by Joseph Fink
I watched with trepidation the rise of highways, the proliferation of vehicles, the dispersion of white society from urban centers like dandelion seeds planting homogenous weeds across the plains. Oklahoma, like much of South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas, was flat and dull, endless plains of corn and wheat, marred by oil towers and electrical wiring.
The wretched remnants of the Depression eventually died of starvation, died of war, or worst: died of old age preceded by decades of suffering under the centralized greed of industry. Dizzyingly tall skyscrapers housed securely the richest bankers and investors in America. Tycoons perfected the alchemy of turning blood into gold. Seeing the mud-smudged faces of children across western Oklahoma throughout the 1930s made me wish my path would serpentine itself to the financial centers of New York or Chicago. I wanted to find a new gang of thieves who could help me tear apart these institutions brick by brick, dollar by dollar, and place it back to the hands of the farmers and grandchildren of slaves and indigenous tribes.
But my path was so clear to me now, so vivid in its intentions, I could not abandon it. My path did not lead me to New York or Chicago. It led me instead to Texas.
6
In 1953, I arrived in Amarillo. My path took the shape of a gravel road, leading to a dusty trail, leading to wooden steps which rose up directly to the home of Moses.
Moses owned a ranch. He owned horses and cattle and chickens and dogs. He had a wife and a tractor and a barn. He had six children. He had a lot of whiskey. Moses yelled at his wife, Lola, when she failed to keep house to his liking. He yelled at her when she told him to get cleaned up for church. He yelled at her when he ran out of booze. He yelled at her when he had plenty of booze. He yelled at his children when they spoke out of turn. He yelled at them when they did not make their beds. He yelled at them when they ate too much or too little.
Moses’s father had vowed never to lay a hand on his children, having learned from his own experience that beatings did not strengthen one’s message. But Moses’s father also was not around when Moses grew up, so Moses instead replicated the actions of his mother.
I also was not around when Moses was growing up. I was in Oklahoma trying to undermine oil barons who did not pay fair wages, nor provide safe work environments. I spent many years fighting an impossible battle against economic inequality, instead of being present for Moses’s childhood. He was a healthy baby. At only two days old he smiled at me, and I knew he would be okay. But he was not, because I had not been there to help him, not there to help his widowed mother. Ignoring the call of my path was a mistake I vowed to never make again.
While Moses had failed at being a kind father and husband, he had succeeded at making a comfortable living for himself, buying a West Texas ranch and learning to raise livestock. But he was brutal and unstable, and I knew I needed to step back into his life.
I met the adult Moses while he was feeding his horses. Deciding immediate intervention was necessary, I hid in the corner of his barn and began to speak. I told him that I was the ghost of his dead mother.
“My momma ain’t no ghost,” he said, as if hearing voices were normal to him. Perhaps it was. “My momma would never be a ghost because ghosts can’t hit folks.”
“My child, you need to lay off the drink,” I said to him. I wasn’t great at these American accents, but I figured his mother had been dead for a while and he was perpetually drunk. “Your Lola needs you. Your church needs you. Your son. Your only boy, Jacob, needs you.”
Moses thought about what I said, and for the evening he didn’t touch a bottle, but newly sober Moses was more foul than drunk Moses. Lola eventually poured him two fingers just to calm him down.
I attempted many different voices, hoping to find anything that could reach him. I tried being Jesus. I tried being one of the horses. I tried telling him I was his subconscious, but he didn’t know what that word meant. He never questioned the existence of the voices, but he certainly did not take them seriously.
I eventually cornered him in the barn one night. He was placing the last of his summer gardening tools away for an early winter, and as he turned around I was standing in the doorway. I held a lantern up to my face and he froze. His skin lost all color and he looked like he wanted to scream. I grabbed a pitchfork and pointed it at him.
“You’ll stop your drinking this moment, Moses,” I intoned. I stepped forward prodding the pitchfork until I backed him into a corner.
“Momma, no. Momma,” he began to sob, reverting to a childhood he never really had. “Momma, your face. What happened to your face?”
I pushed him into the hay with ease and I tied his hands together. If, in his besotted state, he was going to mistake me for his mother, I would certainly go along with it.
“You’ll stay here till you get clean, boy.”
And I hid him there, mouth gagged, for an entire week. Lola and the children came to look for him, but I kept him quiet. I kept him fed. I kept him away from them.
Moses without alcohol, though, became more irrational, more unpredictable. I began to wonder if it was the alcohol that kept him stable. He would stare, silent and motionless, for hours on end at the ceiling, and then suddenly thrash his body about, throwing himself into walls, lifting himself to his feet and then diving like a dolphin into the air and face first into the floor.
He broke three teeth and dislocated his right shoulder doing this.
Within a few days, he began muttering to himself, and those utterances became full conversations with invisible people who were not me. I was the one voice he wouldn’t listen to anymore.
I liked the feeling of ending the lives of people like Moses, but I did not like to do it myself. I’m not a serial murderer, and I would never want authorities to think there was a killer wandering the country. Most importantly, being mysteriously murdered makes one a victim, a man fondly remembered.
