Welcome to Night Vale

by Joseph Fink

  “Okay” was all she ended up saying.

  “All of this is to say that I am choosing to not tell you some of what I know. Or I am lying to you about it. And I want you to forgive me.”

  “We all want things,” said Jackie.

  Josie nodded sadly. She stood, which involved a complex rearrangement of flesh and joints and muscles.

  “Walk with me,” she said. And Jackie did. They walked into the kitchen. Josie did not acknowledge the bundle on the table, and so neither did Jackie. If Josie wasn’t going to express concern about something, then Jackie sure as hell wasn’t going to either.

  Josie produced a glass of water, through practiced manipulation of cupboards and valves and municipal plumbing. Neither she nor Jackie was impressed with the human miracle represented by how easily the glass of water was produced.

  “Drink this,” she said, extending it to Jackie. “It’ll help with your migraines.”

  “I don’t get migraines. I’ve got something much worse.” She started to hold up her left hand.

  “Drink.”

  Jackie did.

  “I don’t get migraines, though,” she said after.

  “Jackie, I’m sorry that this has happened to you when you are so young. For all those decades you have run the pawnshop, you have been so young and unaware of the cruelty of life outside of the equally but differently cruel bubble of youth.”

  “How many decades?” Jackie asked, mostly to herself.

  “I know what you are looking for. I know what has happened. And it’s going to be very dangerous. You may not live through it. And if you do, the you that lived through it will not be the same you that lived before it. In that sense, you will definitely not exist after, and I’m sorry.”

  The bundle started to float off the table. Josie rolled up a Cave and Cavern Decor and Accessories Catalog, the kind that clogged up so many Night Vale mailboxes, and slapped at the bundle. It plopped back on the table.

  “Damn ungrateful,” she said.

  “What is?” said Jackie.

  “Nothing. Nothing is. The man in the tan jacket is from a dangerous place. A place that no one can go to and return from. That’s what we think.”

  Josie held out her left hand. In it was a slip of paper. It said the name of a place.

  “You too?”

  “There are many of us. We’re not sure what’s happening. We need to know more.” Josie tossed the paper on the counter and sat down at a kitchen stool, the slip of paper already back in her hand.

  “Where do we start?” said Jackie.

  Josie told her. Jackie swore at her, and then apologized for swearing.

  “The library, though.” Jackie considered. “No. That’s. That’s.” She indicated with her hands what it was.

  “The search for truth takes us to dangerous places,” said Old Woman Josie. “Often it takes us to that most dangerous place: the library. You know who said that? No? George Washington did. Minutes before librarians ate him.”

  Jackie opened the front door. The pain in her gut subsided for a moment, or perhaps only faded under the anxiety of thinking about the library.

  The yard outside seemed so bright and so distant from the dim interior. The Erikas carried on with their yard work. There was a hole dug into the backyard that one of them was starting to fill. They stood motionless, muttering at the hole, and a bright black light enveloped the displaced dirt, nudging it back into its place.

  There were hands wrapping around her. Josie was hugging her, but the angle was wrong, and there was a significant height difference. They both stood in the unnatural hug for a moment, neither wanting to acknowledge the misalignment of the physical affection.

  When Jackie thought about where she had to go, she did not feel fear. But she felt an awareness of how tenuous it was, the collection of thoughts and habits that was Jackie Fierro. How easily those could all be taken away and rearranged into some other form of matter.

  “Stay away from the man. Don’t try to follow him to his city. It’s a trap.”

  “Josie. I can’t live with this,” Jackie said, looking at the paper in her hand.

  “It’s going to be okay,” said Old Woman Josie. “It will be.”

  She squeezed harder, and Jackie turned in to the hug, allowing herself to be comforted. Her stomach did not hurt anymore, or it hurt differently.

  “That was a lie,” said Josie. “That was one of those times I was lying.”

  “I know,” said Jackie. “It’s fine.”

  She was lying too.

  8

  Diane was filling her gas tank when she saw Troy. She didn’t approach him, and he didn’t notice her. She had not seen Troy in fifteen years, and had not wanted to see him ever again.

  When she tried to put the nozzle back onto the pump, it kept falling off because her hands were shaking. She didn’t feel anything at all, but she couldn’t get her hands to stop shaking. By the time she looked up, Troy was already gone. He had gotten into his car (white sedan, broken taillight) and pulled away without looking at her once. She forced herself to stand very still and breathe slowly until her hands stopped shaking. Once they were steady, she put the nozzle back onto the pump, deliberately opened her car door, and drove away at a reasonable speed. The entire time she felt fine.

  Weeks later, she stopped by her bank to get change for a PTA fund-raiser. Sitting behind one of the desks was Troy, wearing a dark suit and a plastic name badge. She tried to confirm the name on the tag without him noticing her staring but was unable to.

  This time her hands did not shake at all. She actually felt fine, but she tasted blood. Without even noticing, she had been biting her lower lip so hard that the tooth had broken through. She wiped the blood away and walked past him with her withdrawal slip, not looking at him. Because she wasn’t looking at him, she couldn’t see if he was looking at her.

