Faust: The Movie

By Steven Mizener

In Nick Faustino's own mind, he's the archetypal American underdog: a young man determined to escape a troubled past and make a new and better life for himself relying only on talent, luck, and single-minded ambition. And so far, his luck has held out. But four years after fleeing his abusive father's house in the night to seek his fortunes, enrolling in a state university music program his father would never knowingly have let him enter, Nick finds his escape route unexpectedly blocked when he's denied admission to graduate school and his financial aid begins to dry up.

Taking a mysterious LSD-like drug at a haze-filled college party, Nick wanders away from the crowd and encounters or hallucinates an encounter—he can't be sure which—with a black dog that transforms into a stranger with a perpetually shifting face. The stranger introduces himself as Mr. M. and claims to have the power to change Nick's life forever, to make his most cherished fantasies reality at a price that barely amounts to more than a philosophical proposition: only the tiniest shard of his human soul.

When Nick takes the deal in a moment of irony, his fortunes really do begin to take a dramatic turn for the better. He meets and becomes romantically entangled with a beautiful young woman named Margaret, who reveals herself to be the daughter of a famous film producer. Nick's mind reeling with vivid fantasies of Tinseltown glamor, he's not sure what to believe anymore.

The once bright line between reality and delusion only gets blurrier in the whirlwind of changes that follows as Nick rises rapidly to the top of the Hollywood heap, with his new father-in-law's influence to propel him into a wildly successful career as a film soundtrack producer. But when Margaret launches a new career of her own as a nightclub singer, bringing home a cocaine habit in the bargain, Nick's jealousy and workaholism conspire to undo his comfortable new life.

Haunted, professionally blacklisted, and personally ruined after disastrous confrontations with both Margaret's father and his own, Nick's last chance at the escape he's always dreamed of comes when he's given the impossible challenge of producing the soundtrack to a film he's not allowed to see.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steven Mizener
• Release date: Nov 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310039966

Steven Mizener

Steven Mizener is a poet, author, and occasional music producer who lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

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FAUST: THE MOVIE

A Novel

by

Steven Mizener

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2015 by Steven L. Taylor

All Rights Reserved.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would gratefully like to acknowledge my first readers and others who helped me with editing and proofreading various drafts of this manuscript along the way, including: Satya Stark-Bejnar, Harper Bearss, and Tessa Kum.

I would also like to thank my wife and occasional musical co-conspirator, Lori Grills Taylor, for her help reviewing and offering feedback on the earliest drafts of this novel, as well as for having the patience not to murder me outright for spending so many years of my life working on this project. This novel first began life as a short story intended for the liner notes to an album we released together over thirteen years ago.

Also, thanks to my mother, Petra Bitton (née Brelöhr), and my grandmother, Dorothy Aileen Taylor (née Mizener), who by their examples encouraged and inspired me to follow my creative impulses wherever they might lead me in life in ways I’m still only beginning to fully appreciate.

And finally, thanks to Corcovado Music Corp. for making the process of getting the permissions to quote Dreamer by Antonio Carlos Jobim/Gene Lees as smooth and painless as possible.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1: THE AUDITION

CHAPTER 2: THE BIG NEWS

CHAPTER 3: POISONOUS FRUITS

CHAPTER 4: BLACK DOG IN THE GARDEN

CHAPTER 5: SINGER IN THE DARK

CHAPTER 6: FUGUE STATES

CHAPTER 7: WISHING WELL DIVING

CHAPTER 8: THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN

CHAPTER 9: THE FAMILY BUSINESS

CHAPTER 10: BREAKING BREAD

CHAPTER 11: SUNDAY BRUNCH

CHAPTER 12: STARRY NIGHT

CHAPTER 13: THE MIRROR WITHOUT AN IMAGE

CHAPTER 14: A WOLF IN A SHARKSIN SUIT

CHAPTER 15: THE PROPOSAL

CHAPTER 16: PHANTOM LIMB PAINS

CHAPTER 17: BLACK AND GOLD

CHAPTER 18: A LITTLE TRIP AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS

CHAPTER 19: DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

CHAPTER 20: CROSSING THE LETHE

CHAPTER 21: BITING THE HAND THAT FEEDS

CHAPTER 22: THE FORKED ROAD

CHAPTER 23: COUGHING FITS

CHAPTER 24: RANSOM LETTERS FROM HOME

CHAPTER 25: SMOKING OUT

CHAPTER 26: THE NEW DEAL

CHAPTER 27: FAUST, THE MOVIE

CHAPTER 1: THE AUDITION

Nick Faustino woke in a panic, mistakenly believing in his half-drowsing state that he had already overslept, fully a half-second before the chintzy digital alarm clock on his nightstand started issuing its shrill mantra.

He had spent much of the night only half-drowsing, in the grip of a vividly terrifying dream, a recurring nightmare from childhood he’d thought he’d seen the last of that had squirmed its way back up from the depths of his unconscious just in time to unsettle his confidence when he could afford it least.

The intrusion of the alarm buzzer on his senses when it came—which in a less confused state of mind he might have recognized as proof that the fears he’d awoken to had not yet materialized—only rattled his nerves more. His agitation swelling, he groped in the semi-dark for the clock’s alarm reset button, but his fingers caught instead on the electrical cord.

He peevishly jerked the cord and sent the clock clattering from the nightstand toward the floor, where it lodged in the space between the wall and bed frame, only further frustrating himself and failing to stop the alarm buzzer in the bargain.

After crawling awkwardly under the bed on his hands and knees to fish the clock back out from its lodging long enough to disable the alarm, he fumbled his way along in the early morning half-light of his studio apartment out into the main living space and over to the kitchenette, where he expected to find a sorely needed pot of steaming hot coffee waiting. He was disappointed by what he found instead.

He had meticulously planned every detail of his morning routine out the night before, hoping to leave no potentially nerve-rattling contingency unaccounted for. So when it turned out the auto-brew mechanism hadn’t triggered to start the coffee maker’s brew-cycle after all (which happened from time to time due to an intermittent mechanical failure, but not often enough he had thought to take the possibility seriously before now), he let out an audible groan.

Irritably flipping the coffee maker’s switch to the brew position and dejectedly slumping into a chair next to the ugly little Formica kitchen table that constituted his apartment’s meager dining area, he listened groggily and half-mesmerized as the ancient coffee maker sputtered to life and gradually settled into its familiar, gurgling rhythms.

He’d known this day was coming for years, had worried endlessly in anticipation of it. And yet somehow it still seemed to come without warning. The day of his audition for the MFA program had finally arrived. His performance today represented his one and only chance to continue along the unlikely, steadily upward trajectory he’d maintained over the last four years, as he had hustled, borrowed, and worked his way toward an undergraduate degree in piano performance.

He had no Plan B to fall back on, no reserve of shored-up resources to tap into in the event of failure. Even with his new part-time job, he lived from one financial aid check to the next—and only barely at that.

If he made it into the program, he could look forward to more of the same for years to come. Daily life would be a grind, but with hard work and a little luck, he would survive and eventually achieve true independence, making good the escape he had fantasized about for as long as he could remember. But failure now might leave him no option but to turn back to his father for aid—like a beaten-down dog that chews through its rope and manages to escape for one fleeting night of freedom, only to skulk back to its master’s house at sunup with its belly rumbling in the end.

He’d had no contact with his father since he’d first set out late one night a little over four years ago in his rust-eaten Volkswagen Scirocco—without a word of warning to the few surviving relatives he would miss or to the sociopathic patriarch he wouldn’t—on a one-way trip two hundred miles up the coastal highway to accept a scholarship offer from the state university. For all he knew, his father might be dead by now, too… He couldn’t decide if that made his situation better or worse.

At times like this, he longed to hear his Aunt Sophie’s voice, to seek her comfort and advice, like he always had when he was still his father’s captive. He thought of reaching out to her now and then, of calling her on the phone or writing her a letter, though it had gotten easier over time to put these thoughts aside, reminding himself it was for her own protection.

