it—god knows not from my son—and then when I do finally get a visit, it’s for you to refer to me as a deficit. Would you speak this cruelly to anyone who wasn’t your mother?”
Ben downs half his wine, reflecting on his complete pigheadedness in approaching the familial stronghold without a wingman.
Sometimes instant surrender saves hours. “Sorry. I’m kind of not through the Kübler-Ross stages, you know?”
“Of course I know, honey. I’m your mother, I’ve called, I’ve barely thought of anything else.”
“Except Uncle Claude.”
Her back straightens. “Yes, I know I ought to exist for your grief alone, but what about when you won’t allow me to be close to you? Hmm? Don’t blame me for turning to my closest friend after my son has already shut me out.”
Closing his eyes, Ben allows himself five seconds of the dozens of time machines (aren’t they that, in a way, machines about time?) going relentlessly
clickclick tick click click clock ticktock click clock clickclick click clock ticktick
tock clickclickclick clock click click click
clickclick click clickclick click tockclick
click click click click clock clickclick tock click click click tick click tock tick tock click
and tracking seconds that feel horrifically out of whack before trying again. His mother once estimated owning seventy clocks. If it were even seventy-one just now, a single addition to the museum, he’d choke to death on his own throat.
“How’s your collection?”
“Benjamin, if you’re just going to deflect when I bring up real feelings, then I don’t know how we’re going to get anywhere. My collection is fine. I found the sweetest little baby Plato calendar clock last week, a nineteen-oh-two model. I almost texted you a picture.”
Trudy points to a squat timepiece on the coffee table, drawing her bare feet up under her on the couch like a vintage bathing beauty. The cube of glass in its brass case displays two numbers, a month and a date, that flip if you wind them with a key. They used to love hunting for these temporal treasures together at flea markets. The shapely chronometer on Ben’s desk was a graduation present from her, a Victorian striking lantern clock. Trudy inscribed it with a quote from Saint Augustine:
“There are three tenses or times:
The present of past things,
the present of present things,
and the present of future things.”
“I love it,” Ben admits. “That is a seriously useless clock. You can know exactly what day and month it is, like, all day long.”
When his mom smiles, the old understanding sparking, Ben can almost forget she betrayed his dad’s memory by marrying his uncle.
(A L M O S T)
Facts. No more feelings. Feelings are like chum to his mother, and he loves her endlessly, but her teeth are very sharp.
“You stopped the police investigation into Dad’s death.”
“Of course I did.” Trudy stares into her wine. “Your father loved that theatre company almost as much as he loved us. Do you think he’d have wanted it to be torn apart by petty rumors just when we needed support?”
“Your marrying his brother would accomplish that waaaay faster.”
Her cheeks flush. “I thought this was about the police, and my allowing them to cease investigating.”
“Yep. Without consulting me.”
“Benjamin, honey,” she sings, “do you know how worried I was? About how any little thing could send you back to . . . well, we won’t talk about that catastrophe. I know it’s not good for you.”
Do not bite. Disengage.
“Dad made videos about people being out to get him. Before they got him. They were in his box of office crap.”
“Oh, my sweet precious son, I didn’t know how to tell you this. Paul showed them to me ages ago.”
Ben wishes he could do something other than gape.
She knew. She didn’t believe him, either. She knew this whole fucking time.
“God, Benjamin,” she groans. “You were so angry, and I couldn’t convince you that your poor father was sinking into delusions, and I thought if Claude brought them and you found them yourself . . . I couldn’t tell you, not when you’ve made it so clear you need distance. You had your memory of your father in perfect health, but I began to lose him years ago.”
Tears spill down stark cheekbones. Ben wonders whether, if he dismantled a clock and stabbed himself in the neck with the minute hand, Trudy’s tears would increase to hysteria or vanish in the wake of supernatural mothering skills. It strikes him as fifty-fifty. She’s good at split-second decision making.
His head pounds like a blown speaker. The fuzzy dread amplifies. It’s the clocks. But he loves the clocks, it can’t be the clocks.
clicktickticktickclicktocktocktocktockclickticktockclickclickclicktockticktickticktockclicktockclicktickticktockclicktocktocktocktickclickclicktick
Ben pops a pill from the Klonopin bottle as Trudy watches, unsure whether it’s more strategic for her to be hurt by this action or angry over it. He quickly tires of watching her run the odds in her head.
“So, Dad was going senile and you skipped telling me. Neat.”
“You’re being so critical. Is it a coping mechanism?” Trudy presses silver nails against her temple. “This is the most difficult time that I have ever gone through, honey, but I’m the mother, I’m not allowed to have feelings.”
“You’re having them, like, right now.”
