Nightmare Carnival

“Professors,” she says, and drops her messenger bag into Green’s ratty recliner, where it half disappears into one of the fissures in the dry leather. Its color was probably burgundy, once, but now almost matches Jalena’s skin. A romantic — Jalena, perhaps, when she’d first arrived at Eastern Montana U. — Great Plains as an assistant professor seven years ago — would have identified the smells rising from it as properly aged whiskey, decades-old conversation. What it actually smells of is mildew, old nicotine, trapped fart.

Abruptly, Rogan and Frazee, the Lit and Comp department’s one and only functioning couple, lurch from the windows where they’ve been watching the snow and move straight toward Jalena. Rogan tilts back and forth, making frothy sounds through the floppy rubber lips of her drugstore zombie mask and bouncing a hand in the sprayed-on streaks of red in her spiky gray hair. Frazee just stretches her arms straight in front of her, bracelets jangling, her surprising smile lighting up her face under her gypsy scarves. She is the only person Jalena has met at EMU — GP with a smile that bright, and the closest thing she has to a favorite, or at least a mentor.

“One of us,” they are chanting. “One of us.”

“Hey, that’s right,” Bemis says, looking up from the Wallace Stevens first edition he has carefully removed from Green’s shelves. “Hear, hear.” His beard stirs like rabbitbrush in a breeze, and it’s possible that he smiles. Then they’re all chanting, even the Great Dr. Green behind his desk, almost as if they’re genuinely happy about her promotion, or, to be fair, even care one way or the other.

“Hear, hear.”

“Congratulations, Jalena. Tenured Professor Jalena Russell.”

“Tenured Full Professor Jalena Russell.”

“One of us!” Rogan and Frazee chant. Rogan sticks out a hand for a shake, but Frazee engulfs Jalena in a jangling hug that almost feels natural, for a second. At least, it does to Jalena, who has never exactly been a natural hugger herself.

Then Rogan joins in the embrace, which just seems strange, awkward, until finally, over Jalena’s head, Rogan and Frazee kiss. Jalena can feel their elbows and hips and breasts, as well as Rogan’s rubber mask, and wants to squirm free. At the bookshelves, Bemis lowers his gaze back to his beloved Stevens. Behind the desk, meanwhile, Green leans his formidably flabby self forward over his dog-eared Faulkners like the molting mushroom he is and grunts his disgust. Instantly, Rogan and Frazee release Jalena, join hands, and spin toward him. Rogan clamps a palm on Frazee’s ass atop her tricolored skirt. Frazee smiles, and Rogan glares through the eyes of her mask.

“You’re both going to hell,” Green murmurs, with no heat, as though reciting a line.

“And you can’t come,” Frazee says.

At the window, Darlene Parrott lets the curtain settle and leans her short, blond hair against the wall. Her face is so pallid and tired, she looks like an old, framed portrait of herself. For Halloween, atop her usual gray sweater and darker gray woolen ankle scraper, she has tied a yellow scarf with cat faces on it. She pushes her pince-nez up her nose.

“It’s still snowing,” she murmurs.

“And it’s going to snow,” Bemis says — almost sings — and the rest of them groan.

Green slaps his palms on his desk. “Bemis, if you insist on quoting Mr. Stevens and his blackbirds at us, you’re going to have to put my book back where you found it.”

“Philistines,” Bemis mutters. “And there’s only one goddamn blackbird.”

Even Parrott lets a smile — or a reflection of everyone else’s smiles — flicker on her pale face.

“Any kids out there yet, Darlene?” Frazee calls, snatching the gin bottle out of Bemis’s hand. She pours Jalena some in one of Green’s moose-head shot glasses.

Parrott leans between the curtains again, peering down at the entrance to the Humanities building, where the MFA students none of them teach — this being the Lit and Comp end of the hall, where the rhetoricians and studiers of story lurk in their quieter offices, as far as they can get from the tellers of story — have constructed their contribution to the annual Clarkston, Montana festival of haunted houses. All they’ve managed is a thatched hut this year, draped in black crepe paper and black paint. Inside, grad students in black sweatshirts and face paint have tucked themselves among the shadows, waiting to slither up from the floors or climb down off the walls, whisper in a little kid’s ear, maybe cop a feel from a classmate.