The King of Infinite Space

by Lyndsay Faye

  This wasn’t a funeral at which Lia had lost anyone. When she selected a single white lily to bring, the sisters smiled at her, and she knew she’d made the right choice. It meant nothing to her; it was simply corporate America’s choice of mourning bloom.

  Lia, Robin, and the sisters stand a discreet distance away. No one notices them. Lia is beginning to realize that if they don’t want to be noticed, they won’t be. It’s as easy as that.

  “Did we make all of this happen?” Lia asks.

  “Mais non, chouchou,” Mam’zelle replies. Her black dress has a pink silk ribbon at the collar. “We nudged these things. We placed people where they should be.”

  “They done decided what to do once they got there,” Moma adds.

  “The seeds were in the ground,” Maw-maw agrees.

  Lia nods. Robin vanished after the lights went out at the gala, and apparently witnessed shocking events. He bragged about them as if they were his needlework, but Lia isn’t so certain. He said he helped Trudy Dane come to power and then be killed by her own son. That he forever tarnished the name of New World’s Stage, ruined Horatio Ramesh Patel’s life. That he had a hand in Paul Brahms’s killing. That he cut down Benjamin Dane.

  But Lia is beginning to understand cause and effect. Definitely better than Robin, though probably not as well as the sisters do. Not yet. But she knows the story isn’t quite finished.

  The second funeral is the simplest. Lia leaves a trio of pink carnations at Trudy Dane’s elaborate ceremony—a yacht voyage down the Hudson, all the corporate tributes and offerings from carefully cultivated friends piled near the bow of the boat as the attendees sample caviar and drink moderately good champagne. Her carnations are ridiculous next to all the ostentatious offerings.

  Lia smiles, looking at them. When Trudy’s ashes are given to the river, a few tears are shed, but none of them are genuine.

  PINK CARNATION: Remembrance.

  Don’t think I’ll ever forget what you did. Or who you really were.

  For an instant, Lia is saddened that such a vibrant woman has so few people at her glib socialite funeral who actually cared about her in the daylight, in restaurants and crosswalks and bedrooms. She may have been dark and grasping to the core, but she lived her life. She took her chances.

  Then Lia recalls that Claude Dane would be here, but he’s awaiting trial for the murder of Benjamin Dane.

  She doesn’t feel quite so sorry for either of them anymore.

  The third funeral is eviscerating.

  Paul Brahms is laid to rest at the largely Jewish Mount Carmel Cemetery in Ridgewood, Queens. There are around eighty people in attendance this time. No matter what she knows about him now, how ruthless he was and how desperate, how ready to wield a gun, her father was decent to his employees, and he worked so many hours and put his fingers in so many pies that practically everyone at New World’s Stage was at least his acquaintance.

  Lia learns, and it touches her deeply, that some were even his friends.

  “Paul saw me leaving the building around one in the morning this time I had a late shift, stopped me and asked if I had a ride. I didn’t,” one of the cleaning staff says. “He called me a car right there. Said I’d never been late a single day in four years, and it was on the theatre. What he didn’t know was that my son was home sick, and I got back to him that much faster. How do you ever forget something like that?”

  Walking up the simple paved walkway with a huge armful of white gladioli almost taller than she is, Lia kneels beside the hole in the earth.

  GLADIOLUS: Shaped like a sword, which is the meaning behind their Latin name. They take traits associated with gladiators—agility, courage, power—but have also long been a symbol of infatuation.

  “Hello,” Lia says softly, through her tears.

  Paul’s grave doesn’t answer her. She didn’t expect it to. He’s somewhere else now.

  “You did a lot of terrible things I didn’t know about,” Lia tells him. “I was surprised when Robin told me. He seems to know just about everything. But then I remembered the way you loved Mom, and the way you loved me, with everything in your soul, and . . . then I knew I was stupid for your choices to have shocked me. You put the two of us first. And when you didn’t have either of us to put first anymore, you changed.”