Here was Moses, fully mad, whether from the makeup of his brain or whether from the DTs. I only had to watch him destroy himself. There were no consequences for me, only for the wicked men of this wicked country, who were borne of other wicked men of other wicked countries.
But Moses proved me wrong. I had long believed he couldn’t hear or see me anymore, but he saw me enough to drive a pitchfork straight into my neck from behind me. I had not been maintaining the ropes on his arms and legs, and he had worked them free.
I fell headlong and stiff into the frozen dung and dust of the barn floor. The middle tine had pierced my throat and stuck into the boards. I tried to gasp but could not. I could not lift my head, because my neck was staked to the ground. I struggled to my knees, kicking and gashing my bare skin against the cold, broken wood.
Moses walked up next to me. I could see his ragged boots and torn denim jeans. I could make out his crooked back from his broken shoulder. One of his eyes was swollen shut and a silver-dollar sized piece of his lower lip was missing, exposing the few teeth he had remaining.
I was not a ghost. I was bleeding, aching. Feeling the pain down my spine and into my legs and toes. It went from fierce, to hot, to ticklish, to nothing.
I was not a ghost. I was an old woman, pinned down like the ragged centerpiece of a butterfly collection.
Moses stormed out of the barn shouting at whatever voices would listen.
“Eddddmmmmoooonnnd,” I hissed.
And I was instantly inside the house. I had not moved like that in years, so used to walking, to feeling the grass and dust and rocks beneath my feet. Becoming so connected to my body that I nearly forgot I could move without moving.
But something was different. My head hung limp. The muscles in my neck torn loose by the pitchfork could not maintain the weight of my head. It must have also pierced something in my nerves, because I couldn’t move my right arm either. I dragged myself to the bedroom of nine-year-old Jacob, Moses’s son.
“Wake up, boy,” I cried hoarsely. “He’s coming to kill you. He’s coming to kill you all.”
Seeing me
—a silhouette of an unknown old woman covered in blood and neck bent at an unnatural angle—must have been quite a sight, because Jacob leapt upward and ran screaming from his room.
I collapsed from the pain for a moment but managed to piece together enough strength to stand. As I got fully to my feet, I heard a crash from behind me. Moses had shattered the window to his son’s room with a pipe wrench. He must have seen the light of Jacob’s lamp. He did not even clear the broken edges before he climbed through. One particularly long shard sunk at least two inches deep into his inner thigh, and thick dark blood erupted immediately from the wound.
Moses poured his body into the room. I couldn’t move. I thought of Edmond. I thought of my father. Moses was only feet from me. He raised his wrench over my tilted limp head. I heard a shotgun cock behind me.
In a split second, as the boom of the gunshot spread across the prairie, I had transported myself outside the home. Through the broken window I saw the boy, gun clenched in bloodless hands, a wisp of smoke from the barrel. On the floor, a silent father, his throat and lower jaw gone, a glistening parabola of red across the wallpaper.
Lola rushed in, immediately began screaming and hugging her boy. Jacob, of course, told his mother and the Texas Rangers that his father was a violent man and that he (Jacob) was only trying to protect his family when Moses broke through the window wielding a heavy wrench. He did not mention the crooked-necked old woman screaming at the foot of his bed. The truth he did not voice was that it was this woman he had been trying to shoot, not his father.
But one morning as the family prepared for church, I heard Jacob talking to his mother.
“I once saw a woman, mother. She stood at the foot of my bed. She had no face. What kind of person doesn’t have a face, mother?”
Lola did not answer, although her own face said much.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” Jacob asked.
“I suppose a woman who has no face is a woman who has no soul, Jacob.” She put her hand on his and squeezed it.
“I’m scared I’ll see her again someday, Mother.” He leaned his head to her shoulder.
“You may,” she said. “You may.” And she kissed his forehead.
Faceless.
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror. There they were, my eyes, my nose, my lips and teeth. Could no one see my face at all?
And what of my soul? Lola spoke from the Christian Bible. It was her genteel southern way of telling her son that I was not one of them. That I was forsaken by her God.
Or maybe the face is the soul. If you cannot see or understand the face of someone else, you cannot see them. This is why humans fear insects. Their faces make no sense to us. We cannot infer emotion like we can in dogs or horses or pigs or people. I thought of the eye of a fish I had once held in my hands, devoid of fear or intent, and how frightened I had been of its emptiness.
Over a century since Edmond left me for dead in that Nulogorsk harbor, many men had looked me in the face as they died. The terror in their eyes, in the corners of their quivering mouths, in their snotty, snuffling noses took on new dimension for me. Perhaps they feared mystery more than they feared death. Perhaps it was my faceless face that made them react so strongly.
But Eleanor saw my face. She acknowledged my eyes. She saw me for who I was. She saw my face. She saw my soul. Eleanor was different. I was no ghost. I was no demon. Even demons have Satan. All I had was murder.
