The King of Infinite Space Read online

  ALSO BY LYNDSAY FAYE

  Dust and Shadow

  The Gods of Gotham

  Seven for a Secret

  The Fatal Flame

  Jane Steele

  The Paragon Hotel

  The Whole Art of Detection

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  Copyright © 2021 by Lyndsay Faye

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Faye, Lyndsay, author.

  Title: The king of infinite space / Lyndsay Faye.

  Description: New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021021036 (print) | LCCN 2021021037 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525535898 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525535904 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3606.A96 K56 2021 (print) | LCC PS3606.A96 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021036

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021037

  p.   cm.

  Cover design and art: Sandra Chiu

  Book design by Pauline Neuwirth, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_5.7.1_c0_r0

  This one’s for the Groundlings.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Lyndsay Faye

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Dramatis Personae

  Epigraph

  Lia

  Horatio

  Benjamin

  Lia

  Horatio

  Benjamin

  Lia

  Horatio

  Benjamin

  Lia

  Horatio

  Benjamin

  Lia

  Horatio

  Benjamin

  Lia

  Horatio

  Benjamin

  Lia

  Horatio

  Benjamin

  Lia

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  BENJAMIN DANE, son of Jackson and Trudy Dane

  HORATIO PATEL, Benjamin’s closest friend

  LIA BRAHMS, Benjamin’s former fiancée

  JACKSON DANE, owner of the New World’s Stage Theatre, recently deceased

  TRUDY DANE, Jackson’s widow, now married to his brother, Claude

  CLAUDE DANE, brother of the late Jackson Dane

  PAUL BRAHMS, Lia’s father and administrator of the New World’s Stage Theatre

  RORY AND GARRETT MARLOWE, friends of Benjamin’s from Columbia

  ROBIN GOODFELLOW, an event coordinator

  MAM’ZELLE, MOMA, and MAW-MAW, three very weird sisters, owners of a floral boutique

  ARIEL WASHINGTON, the doorman of the New World’s Stage Theatre offices

  JÓRVÍK VOLKOV, the late janitor of the original World’s Stage Theatre

  JESSICA ANNE KOWALSKI, a client in need of a bouquet

  VINCENTIO, a tailor

  DETECTIVE YING YUE NORWAY, an NYPD detective

  DETECTIVE BARRY FORTUNA, her partner

  No longer mourn for me when I am dead

  Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell

  Give warning to the world that I am fled

  From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell;

  Nay, if you read this line, remember not

  The hand that writ it; for I love you so,

  That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,

  If thinking on me then should make you woe.

  O, if (I say) you look upon this verse,

  When I (perhaps) compounded am with clay,

  Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,

  But let your love even with my life decay,

  Lest the wise world should look into your moan,

  And mock you with me after I am gone.

  Sonnet 71

  William Shakespeare

  LIA

  i am not police sirens

  i am the crackle of a fireplace

  —Rupi Kaur, milk and honey

  Lia never knows when she’ll appear in one of Benjamin’s nightmares. But since it’s started happening, they tend to meet in the charred shell of the original World’s Stage Theatre, the smoke hanging as solid as proscenium curtains.

  Sometimes the damage is the way it really happened. Total annihilation on the lower floor and a dragon-razed mezzanine. Sometimes the destruction is rendered pretty and whimsical. The ruined velvet seats crowd against either wall, creating a proud aisle like an apocalyptic road. Or granite-sparkling ashes flit toward her pupils. Or the roof is gone, and Lia looks up to see stark, perfect constellations.

  Unheard of in midtown Manhattan, what with the light pollution.

  But the artist in Lia can easily imagine it anyhow.

  Always, there is the terror. Even when nothing more significant happens than her boots sloughing through cinders.

  This theatre burned twenty years ago.

  Lia knows there isn’t any logic to dreams. But it’s nauseating, and she always thinks a little petulantly, spectacular, another nightmare, being in the cremated bones of this place is automatically a nightmare, and it isn’t even in my head.

  Because it’s all in Ben’s.

  This time Ben sits downstage left, staring into the orchestra pit. He’s ropy and pale in a red T-shirt and torn jeans—a towheaded, manic-eyed eight-year-old instead of her towheaded, manic-eyed ex-fiancé. His shiner is pulpy, and the sweet curve of his lower lip gapes like an extra mouth.

  So that helps to date things. It’s Ben before therapists, Ben before meds. Ben the toilet plunger, the lunch money source, the punching bag.

  Looking down, she sees a pair of green corduroy pants she lived in throughout the late nineties; so she’s Ben’s age, too. It’s before she got the hang of her coarse nut-brown corkscrews, for instance. They’re cropped at her nape, much longer on top, like they were for that heinous school picture. A Halloween wig from the discount bin.

