The King of Infinite Space

by Lyndsay Faye

  “Do they?”

  “Yeah. I wore you then, I wear you now. I wear you in my heart of hearts.” Benjamin’s voice catches. He brushes Horatio’s lower lip with his thumb. “Do you understand?”

  All Horatio can do is go back to devouring him. It escalates to come to bed and please don’t stop and tearing at tuxedos and not bothering to close the curtains on the diamond-strewn satellite orbit they inhabit up here. And when their pulses are slowing and the world begins to reappear, Horatio curls up with his head on Benjamin’s shoulder and regulates his lungs and his friend places the gentlest kiss in his hair he could possibly imagine enduring.

  * * *

  • • •

  Horatio can barely see by the light from the surrounding high-rises when his eyes crack open again. It can’t have been very long—he wasn’t sleeping, he’d just been blissfully warm and shagged out and dozed off for a few minutes.

  The side of the bed next to him is empty.

  When he flicks the lights on, he sees that Benjamin’s tuxedo is missing. Tripping, Horatio casts about for scattered togs, muttering a mad series of incoherent chants.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  We are helpless in the face of death but the inner invisible force always lives.

  You bastard.

  I am light and only light can come to me.

  How fucking could you?

  When he’s half-dressed in trousers and an untucked dress shirt, Horatio dives out the door. He flings himself bodily in front of a cab. But his directions, when he gives them, are clear and distinct despite his voice shaking.

  He knows where Benjamin went, after all.

  BENJAMIN

  You’re going to die

  in your best friend’s arms.

  And you play along because it’s funny,

  because it’s written down . . .

  —Richard Siken, “Planet of Love”

  Benjamin doesn’t feel like hurrying. The thought repels him, and Horatio sleeps unawares. Exerting an unconscious gravitational pull, lining Ben’s dress shoes with lead weights.

  So he walks to the subway instead of hailing a cab, thinking about how Manhattan looked from the sky while he made a home inside his friend. They couldn’t see the city’s more than 250,000 streetlights, of course, and they were preoccupied anyhow. Entirely. But the NYC Department of Transportation is worth cogitating over, because it employs possibly the coolest unit of measurement ever to categorize its lamps:

  AVERAGE ILLUMINANCE

  ILLUMINANCE UNIFORMITY

  Roadways

  Collector

  8–12 lux (.74–1.1 footcandles)

  4:1

  Local

  6–9 lux (.56—.84 footcandles)

  6:1

  Horatio, you’re measured in footcandles, not inches or pounds or even years, did you know about that?

  Ben hopes he can explain it someday.

  He crosses a green signal, a red one, zigging and zagging. It’s probably not worth puzzling over when he fell entirely madly for Horatio, but sometime between the seven thousandth oh, hullo and the Four Seasons hotel, it happened, and Ben walks faster, face to the night wind. His thoughts aren’t smooth, they chatter along like a sunlit brook, and if he weren’t heading to visit his mother, he’d feel about as happy as he ever has.

  it isn’t that I love you I mean I do love you

  but this is something else; I have to keep you

  may I please keep you

  and if you understood what looking at you feels like . . .

  I mean it’s all about perspective isn’t it,

  everything is relative except for light, it’s the only constant, the speed of light, which means that you can’t ever

  catch light at the end of a fishing line hold light in the palm of your hand

  make a soft bed for light and tuck it in and kiss its forehead lips nose

  and I never really understood that before, the sicksweet urge to catch starshine in a butterfly net

  own it

  keep it in a box lined with blankets

  punched with air holes but with you

  you’re constant just like light is constant and I only want to

  keep you

  to us a photon takes light-years to arrive, but to a photon

  it’s  traveling    at   the speed    of   light

  which means time literally stops for a photon

  do you understand how light you are, and how much I want to travel with you? because

  I do

  I do

  I do

  When he reaches Grand Central Terminal to take the crosstown train, he goes into the rotunda. It’s an indulgence. He deserves those just now.

  The night sky spreads above him in rich aqua and gold, a pantheon of Greek heroes and astrological signs. When he was a boy, he told Trudy he wanted to be an astronaut. He would live in space without the eerie lag between people’s questions and his answers. She didn’t take him to the Hayden Planetarium; Trudy took him to Grand Central and showed him the sky as reimagined in myths, pointed out that Orion was flipped backward, that east was really west and west was east. Ben remembered this when he studied philosophy and Einstein, that

  perspective

  w

  a

  s

  everything.

  The scientist they consulted for this ceiling was named Dr. Harold Jacoby, Trudy told seven-year-old Ben. He went to Columbia University and then chaired the astronomy department. He even went on an adventure to West Africa to study a solar eclipse! And now sixty-seven million people a year see the constellations he helped create. You could do the same if you tried, honey.

  Ben decided he would go to Columbia too and never changed his mind. He would always have met Lia, that was inevitable.

  But Trudy was responsible for his meeting Horatio.

  “Fuck,” Benjamin says as he heads underground.

