The King of Infinite Space Read online

  “How do you mean, is it World’s Stage?”

  Ben lifts his arms and makes a dramatic circle. “I mean the Ship of Theseus.”

  “The what, now?”

  “This is actually one of my favorites. A classic. OK, so you have a boat that’s being replaced plank by plank. Once every molecule of the vessel is new, then is it still the same ship?”

  “The human body discards all its cells every seven years, but you don’t imagine I’m a stranger.”

  Ben claps, delighted. “Good one. No doctor is capable of replacing every piece of you and preserving your, like, consciousness, your you, your Lia, whatever.”

  Ben always did have a ferocious attachment to individualism and individuals, Lia remembers with a pang. It was never just his obscene wealth that drew devotees. Prove yourself a bully or a hypocrite, and he would eat you for breakfast with a dash of Cholula. Prove yourself worthy, and he would lie in the middle of the road to stop traffic as you crossed the street. People slavered over his genuine laughter as much as they hinted needing six-figure astronomy textbooks. It’s why he and Lia were together so long. Christ knows nobody else would have fed her for the fifteenth time because she couldn’t hold the spoon herself.

  “But theoretically a boat could be a boat until the end of time. It’s inanimate,” he continues.

  “World’s Stage isn’t inanimate, and I don’t care which one you’re talking about. This building or what replaces it.”

  Ben grins wolfishly. There are dry-bones scuffles here always, sounds like the spectres of flames chewing at plaster.

  Gnawing at flesh.

  “Then what if you never threw away any of the pieces of the original ship, and you reassembled them when the fresh one was complete? Which ship is more real?”

  “Who came up with this?”

  “Plutarch.”

  “He must’ve been a real pain in the dick.”

  This produces a yapping laugh with his face thrown skyward, and Lia feels the old joy flooding her body before she can plug the hole in the dam.

  Fuck you, she thinks. Fuck you, Ben, and your beautiful brain, and your even more stupidly beautiful, generous, loyal heart, and forever and for always fuck the fact I still managed to torch us to the ground.

  Ben recaptures her hand and plays with the fingers, knuckle by knuckle, which does wretched things to her blood pressure. “Wanna know my two favorite solutions?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “The first is conceptualism. There is in reality no ship. The ship is a human concept applied to a particular mass existing at a particular instant. The way love is a particular feeling during a particular period. It carries no significance whatsoever outside of human linguistics. Love doesn’t exist objectively, and neither do Theseus’s ships.”

  Lia wills her heart to slow. “And the second one?”

  Ben takes a shaky breath, concentrating on her fingertips. “The second one is easier to explain with rivers. You can never step in the same river twice if you think of it in three dimensions, according to perdurantism. But if the river is four-dimensional, then it’s completely logical to step into, like, different time-slices of the same river. It’s always there.”

  “What is this about, Benjamin?” Lia whispers.

  He presses his lips to her palm. “Then love would always be there, too. In another time-slice. It doesn’t vanish just because the person left.”

  Ben releases her just as impulsively. Looks away, shoves his hands in his pockets.

  “Anyway,” Lia sighs, “the modern building’s wall has that one section made of the blackened bricks, with the plaque. By the box office. So it isn’t a hundred percent new.”

  Ben prods at his lower lip to explore the damage. “Maybe its personality was somehow, like, transplanted.”

  “I thought you said buildings were inanimate?”

  “Well, that was clearly pretty dumb of me. You of all people should realize my capacity for, um, stupidity. Considering.”

  “Why do you bring me here?” Lia’s temples pulse around her eye sockets.

  “But . . . I don’t. I wouldn’t, I’ve never deliberately hurt you in my life.”

  He’s right, Lia thinks. He has hurt dozens of people, but never deliberately, not a single one of them. Even the ones who deserved it.

  Ben sounds so dismayed that a cold salt swell of guilt submerses Lia, which makes her angry, which combined with the grief finally bursts the floodgates.

