Working backward, John went over the events of that day and made diagrams, flowcharts resembling those intricate schematics of computer innards. He examined the whole day from the very start, when he woke her up, nudged her softly, and gave her breakfast of frozen waffles, one thing leading to another, which led eventually to that ride. (Ned had been captured, finally, in Albany, after an APB went out on him over fax machines. Irrefutable proof in the form of hair samples found on her sheets and in Ned’s trailer linked the crime to the carnie.) A crew of jaded cops and medics and social workers hung around long after the event to give some assurance to the family that they were doing all they could in every way. It was no use. Behind him John felt the web of events untangled, like an old used-up fishing net washed ashore. It was all there, in the past, gone, lost. Nothing would ever change it. And yet he felt it might be changed. He pondered it for a year, for another year, for the rest of his life. He lived simply outside the world of rational thought. He kept his toes in the magic. He pondered the electric spark and went on with his life; he even, a few years later, took her to another carnie as a way of going through the pain (as was suggested by the social workers).

The carnie went on to Indiana, to Laketon, where it set up for another firemen’s fund-raiser. With rheumy eyes, the crew got the rides up during an afternoon that was as dry and hard as peanut brittle, heaving parts from the flatbed, working slowly with a bored somnolence, hammering with wooden mallets, making what used to be music to a kid’s ear but now went unheard mostly behind car windows. The edge of the town simmered with insects. To the left of the lot there was nothing but a flat field that married the horizon; to the right of them was the last house in town, in which an old man lived alone. Staring at it, Zip could tell an old fart lived there, what with the weathered clapboards and the rusting tools on the wooden bench out back. Indeed, the old man came out, unfolded a lawn chair, took a pipe and wedged it into his teeth. He watched them for hours on end with a blank expression. There, Zip thought. I was right. An old codger working his way through the last of his days. His visions were coming more often since Ned had been caught, and his Zip-speak was even stranger, more fanatic, mostly incomprehensible babble to the other roadies, who avoided him completely if they could. You can’t Christ-all this fucking nothingness, he said. He’s going to hell-fuck fore I get to fuck him myself. Some even admitted they were scared of the Zip. For a moment, resting his back against a canopy support beam of the merry-go-round, which he was assembling by himself (there were a few bolts missing), he had one of his visions again—the old man with a blade between his eyes, lodged deep. In honor of Ned, I just might make this one vision come to pass, he said aloud. Then he shook the thought off the way you’d shake away an ice cream headache. The carnie was going up piecemeal. A real half-assed job. It would be inspected by a bribed official of the state, who just happened to be passing through the town to visit his great-aunt. It would have the usually dusty lightbulbs strung from a feeble infrastructure, and the people would arrive sensing the dubiousness of the whole affair, as if it were nothing but a holding pen for castoffs. That’s what they liked about it, essentially. It gave them a sense of being ripped off, betrayed, denied. They hated it but loved it. Hordes came through the gate on opening night. Stayed a few hours. Left glad to leave. It was Zip who got to stay, alone with his bottle, sprawled back on the cold plate steel, watching the old man’s house, shrouded in darkness, stark against the dark horizon like a cardboard prop. It wasn’t real enough. It stood as a testament to the unreality of the world.