“Are you always so stubborn?” she asks.
“Never. So tell me about death.”
“It’s not a joke.”
“Did I say it was? I’ve watched you die.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“There must be something.”
“A dark abyss. Nothing.”
“Silent?”
“There’s the single dying note.”
“And when it ends?”
“I’ve never heard it end.”
“That’s something then, right?”
She looks down and then up. “We have to go back.”
“Back to Bartholomew’s? No way.”
“It’s not just another performance.”
“What is it then?”
She takes a deep breath in and out. She knows I’m not going to like this part. “Justice, I guess you could say.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The young man was early. There are more to come. Enough to fill the tent — and then some. Loved ones. Not a tent full of happy people, Orlando. Much, much worse — a tent full of unhappy ones who believe I stole their happiness with my song. Survivors of those who gave their lives to me.”
I’ve obviously never wanted to die badly enough to end my life, but I’ve lived so long in the neighborhood I understand the concept all too well. My failure to act has been nothing more than cowardice. It’s all a matter of timing, isn’t it? The readiness is all, though I suppose the survivors might disagree.
We round a curve, and I spot iron gates and a sign up ahead, a field of stones beyond. “Look what we have here. Seems you can find one of these almost anywhere.” I pull off the road into a cemetery and park the car. It’s not as big as the one she described in her tale about Jacob, but big enough and full of the dead. “Walk with me,” I say and get out, heading for an angel on the horizon, hoping she’ll follow.
She does.
“What are we doing here?” she asks.
“I want to tell you my story. Everybody’s got one, right?”
“Right.” Her tone softens. She knows what we’re doing here.
We reach the crest of the hill where the angel stands and take in her mountain valley view. I’m not sure I see much more than the stone eyes see at the moment. I look out. I see her fall. I hear her sing.
“I wasn’t cursed by a wizard or anything, or maybe I was — the Wizard of Mediocrity. He ruled everything, every fucking cul-de-sac for miles around. We lived it, we breathed it, we ate it breakfast, lunch, and dinner by the bucketful. We sure as fuck drove through it. But I was smart, which meant I took the smart classes, which meant, you know, I had to work a little harder, smoke a little more dope to finish my math homework. But I was real good at it, and I did a science project. A science project. I don’t even remember what it was about exactly, some barely coherent sustainable habitat horseshit I came up with when I was high on several substances, including weed, speed, and acid. Certainly beer. Ended up a winning combination. I won a ribbon at a science fair. I think the judges liked the model I built to go with it. I later ran over it repeatedly with my car but that’s more the middle of the story. I cashed in the ribbon for a scholarship, started believing my own bullshit, and next thing you know I had more or less faked my way into grad school until I landed an internship at an environmental agency on my way to green science stardom.
“I was supposed to monitor a major watershed for toxic substances. I didn’t do it. Busywork, I figured, for a smart guy like me. It was a hot, unpleasant summer. I had interviews for real jobs. I faked the data. I’d faked everything else in my life. Why not? I looked at the last three reports and wiggled them this way and that. I was a master faker. Only trouble is I missed a toxic bloom you might’ve read about. Google liver cancer, and it’s bound to turn up. Birth defects is the latest, most horrible consequence, but they didn’t know all that back then, how bad it was going to be, because thanks to me, it had gone virtually undetected for months.
“The minute I heard the analysis of the shit I allowed to go right into the reservoir, I knew enough, smart bioscience whiz that I was, to know how bad it was going to be, enough to know I was basically a slow-motion mass murderer, visiting death upon several generations. When my laptop was seized as evidence, I knew I was screwed and ran.
“Sam was looking for someone with my skill set, someone without a past to keep his carnival running. Running from pretty much everything else, I spent a few years feeling ridiculously sorry for myself. I was scarcely worthy of my sympathy.” I look at her. She’s listening intently. I’ve never spoken to her like this, ever, opened up to anyone since I joined this carnival over a decade ago. We’ve talked about books and movies and music and food and the first time we swam and the way the striated clouds looked in the slow sunset and the calm that comes with listening to the river flow, but not our stories. What was it she said? Not the silenced anguish of our lives. “Then you showed up, and like you say, at first all I could think was, ‘That’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.’ Then I heard you sing, saw you die — the most beautiful, and the saddest things in all the world, in a single moment. When you came back to life in my little fortress of solitude, hugged my toilet, bled on my sheets — that broke the wizard’s curse for good, I can tell you. Love you? Oh, it’s much worse than that. Love you doesn’t begin to cover it.
“The last class I went to in grad school I was high and totally unprepared, scared out of my mind because everything was starting to fall apart, and I was supposed to make some presentation on the research I hadn’t done, and the professor asked me if I was ready, and I started to give him some lame excuse, when somehow the truth just came out, and I told him I wasn’t ready, that I’d never been ready my whole fucking life. What was the point? The fucking point. I’m sure I said fucking. Ready? For what?
“Then I met you.”
Her eyes are full of tears like mine. She lays her hands on my cheeks. “You know what I’ve wished for? Someone like you, Orlando. Someone who loves me because of who I am — what I am — no matter what. You think I’m brave?”
“You’re the bravest person I’ve ever known.”
She kisses me softly on the lips. She lingers a tender moment. “Orlando, we have to go back. I’ve promised to perform.”
“Promised who?” I ask, though I already know.
“Bartholomew.”
I try to doubt everything she’s told me in our silent drive through the countryside, holding hands like lovers. I’ve just about talked myself into believing poor Alexandra suffers from some plausible delusion she might be treated for with the latest drugs and quackeries — I’ve heard electroshock is back — but when we catch sight of Bartholomew’s place, there’s no doubt. It’s a sea of cars, mostly modest, carnival-going sorts of cars. Some even sport our bumper sticker—Sam’s Carnival of Dreams. (“People go for dreams,” Sam says. “That’s what we are — a weird fucking dream.”) I can’t park anywhere close to the tent. It’s surrounded by cars from all the states on our meandering route, a scattering of rentals throughout. Some survivors must’ve flown in to the nearest airport.
The Ferris wheel, near vintage, the classiest thing on the midway, spins near empty, but for some of the help from the big house, taking a break. Their master must be inside the tent. There’s a handful of kids on the merry-go-round overseen by a lone woman, her eyes on the big top. I tell Alexandra to wait in the car and keep out of sight while I peek inside, scanning the crowd’s faces. The tent is filled with ill-will wishers waiting for Alexandra to perform, enduring the other acts merely to be polite. It’s written on their faces. There are no children.