  Ben has a song stuck in his head, seemingly. From all corners of the building, “Harvest Moon” by Neil Young croons its easy melody. A deeply harmless ballad. Still, Lia’s blood runs thin and bluish in her wrists.

  Hear what I have to say

  Just like children sleeping

  We could dream this night away

  “Neil Young is pretty cheesy for you, isn’t he?” Lia observes.

  “Oh my god.” Ben scrambles to his knees with a look of pure hunger.

  Please not this again.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “You’re back,” he blurts, standing. “I mean you’re, like, you’re here. Again.”

&nbs
p; “Don’t ask me how. We went over this maybe ten times already.”

  “Sorry. No, I wasn’t going to. Just, you know, there you are.”

  “Let’s not make a scene of it.”

  “I’m literally on a stage.” The premonition of Ben’s adult smirk appears. “Wouldn’t a scene be, dunno. Appropriate?”

  “No scenes.” Lia’s heart thuds like a doomed heretic’s. “I’m here against my will.”

  “Right, but. God, you can’t understand how much I’ve missed—”

  “Benjamin, change topics, or I swear I’m going to walk away and keep walking till I—I have no idea. Fall out of your ear.”

  “You—”

  “Do not discuss me. Us. There’s too much to . . . there’s just too much. We tried it last time and I could barely function for three days after I woke up. Tell me a different story.”

  Longing, anger, and disappointment threaten to crumple Ben’s face like a child’s after a terrible fall. But Ben isn’t a little boy—he only looks like one. Straightening, he nods. It was a kaleidoscope of emotions, longing and loss as a high-pitched garble.

  The last flicker looked simply like love, though. Which is excruciating.

  “So this theatre was built in nineteen-thirteen,” Ben forces out. “Um. Right, sure, you know that. Please bear with me. This is offhand, and I generally prepare my lectures. World’s Stage survived the Great War, the Great Depression—which I gotta add is geographically waaaaaay more impressive—World War Two, Vietnam, and the dissolution of the Brit-pop boy band Take That, which prompted dozens of emergency suicide hotlines to be set up in the UK. Horatio has firsthand tales. And anyway, then one spark, one instant when the temperature surpasses the flash point in the presence of both fuel and an oxidizer, and what happens?”

  Lia’s arms are bare and cold. The ceiling sends a drizzle of plaster to the ground.

  “The fire tetrahedron begins!” Ben sounds like he’s walking a tightrope. “Wheeee! Oh shit, and don’t forget gravity has to be present, that’s what, like, prevents the flame from being snuffed out immediately by the waste material produced via its own combustion. But yes, so then the solids and gases create visible particles, the red-orange-yellow spectrum we associate with incandescent things, and poof. A historical Broadway landmark vanishes. As permanent as a cigarette. Left behind only in records, photographs, online, and in the memories of those who experienced it. Us, for instance.”

  Little-boy Ben talking like present-day Ben makes Lia’s neck prickle.

  “And in your dreams, which I now share.”

  “You sound kinda pissed about that.”

  “I can’t leave until you wake up.”

  Ben’s blue eyes glimmer. “Yeah, dreams are never consensual. They’re like, I don’t know, having a shitty frat boy Sigmund Freud in your brain, and he’s throwing a torture party. I don’t do it on purpose.”

  Lia shivers. “Who would?”

  “Who would talk with the long-lost love of their life subconsciously?” Ben shifts gears so fast Lia hears the brakes skidding. “Half the products in this country are marketed on nostalgia. If I could bottle this crap, I’d be rich.”

  “You are rich. Your family is from oil money, your dad first bought World’s Stage and then rebuilt it, and it was only dark for three years.”

  “Richer, then.”

  “You don’t give a damn about wealth. Unless you’re throwing it at people you think deserve it, that is.”

  “Well, that’s because I’ve always had tons. Paradoxical, right?”

  A silver-tinged wind brushes along crumbling pilasters. Lia remembers afternoons here after her father picked her up from first and second grade. Flipping down a burgundy velvet chair seat, dropping her patch-covered JanSport in the third row. War is unhealthy for children and other living things with sunflowers embroidered around it, Kermit leaning on a rainbow, a vaguely defiant UK anarchy flag pin. Then Paul Brahms would ruffle her horrible bushy head, duck his own bald dome, squawk at any stage crew present, and disappear back into the general-manager-of-theatre-operations office to make calls and crunch numbers until the lights blinked on throughout Lincoln Center.

  Lia did fractions while the carpenters swore like pirates, watched rapt as dancers dropped and curlicued. Stage managers sneaked her paperbacks—Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Hobbit, The Borrowers, The Great Brain. Actors made her a combination stray cat and mascot. She learned about musical phrasing from first violin chairs, drop pleats from Tony Award–winning costumers. After befriending the ballerina playing Louise in Carousel, she refused to match her socks for three years straight.