“But I’m not allowed to express them, am I? How are we supposed to talk if I’m continually in the wrong?”
“I—”
“Look at you—your weight, your pills, that morbid shackle on your wrist, it’s all screaming that you aren’t up for learning what my life’s been like since you and your father both essentially left me. Now you’re going to be punishing me for months for even mentioning your father’s decline, when you’re the one who cannot handle it.”
BREATHE blink BREATHE blink BREATHE
“OK!” Ben cheerily claps his hands. “Let’s discuss Dad’s decline.”
“Absolutely not. Later, maybe, when our heads are clearer.” Trudy shakes her head. “I’m too hurt, Ben. I love you more than anyone will ever love you, I’m your mother, but everything we argue about lately regards who I am as a person. It’s exhausting, honey.”
“Actually, by definition, everything everyone ever argues about is regarding who they are as a person. As in, how they’re acting. If we stopped having arguments about who people are, there would be no arguments. Just, I dunno, debates about systems of economics and which one is the hottest Jonas brother.”
Trudy leans over, lifting a pocket watch resting with several others in a dish. She’s opening her mouth to answer with something emotionally castrating when the
S
W
I
N
G
I
N
G
of the little timepiece sends Benjamin’s heart rolling away like a marble.
“That’s it.” He lurches forward, chest tight. “That’s what I saw, that’s what’s been eating at me, Christ, it’s like a fucking maggot in my brain.”
“Benny? What’s the matter?”
He’d reply, but Ben absolutely cannot stop seeing:
THE DREAM HE HAD LAST NIGHT THAT HE ALMOST TOLD HORATIO ABOUT BUT NOT REALLY BECAUSE HE JUST REMEMBERED IT FULLY:
A DRAMA IN ONE ACT
In the deepest darkness, Ben fell through a crack in his sleep. He scuffed in gently bruised twilight through twigs and decay, surrounded by a forest festooned in spiderwebs. The sun was setting faster than usual. Either the Earth’s rotation had hastened, or else something fouled the atmosphere.
He wanted to turn back.
But he didn’t know where he had traveled from.
And he wanted to speed up and arrive.
But he didn’t know where he was going to.
He was as free from directional orientation as Einstein’s equations (true weightlessness is indistinguishable from free fall). All Ben knew was that he was headed somewhere as the scratches and chitterings of the woods grew louder.
The land fell off into a bayou with a promontory. He stood high above this finger of solid ground. Near the edge of the miniature peninsula was a monstrous tree, millennia of rings curled up in its trunk, crowned with enormous garlands of glowing spidersilk. When he saw Lia step out of the woods, he understood.
This wasn’t his dream. This time, he was in Lia’s.
She was a young Lia, perhaps ten or eleven. Her face was round and constellation-freckled, her eyes huge. Ben’s tongue tasted Lia’s name until he remembered how little she liked sharing dreams with him.
So he
stopped.
Jórvík Volkov’s grey head emerged from the lake. Then his long, drawn, hangdog face, then his wiry neck, then his slumped shoulders. He was dry and unhurried as he walked up the shore. When his hand became visible, Ben saw a plain metal pocket watch swinging, a prelude to a trick he’d seen the man do a thousand times.
Lia’s mouth opened wide enough to split her face from ear to ear.
“Hallo, pretty little thing.” Jórvík stood on the green shore, lips moving as pendulously as the hypnotist’s prop. “Are you ready for the magic show?”
Lia scrambled away, spine hitting the mammoth trunk. Ben had seen Lia terrified before. But he’d never realized how frightened she was of their theatre’s head custodian.
Why are you horrified by a janitor?
“For you I have made many times things to disappear. Yes?”
Jórvík held in his other hand, as if he were playing poker, a series of wallet-sized school photos. They were all little girls, chubby cheeks and skinny chins, all smiling.
“You choose a card, and I make her disappear. If you do not choose a card, more will vanish. So choose.”
Ben did not know what kind of sick game he was watching. But he did remember headlines from those years. The sort of headlines that could happen anywhere, in any small town, in any huge metropolis, always terrifying.
CHILD REPORTED MISSING FROM MORNINGSIDE PARK
SEARCH CONTINUES FOR EIGHT-YEAR-OLD GIRL
PRETEEN VANISHES FROM UPPER WEST SIDE
It was Jórvík.
Ben didn’t know this because he understood it. He only knew it because somehow, in her mind, Lia did understand.
Ben leapt forward. He clawed up thick, dripping hunks of earth to get to her. Lia was shrieking without making a sound. Fixated on Jórvík’s watch moving closer . . .
And closer . . .
And when Jórvík dipped the watch into her open mouth, she swallowed it down to the very end of the chain.