Chương 309: Book Six, Chapter 71: Bobby I

Carousel always kept a careful balance of cars on the road, Bobby Gill thought as he sat in his toll booth. There always had to be enough cars to make the world feel lived in, but not so many that you couldn't hear what was going on around you. The roads always needed to be clear enough that you could jaywalk if you needed to, and if you found yourself walking down the road, especially out in the sticks, you would only find a car headed toward you from one direction or the other, but never both.

Cars were safe in Carousel for the most part, possessed vehicles excluded. Automobile accidents were the horrors of the real world, they didn't belong here. Cars, Bobby realized, were just there to set a scene. He leaned forward in his booth as a car approached. It was a large military car repurposed for civilian use, like a Hummer. Janet hated big cars like that.

The roads weren't built for vehicles that big, and she felt that people who drove them made the world more dangerous for everyone else just to stroke their ego. She had always been a cautious woman, and Carousel had punished her for it. The driver in the Hummer was wearing a tie-dye shirt with the sleeves cut off. His jeans flared out at the bottom.

This storyline was set in the nineties, so the style would be a mix of intergenerational mismatch and expensive designer clothes that could only have existed in one of the most prosperous decades in history. Apparently, that wasn't just a thing back on Earth. Why Carousel worked so hard to reflect a cinematic aesthetic that matched his world, Bobby didn't know. He was done asking the small questions like that. He was done asking the big questions.

There was only one answer he needed and it was the one he was least likely to get... The fake Hummer driver gave him exact change, and he passed them through. His character worked at a tollbooth, but that had not always been the case. Once upon a time, in a happier period of his life, his character had been a veterinarian.

Bobby knew that because when he woke up in his character's house that morning, he had walked through a museum of personal effects charting out a timeline that started to get really sad when, one day out of the blue, his character's wife Janet had disappeared without a trace. At first, he was repulsed when he saw how Carousel was drawing on Bobby's own life to create its little story.

But that feeling quickly disappeared, because if Carousel was finally starting to acknowledge his missing wife, that meant Bobby might be closer to answers than he ever had been before. Another car, some more cash, and then another and another. Bobby did this On-Screen. He knew what Carousel was after. He didn't smile. He didn't act warm or professional. He let the light go out in his eyes as he did his job. They said that the storyline had themes of grief. Bobby could do grief.

So he worked at his tollbooth both On-Screen and Off-Screen for hours until shift change. On-Screen. Jules was walking toward him. She had her own booth, though unlike him, most cars just passed by hers. Carousel must not have needed footage of the other attendants making exact change. Not that Bobby had made exact change, all he had to do was take the money and give them a few coins back. It wasn't like the audience was going to audit him.

"Bobby," she said, "looks like you survived another day on the turnpike." She was being friendly, always his complement, equal but opposite. In this story, he was sad and depressed, so she had to be happy and friendly. She must have hated that.

"Hello, Jules," he said.

"Hey, look. Me and some of the other fellows are about to head out to the bar. I thought maybe you might wanna go tie one on." He sighed.

"Not today, Jules," he said.

"Maybe some other time."

"That's what you said last time," she said, and before she could say anything else, he said "Yep," and walked away, leaving her staring after him with pity. Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Bobby pulled a map out of his pocket. It was technically an advertisement for a real estate company; they had created a detailed layout of Carousel, the kind of thing they might hand out to clients.

He was using it because it marked the location of every neighborhood in Carousel, with little squares representing each house on the street. He held up the map so the camera could see how many neighborhoods had been crossed off, how many individual houses he had been to in his pursuit. By no coincidence, today was the day he planned to head out to Toother Street with a stack of homemade missing posters. The name said Janet Gill, and the picture wasn't an NPC, it was her, it was Janet, his wife, his real wife.

Carousel had scheduled for him to have these posters made with a headshot of some woman that, to its credit, did look a lot like Janet. Instead, Bobby had taken out his wallet and grabbed a picture from it that he had taken of Janet two years before coming to Carousel. It was from their trip to Disney World. Janet had always indulged his love of theme parks more or less, but at Disney World she actually had fun too. Maybe it was just the nostalgia.

