When, in retrospect, he saw the man on the merry-go-round stumble back to change the cassette; when he saw the man then move back to hold on to the pole directly behind his daughter; when he saw the way the man was looking at his daughter, and the droop of the faded Wranglers; when he thought back and retraced everything, he was sure he should have seen it: there were wide-open empty spots all over the ride. The first swellings of a skin growth, and he should have spotted it.

One theory might be that carnivals provide a natural outlet for a darker need we all have to play ourselves against the forces of transience; a neatly polished road show would go against that need. Dejects, freaks, wash-aways run the rides. The state inspector—half blind with foggy cataracts—comes in for a show of civilized examination. He holds his clipboard and checks the joints of the Ferris wheel, and maybe watches the men work lug nuts onto bolts. But he avoids inspecting the undersides of the men’s souls.

Strangely enough, the paths of John and Ned had crossed before, on a beach in northern Michigan, near the encampment in which Ned grew up. (No one was really sure how he got the name Ned, or even Alger, his mother calling him Alger but also the Indian name of Walk Moon, too; and there was the man who was supposed to be standing in as his father, Jack-somebody, who came in at night with his belt already undone.) Two women sat on the beach in Petoskey State Park, at the cusp of Little Traverse Bay. It was an unusually cool midsummer day and the beach was almost empty—both women sat watching their sons play, far up, near the waterline. Of course John didn’t remember that day, amid countless other days going to the Midwest to visit his grandparents at their summer cottage, but he did remember the ragtag encampment of residual beings where Ned was reared, and the warnings his grandfather had given him to stay away from the camp. A shaggy little creek wove through the myrtle along the side of the road there, loaded with broken gin bottles and potato chip bags, and through the weeds one could see the old trailers, and men and women in lawn chairs drinking beer.

The idea of blind chance put a hole in John’s gut; he refused it outright as an available explanation. It just wouldn’t do. John made a vow that he would never admit in any way that the whole thing hinged on brutal good luck (from Ned’s vantage) and bad luck (from his vantage) and nothing else. The fact that his daughter had been at the carnival that day and taken a twirl (sixteen rotations) on Ned’s ride allowed him to make the connection between the two that led to a legal conviction; but that was all. When he tried to visualize it he came up with the image of a huge arc, a bolt of raw, blue charge going from his house to that ride. A bolt fired by fate, by forces begun by his own actions. After wandering around, Ned found himself beneath her window, hunched in the thickness of the hydrangea bush, eying the partway-open window and getting his X-Acto knife out to slice through the nylon screening with only the faintest of zips, the blade easing through the squares the way a very hot scoop curled back ice cream. Then with both hands spread out, he lay his palms on the underside of the window and lifted it slowly (the window grooves had been recently waxed to reduce friction, which caused brain-deadening lead dust), softly enough so the sound of it was actually nothing more or less than the usual movements of night: trees rasping each other in the gentle upheaval of breeze, or a raccoon scuffing the side of an overturned garbage can. He lifted himself acrobatically into the window—his footfalls on landing softened, he felt, or dreamed, by all of history, his imagined forefathers tiptoeing the wooded trails along the shore of Lake Huron.