Another Faust (28 page)
Authors: Daniel Nayeri
Victoria had picked a book from the bookshelf lined with leather-bound volumes — some that could be found in all the world’s libraries and some that could not. She was reading
The History of the World: A Work in Progress,
a fairly thick book that Valentin had seen Madame Vileroy reading from time to time. Valentin found the book too exhaustive in some places, but worth looking into for colorful anecdotes. Maybe Victoria was using them for her debates.
The passage she was reading went like this:
That day proved uneventful for Mr. Shakespeare. A bit of light reading in the morning over sausage and candied ham was followed by his daily walk through the glen. In the early afternoon, William paid a visit at the inn to James Stafford, whose daughter, Melissa, was recently sequestered in her room for allowing John Harding to hold her hand. The father Stafford’s long feud with John’s father was the cause of the forced separation of the young lovers. Upon the suggestion of a young acquaintance, William hurried home to begin his next play,
The Innkeeper’s Pretty Daughter and the Boy Who Fell in Love with Her (Despite a Questionable Personality).
Immediately after leaning over William’s shoulder and whispering, “What a good story that would make,” Valentin realized that he might have somehow changed the course of history. Just after he spoke, a little part of him, the part that was watching Victoria in the room’s dream, caught a glimpse of what she had read and knew that he was responsible for it. He just wanted to start a conversation. He’d been sitting at the bar, eavesdropping on the portly old man’s rant about Harding encroaching on his daughter. Valentin just wanted to introduce himself. But as soon as he did, Will excused himself and rushed off.
At that exact moment, Valentin felt a sudden pang near his rib cage, like his heart had stopped and diverted the rhythm of the cosmos in an instant. He immediately closed his eyes. The inn began to rewind. William was back at the bar, alternately spitting beer back into his mug and unrolling his eyes at the old man. Valentin opened his eyes, and the man began to shout again, something about “that rake Harding.” Valentin didn’t say anything this time.
In New York, Victoria didn’t notice that between the time she blinked and the time she opened her eyes, the text in her book had completely changed. All of history had been altered and then altered again, and Shakespeare never ended up writing that long-winded play. Across time and space, Valentin could see all this happening somehow, but he didn’t ask himself why.
Valentin stayed at the inn — without ever introducing himself — until he was sure Will had made it home. He decided he’d just pay him a visit and pretend he was a landowner from the Orkneys. It was midafternoon when he went strolling back up the path, along the tulips. He picked one of them to give to that dainty housekeeper he had seen up the way. He picked up a stone and skipped it along the pond. And when he got to the door, just as he knocked for the third time, he heard, “I’m coming, I’m coming,” and was almost struck down by the force that hit his chest.
He closed his eyes immediately and walked backward down the path. Was it the flower? The pond? The third knock? Whatever it was, it had altered something. A thread from the fabric of the world had been ripped out. Any little thing could have set into motion a series of events that would eventually change the future of the past. Valentin would have to go back and try again. He would have to keep trying it till he could avoid whatever it was that had sent ripples into the timescape.
Victoria looked up from her book, and the bookcase caught her eye. It looked as if one of the volumes was getting thinner, as though a biography was getting shorter. Another book was becoming less worn, less important to literature perhaps. Then it happened in the corner of her eye. A whole book seemed to disappear. She shook her head. Too much reading was going to her head. She went back to her book.
Valentine cursed and kicked the head off of every tulip in the garden.
Behind Victoria’s bent head, four more books faded and disappeared.
Valentin had been doing and undoing the same stupid walk up to the house more than a dozen times. He had tried every way he could think of, skipping up the path, sneaking around back, shouting from a hundred yards away. “Screw this,” he said. “He’s not that good.” He closed his eyes and clenched his fist. He opened his eyes, his fist. The watch was in pieces in his sweaty palm. Valentin sighed. He closed his eyes until everything was back. Will was still at the inn. Valentin had just come through the window. He went over to the pot of stew, snorted up every glob of mucus in his nasal cavity, and spit it right in. He paused, waited to see if that might have given the greatest writer of all time some kind of flu or something. Nothing happened. Valentin smiled. “
Bon appétit,
jerkface.”
Victoria hadn’t been reading for more than a few minutes when she looked up to see Valentin storming through the hall looking like a cash-strapped geek from a preschool Renaissance Fair.
“How was it? Did you find out if he’s a fraud?” Victoria said. Valentin stopped for a moment. He thought he had returned to the moment
before
he had told Victoria where he was going. He must have picked the wrong moment when he was coming back.
“You saw what happened!” he said.
“I did?”
“With the history book . . . the plays that didn’t get written . . .”
“What are you talking about? What plays?”
Valentin looked down to see that Victoria was reading an ordinary textbook. Victoria gave him a confused stare. Valentin looked around, rubbed his eyes, and kept walking. He stomped into his bedroom and slammed the door. Behind him, a voice said from the shadows, “The best-laid scams . . . huh, Valentin?”
Valentin snapped around. “What do you want?” he said.
Madame Vileroy stepped out. She was so pretty in the half-light, like a centerfold. Valentin looked away. He was too tired to entertain his usual thoughts. He placed the watch on his nightstand. “Aren’t you curious?” she asked, slinking across the room.
“About what?”
“About what went wrong.”
“Time went wrong,” said Valentin.
