“Sam could give a shit, case you hadn’t noticed. You aren’t worried about falling another twenty feet? You’ll be going faster, you know. The acceleration is really something.” There was a time in my youth I could’ve calculated it in my head. Now I couldn’t tell you the formula. I try not to imagine it, her hitting the ground harder, faster, with a more decisive, fatal smack. The usual fall is bad enough. It makes you sick how many people turn out to see her, until you hear the song, and then you understand. Most people look away and just listen, but there are always several in the crowd, like me, who feel they owe it to her to witness her fall, her sacrifice to create such beauty.
She shrugs. “Death’s death,” she says.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Fine. Don’t.”
“So what brings you back to life? If you sing like that because you know you’re going to die, then why the fuck don’t you stay dead?” I have trouble saying that last part, and she touches my cheek with her delicate fingertips, which by all rights should be mangled claws. I’ve seen them crushed like eggshells. I live in fear of the day she dies and doesn’t rise to sing again.
“Sweet Orlando, I come back for you. It would break your heart if you lost your Alexandra. Who else would drive you crazy?”
I want to bat her hand away. I want to seize it and cradle her in my arms. I do neither, and then her hand is gone.
“When do you need it, your new noose?”
She rolls her eyes. “Tomorrow afternoon if possible, so I can try it out, get the feel of it before my performance in the evening.”
“I’ll just use the same harness. It’s only the line that will be different.”
“I want to experience the ride, the world from a higher place.”
“You like it, don’t you? Dying.”
I expect her to make a joke of it the way she usually does, but this time she doesn’t. She drops her gaze, confesses. “Sometimes I think so. I tell myself it’s the song, that I do it for the song, but sometimes I’m afraid it’s really death I want — to feel its power.”
“Then why do you always come back?”
She smiles bravely. “I thought you would’ve figured that out, Orlando. I’m cursed, blessed — whatever you want to call it. I brought it on myself. My problem, okay?”
Alexandra claims to believe in that supernatural stuff. I don’t. Except for her. I believe in her. I have no choice. “So, what? If you jumped from a plane, you wouldn’t die?”
“But I would never do that. That would be suicide.”
“What’s the fucking difference?”
“No one could hear my song.”
“Why does that matter?”
The question hangs in the clattering Denny’s unanswered. She looks for a moment as if she might tell me, then gives me the same flirtatious laugh she gives every other lovesick rube who longs to know her story. “I’m a true artist, haven’t you heard?”
A smitten reporter a few towns back gushed about her. She likes to quote ironically from her lavish clippings, a form of vanity, as if she had any deficiency in that vice. I totally understand the reporter. We’re of one mind: Alexandra’s a true artist, all right, but what’s the art? “One question: Straight answer, okay? As friends?”
She drops the playful but evasive flirt routine. Neither of us has a surplus of friends. We take our friendship seriously. “Okay.”
“Do you ever get used to it? Dying?”
It isn’t the question she was expecting. Her flinch as I ask tells me the answer before she gives her head a quick shake. “No, never.” She smiles ironically. “That would be the end of it, wouldn’t it? Death be not proud. All that.” We’re both Donne fans. She laughs but lets it go, looks me in the eye, as a friend. “Never.”
She first showed up outside of Lubbock a couple of years ago, her act not quite fully formed — some bad rope work, the song, and the fall. God knows how she came up with it. I imagine her dangling from one of the few tall trees in town, repeatedly falling onto the hard, baked ground.
It didn’t take her long to persuade Sam to give the act a try. At first we wanted to put a net under her, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She didn’t need it, didn’t want it, didn’t sing so nice, she insisted, if she believed the fall might not kill her. Sam admired what he thought was her hammy theatrics, selling the act to him, and humored her up to a point. But still the first audition almost didn’t go on. She insisted she needed someplace to go to recover—come back to life is what she said. Sam guffawed at that. “You want a dressing room? You want a fucking dressing room? Nobody gets a dressing room around here.”
I said she could use my trailer if she wanted. Not big enough to turn around in, but she could stay there, put herself back together. Fair enough. Seemed like a simple thing. She hit the ground hard. It stunned everyone, that incredible song still ringing in our ears. She wasn’t breathing. We were all certain she was dead. Sam muttered, “Aw shit” and called 911, was still describing the accident when her crumpled legs pushed her up, and she stumbled back to my place. I had to give her a little help then. The door’s difficult even when your hands aren’t broken. Her breath, as she waited patiently for me to get it open, wheezed and gurgled horribly. The place was a mess afterward. Blood. Vomit. Smells I’ve never smelled before and hope to never smell again. She had died. I still can’t believe it no matter how many times I’ve watched it happen.
She apologized to me later for making such a mess of my trailer, and I said it was not a problem. She could come back to life in my place anytime. She just had to promise to finish the job. “I don’t want some half-dead woman lying around taking up space.”
She laughed and gave me a peck on the cheek, and I suppose that’s when we became friends.
She never used my trailer again. Sam surprised us all by buying Alexandra her own trailer the next day. She usually rides with Wilbur in a truck cab so loud you can’t hear yourself think, but he claims they talk opera. “She once performed Madame Butterfly,” Wilbur claims.
When I asked her about it she quickly changed the subject, saying it was nothing. “If I was really any good, what would I be doing here?” she says.
Right. My IQ used to make my guidance counselors salivate, but look at me now, one of those fellows parents can at least be thankful their sons didn’t turn out to be even if the brain surgeon plans didn’t pan out. Good. Just how are you using that term?
I’m hanging more than thirty feet higher up, near the top of our rich host’s tent, putting up the new rigging, when a fellow, nineteen or twenty, comes in down below. He looks up and asks if I’m the manager. I doubt he’s from the house. He doesn’t look clean enough, pure enough, not to mention rich enough. Even the servants up there look down on us as riffraff.
Even at this height I can see the young man is angry.
I lower myself down, and we step outside to where his battered F-150 is parked, looking like it’s driven a thousand miles through macho TV hell. The rides are going up behind us. We’re not even unpacking the games for this stop. What kind of party doesn’t want games?
The kid’s breathless before he even begins. Tells me he’s been following us. Says his big brother is dead before his time. Wants to know if that fucking witch is still traveling with us. The one who sings and dies.
If you’re going to bother having anybody in a carnival in the way of a working act, a strongman’s always handy to have around, wrestling parts of this and that into place, showing people the door when they get a little unpleasant, even when you don’t necessarily have a door. Otto’s our strongman. At least that’s what he calls himself. Makes a good strongman name. Otto the Terrible. I think his real name’s Christopher or something.