Nightmare Carnival

SWAN SONG AND THEN SOME by Dennis Danvers

Alexandra’s explaining her act to me. “It’s only when I know I’m going to die that I can sing that song, hear the changes, hit the notes, and hold them. I can’t explain it. Maybe there are certain emotions only set free at the time of death, some silenced anguish finally given voice. I don’t know. It just wells up inside me. Whatever it is, it’s not a trick, Orlando. I die. I can’t sing the song otherwise.”

Basically, she sings a few songs well enough for a beautiful woman in a seedy carnival, swinging back and forth on a line like a hypnotist’s watch, then she’s hoisted to the top of our tiny big top that sat mostly empty until Alexandra came along. Her final song begins as she ascends, the most incredible a cappella performance you’ve ever heard, sung in what may or may not be a language, like an aria from another planet, intricate and moving — you can’t help becoming lost in it even though you’ve been told she is going to drop to her death at the song’s end — when she hits a crystalline sustained note of such heartbreaking beauty the crowd gasps. I’ve never heard it fail. Every soul in that tent is riveted to her voice as sure as Jesus was nailed to the cross. She holds the note still as she plummets, until it’s cut short in full voice by the sound of her body smacking onto tarmac, sometimes concrete, sometimes earth. We take whatever parking lot we can. We can’t afford to be choosy. Just when everyone who hasn’t heard what happens next has jammed every 911 switchboard for miles around, she springs, well, staggers to her feet and finishes the note, not quite as crystalline, not quite as beautiful, then bows and lurches to her trailer where nobody better come near for a couple of hours or so. She emerges looking as she looks now, so beautiful you want to believe anything she says, but in my case, wanting to know the trick.

Singing isn’t something I’m interested in learning — though I’ll gladly listen — but resurrection, that’s another matter. Alexandra dies but comes back to life. I appear to be alive but died inside years ago. Alexandra woke me from my slumber, one of those deep slumbers you think you’ll never wake from, because what’s the point? She found me working on a clogged cotton candy machine and asked if I was Orlando, because that’s who she’d been told to talk to for a job, though technically that would be Sam, the owner, who’s always too high to trust his own judgment and defers to mine. When she asked, I wanted to say I’m whoever you want me to be, but I only managed, “You got him.” Been true ever since.

Alexandra probably thought my reaction meant I was just another guy who wanted to fuck her, which I suppose I was, am. Men dream about women like Alexandra. Who wouldn’t want to make love to her? Wilbur, who keeps the ancient rides running, vehemently claims he wouldn’t, even proselytizes on the subject. At the peak of the season, Alexandra dies and comes back to life seven days a week and twice on Sunday. Wilbur believes fucking a woman like that just might kill you, and he doesn’t want to find out.

He’s not the only one who feels that way, apparently, only the most vocal. I’ve seen more than one new hand set his sights on Alexandra, only to abruptly drop his pursuit after witnessing her act for the first time. Some quit the carnival outright, as if they’ve dodged a bullet and don’t want to tempt fate any further. Not that the braver or less squeamish have any more success. She’ll have nothing to do with any of us romantically.

Just as well. It’s hard enough watching her die as her friend. As her lover I’m sure I couldn’t bear it. We go for long walks together, manage to talk for hours without revealing too much of our pasts — books, movies, the morning sky — how we feel about anything that matters but without the usual stories to explain what landed us in the same lifeboat, adrift. Nobody ever dreamed of being part of Sam’s Carnival of Dreams, not even Sam. Alexandra and I picnic on the banks of whatever water presents itself — river, lake, park pond — and I ache with unspoken love for her. Once my love would’ve been something to offer, I suppose. Not anymore. It comes with too many fuckups and regrets, not to mention a few warrants for my arrest and even more lawsuits.

If I thought for a moment she was the least bit interested, I’d forget what a bad deal I am, but for now I just try to be her friend. She doesn’t want anyone to love her. I know exactly how that feels, but sometimes what you want and what you feel aren’t the same.

