The King of Infinite Space

by Lyndsay Faye

  “Beg pardon, whose blood is that on your kit, please?” Horatio recalls.

  “Hey, shhhh, not right now. It’s from yesterday. And I never liked the guy.”

  “But you said it’s a problem?”

  “For sure, absolutely.”

  “An immediate one?”

  “Oh hell no, I can think of a much more immediate one.”

  Benjamin’s fingers dart over shirt buttons. Horatio has him by his birdlike rib cage, and Benjamin dives into his neck like he hasn’t eaten in days, which is likely true. This is a foregone conclusion, Horatio supposes as he half-slips on the tile and the other man laughs. And Benjamin is quite right—there’s nothing at all chaste about it save for where the flood of love is concerned, there’s no holiness here, but nevertheless Horatio thanks every ancient prayer that ever taught him how important it was not to lose noble forgiveness.

  How else but by forgiving Benjamin could he have earned something as precious as this?

  * * *

  • • •

  Afterward, Benjamin’s bed is prohibitively wet. Horatio reclines against the couch arm, with pillows behind and with Benjamin Dane curled up on his chest like a cat. This particular cat prefers—they all have their little ways about them—Horatio’s fingertips skating from behind his ear down to his nape and back up again.

  Fuck you, Robin Goodfellow, and fuck bloodsickness, I get to have this.

  “So you’re, like, officially officially my date tonight now, right?”

  Horatio shrugs. “If you say so. But I’m still incredibly cross with you.”

  Ben angles his head so his chin rests on Horatio’s sternum. He’s back to looking demonically cheeky, and Horatio reflects that he ought to be throwing him straight out the living room window. Repeatedly.

  “Fine, you get to be mad at me as long as you like, but you gotta admit the makeup sex was leagues better than our first try.”

  “You—Christ. I admit to nothing whatsoever.”

  “No, for real, I can pat myself on the back now, because those were the kind of noises I used to have to crank up the stereo out here to cover—”

  Horatio has no choice save putting his entire hand over Benjamin’s mouth.

  Benjamin’s eyes shift from amused to pouting to impatient by degrees.

  “Right, so first order of business,” Horatio says as he removes his palm, “is whose blood that was.”

  Benjamin’s lips twitch. If he weren’t blissed out by a good shag, he’d already be heading for the Klonopin bottle, Horatio surmises.

  “Just gotta say, your pillow talk is, like, subpar, which is surprising, considering how much prac—”

  “Supposing I get to have you and supposing you’re amenable, of course, I’d like to keep you. Um, for a bit. For—never mind. Whose blood?”

  A smile flickers over Benjamin’s mouth. Then he starts playing with the string of Horatio’s hoodie. “You’re not going to like it.”

  “No, but I already don’t like it, so just bang right on.”

  “Like, head underwater in the ocean instead of wading in?”

  “If you please.”

  “Paul Brahms is dead and his body is on our roof.”

  Benjamin is correct: Horatio does not like it. After the panic, and occasionally gripping Benjamin’s hair to get him to stay on subject (the fact Horatio can do this sends him into mild ecstasies), he teases out that Paul arrived asking Benjamin to sign some paperwork, revealed that Claude and Trudy had a longstanding relationship (with photographic proof), that Jackson Dane was a paranoid narcissist, and that he, Paul Brahms, had been a master puppeteer working primarily for Trudy. None of this is shocking—it was Horatio who noted Paul couldn’t possibly be a complete plonker, after all. But the part where bald, timorous Paul Brahms pulled out a gun and ordered Benjamin to climb up to a rooftop assassination horrifies him enough to wrap his arms around his friend, bricking him inside a human fortress.

  Benjamin hums. “Not that I don’t like this, I enthusiastically do, but I’ll need intact ribs today.”

  “Er, I need a moment, pardon.” Extricating himself, Horatio tries to regain some dignity by placing his feet on the floor.

  “Get back—that was, like, absolutely not what I meant.”

  The grounded soles approach doesn’t work, so Horatio tries pacing. It helps Benjamin. Sometimes.