  Just a few days after that, she and Josh went to the movies. This was a monthly tradition that went back to when he was seven. He had been acting glum, taking on oozing, gloppy forms that made a mess of the furniture and carpet, and asking her a lot of questions about his dad and where he had gone. She had been alternately terrified and exasperated by the moody creature that had appeared in place of her little boy, and she announced that, as a special treat, they would go to the movies.

  That night at the movies was the first good night they had had in weeks. She hadn’t been sure what to see and just asked at the ticket counter for whatever popular children’s movie was playing. The joyful glow of being somewhere together and feeling like they were both on the same team had outshone the silly antics of the funny characters in the kids’ movie (No Country for Old Men) up on the screen. They had left the theater, him walking upright, with non-oozing legs, and holding her hand with a human palm and fingers. He did not ask about his father again for months.

  And so started their monthly attempt to recapture the lightness of that first night. Mostly it was good. Sometimes, especially lately, she had to remind him to keep his form short, and free of any broad wings or smoke emitters that might obstruct other moviegoers’ views. He would always do what she said, but not without a lot of sighing and eye-rolling (he almost always took a form with eyes when going to the movies, although he had gone through a period where he preferred the experience of sightless listening).

  This particular night, the theater was showing the sequel to that popular animated franchise about the trees that look like trees but have human organs and try to stop developers from razing their forest. The trees are unsuccessful at first, but in the end the construction crews learn their lesson after seeing the large quantities of blood, and hearing the mangled screams. Later they are eviscerated themselves by vengeful arboreal spirits. Diane thought the movie wasn’t as good as the original, but she adored the comical voice work of immortal cinema legend Lee Marvin. Josh said he thought it was boring, but he said that about most movies, and he seemed to laugh at most of the jokes and funny death scenes.
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br />   While sitting through the previews, Diane saw Troy enter. He was wearing a polo shirt and carrying a carpet sweeper. He crossed from one exit to the other. He seemed to be checking the floor lights along the aisle. One strip was unlit.

  Diane tried not to look at Josh and immediately failed, turning to watch his silver, scaly skin, his flat nose and protruding eyes intent on the screen. Josh hadn’t recognized Troy. Why would he? Josh hadn’t seen Troy since he was a baby. She saw herself in Josh, and sometimes assumed he did the same.

  Josh did not see himself in Diane. She knew this.

  She put her arm around Josh, ostensibly out of affection, but subconsciously out of protection. He glanced at her hand hanging near his non-shoulder. He glanced back at Diane, confused but not upset.

  Diane looked forward, toward the screen, thinking about how to not think about Josh’s father. Her foot was tapping. She carefully stopped her foot from tapping.

  Here is what it was about Troy.

  Diane does not always have a husband. There was a time when she always had a husband, but now she never has one.

  She always has an ex-husband. They were never married, but husband and ex-husband are the shortest-hand way to describe her relationship to Troy.

  Diane is interested in the semantics of marriage and not marriage. This is why:

  Diane always has two parents. Someday she will never have two parents, but right now she always has them. They are mother and father to Diane, and grandmother and grandfather to Josh.

  Her parents have never been married. They never want(ed) to be married. They want(ed) to be together and in love. They are almost always together and almost always in love. They never want(ed) to get a certificate or fill out paperwork or have their love and togetherness approved by a smiling god.

  They, of course, value and respect others’ love of a smiling god. (Is that a smile?)

  They also fill out paperwork and get certificates when required to do so for, say, a job or a driver’s license or Diane’s birth or the times they’re required to play the mandatory citywide lottery whose winners are fed to the hungry wolves at the Night Vale Petting Zoo.

  But they do not want to be married. Our life together is just that: our life together, they might say if you asked them to succinctly grandstand about their choice. They might, but they probably wouldn’t. They aren’t sanctimonious or vociferous. They simply love each other, and that is enough for them to believe in.

  Diane too wanted to be with someone and be in love with someone. She wanted to do these things without being married. She still does. She saw herself in her parents. She saw how she could be, how life could be, how love could be.

  There is a correlation between seeing what could be and experiencing what is. But, as the well-spoken scientist who is often interviewed on the news says: “Correlation is not causation” and “Past performance is not a predictor of future results.”

  Diane’s parents are also two different races. It matters which races, but it matters only to Diane and her parents and their family and friends, not to those who do not know them. Not everyone gets to know everything about everybody.

  Growing up in the Southwest, Diane saw a few mixed-race parents, mixed-race children, but she did not always have the opportunity or inclination to befriend these families. When she was a kid, friends were still determined by City Council decree, based on the numerology of each child’s name, which had been considered the most solid foundation for a lasting friendship.

  Sometimes she was teased, called terrible names by other children. Sometimes, those children were not the same race as one of her parents. Conversely, those same children were often the same race as her other parent.

  As Diane became a teenager, she continued to hear not only about her race but also about her body.

  She was a girl, not yet a woman. She was fifteen years old.

  Imagine a fifteen-year-old girl of mixed-race parents.

  That’s pretty good. That’s very close, she might say to anyone who described what she looked like. Diane didn’t know what she looked like. She never cared to know. Many people would tell her anyway.