No riverbank today. She’s found me finishing my breakfast at a counter seat in a Denny’s on the way to our next job. I’m not sure what came over me, but questions just started pouring out — how she does it, how she sings so beautifully, how she dies but doesn’t — a real cross-examination even though I know she doesn’t like to talk about it. She’s been acting strangely — anxious. For a woman who faces death all the time, Alexandra’s usually serene. Something’s up. I have this stupid idea I can help. That she needs it. Help. I know that feeling too.

“So what’s the song say?” I ask. “Say it to me.”

She smiles enigmatically, then a tiny pout. “You know I can’t do that. It’s an incantation.”

“Meaning?”

“It’s magical. I can’t just mumble it in some Denny’s.”

“I know. You need the threat of death. You don’t think this food will kill you? You obviously haven’t tried the Three-Grease Special. It gets a Golden Coffin Award from the American Heart Association.”

She laughs. “You’re awful.” Her favorite compliment when I’ve pleased her. She likes it when I tilt at corporate giants.

“Does it mean anything? Is it words, or is it just notes and syllables?”

“Yes.” She smiles, her eyes shining. Would you please drop the subject?

“You drive me crazy.” I say this with more emotion than I intended.

Her eyes lock on mine for a brief, thrilling moment, and there’s something there. I’ve stumbled onto one of the pathways to her heart. She likes men she crazes, apparently. Makes sense. The siren likes them wrecked. Not a problem. I’ve been a castaway on her island for a couple of years now.

The waitress comes, and Alexandra doesn’t order anything. “I came looking for him,” she tells the waitress, pointing at me.

The waitress smirks like she thinks she knows what that means, but she doesn’t, and I feel a pang of longing I usually manage to ignore.

“So what has you up at this hour?” I ask when the waitress leaves.

“I wanted to make sure the rig’s right for the private show coming up. We’re using the customer’s tent, and the peak’s at least twenty feet higher than ours. I want it to hoist me all the way to the top. No one will care if I only fall partway.”

I see her falling in my head. You wouldn’t think it would bother me anymore. “I can do that. We’ve got plenty of rope.”

“The Sands of Time will also need to be adjusted for the extra time it will take me to reach the top.”

The Sands are a hokey eye-catching contraption under a spotlight attached to a tripwire that releases the harness holding Alexandra aloft. Sam’s idea, it’s basically a balance beam with sand flowing on one side and a feather from the Angel of Death (a crow’s, I’m guessing) on the other. The sands begin to flow as her swan song begins and she rises, measuring out the last remaining moments of her life.

She drops to her death when the last grain falls.

Some suppose this is a classic distraction from whatever trickery breaks her fall, but I watch only her, ignore the sand, and I can tell you she falls like Lucifer until she smashes into the ground with incredible force.

There is always blood, usually hair. Once in the early days I found a tooth, though she is missing none now. No sign of the fractures I’ve witnessed. No scars. She coils up into a ball, but still her limbs are crushed on impact. Her legs stitch themselves back together first, apparently. Her spine. When she stands, her arms dangle all akimbo and bloody. I carry the tooth, upper front. She didn’t need it when I went to give it back. She must not have tucked in her head tight enough. Now the universe has a spare.

“Why can’t we use our tent?”

“It’s a private party,” Alexandra says. “There might be a lot of people, and ours is looking a little shabby, case you hadn’t noticed.” We were about to get rid of our big tent, do away with working acts altogether, rely solely on games and rides, before Alexandra. Sam’s Carnival of Dreams will likely die with Sam, who gave up dreaming about anything real a long time ago. The only reason he kept doing it was he doesn’t know how to do anything else, and in his burned-out, fat sixties he wasn’t likely to reinvent himself — until Alexandra came along.

“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.

He’s strong, all right. I have him step over to where the young man and I are talking. The fellow doesn’t seem to care the least little bit. His hand’s jammed in his jacket pocket like he has a pistol in there. His face is fierce with rage, and his eyes dart around, seeking his prey. It’s easy to conjure thousands just like him, looking for me. “Where is she?” he asks.

