Excerpts

Lia (1) 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." "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, like, 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 , Jorvik 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. "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 lifts her hand, pressing his lips to the palm. "Then love would always be there too. In another time-slice. It doesn't vanish just because the person left." Excerpted from The King of Infinite Space by Lyndsay Faye All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.