  “That is way way worse. Did I not mention the floor is lava? The floor is lava; the couch is safety.”

  “You were nearly killed, and . . . I was god knows where. Benjamin, I am so deeply sorry that you were alone when—”

  “Nope, that’s gonna be the road not traveled. You aren’t my guardian angel,” Benjamin scoffs. “They don’t actually exist except in the Hallmark ’verse and the minds of women who have WWJD tramp stamps. You needed to untangle some shit. Probably still do, anyway you’re not responsible for Lia’s dad turning out to be a supervillain.”

  This doesn’t loosen the knot in his belly. It only adds twists, tightens loops. And even through his gratitude that Benjamin escaped, a sick realization snaps Horatio’s head up.

  “You had to . . .”

  He can’t say it. Horatio, a modern city dweller, isn’t traditional Jain enough to fret over rat poison or the pesticides spread for cockroaches. But it is one of the highest tenets that he murder no living creature, from eating a chicken wing to stepping on an ant, and even though he’s reasonable about it, the thought of Benjamin—caustic, mercurial, but never willfully hurtful Benjamin—being forced to kill in self-defense is revolting.

  “No, it wasn’t, just no,” Benjamin hastens to say. “It’s hard to explain, but. He hated me. Said if I wanted to die so much, whoopee, he’d fulfill my wish. And that I didn’t deserve anything I’d ever had, and that I ruined Lia’s life.”

  Horatio’s jaw drops. “That you ruined Lia’s life?”

  “Yeah,” he says, eyes on the carpet.

  “That’s not—you didn’t, Benjamin.”

  “I know that now.”

  “How are you this calm? How exactly do you suddenly know that?”

  Benjamin makes a complicated gesture indicating all of this. “Paul had a gun and he said things I’d always suspected, things that made me hate myself, but when I heard the words out loud, from him . . . then they weren’t true. I get the urge to destroy myself, but I don’t yearn to die. Apparently. I might not deserve as much money as Oprah, but no one deserves that. Except for Oprah. Jesus, if you’d ever told me that Paul would force an epiphany on me, I’d have told you to check yourself into inpatient. Anyway, I never got my hands on his gun. We were . . . all tangled up, and it went off, it was in his hand and he pulled the trigger, and here I still am.”

  “I’m grateful,” Horatio tries to say with a steady voice.

  His friend shrugs his thanks. “So am I, weirdly. Then I just used Paul’s plan—he was gonna leave me up there and close the door. That’s going to work for a hot minute, until it doesn’t anymore. And we won’t have said anything to the police yesterday, or today, because I sure as hell am not saying anything till after tonight is over, so then hello, I’m a murder suspect, even though Paul was holding the weapon himself and tussling with me. Sure they can test for prints and powder residue and whatnot, but there was longstanding bad blood between us and I left the bastard to bake on a rooftop. Because of the whole, uh. Shock thing. Which I did not enjoy.”

  “Why wouldn’t we call the police? We can ring Detective Norway this second and—”

  “No can do.”

  “Tell me why not!” Horatio protests.

  “Because I need tonight, or I’ll never find out how my dad died. Paul had no reason to lie when he said he didn’t kill him.”

  “But that’s lunacy, what if no one at all—”

  “Either way, I’ll find out for certa
in.”

  Benjamin is eerily relaxed, as if a car with misfiring pistons was given the perfect kick in the tire. Chinese porcelain eyes, lotus position with an arm slung over the couch back. When he first woke up from that deathly shower, Horatio thought this serenity was drugs. In bed, looking up at him from priceless new angles, Horatio thought it was passion. None of that explains this new Benjamin. He remembers his friend trying to support Lia and putting serenity into his own words, just the three of them and a shared bowl of excellent weed.

  We can only see this infinitesimally small slice of time, this instant, and now this instant. Maybe serenity is realizing that the only way to change your circumstances is to live right now. Otherwise you’re either too early, or you’re too late.

  That’s how he looks, he looks serene. The last thing Horatio wants to do is ruin it, but it’s grotesque after Ben shot the man who could have been his father-in-law.