I wanted murder to feel like a fever breaking. I wanted the satisfying plunge of a knife into a gut. I wanted the warm blood dampening my sleeves. I wanted the splattering wheeze of Edmond’s final plea for mercy. I wanted his nose against mine. I wanted my name to freeze upon his tongue as his last cold breath pushed back against it. But murder has been a cloudless day. Murder has been a gently lapping wave. Murder has been the light rattle of leaves in a breeze.
My wounds from the pitchfork would heal, eventually, but a slight hitch in my neck and a limp would remain. Would I live forever? Beyond this version of America and all the versions after? Beyond humanity? Beyond the universe itself? A faceless judge, jury, and executioner of right and wrong? I hoped not. Lola could believe that I was sent by her god or her devil, but I was sent only by me.
7
Even with Edmond gone, the path had revealed itself, and I simply walked upon it, feeling its sharp pebbles crunch beneath my feet.
The path led me out of Amarillo into the desert. I had seen maps of the new world. I had heard stories about the American West, but nothing prepared me for its empty beauty. Pink mesas, deep canyons with striped façades like neat stacks of fabric, billowing shelves of clouds held at bay by mountain titans. The dust was dry and thin, easily swept upward in tall spirals by blasts of hot wind. I saw tarantulas and scorpions, red ants nearly the size of my toes. I touched cacti, never tiring of the sharp prick. I caught a jackrabbit and ate it raw.
I did not believe I needed to eat. I certainly did not feel any ill effects from days without food or water, but seeing the nightmarish length and erratic speed of such a creature made me ravenous.
I could feel the lawlessness of the West. There was certainly a lawlessness to the sea, but everything at sea must eventually return to land. The desert did not require a returning. The desert could be a person’s eternity.
The hot air and sun surely could ruin a traveler, but at night, the purple sky brought frosted air and coyote howls. The American Southwest is nature’s surrealist masterpiece. A place for getting away and for coming together. The desert upsets stale notions of sensibility, and invites newness in every form.
Lola’s Bible spoke of forty days and nights in the desert, a temptation and a test. Before that, there was forty years in the desert, a punishment and another test. My trial was less strenuous, as it felt like a place I could live forever. It was so like the sea to me, a horizon of near limitless possibilities, most of which would never materialize.
I had grown to enjoy dreaming more than achieving, the anticipation more than the actuality.
Like many before me, in the desert I found a sign. Mine was literally a sign, by the side of a highway:
WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE
IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE DEAD BY NOW
A sense of humor is attractive.
The news when I left Sioux City was dominated by a financial crash, men in tall buildings flinging themselves to the pavement below after losing millions. Nebraska and Kansas had been covered in signs reading “NO JOBS / NO OKIES / NO BLACKS.” When I left Amarillo, I heard of a war in Korea that was not to protect land or people, but to protect ideas about money. I was dubious of visiting another town. But such is the path. The path led me here, to Night Vale, and here I would stay for as long as the path directed me to stay. The path was fulfilling me, helping me find that which I thought had vanished. I did not know the town of Night Vale—I did not even know what state I was in. I only knew that it was where I should be.
Near the edge of town, there was a young girl who waved to me from the front porch of her home. I said, “Hello, young lady.”
The girl beckoned me with a wave of her hand. When I approached she leaned into my ear and said, “There are angels here.”
I played along, asking, “Do you think I am an angel?”
“No,” the girl frowned. “THEY are an angel.”
She pointed to a being at least eight feet tall with half a dozen wings and hundreds of eyes who had been quietly standing behind her. The being let out a cacophonous honk like several broken French horns, and a cylinder of black enveloped the porch, the negative image of a sunbeam.
“My name is Erika,” the angel boomed.
“Hello, I am a faceless old woman following an invisible path.”
“I see your path,” Erika said. “It is a good path, because you believe it to be. I also see your face.”
Erika placed one of their many hands on my cheek and ran a finger along my eyelids, my lips, and eventually into my nose. I did not wince
. I understood that touch was part of how the angel experienced the world.
“I believe you will be with us for a while,” Erika said pulling their hand away. “I think you will like it here.”
“Come visit me,” the girl said. “My name is Josefina.”
“I will,” I said.
“Hey,” the angel called after me as I walked away along the road into town, “can I borrow fifty cents?”
In the center of town, several people (some of whom were wearing what looked to me like hats made of internal organs) pointed and shouted “Interloper!” as I passed. Then those same people returned to walking or reading their newspapers on park benches, and ignored me. I felt remarkably at home.
Everything in Night Vale felt clandestine. Night Vale had a secret police force within the public police force. This secret police force spied relentlessly on its inhabitants, and every home bristled with poorly hidden surveillance microphones. There were helicopters that hovered above, representing numerous shadowy organizations, and the night sky was filled with mysterious moving lights. There were suspicious people in dark suits and sunglasses standing along most street corners who would quietly mumble into tiny antennaed devices. Along one of the streets a black cargo truck passed by. On its side was a white emblem of a labyrinth. The truck was travelling west toward the scrublands and sandwastes, beyond the edge of town. In its partially covered bed were stacks of crates. Following the truck was a black sedan. It pulled up next to me, and two men got out. They were not wearing hoods, but instead hats.