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.

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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.