  She lays down the enormous bundle of white gladioli on the half-green, half-amber grass. She could always carry flowers, even when she didn’t exist any longer. The sisters would have had no use for her otherwise. There are clumps of dirt visible in the landscaping, whole streaks of fried ground cover. The cemetery is meticulously kept, but no matter how well-maintained, Mount Carmel is visibly imperfect. It’s the perfect resting place for her father.

  “These are the right flowers for you, Dad,” she whispers. “You were maybe preoccupied by the wrong things. But you fought like hell for them. I’d have brought you violets, you know, which stand for faithfulness and humility. That’s how everyone saw you. But it felt like they all withered when you died.”

  Lia doesn’t attend Benjamin Dane’s funeral, because she has a plan.

  “All right,” she says, walking into the sitting room above the flower shop. “Ladies, I have questions. Actually, for you too, Robin.”

  Moma, who was approaching the barre with a water bottle, pauses. Maw-maw enters from the kitchen, drying her hands on a rag. Mam’zelle looks up from her book on the sofa. Robin wriggles in his chair, where he’s finishing a stitch on the dress sock he’s darning. He announced he’s leaving for Bali in the morning, and Moma muttered good riddance to bad rubbish, but Lia is grateful he’s still here.

  “Is it . . .” Lia pauses over her wording. “I can communicate with Ben, there’s this in-between place we go to talk. I can find him. But for other people, when they die, where do they go?”

  “Everywhere, chérie,” says Mam’zelle.

  “Far away,” says Moma.

  “In the ground,” says Maw-maw.

  “OK, I gotta be real here, that was spectacularly unhelpful,” Lia remarks.

  Robin laughs, loud and long. “Oh, precious duckling, you really ought to have defected.”

  “I think we’re pretty well past that.”

  “Checked the weather in Bali, it’s—”

  “It’s going to be hurricane season in a minute if you don’t answer my question.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Robin says with a comical look of shock. “Don’t even know how, do you?”

  “Sure, I do. I convince a butterfly to flap its wings. Cause and effect. Can I influence where the dead go? Where do they go?”

  Robin, after a satisfyingly stunned moment, rouses himself. “That . . . is exactly how you would go about making a hurricane, tip-top. Ah, let me see. Most of the dead are relatively settled in their lives. Had a smashing life! Had a rotten one. Had an ordinary one. Any which way, they’re returned to . . . what to call this, there aren’t really words as such . . .”

  “They’re returned to the everywhere and everywhen,” Lia supplies.

  All three of the sisters sit down, and Robin drops his sewing.

  “Really rather good, isn’t she?” he coughs after a few seconds. “With whom do you want a chin-wag, you magnificent entity? Martin Luther King Junior? Hammurabi? Alexander McQueen?”

  “Oh,” Lia realizes. “Sorry, I wasn’t expressing myself very well. See, I myself can find Benjamin whenever I want to if I decide to dream him. I don’t think that’ll change a bit now that he’s dead, we’re so connected. What I’m curious about is whether there’s a way for a person who isn’t dead yet to find Ben after they die.”

  The silence that follows this suggestion seems exaggerated to Lia. But then again, all four of these beings are entirely melodramatic and completely out of proportion, so it does make sense.

  “Now, that there’s just too much generosity
,” Moma says, looking equally adoring and skeptical.

  “Heart like an artichoke,” Mam’zelle breathes. “A leaf for everyone. Oh, Lia, Lia.”

  “The harvest is sweet.” Maw-maw wipes a tear from her eye. “The harvest is bountiful.”

  “Merciful heavens,” Robin exclaims. “That’s what you want to do?”

  “Look, you all can like it or leave it, but here’s what I’m trying.” Lia tightens the knot on the scarf in her hair. “Obviously Benjamin has unfinished business and hasn’t just dissolved, or I’d sense that he was gone for good. I feel like the five of us are generally really . . . occupied. With the entire universe, and all. We’re too busy to fret over one ghostly consciousness. Can I make it so that two people who have unfinished business can . . . finish it? Find each other?”

  The sisters smile their slow, one-minded smile. Robin laughs hard enough to lift the ceiling.