Then the master of the house shows up out of nowhere. Master of the house is an old-fashioned term. I don’t use it lightly. He seems to be living in another century out here. Dressed in immaculate white linens without a wrinkle, he looks like a dogwood in bloom.

The house itself is a big Victorian curiosity with all sorts of gazebos and promenades and whatnot. I’ve spotted him patrolling the grounds pensively in his antiquated gear. He carries himself as if his money matters. Not that it doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong. I’m no idealist, but all that money doesn’t make him important. That can always change one way or another. Easy come, easy go, unless you’re lucky, and who makes his own luck? Only the fool who thinks he does, all of it bad, but I’m only speaking from experience. Maybe his sense of importance comes from somewhere besides money, despite the showy evidence to the contrary. Maybe he’s thinking great thoughts in that ostentatious pile. He must keep them to himself because Googling the guy turned up nothing but this place. It’s his, the county says so. He paid cash. Sam and I were curious because he’s paying us five times in a single night what we’d be making anywhere else for a whole week. Mr. Bartholomew’s his name. He ignores me and Otto and fixes the young man with a look that says he doesn’t like a ruffian on his premises and tells the fellow to leave immediately. Odd thing is, he does.

It makes no sense to me. I know he was about to pull a gun. I know he was enraged. I know. Nothing really. But I’m very surprised, shall we say, when the young guy says, “Yes, sir, sorry, sir,” gets in his truck, and drives away at a moderate rate of speed.

Mr. Bartholomew turns and walks back to the house without so much as a screw you for me and Otto.

Otto returns to where Wilbur is working on the Tilt-a-Whirl, holding the stupid thing up while Wilbur makes another repair on the ancient mechanism. I hate rides. They always break down. If there’s anybody comes around to inspect these rides, he’s never caught up with us. Sam and insurance companies don’t get along. He thinks they’re crooks — imagine. So if one of these contraptions mangles you, there’s nobody to sue. Without Alexandra, Sam’s Carnival of Dreams is less than desirable, so it’s fairly obvious it’s Alexandra Bartholomew’s paying to see. To watch her dangle at a higher, deadlier height, to hear her hold her final note a little longer than anyone has heard before.

To watch her die.

Death’s death.

Young men with guns — I understand them and know to avoid them — but I’m developing a serious aversion to Mr. Bartholomew that has my back up.

As soon as F-150 leaves — nobody got his name — I go to Alexandra’s trailer. It’s set apart from the rest. Nobody wants to be too close when she wakes up screaming in the night. I asked her once, and she said it’s always the same nightmare: she opens her mouth to sing, and nothing comes out. She lives to sing, she says.

She’s not surprised to see me, imagining I’m here about the rig. I ask her if she knows anything about the young man’s brother, figuring she’ll say the whole idea is ridiculous.

Instead, she says, “Is he the first?”

“First what?”

“The first to say I killed someone — a brother, a husband, a wife? Have there been others?” She looks into my eyes as if I might have been harboring this secret knowledge from her.

“Not that I know of,” I say. “Why do you ask?”

She looks around her little trailer at her little knickknacks and souvenirs she’s accumulated over the last couple of years — mostly gifts from adoring fans. Swans. Lots of little swans. Mostly glass, some wood. A fine pewter fellow that must weigh a couple of pounds. None of them mangled and bloody and broken. Clippings on a corkboard, featuring her in her sexy swannish but disposable attire. Alive. Photography is strictly forbidden during her act. I notice for the first time obits scattered among the clippings from the towns in our wake. Samuelson, Michael, passed away peacefully. Blunt, Donna, departed this earthly life. Cort, Obadiah, died in his home in the early morning hours. In every case, the survivors were snipped away, nothing but the name and the fatal sentence, a grainy photo from another time.

It occurs to me that the reason the young fellow left so quickly is he plans to come back. Maybe with the law. Maybe I shouldn’t have made such a fuss over a simple inquiry concerning a performer. A singing witch? No idea what you’re talking about, no idea at all.

Alexandra ends her survey of her tiny trailer, gathering her thoughts. It’s finally here, the moment I thought I was waiting for — when I learn the truth about her — but everything inside me is screaming, Stop!