  When he arrives at Port Authority and emerges with the rest of the moles, he walks north. Their townhouse is only half an hour away. The air is heavily warm, like a weighted blanket, the trees sluggish and still. A thunderstorm approaches. Presently the city will smell like damp asphalt and petrichor.

  Petrichor (/ˈpɛtrɪkɔːr/): the odor the earth emits when raindrops strike dry ground and it releases scent-carrying aerosols.

  Ichor (/ˈaɪkər/): the ethereal blood of gods and goddesses.

  Benjamin knows it was Lia on that balcony. Wearing the fog-grey dress covered in purple wildflowers he gave her for the Elegy for a Life Lost installation closing, her curls snaking Medusa-like, looking more herself than Ben had ever imagined. Everything in him screamed to run to her. But in the millisecond before the lights shorted out, he thinks he saw four others flanking her, and that they were the ones who plunged everyone into midnight. Three crone-shaped hooded figures draped in black, as faceless as holes, and a tiny creature with pointed ears and cloven feet.

  Not so much the sort of thing to tell Horatio.

  The townhouse appears empty, but a light glows in the front room, another upstairs.

  You already did me proud today, son. But it’s high time this was resolved.

  Yeah, pulling up bootstraps. Ben rubs the cuff. I put that in the speech for you.

  I heard you, Benny. It was right on the money. You really showed those two whose kid you are. Now go talk to your mom and settle this.

  The entryway looms silent and unlit. Heading toward the back of the townhouse, Ben brushes his fingers against the walls, the doors, the fridg
e, the furniture.

  I was here. I probably won’t be, ever again. But I was here, now, before my family disintegrated.

  Several antique lamps illuminate Trudy’s study in amber pockets. The clocks envelop him as he enters. He feels warring comfort and abhorrence at the

  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

  that Trudy wraps around herself like a protective cloak or maybe an unyielding straitjacket.

  “Benny! Oh, I looked everywhere for you.” Trudy appears from the shadows, likewise still in her gala attire, the green silk gown trailing after her bare feet.

  “We’re not still doing this, are we?”

  Trudy steps farther into the light. Despite the memorial debacle and subsequent discovery of Paul Brahms’s body, her face is cool and calm and her mascara could have been applied lash by lash.

  “Still doing what, honey?”

  Ben’s hands twitch in his pockets, but he refuses to muddy this with more pills. There have been enough pills, there was enough champagne, more than enough ghostly visitations, nearly enough heartbreak.

  “It’s amazing to me.” He shakes his head. “It’s not exactly that I think you don’t love me. I think you do love me, in your way. But it’s like you were born with one face, and you paint yourself a totally different one. Depending on who you’re with and what you want. I have no idea who you are.”

  Trudy’s lips twitch. A flash of hurt, a calculated deflection—who can tell? She goes to the buffet housing a hidden fridge drawer and retrieves a bottle of white wine. The bones of her spine snake upward in a gentle S.

  “I’m your mother, Ben. That’s all I ever wanted to be. Before you abandoned me, I got to play that role, and it was the most cherished I ever felt in my life. You were so fragile, but you trusted me. We understood each other. I would have kept on protecting you for the rest of my life if you’d let me. You have no clue what that feels like, to have been everything to someone, to be their lifeline, and then turn into some kind of joke.”

  When he was nine years old, at a private school on 82nd Street, Ben was introduced to a new torment. Bloodied noses were too noticeable—the perpetrators knew the consequences for visible cruelty. So they started breaking into his locker during his honors math class, and while he studied number theory and probability, they copied his answers for US History and Biological Sciences. Changing their responses individually, of course (these thugs weren’t stupid), but when they started tearing his work into little pieces after plundering it, Ben felt like nothing in his life could ever be safe again. Physical abuse he could withstand, but now his teachers would think he himself was

  slow

  and they didn’t

  believe him

  and it was so much worse than his body being abused, this deliberate sabotage of his already wretched reputation and his mind, and Trudy held him as he gagged on his anger and she whisked him into another school where the students saved doggy waste bags to drop into his lunch, but hey, at least his homework survived.

  Trudy is right; they understand each other. But Ben has spent enough time with Horatio to recognize what selfless love sounds like, ditto what it sounds like when someone wants to appear a combination Mother Teresa and Angelina Jolie.

  I’m your mother, Ben. That’s all I ever wanted to be. Before you abandoned me, I got to play that role, and it was the most cherished I ever felt in my life.

  “You liked me helpless,” he realizes, awed.

  “What a horrible thing to say to your own mother—but it’s what I expect these days.”

  “Is this, like, make-believe time at the Dane manse? You hired the Marlowe twins to spy on me because you’re never ever squeezing anything out of Horatio. I’m assuming they reported to Paul, who showed up at my apartment with paperwork to boot me from the board of directors and a gun to kick me out of this whole ‘being alive’ business. He was shot—totally by accident—after he outed your affair with that bag of rancid hot dog water Uncle Claude. Where is he, by the way?”