He had taken her picture in front of the Haunted Mansion, and that picture contained everything he loved about life, his wife and horror. At the printers, they had cut out most of the image of the Haunted Mansion and zoomed in on Janet's face. Carousel had gone along with it, he knew that because when he passed by some old posters that his character had put up previously, they had changed and now matched the ones he carried in his arms. Janet would be playing herself now. He hoped that would mean something.

He was back at his old haunt, Toother Street. He knew all of these NPCs by name. He wondered if, on some level, they would recognize him. He walked up to the first house on the street, knocked on the door, and when the woman answered, he went Off-Screen. This woman was called Aretha Johnson on the red wallpaper, and he had spoken to her several times. She was an elderly woman, and he thought he saw pity in her eyes, just like Jules, but maybe he was imagining it.

She reached out for a poster, but by that point Bobby knew it wasn't going to matter. Carousel wasn't even recording his conversation with her, which is why she wasn't speaking. He grabbed a poster from the stack in his arms and handed it to the woman. She grabbed it, looked down at the picture, and read what had been written there. She looked up at him and mouthed the words, "Good luck."

Bobby walked down the street and knocked on a few more doors, but it became clear that Carousel was just going to imply he had knocked on every door. Clearly, this was not the scene where he was supposed to establish his backstory On-Screen. And he didn't go back On-Screen, not until later, when he was stapling the poster to a telephone pole. But that was it. Carousel was through with him for a while.

It didn't matter, when he had walked around his house, he had seen his character's day planner, and it would seem that that night he was scheduled for group therapy. It would be there that he would air his grievances. So he walked away from Toother Street toward his next scene. Off in the distance, the team they were there to rescue was at Eternal Savers Club, and if the very short script he had been given was accurate, they were already halfway through their time in this film.

Hopefully, he and the others would survive longer. There were only thirteen people in the group. Most were only there to justify the amount of snacks and drinks on the back table. Bobby was disappointed to find that everyone was sitting in a circle, which meant that he couldn't sit in the back and watch. It would be a game of hot potato where the loser had to pour out their soul. Bobby could take it; most of his time in Carousel had been spent pondering his soul and what chance it stood in a world like this.

Of course, Bobby was also curious what would happen if it was Riley who lost the game and had to speak about his tragedy. Had Carousel given him a safe backstory so that he didn't have to talk about his parents? Kimberly sat next to Riley, and if she got called on, she would have no problem. She had entered Carousel afraid, just as Janet had, but fear had transformed her into a survivor. Janet's fear had no such transformative power. Bobby didn't think that was fair.

A man named Tom stood in the middle, Tom Carmichael on the red wallpaper. He was dressed in slacks and a light blue button-up shirt. He had a giant key ring and a laminated badge that hung from his belt. The badge had the logo for Eternal Savers Club, a simple ESC. But even if Bobby hadn't seen that, it was clear that Tom was important, because Tom did ninety percent of the talking.

"What I've realized since my brother's death is that when you lose someone that close to you, you're not just grieving them," Tom said, "You're grieving the person you got to be when you were around them. Lance and I did everything together. As kids, he protected me from bullies, and as adults, he also protected me from bullies. He was the guy that believed in me even when I couldn't, so everything I did, I was relying on him. I could substitute in his confidence for my own.

"I don't think I've ever relied on anyone as much as I did him. But when he passed, so much of myself left with him that I find myself wanting to know that guy again, the guy I used to be. But the truth is, that version of me has left this world behind. Part of the grieving process is figuring out who you can be without your loved one, and more importantly, who you can be because of them, because of their memory, because of those little invisible gifts they gave you."

He was tall, an average build, but on a guy who was six foot three, even an average build meant muscles. He had an intensely friendly face, Bobby realized, not in a fake way like the greeter at Eternal Savers Club. You could see the sadness in his eyes. Bobby wasn't sure if he trusted anyone that wasn't a little sad.