If We Were Villains: A Novel

I sprinted through the forest to the FAB like I had only a few weeks before, then with a scrap of fabric clutched in my fist. I ran with the boat hook at my side like a spear, feet churning the earth to a pulp. When the building was in sight I realized my mistake—I’d forgotten the time. People were already lining up outside to see the show, playgoers in their evening clothes, talking and laughing and clutching glossy programs. I dropped into a crouch and crept along the bottom of the hill, head bent low.

The side door to the stairwell opened with a crunch. I caught it when it tried to slam behind me, let it shut more softly, then took the stairs down to the basement so fast I almost fell. Sweat prickled on my face as I shoved my way through the mass of furniture piled up in the undercroft. After three harrowing minutes I found the room with the lockers again, the open padlock glaring at me like a single Cyclopean eye. I dragged the trestle table aside, removed the lock, and threw the door open. The mug was sitting there, untouched, that guilty bit of fabric stuffed in the bottom like a crumpled napkin. I thrust the boat hook in beside it, slammed the door and kicked it until it latched, heedless of the sound. The lock scraped as it slid back through the loop, and I pushed the shackle toe into place without hesitating. I staggered back, stared for a moment, then scrambled out to the stairwell again, panic rising from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head in a hot, delirious rush.

I ran down two backstage hallways, the clatter and murmur of the audience seeping through the walls. In the crossover, two second-years hurried past me to get to the wings, pointing and whispering as I charged by. I flung the dressing room door open, and everyone looked up at once.

“Where in the fuck have you been?” Alexander demanded.

“I’m sorry!” I said. “I just—I’ll explain later. Where’s my costume?”

“Well, Timothy’s fucking wearing it because we didn’t know where you were!”

I turned on the spot to find Timothy (a second-year who usually played Cornwall’s mutinous servant) already on his feet, looking green, a script clutched in his hand.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” I said. “Tim, give me that.”

“Thank God,” he said. “Oh, thank fucking Christ, I was trying to learn your lines—”

“I’m sorry, something happened—”

I threw my clothes on as he pulled them off, struggling with my boots, sword belt, coat. The audience chatter from the overhead speaker crackled and died out. A small gasp rippled in from the house and I knew the lights had come up on Lear’s empyreal palace.

Kent: “I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.”

Gloucester: “It did always seem so to us; but now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the Dukes he values most, for equalities are so weigh’d that curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety.”

Kent: “Is not this your son, my lord?”

I glanced down at Alexander, who was on his knees lacing my boots as I fumbled with the buttons on my waistcoat. “Is James already onstage?” I asked.

“Obviously.” He jerked on my laces so hard I nearly lost my balance. “Hold still, damn you.”

“And Meredith?” I reached for my cravat.

“In the wings, I assume.”

“So she’s here,” I said.

He stood and started feeding my belt through the loops. “Why wouldn’t she be?”

“I don’t know.” My fingers were clumsy, unsteady, unable to form the familiar knot. “She stayed out last night.”

“Worry about it later. Now’s not the time.” He buckled my belt too tight and grabbed my gloves off the counter. I glanced in the mirror. My hair was wildly disheveled, sweat glistening on my cheeks. “You look awful,” he said. “Are you sick?”

“I am sick with working of my thoughts,” I said, before I could stop myself.

“Oliver, what—”

“Never mind,” I said. “I have to go.” I slipped out into the crossover before he could speak again. The door closed heavily behind me, and I waited with my hand on the knob, forced to stand still by the enormous concentration it took—in that moment—just to breathe. I closed my eyes, mind blank but for inhale, exhale, until the last line of Scene 1 brought me back to life. Meredith’s voice, low and resolute: “We must do something.”

I made my way to the wings.

I stumbled along the line sets in the merciless dark backstage until my eyes adjusted to the cool glow of the work lamp in the prompt corner. The ASM spotted me and hissed into his headset, “Booth? We have a live Edgar. No, the original. Looks a little worse for wear, but he’s dressed and ready to go.” He cupped his hand over the microphone, muttered, “Gwendolyn’s going to have your balls, friend,” and turned his attention back to the stage. I wondered briefly what he would say if I told him that Gwendolyn was the least of my worries.

Onstage, James stood with his head bent in deference to his father.

Gloucester: “We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. Find out this villain, Edmund—”

James’s mouth twitched, and I remembered his unsettling repetitions of the previous night. Gloucester finished his speech and strode across the star-strewn floor toward the opposite wing.

“This,” James said, when he had disappeared. “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars … as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting-on!” He looked heavenward, made a fist, and shook it at the stars. A laugh blossomed from his lips and rang in my ears, bold and unabashed. “An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!” He raised one finger, pointed out a single constellation among a hundred, and spoke more thoughtfully. “My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon’s Tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous.” He laughed again, but now the laugh was bitter. I shifted my feet on the spot, every hair on the back of my neck standing on end. “I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar—”

He hesitated, whether due to doubt that I would appear or some greater unease, I didn’t know. I emerged into our star-world with one cautious step.

“How now, brother Edmund?” I asked, for the second time in eighteen hours. “What serious contemplation are you in?”

We moved smoothly through the same conversation we had had the previous night brokenly, bit by bit. James’s face might as well have been a mask. He delivered his lines as coolly as he always had, oblivious to the disbelief and fright and fury threatening to rip me in half every time I looked at him. My words were harsh and stringent as I said, “Some villain hath done me wrong!”

“That’s my fear,” he said, slowly, but as he continued he slid back into his same silky drawl. I forgot my blocking, stood motionless, my responses flat and mechanical.

When he finished again I said, sharply, “Shall I hear from you anon?”

“I do serve you in this business,” he said. It was my time to leave, but I didn’t. I waited too long, long enough that he was forced to look through Edgar and see me instead. Recognition flickered in his eyes and, with it, a spark of fear. I turned to go, and as I walked toward the wings I heard him speak again, a little faintly.

James:            “… A brother noble,

Whose nature is so far from doing harms

That he suspects none; on whose foolish honesty

My practices ride easy!”

His bravado sounded suddenly false. He knew what I knew. For the moment, that was enough. The play would falter on.