  When her body won the race to womanhood against her person, Diane began to hear that she was tall, short, fat, skinny, ugly, sexy, smiled too much, smiled too little, had bad hair, had beautiful hair, had something in her teeth, dressed nice, dressed cheap, had duck feet, had elegant feet. She was too dark. She was too pale.

  She heard a lot of different descriptions of her, and she took them all as truth.

  You must never need to get any sun, Diane, a person might say as they playfully (and jealously) batted their sleeved arm at her. You don’t look like who you are, Diane, a different person might say as they playfully (and scoldingly) batted their unsleeved arm at her.

  Teasing about race came less and less. Or rather, it disguised itself as simple assessment. You sound like a regular person on the phone, someone might say to her on the phone.

  She also heard about the non-marriage of her parents. You’re technically a bastard, right? people sometimes asked when they heard her parents were unmarried.

  Were you an accident? other people (sometimes the same people) might ask. Do they not love each other? other people might inquire, earnestly. Well, they’ve got an easy escape if things ever go wrong, still others might joke, unearnestly. Are they swingers? some might joke and others might ask sincerely.

  But most common was the assumption that she would never fall in love. You’ll probably never meet someone, some assumed, because your parents didn’t teach you the importance of marriage.

  She did find true love. His name was Troy. He was seventeen. She was an older seventeen.

  Imagine a teenager named Troy.

  That’s not bad. He’s a bit less athletic, but it doesn’t matter. Troy looked like what he thought he looked like. Troy always looked exactly how he thought he looked. He never loved Diane until they met. Then he always loved her. Until later, when he never loved her.

  “I will always love you,” he sometimes said.

  Later he didn’t say this at all. He wasn’t even there to say it.

  They were always together and always in love for the eight months they first knew each other, working summer jobs at the White Sands Ice Cream Shoppe. Then Josh, not yet named Josh, began to form. He began first as scattered cells. Those cells joined and began to multiply into billions and billions of cells until they were shaped like a single, giant cell.

  Those cells added more cells from Diane’s cells, and those cells began to make eyes and feet and kidneys and tongues and wings and gills, growing and expanding into a Josh-like shape. People pointed out to Diane how different she looked on the outside. She did not feel she looked any different.

  Then one day Josh came out of Diane.

  She was a girl, finally a woman. She was eighteen years old.

  Imagine an eighteen-year-old mother.

  Imagine a seventeen-year-old father.

  Troy couldn’t. Troy couldn’t see himself anymore. He looked at Josh, whom he named after his uncle, a retired Army Ranger he vaguely thought of as “cool,” and Troy saw a mirror out of sync. A face stared back, making different gestures, different motions than Troy made. It was his face, but it did not look like him, act like him.

  Troy had never experienced discord. Or he had never known he had experienced discord until that moment.

  Troy moved out of Night Vale when Josh was one year old.

  A month later, Troy sent Diane a letter. It said something about a military family. It said something about being children. It said something about mistakes. It said something about remembering each other. It said something about never forgetting her face.

  She doesn’t remember if he said he would never forget her face or if she should never forget her own face. Either way, neither happened.

  Some people told her they knew she would never keep a man. Some told her that good parents would have insisted Troy marry her. Some told
her she dressed inappropriately. Some told her she was too tall. Most told her she would never get married now.

  This was fine with Diane. This is still fine with Diane.

  We meant to say you’ll never meet anyone now, let alone get married, most would clarify.

  Josh was always curious about who his father was. He understood, based on what his friends had told him, that many children had two parents, and there were periods where it was clear he felt one short. Often he would ask questions. Sometimes those questions were out loud.

  Diane sometimes hears that Troy is an actuary. Sometimes she hears Troy is a florist. Sometimes she hears Troy is a cop. A toll collector. A professor. A musician. A stand-up comedian. Once she heard a terrible rumor he became a librarian, but she could not imagine Troy becoming the darkest of evil beasts, no matter what he had done to her. Is it even possible for a human to become a librarian? Diane wondered.

  And now she and Josh in the movie theater, and Troy, unnoticed by Josh.

  The dark strip of floor lighting turned back on. Troy, still not looking her way, gave a big thumbs-up to somebody out of sight, just around a dark corner. Troy’s teeth shone in shadow. He did not look at Diane. Troy exited the theater slowly, still grinning, thumb still extended.

  She looked back at Josh, her arm reflexively tightening around him. He squirmed and glanced at her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and removed her arm.

  “No, it’s fine,” he said, looking down at his half-eaten Twizzler.

  “Really?” She put her arm back around him.

  They waited quietly for the movie to start.

  Later, Diane would return to the theater on her own.

  9

  Jackie started her car in the direction of the library, but soon it strayed. Or she strayed it. Whatever the verb is to cause to stray. Corrupted. She corrupted her car toward her mother’s house.

  Her mother had called, and being a good daughter was as convenient an excuse as any. Anything to avoid the library.

  She turned onto Desert Elm Drive, a name which was evocative of nothing real. She drove past the Antiques Mall. The antiques in the window were especially cute, wrestling with each other and playfully snapping at each other’s tails. But she could never seem to justify the money for an antique, and besides she was rarely home, so how would she care for one?