  “You must be bringing me here. Who or what else could be? And it’s cruel to put me in your head like this. You don’t even love me anymore.”

  Ben’s tender young jaw clenches. He puts small fists on his hips in a parody of manhood, glares up at where the fiberglass safety curtain hung before the fire turned its function into a dark joke.

  “Lia, I’ve said a lot of things to you over the years—a pretty, like, daunting array of both vocabulary words and their shades of emotional nuance, in an exponential growth of combinations. I never said I stopped loving you,” he growls. “Not once. And I never will.”

  “Ben—”

  “Radioactivity doesn’t, it doesn’t stop, that’s what half-life means.” Ben’s eyelashes sparkle wetly. “It just, like, halves, and halves, and halves, forever, and I don’t even have that luxury, it diminishing, you were always everything to me.”

  HELIOTROPE: Endlessly devoted affection.

  COWSLIP: You are my divinity.

  HELENIUM: Weeping.

  Lia can’t stand this. They can’t be together, but she can’t get out of his head or get him out of hers. The words would wound in any setting—a coffee shop, a park, some street corner where countless nameless people suffering small tragedies have scuffed their shoes against the cement. But the old World’s Stage creeps along her follicles, the cobalt sheen of its walls stately and menacing.

  This is the place, this is where you stood, exactly here.

  Pick a card, any card.

  I will make for it to disappear.

  Lia races down the stairs into the theatre’s house.

  She’s never attempted to leave before. That was asinine. She’s going to bang outside and find herself on West 64th Street, or else wake up, or else fall off the edge of the known universe’s ocean into a dark nothingness of rudderless ships that might or might not belong to this Theseus son of a bitch, she really doesn’t give a damn anymore. So what if she’s a coward?

  Fine. She’ll be a coward, then, belly as yellow as asphalt paint.

  Nothing ever really happened to you. Not really. Just pick a card, any card.

  There are no excuses for the things that you’ve done.

  “Lia! Wait!”

  Lia is already through the double doors, next to where the downstairs bar stood. It’s a sullen shell. Leering at her with charred teeth, licking rotten chops.

  The problem, she concludes, is that Ben doesn’t understand why this place makes her throat close. If Lia were Ben, she could look at it the way he sees the world, like a lyrical theorem or a mathematical poem. She can’t, though, and not just because Lia is herself and Ben is himself.

  Ben doesn’t know key aspects of this narrative.

  Neil Young is still crooning his way under her skin. If burning down the inside of Ben’s head weren’t a horrifying prospect, and one very unlikely to work since nightmares aren’t fucking real, she’d consider conjuring up a flamethrower just to stop her ex’s mental soundtrack.

  Lia freezes. Slowly turns.

  She’s reached the section of wall where the scarred bricks will someday commemorate the new building. But here, although the Sheetrock is blasted and the Manhattan street beyond flickers like a snowy TV set, three portraits in oil hang just where they will when World’s Stage is resurrected: the chairman of the board of directors, the president, and the exec
utive vice president. Ben’s family.

  Jackson Dane, his father. Trudy Dane, his mother. Claude Dane, his uncle.

  Something rivets Lia to the floor. It isn’t the spirit shining through the portraits’ brushwork, far from it—she might work in three dimensions and painters in two, but Lia knows these might as well be mall posters. The faces coolly shine, eyes glazed. They’re not Whistlers, not Sargents.

  When her lips do part, Lia’s voice has been switched off.

  It’s only a dream.

  Plenty of people get turned to stone in nightmares.

  Plenty of people can’t scream.

  A smear of black nothing creeps across Jackson Dane’s likeness. At first it looks like virulent mold accelerated into a few seconds. A fast-motion portrait of Dorian Gray.

  Lia’s hand rises in mute horror when she understands it isn’t decay at all.

  It’s combustion without any visible flames.

  ICE PLANT: Your looks freeze my soul.

  Lia watches Jackson Dane’s features warp into a surrealist’s mute shriek. But there’s no snapping, no hissing—only the incessant melancholy breeze. By the time Ben pads up, the portrait has vanished, ashes delicate as moths’ wings littering the carpet.