“I take their lives,” she says. “They die. When they hear the song, it awakens the longing for death they carry with them always, held back by fear or religion or false hope, but the song takes them to such a height they’re beyond fear, and they long for the release of death. They take mine if they’re ready. It’s how I come back to life. They give me their hearts, the will to live they don’t want anymore. It’s time.” She picks up the pewter swan, admires his plump, smooth belly. The one who gave her that one proposed, I believe. She puts it down. “They don’t die right away. A day or so, but they’re finally ready, you know? They say their goodbyes, die peacefully, still hearing the song — the death they’ve longed for.

“They confide to those who will be their survivors — the same ones who would find them if they just put a gun to their head or slit a vein — how in the middle of my performance, time seemed to stop, and there was nothing but my voice and the music, and they knew they were ready to die, so they surrendered their lives to me. It’s the simplest of transactions: Our spirits meet, they give me their lives, and I draw a fresh breath and stand, so I may sing again.” She looks me in the eye, barely holding it together now, her lip trembling. “They thank me.”

I believe every word, but I don’t want to. “You’re crazy. There are that many who long for death? Someone every night?”

“More. Too many. They clamor to save me. Usually, there’s more than one, and I must choose. Sometimes I choose the oldest, sometimes the one in the worst pain, sometimes the one in the deepest despair. I hate that part. Who am I to choose? Only there’s no one else.”

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll have a tent full of happy people some night? Wouldn’t that be the end of you?”

“It’s not funny.” She laughs sadly, sniffles. “Or maybe it is. God, how I wish there were such a thing as a tent full of happy people.”

“Maybe Mr. Bartholomew will provide. He seems pretty happy with himself at least. Far as I can tell, this whole thing seems to be for him. Nobody up at the house but the help — and even they’re too good for us. We’re a fucking carnival, for Christ’s sake. Somebody’s supposed to be excited we’re here.”

“He has company coming,” she says. “The tent will be full. Believe me.”

“How do you know that?”

She looks into my eyes. “Oh, Orlando. Never mind.”

“Fine, I will. That’s pretty much what it takes with you, totally checking out of reality. You think it’s easy watching you die? My friend the resurrectrix? But I think the young man’s coming back, and I think he has a gun, and I’d rather not see how you ad lib with bullets. So why don’t you and me take a drive around here and see the sights until he finds out you’re not here? Sam won’t want any trouble.”

“Maybe the kid just wants to talk to me.”

“Maybe he wants to shoot you between the eyes. All he had to say about you was you’re a ‘fucking witch,’ and implied you killed his brother. Does that sound like a chitchat to you?”

She hangs her beautiful head and shakes it sadly. “Do you remember Slim?”

“Of course I remember Slim.” He was a charming, haunted alcoholic who used to work the games, who died in my passenger seat on the road to Tucson. How could I forget? It takes a moment to realize what she’s saying. He died looking out over a moonlit desert with a smile on his face a couple of days after he heard Alexandra’s audition.

“Maybe I deserve that bullet. There’s no point running, Orlando. Don’t you understand? I don’t find them. They find me. I’ve found the smallest, most obscure tent I can.”

“There’s always a point in running.” I should know. My name’s not Orlando. I ruined a lot of lives on my way to the carnival life. I should be in jail or worse. I often wish I hadn’t fled, but the thought of whatever rage is in pursuit of Alexandra makes me want to take flight again. The two of us. When the carnival comes anywhere close to certain jurisdictions Sam understands I need to take some time off. I’m not the only one. Otto has an aversion to Seattle, though mostly the area is too classy for our fleabag show. Wilbur claims Otto killed a man there, but you can’t believe half the shit Wilbur says. He says that Alexandra will be the death of me. Where on earth could he have gotten that idea?

“Get up, get your stuff,” I say.

She rolls her eyes. She’ll go just to humor me. She doesn’t take anything except a shoulder bag. None of us has much. There’s not a thing in my trailer I’ll miss if we run, and a few mementos that won’t haunt me anymore. Running. Great exercise. Done it all my life, in ever widening circles.