  “Upstairs making some calls.” Trudy eases the cork off the screw. “We can’t reverse what you did, Benny, but we can put our own stamp on it. A few New York morning shows, the Post. I describe being married to a paranoid egomaniac with a starfucker kink and suddenly an affair with a normal, loving human makes sense.”

  “Cool. Does that mean we can stop playing nineties sitcom family now?”

  “Only you would consider our being a family an exercise in make-believe.”

  “Only you would consider your being a diabolical wannabe murderess forgivable. It isn’t.”

  “Why are you here at all, Benny, if that’s true?”

  Ben’s emotions lap against the levee. He has about ten more minutes of preternatural calm in him before the vision of Lia at the gala will fade like the dream did. Then the river is going to crest the embankment and drown god knows who.

  “Because people are dead, and since you wanted me dead too, you owe me an explanation.”

  “Owe you,” Trudy muses. “How exactly, entirely like you. All right. Since you asked so nicely.”

  She sets their wineglasses on the coffee table, going to the bookshelf. It holds far more clocks than it does books, and she selects one resting on a small marble base, decorated with silver pieces including a bird.

  “This is the first gift your father ever gave me.” She brushes her fingertips over it. “A William Comyns miniature carriage clock from nineteen-oh-five. He didn’t know how appropriate a present it was. These blue dial numbers are hand-painted on the porcelain, and the tortoiseshell encasing isn’t really something you can find in this quality today.”

  “If I live to inherit it, I’ll buy it a pedestal.”

  “Don’t sound so dismissive. You always understood clocks the way I do.”

  “I’m not so sure about that, and why do you say Dad didn’t know how appropriate it was?”

  Her forefinger comes to rest on the bird. “This is the Eagle of Preparedness. When Jackson drove through that pitiful town where I was born, I didn’t know a thing about sophistication, but I knew I needed money and a husband to escape being ground into the dirt like my own mother, so I was ready. Every day going to work in that filthy junk shop I wore the best secondhand clothes I could find. I kept my face clean and when we couldn’t afford lotion, I used Crisco. When my parents threw bourbon bottles at each other, I swept up the glass. Jackson walked inside the pawn shop and I made him love me. Whatever comes my way, Ben, I am prepared for it, and somehow Jackson foretold that with a clock.”

  Ben hesitates. “What else were you prepared for?”

  Trudy smiles, catlike. “What do you mean by that?”

  Ben’s chest feels too small for his heart. “The original World’s Stage Theatre was dying before somebody set it on fire. Was that you?”

  “Of course not.” Trudy begins a tour of her timepieces, glass in hand, stopping to wind mechanisms. “That was Jórvík Volkov, the theatre’s custodian. I might have suggested it to him, of course, and offered a hefty fee. I’d have paid him too, if he hadn’t vanished—though I won’t deny I was glad. I always suspected his was the body that was so badly incinerated. But I didn’t mention it, and no one asked after him. Life can be much easier when risk factors are eliminated.”

  “Yeah, I can, um. See that. And after Dad died, you’d planned far enough in advance to have Uncle Claude. Did you plan for Paul to fall for you too, or was that just a side casualty?”

  Trudy touches a 1940s round Masonite clock that looks designed by the Jetson family. “
Jackson wanted an angel who worshipped him instead of the Almighty, so that’s what I was. I never had to see my stepfather again, or rummage through restaurant trash for food. Paul wanted a queen to give his life meaning after Laura died, and I gave him that. In return, I controlled everything, though I admit the photos came as an unwelcome surprise. I thought he trusted me. But it must have been pure self-defense, I realize now. He always was so lost after poor Lia passed, always looking to lay blame. The slideshow stunt doesn’t matter though, because I’m prepared, and Claude will help me deliver the message the world will forgive.”

  “What’s Uncle Claude getting out of it, then?”

  “Claude wants proof that he’s as good as his brother. I’m his proof and have been for decades. He also wants someone to watch over. It’s a match made in heaven, when you think about it.”

  He was never as good as me, you know that, son. He sells property, but he doesn’t create anything, not the way I did.

  Jackson’s voice is getting alarming enough that Ben touches the pills in his pocket, finding a shape that’ll make him feel that crucial bit more sane, and popping it down.

  “And what do you get out of Uncle Claude?”

  “Devotion. You’d be surprised at how useful he is, especially when it comes to tedious business formalities.”

  “Is that why you killed Dad? He wasn’t useful anymore?” Ben forces the words out before they can rob all the air from his lungs.

  Trudy pauses over a Lux clock with a black and gold face and four tabs meant to be screwed into a car dashboard. She smiles again, and again the smile is

  BLANK

  “Spiritually, your father was a small man,” she answers. “His obsession with leaving a legacy crippled him. He’d have ruined us, the way I let him operate before the first theatre burned. To be honest, I don’t know exactly how he died. He was on any number of medications by then. Afraid of Claude, cloying and overprotective with me, completely useless at running a business. I hate watching miserable creatures suffer. If he took some of his pills and forgot to keep track, and I reminded him to take them again, whose fault was it?”