  What does Benjamin need now? Questions? Quiet? He would give the man anything—his heart on a leash, his soul in a watch case—except for something that would hurt him. When Horatio kneels before the sofa with hands on his friend’s thighs, Benjamin readily sits up, mussing with the Londoner’s disastrous hair.

  “You’re still in shock,” Horatio says clearly.

  “Um, Horatio. Can you blame me?”

  “No, but I—” Benjamin’s fingernails on his scalp, those are distracting. “Stop that. We have to—”

  “Horatio, I never touched the gun, I’ll talk to them tomorrow, all right? We can’t miss Mom’s Cheater Extraordinaire–themed wedding reception.”

  “It isn’t funny.”

  “Are you kidding me?” He mock shudders. “I know.”

  “When you . . .” Horatio attempts, measuring his words. “Um, when I came home and found you just now—”

  Benjamin’s laugh is explosive. “Oh my god, it was hardly just now.”

  “You said you were dreaming. And you’re acting pretty barmy, even for you.”

  “Whoa now.”

  “Tell me please, what was it about?”

  “It’s hard to explain these dreams, they’re some immersive shit. I mean. Lia was there.”

  “So you’ve said about the others. And?”

  An eerie tale unfolds that turns Horatio’s blood several degrees colder. In the dream, Benjamin and Lia were children again. Lia told him in much more detail about the janitor whose tricks both kids were so obsessed with—Jórvík Volkov, now cast as a nightmare figure.

  “I didn’t know it then,” Benjamin explains, “but the theatre was geographically in the epicenter of these missing child cases. One missing kid’s backpack was even found with a Playbill of ours, although we were running a production of Peter Pan right then so who cares, and another one’s classmate said her friend gushed about going to see a play all week. Only problem was, the parents denied there, like, being any play tickets. But nobody could find anything. Any more than they could find out what started the fire or whose body that was. And in my dreams, Lia keeps telling me all this horrific shit about Jórvík, how he used to play a game with her about picking cards. Except the cards were school photos of the missing kids.”

  Horatio longs for a magic penlight to look straight through Benjamin’s pupils into his brain.

  “So on the one hand, here’s Norway and Fortuna bringing up these cold cases to see if itty-bitty me knew anything. What do I recall? Could the missing kids be connected to Dad’s death? They refused to say so, but I know they were thinking it. Different decades, different crimes, but you never can tell with that kind of thing. And then here’s Lia in my subconscious—well, sometimes I’m in hers—telling me that the murderer was Jórvík, and that he made her pick the victims, and the guilt was killing her. Is that insane?”

  Horatio struggles to keep his face blank. “I . . . let’s hope not. No, of course not. But it’s not calming, and you’re calm as anything.”

  “Yeah, Lia said she’s going to make it all clear when she comes to the gala tonight.”

  “Lia said in your dream she’s coming this evening?”

  “Don’t look at me like that, it’s not like I believed her,” Benjamin grumbles. “It was only a dream.”

  “Right, um. Yes. Dreams can’t be trusted on such subjects.”

  “Still. Like, what if she did—could you imagine the drama? I mean, glory hallelujah, that there’s a showstopper. Not that I wouldn’t love to see her, obviously. But just picture Lia Brahms walking into the middle of the New World’s Stage gala.”

  Horatio does imagine. She’d be wearing some incredible designer dress she found in a bin for ten dollars, freckles dancing, flowers woven into that halo of hair as if she were a wood nymph. He’s missed her and he’d tell her so. She’d burrow under his arm and he’d snug her closer, smelling rose water and cinnamon.

  It would be wonderful. And Benjamin wouldn’t so much as glance my direction for the rest of my life.

  “Hold the motherfucking phone.”

  Benjamin drops a kiss to Horatio’s eyebrow before springing away. It sparks a small catastrophe, like the fall of an icicle from a roofline. Horatio watched the same thoughtless gestures for years without pain. Now they open scars that were never there in the first place.

  “What is it?”

