All the Lasting Things Read Free

It would be great. Happy birthday, Marge.” Here, he pressed a hardcover edition of Henry’s fourth novel, the seventh book in history to win both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, into Benji’s hands. If the uninvited game of peekaboo was a violation, this equally uninvited game of hot potato was worse. Benji flicked the novel back to Knuckles, but Knuckles had already turned and, quick as a child who believes his every wish will be granted if only he can outrace the word no , scurried away uttering a stage whisper of, “Thanks, Brian.”
    Brian? Benji hammered on the name like a coffin nail as his dulled but not entirely useless reflexes sent him fumbling after the airborne book. He caught it with every intention of hurling it after its owner, but it became, in that instant, heavy as marble. His arm felt like he’d been carrying that stupid book his entire life. Brian. He could die with Brian etched on his tombstone and who—other than his mother and father and sister—would register the mistake?
    Benji wilted against the wall in his great metal suit. The lambent red of the exit door shone like a beacon, and his feet, before his mind could tell them to move, ferried him outside. The sudden shot of mid-August air, already crisp and cool as a September night, fueled him past the reeking leviathan of the Dumpster, into which he tossed the birthday present for Knuckles’ poor mom. He had no particular destination in mind, but, in what was technically a stolen suit of armor, he began to run. Or at least move as swiftly as he could encased in fifty pounds of metal and mail. The thrill of escape from the thankless chore of playing King Hamlet, from the crushing, mocking, monolithic successes of his own father, from the indignity of being called Brian—fucking Brian!—spurred him forward. That, and the adrenaline that came from being chased.
    As he ran, he made ridiculous music that brought to mind a festoon of tin cans rattling behind the newlyweds’ car, a sound punctuated by the flat footfall of the homelier of two assistant stage managers, who demanded, sotto voce, that he stop, turn around, and get back here right now. With her shiny Elvis hair and oversized lumberjack shirt that essentially rendered her pear shape shapeless, the woman looked not merely like Kay’s assistant but her clone. Even in work boots, she was, compared to Benji, lithe and swift and beginning to gain. Her winded, whispery plea zipped into Benji’s ear at such close range he expected her to grab his shoulder and throw his helplessly stiff body to the ground, but at the edge of the parking lot, like a dog who’s reached the perimeter of an invisible fence, she stopped. It was eight o’clock. Soon, the Alice Stone Memorial Pavilion’s little stage would be aboil with light. The curtain would rise. And Kay No. 1, regardless of the actions of a washed-up child actor and now costume thief, expected outpaced Kay No. 2 to be in her place.
    Watching her hurried retreat, Benji stopped running and, hands on knees, struggled to catch his breath. The thought that there would be no ghost, not tonight, curled his mouth into a dark, momentary smile. He hadn’t set out to fuck Kay over, or jam up the night’s machinery with a wrench big enough to cause even the easy-breathing Judge Tornquist to hyperventilate, but if that was the icing on this particular cake, he wasn’t above licking the fork. Then again, maybe fucking them over was exactly the reason he’d run. Imagining the lot of them now, Judge and Delores and sweet, sanctimonious Cat, who one by one had looked across the table on that first day of rehearsal and claimed they’d never heard of him, being either too young to remember any sitcoms older than Saved by the Bell or, in Delores’ case, too flatulently theatrical to own a television, Benji savored a backstage scene of contagious panic. The very people who’d left him feeling untalented, unsexy, unsung, whose poisonous mockery