“Why are you doing this?” she asks as she fastens her seat belt and checks her beauty in the rearview. “You can’t need the aggravation. Wilbur says you can’t go back to Houston, you’re in so much trouble there. He says there’s serious law after you.”

“Fuck of a lot Wilbur knows. It’s Dallas, well, the whole Dallas — Fort Worth Metroplex I best avoid. Waco too, though there’s fuck-all in Waco anyway. Nobody knew me in Lubbock, so that must be far enough, though there’s always federal marshals to consider. Is that where you’re from? Lubbock?” I’ve never gotten her to talk about her past.

She doesn’t answer right away, watching the lush woods roll by. “Don’t be in love with me, Orlando.”

No point denying it, though I certainly wasn’t going to bring it up. “Is there a reason for that? Is that part of the curse too? No love?”

We’ve reached the extent of Bartholomew’s estate, which just sits here with acres and acres of verdant wooded beauty, some very expensive horses, and not much else. He doesn’t seem to be famous, so I figure he’s a crook of one sort or another. We’re at the northeast corner of his property. I turn east so we can drive alongside someone else’s land for a while, a rock star or a mystery writer or a philanthropic heiress. The help for all these places must live in the next, poorer county we drove through to get here. We usually don’t perform in this part of the world, nestled between coal mines and national parks. There are plenty of riverbanks close by, but none of them we can sit on for this heart-to-heart. Part of me just wants to keep moving anyway, like a migratory tug toward another impossible future, but I poisoned my happily-ever-after habitat a long, long time ago.

For as long as she remembers, Alexandra says, all she ever really wanted was to sing beautifully, but all anybody ever cared about was her looks. She turns sideways in her seat, tucks in her legs, and tells me her story. I try to tell myself I’m ready. I keep my eyes on the road.

“I was in love with a man,” her story begins, “but he didn’t love me.”

“What kind of fool was he?” I ask.

“Shut up and listen, Orlando. I’m trying to save your life.”

The man’s name was Jacob. In addition to all the usual virtues she goes on a little long about, the man sang like an angel, but that wasn’t enough for him. He wanted fame. He wanted adulation. He wanted everything, and who can have everything? The more he wanted, the more he despaired because he couldn’t have it, and what he had bored him. So what was Alexandra?

I know the answer to that one — she is everything — but she’s asked me not to speak.

As an understudy to the female lead who never seemed to miss a performance, Alexandra doggedly followed in the footsteps of Jacob’s career, scarcely getting his attention. So in love was Alexandra, she slipped something in the woman’s drink, making her too sick to perform, and Alexandra had her chance.

Her performance was full of passion and fire, but her voice disappointed the crowd, and the applause was tepid and polite. I glance over at her, and she looks crushed by that failure as if it were fresh — a moment she can never get past. Doesn’t seem fair. A defining moment, they call it. She goes on:

“Afterward, Jacob was terribly sweet to me and took me walking in a huge cemetery in the moonlight near the performance hall. He said if I wanted I could have the secret of his beautiful voice, but I told him all I wanted was him. He laughed and made love to me on one of the graves, though it obviously meant nothing to him. Just another fuck. Nothing could’ve been more heartbreaking.”

“Why are you telling me this story?”

“Because you need to hear it, because you need to know who the woman you think you’re in love with really is. What I’ve done.”

Who really needs to know that? Do I want her to know who I am? What chance would I have then? “Go on.” I reach another crossroads and turn north.

“He told me he would teach me a song — his most beautiful — the song you’ve heard me sing hundreds of times now, and he told me when I learned it, it would be mine, the most beautiful song in the world, and he could have what he wanted more than anything on earth — release — to die, to sing no more. He said to me, ‘If you really love me, you will rescue me from this life, and you will let me die.’