  “Behold these documents, brought from the mountaintop via the Prophet Brahms!” Benjamin plops on the rug to peruse. “Paul gave these to me, and—because I’m afflicted with the rare condition of cabbages for grey matter, suuuuper weird mutation, it causes total morons to sign whatever people put in front of them—I don’t know what they say! C’mere, let’s take a gander.”

  This is still manageable.

  Manic Benjamin is funny and brilliant; Horatio knows how this Benjamin is wrangled. It’s only been these few times that the new Benjamin slipped through the cracks, painting dreamscapes and scaring the daylights out of him.

  “Ooooooh, Paul,” Benjamin intones as Horatio sinks next to him. “You walking ejaculate hose, you said this was an insurance rider, but was this your idea or Mom’s?”

  “Benjamin,” Horatio says incredulously, “these abdicate you from all your rights on the board of directors!”

  “Cute, huh.” Benjamin relinquishes the papers, starting one of his syncopated rhythms on the silent carpet. “Ariel told me that the theatre was in financial trouble. And Paul said yesterday morning that Dad would have shoveled it underground as a point of pride. They must have thought I’d want to, whatever you call it. Carry on his legacy. Pull up his bootstraps, as it were, posthumously. Continue to produce non-crap. Which is, by the way, correct: I would do that to a degree of certainty entirely outside of acatalepsy, categorically confirming that the Pyrrhonists were total crank yankers for insisting that only appearances could ever be truly known.”

  “Remain on topic, please?”

  “So either way, Paul was getting rid of me—if I die, I’m dead. If I don’t die, he has these papers for. Uh, Mom, presumably. Who is probably about to have me committed or something equally Victorian.”

  Benjamin plays a complex amalgam of piano and percussion, eyes focused on some part of the fourth dimension known only to him. Interrupting is a risk if he’s following a train of real thought, but what good is this afternoon if it doesn’t make Horatio more useful? They’d just closed over each other like two halves of a book with a story inside. He captures the nearest hand in both of his and starts gently pulling the tendons.

  Ben doesn’t so much startle as come up for air. He squeezes back gratefully.

  “Soooo weird,” he sighs.

  But when Horatio tries to withdraw, Benjamin tugs him back in. “Nope nope, it’s weird that you could have done that at, like, any point in our relationship and I don’t think I’d have found it unusual. Neither would Lia, I’m guessing. So what have we learned today, kids? Mom wants m
e off the board of directors, possibly dead—”

  “Benjamin, that was Paul being overzealous, you two have never got on and your own mum—”

  “Has been doing the dirty with my donkey impersonator uncle Claude since I was a kid, and my dad, who I really genuinely thought ruled the world, was a wannabe New York power player ashamed of his big oil origins and under the thumb of a guy who pretended to be afraid of the bleach in toilet paper. Well, strike that, not pretended exactly. Anyway, a guy who had every dirty little finger and toe in New World’s Stage’s pie so it couldn’t operate without him. And as a bonus prize, I’ll be a part of a murder investigation tomorrow. Cool.”

  The skin of Benjamin’s hands is softer than Horatio thought it would be, save for where music has scarred his fingers. Too much uncertainty and fear bombard them for Horatio to think about a single other thing. They sit on the floor of their flat, in Washington Heights, in Manhattan, in America, skin to skin.

  How likely was this ever to happen again?

  “That sounds like an impossibly shite day and I’m sorry.”

  Turning his hand over, Benjamin laces their fingers together and Horatio feels it flash through his entire spinal column.

  “Nah, I dunno. I’m gonna go ahead and say the good parts might’ve outweighed the bad. Let’s call it sixty–forty.”

  Horatio’s heart does something incalculable, perhaps to do with fractals. He’ll ask Benjamin. His friend’s cashmere-pale eyes drift down to his Patek Philippe wristwatch, however (a gift from Trudy of doubtless obscene value), and Benjamin starts. Hopping to his feet, he pulls Horatio up with him.

  “C’mon, let’s get ready—you need time to throw six fits over the tux, which was delivered with mine just before the Great Regrettable Shower Incident.”