  Lia went to school, and slept at home, and did her art projects. But she lived here with Ben.

  He coughs. “OK, look, I’m sorry you’re here. I mean, not sorry, I like to see you—I love to see you actually, like, love in the exploded firecracker sense, something irreversible you couldn’t possibly put back together again because we’re all hurtling hell-bound toward total thermodynamic equilibrium, but. Christ.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you make of . . . of any of this?”

  “When I’m awake, I never think about it. You’re the one dreaming.”

  Lia is lying. She thinks about Ben and the old theatre constantly, in fits and spurts and sizzles and pops. After the cacophony of glitter-blessed chorus boys came the silent time. The lonesome, post-fire time. A swing set at Riverside Park creaked as the sun dragged shadows across the playground in darkening claws. She collected flowers and twigs, wove grasses into huts for mice. The apartment’s lock clicked as her father arrived home exhausted from haranguing insurers, backers, corporate patrons. The radiator hissed in the ripe yellow-grey gleam that passes for the dead of night in New York, and she’d think about a set of little girls’ school photos shuffled in front of her own little girl eyes.

  Pick a card, any card, the thick consonants of the old man rumbled. You love magic tricks. You want to, yes? Pick a card and I will for you make it to disappear.

  Seven times Lia was shown a selection of miniature pictures by the World’s Stage head custodian, stooped and smiling in a worn denim uniform. Seven times, she picked a card.

  Seven times, he made the card disappear, and she smiled up at him. Rapt.

  Lia’s after-school hours reverted to haunting stage doors and lighting booths upon the opening of New World’s Stage. But it wasn’t the same. The head custodian never returned, for one. Many of the immigrants didn’t. And here were brilliant dressing room lightbulbs instead of flickering fluorescents, this stairway curved sinuously up instead of diving headfirst into the bathrooms. Still. Something in the new structure pulsed as if all the passion of the performers inhabiting the lost building were a scent persisting even after the fire. Lia wasn’t always happy here. Far from it. But she was alive. There were so many sly jokes and not-a-bit-secret affairs, all the chaotic champagne-colored froth of adult relationships.

  And Ben, of course. There was always Ben.

  Eight-year-old Ben scrubs his hand down the front of his elfin face. When he draws it away, his palm is painted with the gore from his lip. It’s always awful to see him like this, golden-haloed and hurting.

  “Aaaaand I’m bleeding,” he drawls. “When was I not bleeding at this age, though? Simpler question, let’s use Occam’s razor here.”

  It’s only a dream, and dreams can’t hurt him or you.

  Lia shakes herself. “Look, Ben, I don’t know why you aren’t more creeped out by this.”

  Ben shrugs. “Nothing about the way our minds interact surprises me anymore.”

  “But why the old World’s Stage?”

  “Why not? All’s fair in love, war, and REM sleep. Does it really bother you so much?”

  “Seeing you?”

  “No, not that part, please don’t answer that question, just let me, l
ike, keep my illusion you treasure our time together. I meant the wreck of the theatre.”

  “Of course it does. Someone died.”

  Pick a card, any card, Jórvík would say to her. And she did.

  Seven times.

  Ben pulls her hand out of her pocket in one of those sudden gestures that sends blood rocketing through her veins.

  “But maybe that’s why we’re here, huh? Maybe whoever it was who died in the fire is trying to, you know. Tell us something, settle scores.”

  Lia doesn’t bother repressing a shudder. “I don’t want whoever they found incinerated in this to tell me anything. Ever.”

  Lia knows who died. To everyone else, he was an unidentified husk. Barely a corpse. But she has never breathed a word of it to a living soul. Especially never to Benjamin.

  “Some journalist you’d make,” he teases. “Aren’t artists supposed to have just a liiiiiittle smidge of investigative reporter in them? You know, really peel the skin off reality, see what lies beneath?”

  But I’m not an artist anymore.

  Lia has spent practically all her days expressing herself through the language of flowers, wild and weird installations, and she lost that lifeline when she needed it most.

  ROSEMARY: For remembrance, and woven into sacred garlands by the ancient Greeks to bring mental clarity.

  “Artists have to make art,” she snaps, “and I haven’t since the night two years ago when we stopped being us.”

  Ben looks chastened. Then he nods, swinging the hand he still holds. It feels like a soft slide of home against her palm.

  “All right, sure, we quit the gumshoe stuff. How about . . . oh, I know. Here’s a riddle for you: Is the reconstructed New World’s Stage even World’s Stage at all?”

  Lia nearly smiles before it catches in her throat. Ben loves these mind games, has played them forever, and he always stares at Lia as if world peace depends on whatever answer tumbles from her lips. She glances down before replying and sees a symbol carved into the stage. It’s a five-pointed star, with a smaller one nestled perfectly inside, and a third tinier pentagram within that one. She’s seen it before. But can’t recall in what setting.