Nightmare Carnival

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.”