She had been the one who encouraged him to strike out on his own in the first place. But he had only found the courage to actually leave by resolving to make a clean break, by making a conscious decision to leave everything about his former life behind and never once look back, so great had been his fear of his father’s reprisals.

Rational or not, he believed that if he involved Sophie in his plans in any way even now, his father would find out and she would become a target for his abuse. So Nick had learned to view the distance he kept from her as a tragic necessity. Besides, the thought of actually hearing her voice—that voice whose familiarity aggrieved him in more ways than one—yet not being able to see her again was too painful to consider anytime he was tempted to take the chance.

But this was not the time for digging through the wreckage of the past, he reproached himself, trying to imagine what stern reassurances Sophie might have offered him at a time like this. She had always known exactly what to say to appeal to the tougher parts of his nature, and despite being a profoundly compassionate person at heart, she had little tolerance for sentimentality or self-pity.

By now the coffee maker was a quarter of the way through its brew-cycle, and Nick was in no more mood to wait. He shambled over to the cabinet above the sink and removed two large cups, one to hold under the filter basket assembly to collect the coffee flowing out as it brewed, and another to fill from the partly-filled pot before quickly returning that pot to its rightful place. He’d used this short-cut many times before to fast-track a desperately needed caffeine fix. But it had never occurred to him the trick carried any risk of injury until the precise moment that, inexplicably, his left-hand jerked, and the cup collecting the scalding black liquid escaped his grip.

Dammit! Unconscious reflex mercifully seized the motor control away from his sluggish mind, enabling his body to respond deftly to the danger on its own. Miraculously, he managed not to spill a single drop of the coffee from the glass pot whose handle he still clenched in the fist of his right hand.

But he hadn’t made it through this micro-calamity completely unscathed: the back of his left hand had been caught in the backsplash as the stray cup had somersaulted through space and the freshly-brewed coffee had gone on flowing, indifferent to the hissing burner plate. That cup now lay smashed into dozens of lethal pieces on the porcelain floor.

After quickly replacing the glass pot, switching off the coffee maker, and tidying up most of the mess, he rushed to the sink to inspect his injuries and to run the back of his hand under cold water. It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. The burns were minor. Only bad enough to wind up his nerves again, not enough to do lasting damage.

Small patches of raised, red flesh had formed here and there on the back of his hand, but the pain from the wounds was negligible, only a nuisance. He felt his heartbeat settling back into a less frantic rhythm.

The coffee was meant to help cut through the residue of the early morning fog. In a round-about way, it had done its job sufficiently already, even though he hadn’t drunk a single drop. He felt more alert now than he usually felt by the middle of the day. Caffeine, he decided, might as well have been a placebo compared to the adrenaline jolt his sympathetic nervous system had just delivered.

Though he no longer needed its active ingredient, he finally poured himself a cup of coffee. Then he crossed the main room and seated himself before the boxy but functional-looking upright piano in the corner. This piano also happened to be the most valuable piece of personal property he currently owned. He’d sold his Scirocco for cash-on-hand to buy it from a local junk shop to use as a practice piano in his first year at university.

When the piano had first been delivered to his apartment, it had been in a state of near-total neglect and disrepair. A dull, yellow film had coated the entire run of major keys (several of which also stuck), and the flats and sharps had offered almost no dynamic response; spidery hairline fractures and scuff-marks marred large sections of the exterior cabinet finishing. And more than an entire octave range of notes it produced had come out sounding either slightly sharp or slightly flat.

But working steadily on weekends and late nights over the next couple of months, Nick had stripped and refinished the cabinet, and then painstakingly repaired the hammers and retuned the strings himself, using tools borrowed from the music school’s piano labs.

As performance pianos went, it still didn’t amount to much. But it made an adequate practice piano. Nick believed, almost to the point of superstition, that the many hours he’d spent restoring the instrument gave him a unique understanding of its tonal characteristics, special insight into the subtleties and quirks of the sounds it could make.