“In that moment, I knew I wanted, more than I had ever wanted him — a man who would never love me after all — to sing as beautifully as he. So he sang, taught it to me. He had swallowed poison, he told me. I could feel his dying like a vortex drawing me in, but the song flowed into me, through me, until I was nothing else. The beauty of it made me quiver like a bowed string. Time stopped on that grave, and I finished the song, kneeling naked over his strangling body, howling the perfect note to the full moon as he died.

“You can’t imagine what it’s like to sing like that!

“I soon learned he had tricked me, that only in the face of death could I sing the song so beautifully that time stops at the borderlands of life and death where the most intense beauty thrives. Don’t love me, Orlando. Please, please don’t love me. I devour lives for beauty, consume despair and hopelessness like a breath of fresh air.”

I don’t speak right away. Time is distance. The farther we drive, I tell myself, the more it’s just us two — the madwoman and the man who loves her. If we drive far enough perhaps we can leave the curse behind.

“Here’s the problem, Alexandra. You tell me not to love you, then show me that you care. This concern gives me hope.” I give her a sad but hopeful smile, and damn her, she smiles back.

“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.

Otto is bending steel, but no one cares.

There’s not much left of the show. The halfhearted clowns have fled, or maybe Sam just gave them the night off to cut down on his overhead. Sam’s fairly dressed up for him in a tattered corduroy suit a couple sizes too small. He’s sitting with Bartholomew, trying to impress, telling his usual stories. He’s washed and brushed out his lush gray mane, tossing it now and then.

Bartholomew has a look of superiority on his face that makes me sympathize even with Sam who as usual has not a clue what’s going down. He probably broke out the good bud for this event.

Otto holds up a rebar pretzel and gets a smattering of applause. He usually gives it to someone in the crowd but this time doesn’t bother. The kid from earlier is sitting right up front, chewing furiously on a mouthful of gum, like he’s trying to make his ears pop. He’s already up there with Alexandra, where everyone looks now and then, tilting their heads back, though all that’s up there is the rigging for Alexandra’s act, the machinery of fate.

Otto starts into his big finale, lying on his back, foot-juggling a refrigerator. It’s not as hard as it looks — the compressor in the refrigerator is a hollow aluminum shell — but it’s still fairly impressive. This crowd can barely manage to give the dancing refrigerator a glance. He tosses it high, balances it on one foot. Nothing.

The kid takes his hand out of his pocket, checks a phone, and puts it back. Maybe the rest of the family is on the way. Wouldn’t want to miss this.

I return to Alexandra. “Otto’s almost done. So who’s Bartholomew?”

“An avenging angel.”

I know better than to smirk. This nightmare is unimpressed by my skepticism. “And Jacob, was he an angel too?”

“Yes. Fallen. Heartless.”

“I want to believe you, but—”

She puts her fingers to my lips. “Don’t. Don’t believe me.”

Don’t love her, don’t believe her. So of course I do, and she disappears into her trailer to change. I hurry into the tent to adjust the Sands of Time. I totally forgot. I use a stopwatch and a scale to add the necessary seconds, the moments of her life, before I set the mechanism. There’s a moment I consider tampering with it, leaving her hanging when the song ends — and it’s my turn to look up, to imagine her there when silence fell and she was still alive, imagine her dying in silence, her nightmare fulfilled. I measure carefully. I set the mechanism, hurrying to finish before her intro begins, and the tent is filled with the thunderous applause of an audience ready for blood.

She sings her opening numbers exceptionally well. She must feel the approach of death with near certainty tonight. The crowd peers at her with unbroken malevolence, some openly grieving for those stolen from them by her song. They pray for her doom.

I imagine life ahead without her, and I don’t want it. I understand what she meant when she said she was trying to save my life, but it was too late. I already loved her. You can’t imagine what it’s like to sing like that! No, but I can listen. She doesn’t just live to sing. She lives to die to sing.

Her song fills the moonlit empty nights, vast and silent otherwise, with beauty, driving through the desert toward the dark horizon into the dark abyss, into nothing. Letting go. When it’s time.

There’s my cue. A spot finds my hand, and I pull the lever. The Sands of Time begin to flow.

Listen. Listen, goddammit. She’s started her song.

I’m ready.