  Then he jumps up, snatches Lia’s hands in his, executes a twirl, and when she’s spun around, finishes by kneeling at her feet with their fingertips barely in contact.

  “My fairy queen,” he says, all his teeth showing. “You absolutely can.”

  “How?”

  “You need a talisman. An object imbued with love and power by a magical creature, enough strength to make this mortal being findable if they keep it with them. Like a beacon, or a distress signal.”

  “That’s all it takes?”

  “From you? That’s all it takes.” Robin’s eyes gleam like molten ore. “What a pity. Can’t imagine you have any such item lying about. Do you?”

  * * *

  • • •

  When Lia walks down the aisle of the old World’s Stage Theatre this time, she arrives here on purpose. Which makes the experience altogether individual.

  Ash still floats in the air, but it reminds her of snow. The smoky atmosphere is a fireplace on a cold winter’s night with the promise of an ugly blanket and a mug of something steaming arriving soon. As rickety and ruined as the structure seems, it’s a relief to see that it’s crumbling. There’s no debate now. No is this worth saving or is it still beautiful. She knows that in New York City, it was rebuilt through grit and force, and continues to showcase art. But here, in the place where she meets Benjamin, the finality of its demise soothes her.

  A loud crack sounds, and a chunk of ceiling falls. Lia smiles at it.

  “What the ever-loving fuck is happening to me?”

  Lia climbs to the stage. Benjamin isn’t so much sitting as huddling, arms wrapped around his knees, staring at his surroundings. A crack in the wall sends a puff of plaster dust into the air.

  “Oh god,” he breathes as she walks up to him. “It’s . . . you’re here, you’re really here.”

  When Lia laughs, he springs to his feet. They close the distance between them at a run, falling into each other’s arms. Both are adults, the age they were when they died. Both are cracked and completed. Neither is a terrified kid in this space anymore, confused about how they got here. Ben spins them in a circle with Lia’s feet off the ground, and she hasn’t felt anything as wonderful as this in a very long time.

  “You’re different.” Ben is panting when he finally sets her down, slotting his fingers into her hair in the exact way she remembers. “It took you so much effort. Like, attempting to be different, and then staying the same no matter how hard you tried. You’ve changed, what is this?”

  “I’m actually not sure yet.” Lia smiles. “I guess that we know what we are, but we don’t know what we might become.”

  A slow smile trickles from Ben’s mouth toward his eyes, against all gravitational sense. “Where is this? Another dream? It feels a lot more, uh, very? Extra? Cranked to eleven?”

  “I wish I could say it was that, but.” Lia links her fingers behind his neck just the way she used to do. He half-laughs, half-sobs, his brow coming to rest on her shoulder. “God, Benny, I missed you, too. I missed you so much.”

  “This is the cool part then, where we can stop missing each other?”

  “Not—”

  “I’m dead, aren’t I?”

  “We shouldn’t—”

  “Ooooh no no no, it’s coming back, my mom killed me, Jesus of Nazareth on a rickshaw, this is—”

  “Ben, please stop till you remember the rest of it.”

  Lia waits as his face changes.

  She watches Ben remember her own death more vividly. She watches him see his demise, too. His mother’s treachery flickers in his retinas. She waits while he recalls Horatio and tears flood his eyes, and she waits while he tries to stop them and can’t.

  “You want him back, don’t you?” she says in his ear. “I need to know.”

  “Yes, but I . . .” He shudders. “You, you’re my—”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not your anything anymore,” Lia says softly. “I haven’t been for a while. What do you want your future to look like?”

  “It reeeeally sounds like I don’t have one.”

  “Oh, you do. I never got the chance to tell you at the gala what was going to make things more clear. I should’ve said in the first place that it would be the same message from the Bulvmania waiter, reinterpreted. That’s why I needed you to get it.”

  Ben kisses her temple, leaving salt water on her cheek. “It doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “Yeah.” Lia hugs him tighter. “I didn’t know either, at the time. But, I do now. I don’t exist anymore. At the same time, I’m pretty hardcore, as you’d put it.”