“There’s time for everything you want, Valentin.”
Madame Vileroy stared hard at Valentin. He had believed what the room had shown him. The room of lies — of hallucinations.
Madame Vileroy hid a smile behind her pretty hand. In fact, she knew, Valentin had not gone anywhere at all. He had spoken to Victoria. He had put on a makeshift costume. Then he had entered the room. He had breathed the fog, fallen asleep, and dreamed a beautiful scene. His mind had created all of it: the tulips, William, even Victoria with Vileroy’s book. He had woken to find Victoria sitting there, only ten minutes after what seemed like a long adventure. Valentin was convinced of what she had given him to dream. And this room, it would continue to deceive him, with all the fantastical experiences he could imagine, and slowly change him to the core, leaving him nothing but a shell of himself: a dummy. He had believed the lie with his very soul — because he wanted to.
And so Madame Vileroy confirmed something about human nature that she already knew. Even the best liars will believe anything — if they want to badly enough. “Hmph,” she said under her breath, and then she licked her lips. Yes, the observation was interesting. But more than that, there was a satisfaction to it. Because this is why she had chosen Valentin, for his weaknesses — the weaknesses she specialized in, the weaknesses that allowed her to manipulate him — and so she could watch him slowly change, become entangled in a web of false beliefs. There was a satisfaction to it, watching him degenerate. The way his eyes darted or his hands smashed the pocket watch. Like the way Belle tortured herself in the bath, or how Christian suffered from a wavering heart, or the way Victoria justified everything in her mind. Or the challenge of Bicé.
Valentin sat on his bed, deep in thought. “So what was it?”
“Hmmm?”
“What was it that I missed? What was it that altered everything?”
“Oh . . . it was . . . the stone, dear.”
“How?” Valentin was intrigued, never suspecting the lie, because after all, he wasn’t the
most
talented of liars. In that,
she
had many more years of experience.
“Without the stone in the pathway, the maid would never trip and fall. William would never have put aside his writing to tend to her. Yes, he always remembered the gentle look she gave him as he helped her up — the meek and vulnerable eyes that would later inspire the sad state of . . . of Miranda . . . in
The Tempest.
”
Valentin’s eyes glimmered with recognition and excitement. “Of course! It’s so obvious! Why didn’t I see that?” He was like a child, to whom the tooth fairy sounds so logical.
She shrugged. “You must come to the room often . . . and practice.”
“It’ll take forever to get good at this,” said Valentin, his chin resting on his fist. He was already thinking of the next time.
“There’s time enough for all of it,” she repeated, sitting next to him. “Don’t worry, Valentin.”
In the Highlands, a woman with hair as red as the fires of hell stumbled across the grass on a rain-soaked night, terrified and ecstatic and aching. She sprinted across the pitch in her long dress, the hemline dragging in the puddles of mud. She looked back. Something was chasing her. The tresses of her curls flung themselves around like dancing flames. She fell. Her hands and knees splashed on the green. Behind her a figure loomed upward. A bodice like black death, her skin like a pale horse, her hair yellow like a jaundice plague. She stood above the fallen woman. The sign staked into the ground read:
GENTLEMEN ONLY; LADIES FORBIDDEN.
The woman’s cheeks were flushed with blood just beneath her supple skin. It would take so little to puncture. The figure knelt beside the woman, hungry. She scrambled away. The figure clutched her foot. The woman fell, sapped of energy, her hair already less vibrant. The figure was on top of her. Teeth, sharp like nails. A laugh, chilling like rain. A scream, lost like children.
“And here we are at the prestigious Hampshire Country Club for the thirteenth annual Mid-Atlantic Regional High School Golf Benefit for Muscular Dystrophy and Attention Deficit Disorder Research, or MARHSGBMDADDR for short. I’m Charlotte Hill, vice president of the Journalism Club at Marlowe, and with me is the handsome Valentin Faust, an honorary member until next year.”
“Thanks, Char. You’re not so bad yourself. As you know, three Marlowe boys will be competing in this match-play tourney, and as always, the Marlowe coach will be using this unofficial opener to the season to choose this year’s captain. Connor Wirth has to be a favorite as last year’s champ and captain. But newcomer Christian Faust is the dark horse, and rumors of international glory have everyone abuzz with what Marlowe’s newest prospect is capable of. To round out the threesome, Thomas Goodman-Brown should have another solid performance.”
Charlotte giggled as she pressed the stop button on her digital voice recorder. At the same time as providing live commentary for the match, she and Valentin were recording their banter for the Journalism Club podcast. “That was great! We sounded so professional!”
“Yeah, it’s fun,” said Valentin. “And Coach K will be glad we mentioned his name.”
“Wait. We didn’t mention Coach K.”
Valentin adjusted the wireless mike on his collar. “Right, my bad.” He blinked as though the light was too bright for him, fidgeted as if he had too much caffeine in his system.
“Well, it was hot,” said Charlotte. “Where’d you learn to do color commentary like that?”
Valentin smiled his dimpled smile. “Practice, I guess. You’re good too.” He touched her on the inside of her elbow, a place she thought incredibly intimate. “Practice and repetition.”
Charlotte actually swooned. She made a droopy look with her eyes and a whiny noise with her throat. Her knees kind of buckled. It was pathetic to see, even from the clubhouse terrace.