  “I’m sorry.” Ben sounds close to breaking. “I shouldn’t have . . . said anything. Yep. Sometimes silence is vastly underrated. Did you know that many social animals consider silence to be an indication of imminent danger? Apparently in some vestigial part of me there’s a leftover ring-tailed lemur, and I absolutely needed to initiate a contact call. What I mean is, I’m less of a lemur. More of a jackass.”

  “Stop talking,” Lia orders.

  “Right, yeah, I get it. The subject is upsetting you.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Oh. You ran out, so I guessed it . . . was? But admittedly the obvious conclusion isn’t always correct, and when the observer is at a loss, it’s better to ask. Although it can feel inelegant to barge ahead like that, verbal battering ram.”

  A tear spills down Lia’s cheek.

  “Articulate wrecking ball?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Jesus Christ, what’s upsetting you? Other than me.”

  “Your dad.” Lia points a shaking finger where the painting ought to be.

  “Huh. The portrait’s gone. What did that magnificent bastard do this time?”

  “He didn’t do anything.”

  “Soooo, then what about him?”

  “Don’t ask how I know it but, Benjamin . . .” Lia forces herself to breathe. “He’s dead.”

  HORATIO

  Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism, and you know how reliable that is.

  —attributed to Joseph Campbell

  Horatio, bleary-eyed and under-caffeinated, takes in his surroundings.

  The air in the corridor is too cold and too close simultaneously. A discoloration on the industrial carpet reminds him of Australia. Barking a walrusy cough, the very old man at the front of the queue checks his mobile with a hand gloved in crepe paper skin. A baby emits weird shrieks that might possibly be laughter—otherwise it’s distress or, at the outside, demonic possession.

  This is a decidedly unromantic opening scene for a homecoming journey, Horatio thinks, and then mentally smacks himself.

  What did you want, a moonlit moor? You aren’t Jane Eyre returning to Thornfield.

  Horatio’s chest aches.

  The bored, eager snake of passengers fidgets onto the plane. There’s nowhere else to be, everyplace to get to, and all in a terrifically slow hurry. Somebody’s headphones blast at ear-melting volume, Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” battering plastic walls. Wedging himself along, Horatio pauses at precisely the wrong moment—and as he attempts to abort the maneuver, sends his elbow smashing against the latte of the woman behind him.

  “Fecking hell!” she squeals, glaring at the coffee plume staining her blouse.

  “Oh my god!” Horatio exclaims, horrified. “That—that was so very, very far from intentional, ma’am. One moment, here’s—”

  “Get yer snot rag out o’ me face!” she shrieks.

  A widening ripple of the transatlantic aircraft turns. Morbidly curious. Meanwhile, Horatio detests being the center of attention for any longer than it takes him to shave.

  “Please do accept my apologies, I’d no idea—”

  “That there might be somebody behind ye whilst boarding a fecking jet plane? Great mammoth git like you?” The woman waves the hem of her cheap rayon shirt in happy rage. “Had to run me arse off just to get a drop of coffee afore takeoff, and now look! Didn’t mean to dye me blouse with it, did I?”

  “Um. You’d hardly mar such a flattering top with abstract expressionism,” he agrees helplessly.

  “Are ye taking the piss, young man?”

  “On the con—”

  “Now, you just listen here!”

  Family border disputes over seat-back pockets and earbuds pause their negotiations to listen. The woman hooks her index finger into Horatio’s button-down and beckons him forward, a carp on a reel.

  “Do forgive me,” Horatio pleads with white flags in his deep brown eyes. “Any man of my size is inevitably something of a menace when it comes to air tra—”

  “How much cash do ye have, then?” she demands.