  Ben’s head falls back as he laughs. Lia hasn’t seen it in far too long. He’s just as absurd and as beautiful as she remembers, and their time together was never wasted, no matter what the ending looked like. They survived in one another’s company. That was always going to happen, and it always will have happened.

  Nothing can take what they were together away from them.

  “I really get to decide my future?” Ben marvels.

  “Yeah, I’m fond of you, so you get extra perks.”

  “I, um.” Ben shakes his head. “There’s someone I did not treat well I would like the chance to treat better. If possible.”

  A massive chunk of ceiling collapses. Soot and wood and plaster fly everywhere. Standing on the stage, however, Lia and Ben don’t flinch at it. This place is supposed to come down. It burned a very long time ago, and maybe it was always the pair of them who allowed it to keep existing.

  They’ll find someplace better to dream one another.

  “I was hoping you’d say that.” Lia lays her head on Ben’s shoulder. “Consider it done.”

  * * *

  • • •

  A full month after the deaths of Jeremy Bradford, Paul Brahms, Trudy Dane, and Benjamin Dane, Horatio packs his bags for London.

  He isn’t really present. There is also less of him physically than previous. He’s tried sobbing and tried not sobbing. Being busy and being curled in a quaking ball under Benjamin’s blankets. Everything hurts so much that he can’t remember what it was like before. When muscles didn’t scream and his skull wasn’t fissured. He doesn’t remember life before bloodsickness, and he can no longer imagine the warm weight in his palm of an unshattered heart. It was never in his chest, not really. It lived in his hand. It might have been cracked, but he was always offering it to his friend. Every day, in countless fashions.

  Here. It’s yours for the taking.

  Do you want it?

  I don’t know whether you do, but your wanting it would be the greatest gift of my life.

  Now he puts clothes from the dresser in his bag. His mum flew out for two weeks during the worst of it, held him while he disintegrated. They did video calls with his dad, all wept together.

  But he really only had time for one parent, because Horatio has been on every news and talk show in the greater New York area, and two in Los Angeles.
Telling Ben’s story. Over and over, mostly through tears, but coherently. Concise and eloquent.

  No, he had no intention whatsoever of killing Paul Brahms. Benjamin was no angel, far from it, but he only hurt people by accident or in self-defense, and never violently. I don’t suppose I even saw him punch someone’s arm as a joke. He suffered terrible violence as a boy.

  You’d think that we would have, but it never occurred to us to imagine Benjamin’s own mother was such a ruthless woman. I mean, I found her wonderful company for a decade. Then she went and . . . it’s difficult for me to grasp. And it hasn’t got any easier.

  Yes, he was always different, but in that special way where everyone else suddenly seemed the same. As if he was the only original person present and the rest were copies of each other. Yes, I suppose that does sound extreme, but . . . Well, he had that effect on everyone, it wasn’t just me, despite . . . yes, I did love him, of course I did. Do.

  I do love him.

  There’s nothing left to attempt within Horatio’s purview. Everyone has been buried. Claude is in prison awaiting trial, and Horatio dreads flying back for that wretched business, but he will be ready when the time comes. He’s spent more hours than he ever expected with Ariel Washington, who keeps popping up at the flat with Bernardo Brothers coffee, talking about Benjamin.

  Do you remember when he set up a booth at the Union Square subway stop offering Free Time Lessons?

  Do you remember when he first started working at the youth centers, the way he’d talk about those hurting kids?

  Do you remember when he said everyone worth their salt should know how to escape a supervillain and decided to learn horseback riding, scuba diving, and get his pilot’s license?

  Horatio is stacking boxer-briefs when he finds something unexpected. To say he’s stunned would be far too extreme for what he’s capable of feeling. But he’s surprised, and these days that takes a great deal.

  Tucked between a black pair and a navy pair is a scarf. It’s embroidered beautifully with wild strawberries, all lush red fruit and writhing green vines. He knows at once it was Lia’s but can’t fathom how it came to be here.