Nightmare Carnival

Bemis shrugs and lights a fresh cigarette. It’s the alcohol, Jalena knows — the years and years of it — that makes his hands tremble that way. Only the alcohol. But he keeps watching Green watch the grass. “Not very, I think. It’s been a while.”

“Maybe this is far enough.”

He glances over his shoulder, right into his ex-wife’s face. Another look that Jalena doesn’t recognize or understand passes between them. When Bemis next speaks, his voice has regained its customary bitterness. “Jalena’s tenured, after all. One of us. Part of this story, whether she wants to be or not.”

“Maybe it’s time we had a new story.”

“There are no new stories. Not for me. Just the inescapable rhythm.”

“Oh, Christ, just for once, Bill, talk Bemis. Not Stevens.”

“Fine. Here’s some Bemis: fuck off, Alexa. This is the only story I know how to tell. Thanks to you. How’s that?” He turns away and starts the truck.

Even sitting still, the air has gotten colder. As soon as the truck starts moving, Jalena can feel it shooting up her sleeves, down the throat of her closed coat. This isn’t the winter wind quite yet, she knows, but its herald. The lights in the grass have stopped sparking, or else the truck has passed the place where the lights are. Way out above the prairie, a single crow rides the gusts of breeze like a clump of black ash.

“Three years, he stayed gone,” Parrott says, when they’re moving at full speed again. “No letters. No e-mails. As far as I know, not a single one of us heard from him. His sister, either. And then, on Halloween, right at dusk, as we all gathered in Bemis’s office for the annual toast we’d taken to offering to him, David Roemer came back.”

“He just stuck his head in the door,” Rogan says, “like he’d only popped down to the Butterfly Café on Highbottom for a huckleberry chai.”

“ ‘Found it,’ ” Frazee says, in that recitation tone, again, as though she’s performing a poem, or praying. “That’s what he said.”

“ ‘Found them,’ ” Parrott corrects, even the correction part of the rhythm, as though that, too, got repeated every time they all told this.

And how often, Jalena wonders, have they told this? And to whom?

“He said, ‘them,’ ” Parrott continues. “And then he asked if we’d seen Marco.”

“Marco?” Jalena is listening, but also watching the prairie. Instead of sparking, it’s now sparkling, as though it has dewed over all at once in the last five minutes, the drops catching and scattering the starlight breaking out overhead. The whole prairie glints, the blades of grass silver and stiff and translucent as fingernails.

Fields and fields of fingernails, sticking up out of the ground.

“Marco Roemer. Maddy’s boy. David’s nephew. He was maybe eight, then? Apparently, David had showed up out of nowhere, picked up the kid from soccer practice, and brought him here. I mean, to the university. ‘Just stopped off to grab the rest of my files,’ he said. ‘Say goodbye, Marco.’

“And that was it. Off they went. Leaving us all. ”

“. just sitting there,” Frazee says, so sadly that Jalena takes her eyes off the prairie long enough to check on her. Frazee is crying silently, watching the grass. “Doing fuck-all, as always.”

“Paying him homage,” says Parrott.

“Instead of getting up and helping.”

“Actually,” says Rogan, “after he showed up, we didn’t know what to do except sit around and stare at each other, as usual. And wonder why we all seemed to feel so compelled to retell this story, about some fucked-up fucker even more fucked up than the rest of us.”

“Someone actually capable of living his life, you mean,” Parrott says. “Someone capable of real love.”

“Ah. Right. The digging-up-graves real love. The lit professor’s ideal. The made-up, fucked-up kind.”

This time, Frazee doesn’t take Rogan’s hand or even turn around. And that’s why Rogan is so angry, Jalena understands abruptly. She’s hurt, and she’s scared, because Frazee is so far away from her.

Then she thinks, I am actually seeing. I see.

“We were all still in our places,” says Parrott, “when Maddy Roemer burst through the door. ‘He’s got Marco,’ she said.”

“ ‘He’s going to kill Marco,’ ” murmurs Frazee.

Dazed by the lights on the prairie, the silver grass, the stars blooming in the blackness like thousands of parachutes opening all at once, an invading army gliding earthward, Jalena thinks she has misheard. “What?”

“ ‘He’s got my son,’ ” says Parrott, with a waver clearly meant to replicate Maddy Roemer’s. “ ‘He’s gone all the way batshit. He says he’s found them. The Carnival. He says they’re all dead.’ ”

Jalena stirs, alarmed. “What? Who? I don’t—”

“ ‘Murdered. All of them. Or something. They’re here, they’re back, and he thinks he’s gone to find Kate. And to do that — to find them — I think he’s going to kill Marco. Oh my God, he’s going to kill my son.’ ”