Setting his cup down on the floor beside the piano bench, he raised the keyboard cover and began playing his customary battery of warm-up exercises, taking a deep, calming breath as he did. He played tentatively at first, almost too cautiously, as if the tiniest slip might shatter the keyboard into shards like his coffee cup. His confidence had been deeply shaken by the painful confrontation with the coffee maker.

He began to wonder: had anxiety over the audition triggered that sudden nervous twitch that had sent the cup and its scalding hot contents tumbling from his hand? Had he, unconsciously, been bent on self-sabotage and deliberately trying to spoil his own chances? In any case, what if another nervous twitch seized him in the middle of his audition performance today?

As his fingers momentarily slipped out of position, he could almost hear Sophie clucking her tongue at him disapprovingly, like she had all those years ago when he was her student, before music school was even a remote consideration.

But even as he fended off a worrying new round of doubts, he knew he couldn’t afford to let his thoughts continue to run along these lines. From past experience, he knew what it was like to choke under pressure, so he recognized the warning signs when they began: how the many small anxieties lying dormant in the mind began to thrive and multiply by feeding on each other, until at just the critical moment, all those isolated anxieties coalesced into a suffocating and certain paralysis of body and mind.

Though the burns on his hand ached dully as he played, he forced himself to filter out the distracting signal by focusing only on the rising and falling mechanical action of the keys under his fingers. The trick wasn’t completely effective, but it worked well enough.

By the time he reached the more technically challenging exercises in the series, the last traces of morning stiffness had left his wrists and fingers, and his confidence had finally begun to return.

Two hours later, freshly-showered, he hurriedly shoved the three-ring binder that held his sheet music selections for the audition into the canvas tote bag he wore on his shoulder and rushed out the door of the apartment.

He was almost ten minutes into the twenty-minute trek it took to reach the performance hall by foot when he suddenly found himself caught in a heavy summer downpour. Not knowing what else to do, he clutched the tote bag and its precious cargo to his stomach, hunched his body to form a protective shield over it, and started running as fast as he could.

# # # #

The door snapped shut behind Nick like a sprung trap as he sloshed absurdly into the front lobby of the music school’s performance hall.

It was one of the graduate performance halls, and he’d never been inside it before, though he’d admired it at a distance. From the outside, it was an imposing structure, tall and domed, with ornate marble stairs, Doric columns, and very sturdy looking wooden doors twice the size of ordinary doors.

If it was possible, it was just as imposing on the inside. There he found himself enclosed in a space dominated by high-ceilings and dull marble tile, where haphazard architectural anachronisms came together to create an overall impression of stolid severity while a faint but deep-seated odor of mildew hinted at decades of slap-dash housekeeping.

His breath came in labored gasps as he collapsed onto a bench just inside the entrance, his sides aching from the exertion of his sprint through the rain.

Rainwater had drenched his hair and clothes, soaking him to the skin, chilling him. And so as a burst of cool, air-conditioned air passed by, he began to shiver. Or were his nerves getting to him again and he was trembling?

Either way, his first priority now had to be getting himself cleaned up. He couldn’t show up for the audition in a soggy mess.

It was lucky he’d managed to reach the hall with extra time to pull himself together. Roughly a half-hour remained before he was scheduled to present himself to the audition jury, time he’d hoped to spend preparing psychologically. He would need every minute, now, just to make himself presentable again.

He found a restroom around the corner and slipped inside. Looking into the mirror above the sink, he set about cleaning himself up. His clothes hadn’t been much to start with, but at least they’d been clean and dry. He took his t-shirt off and stood at the sink, squeezing water out of it. He did the same with every other article of clothing he wore, leaving only his shabby boxer shorts in place. He used the electric hand dryer systematically to dry each article, and soon, he was dressed again and looking only a little worse for the wear.

It was then, with this latest mini-crisis barely behind him that he realized he no longer knew where his canvas tote bag was. Frantically, he retraced his steps in memory.

He felt sure the bag and its crucial cargo had still been in his possession when he first came in out of the rain—or had it? Was it possible he’d already lost