  Five minutes later and ten quid poorer, Horatio collapses into 37A (window). His elbows don’t quite fit, which seems like Fate’s cruelest blow yet. He didn’t sleep a wink, wore holes in his socks until dawn hemorrhaged through his curtains. A solid pain has been lodged above his breastbone ever since the text message yesterday morning:

  so I know you’re busy you always are now but get here please I think I’m losing my mind

  Well, no, the pain has been there rather longer than that.

  Allowing his inky head to droop, Horatio wonders how many things he forgot to pack, though he’s not much fussed. In every nation, people sell necessaries like toothpaste and a change of pants. Double-check for your meds (paracetamol for the headache, Telfast for the hay fever), make sure there aren’t any stray drugs in your briefcase (his weed is in a carved teak box budged up on the bookshelf against Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh). Taking mental inventory of his suitcase is a meditative exercise. One which is barely preventing him from worrying himself senseless.

  You didn’t even say goodbye the last time. You didn’t, and now he needs you, and you’ll have to talk about it, won’t you, the whole nightmare will have to be discussed, you ghastly human being.

  “Beg pardon.”

  A trim man with white hair slides a leather duffel under the seat of 37B (middle). He’s a short fellow—though at six foot three, everyone in the British Isles seems diminutive to Horatio. The chap owns the deft movements of a card sharp or one of those sleek ferrety creatures they show on nature channels. He’s strikingly magnetic, with a wry mouth and Jermyn Street clothing. A flowered pink pocket square peeks out of his light dinner jacket, which oddly has a few needles tucked in the lapel. He’s either sixty and has been kept in a jar like preserves, or he’s forty and has lived every instant. If Horatio were attracted to posh older men instead of brilliant fellow Columbia alumni—well, one in particular—he’d have a go during the seven-hour flight.

  The little man thrusts out a hand. “Robin. Always best to introduce oneself to the fellow whose knees you’ll be knocking up against, eh?”

  “Oh, quite. Horatio Ramesh Patel. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Are you?” Robin winks as he seats himself. “Needn’t be, we can get on perfectly well without any pleasure. Or with pleasure as a bonus, just as you wish.”

  Fast mover, Horatio thinks, but he isn’t offended.

  Just tired, so tired, and very much in need of a good long cry. />
  Robin produces a tiny sewing kit and a button. “Fond of this coat, shouldn’t like to let it go to seed. Thankfully the spare was in the inner pocket. I won’t trouble you?”

  “Not at all.” Horatio watches as the feline man threads the needle.

  Discreet dings punctuate the low chatter of dozens of humans slotting themselves into a flying sardine tin. Horatio wonders what that horrid woman will do with his tenner—his money will likely subsidize a trip to the pub rather than to the dry cleaners. A nip or two of something would go down nicely, he reflects. He ought to have shared a pint with some mate or other before leaving for New York. Let off some steam, howl like Marley’s ghost, jangle the chains.

  But he’s only been back in London for a year, and there isn’t anyone. Not anymore. His boarding school friends are either scattered round the globe or else have married suitable acquaintances with sensible retirement investments and clear skin. And he was never minted like they were to begin with; he’s shockingly poor, only frightfully bright. They’ve all moved to places he only knows about from train timetables, and anyway he doesn’t much care for going out these days. He’s fit enough, but he’s thirty-three. Sleeping with starry-eyed young colts cantering from club to club is highly agreeable, and so is getting shagged by studious men wearing frameless eyeglasses he meets in bookshops, but none of it matters.

  The work matters. It’s time he made his mark on the world at large since he didn’t manage to carve it into anyone specific.

  “Won’t go at all well, you know.”

  He blinks to discover Robin tilting a brow as if he’s doffing a bowler hat.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Arsenal versus Chelsea match tomorrow.” He tugs the needle dramatically. “Put fifty pounds on Chelsea en route to Heathrow, online you understand, but they haven’t a prayer.”

  “Then why did you bet on them?”

  “Principle of the thing. Been my club ever since I was a tyke, Chelsea. Dad used to take us to Stamford Bridge—made a day of it, carrying the flag on the Tube, face paint. Once a blue, always a blue.”