Welcome to Night Vale

by Joseph Fink

  Before leaving, she scanned the diner for Troy. She couldn’t see him.

  Jackie waved at her from the counter. They exchanged pleasantries. There was something odd about the way Jackie considered her. Thoughtful and suspicious. Diane tried to seem completely at ease. They exchanged some words that didn’t mean much. Then things turned. Diane said, “What?” and Jackie shook her head impatiently.

  “Never mind. What do you got there?”

  She nodded at the paper in Diane’s hand. Diane realized that Jackie was holding an identical paper, but couldn’t get her mind to rest on that fact long enough to become curious about it.

  “Nothing,” said Diane, and stuffed the paper into her purse. It stayed in her purse.

  “Lucky,” said Jackie, and turned back to her coffee, tapping the edge of her paper against the counter.

  Diane still didn’t understand, but Jackie seemed grumpy, and so Diane let the conversation end there. She said some sort of casual good-bye, and Jackie threw it back in her face as a sarcastic joke, which Diane thought was unnecessary and rude.

  As she walked to her car, she reached into her bag for her keys.

  Her hand came across some crumpled paper. She pulled it out. “KING CITY,” it said. Why did she have that? Where would this piece of paper have come from? She tossed it on the ground and then, feeling guilty, picked it up to carry around to the dumpster. Before she could toss it in, there was a crashing sound next to her, which made her jump.

  Troy was there, throwing big bags of trash into the dumpster.

  “Oh, hey,” he said, and ducked quickly through the back door.

  She seemed to be holding a piece of paper. She did not know what it was or where it could have come from or how much she would later regret keeping it. She put it in her purse.

  22

  Jackie was at a dead end, investigation-wise. In terms of tacos, she was doing fine. Judged on her ability to never be able to let go of a slip of paper with her left hand, it was all going great. But trying to figure out what the hell was going on was not going well at all.

  She had spent the night with open eyes, trying to will her mind to be just as open. There had to be something she had missed, some connection to be made in the events and individuals moving about in the memory of her day. But if there was, she couldn’t see it. Maybe she wasn’t smart enough. Or maybe the world wasn’t. Maybe the world wasn’t smart enough to put together a story that made sense. Maybe it could only stick together random elements randomly, forming, as Shakespeare had famously written, “a show of senseless movement and circumstance that ultimately doesn’t amount to much at all.”

  The next morning found her with only one lead left. She had seen that blond man at her mother’s house. And she had seen him outside of the mayor’s office. And she had seen him at the Moonlite All-Nite Diner. It was time to talk to that man and to find out how he was involved in whatever it was this whatever was.

  She drove to the Moonlite All-Nite. It was the same crowd as always, which is to say that there were many of the regulars, and also to say that certain people were always in the Moonlite All-Nite, always at the same booths, always working on plates of food that never seemed to go away. It’s a sign of a good diner to have customers who are stuck in time. A well-known rule of eating is that if there are no time-loop customers, the place probably isn’t worth even ordering a plate of fries.

  Jackie sat in her regular spot at the counter.

  “Hiya, Jackie,” said Laura, moving with difficulty behind the counter, her thick, woody branches scraping against it. “You hungry?” She bent a fruit-laden branch toward her invitingly.

  “Thanks, Laura, but just a coffee.”

  Laura pushed her way toward the coffee machine, her branches knocking over tubs of ketchup and mayonnaise and stacks of empty water glasses as she went.

  Jackie watched the kitchen. There was no blond man.

  She turned to survey the room. Diane Crayton was getting out of her booth. It seemed like there was probably someone with her, but Jackie couldn’t remember who. She looked back at Diane’s table, and her heart began to pound, and then she looked at the kitchen again and couldn’t understand why her heart was pounding.

  Diane walked by her. Jackie decided to stop her, talk a little, make it seem casual. She needed to know if Diane actually was involved somehow.

  “Hey! Diane!” Jackie said with a casual half salute.

  Diane jumped and gasped.

  “Easy,” Jackie said, bringing her saluting hand down to pat the air with a “Whoa.” “Just saying hi.”

  “Sure. I was . . .” Diane took a breath. “I was all caught up in my thoughts.”

  She waved her hand to indicate where her thoughts were. She laughed to indicate that she was fine and unbothered. The combination of hands and laughter indicated she was startled and uncomfortable.

  “Totally get it. Cool.”

  “I am sorry. I have to go. I hope the tear I gave you is working out okay.”

  “Yeah. The tear. It’s great. I’m sure it’ll fly off the shelf real soon. Always a demand for tears.”

  “How’s your mother?”

  Jackie gave her a hard look.

  “What do you know about my mother?”

  Diane frowned with her whole face.

  “What?” she said.

  The conversation went wrong from there. Jackie felt Diane hiding something from her. It felt like everyone was hiding something from Jackie, the whole world a game of hide-and-seek she had never consented to play. She gave up on the conversation and turned back to the coffee.

  Diane smiled, but only with her mouth.

  “I’ll be seeing you, Jackie.”

  “I’m completely visible.” Jackie thought this was a pretty good joke, but Diane didn’t laugh.

  Jackie’s coffee had arrived in a mug with the logo of a strangely proportioned giant of a man leering out at the world. Underneath it was a phrase that had been vandalized by some sharp object, chipping most of it away and leaving only

  CALL 4 6 TO M E.

  The mug had a smudge where blood had been incompletely wiped off.

  She sipped and she waited. She waited and she sipped. The act of sipping was an act of waiting. Sometimes she didn’t even put the coffee in her mouth, only held her lips to the rim and then put the mug back down.

  The woman with the clipboard was there as usual, and each time that Jackie took a sip the woman would write something down. She appeared to be working with a woman with an earpiece standing outside, as she would occasionally wave wildly to her, and the other woman would wave wildly back, and then they would quickly and nonchalantly look away, loudly whistling and saying, “I don’t know that person. If you asked me to define a stranger, I’d say that lady. Couldn’t know her less.”

  Jackie looked back at the kitchen, and there was the man again: blond, handsome in all of the expected ways (and in this way not handsome), staring at her and flipping endless amounts of burgers into the air, a fountain of burgers with a meat-splash pattern in a five-foot radius around him.

  She hopped up from the stool. The woman with the clipboard started writing frantically on the clipboard, and Laura said, “Hey, Jackie, where you going?” but couldn’t get up because her branches were caught in the ice cream freezer door.

  Jackie ran to the back, where the steel swinging doors of the kitchen were. She slammed through them into a kitchen with no one in it. All the burgers were still there, evidence of the man’s recent existence.

  She walked slowly past the prep table, stopping to look under it, where the pans and plates were stored. No one.

  There was no back door that she could see. He had to be in here.

  A soft clank. Some hanging spatulas moving. She crept toward them, looking around at the large dishwashing sink and the cold storage room.

  The cold storage room. A heavy magnetized door. Was it slightly ajar?

  She reached out her hand, slowly, so slowly. Fingers
around the handle. The kitchen was empty and silent. No one out in the diner seemed to be watching. Even the woman with the clipboard had returned to her usual business of marking off new entrances. She was alone and no one would help her if anything went wrong.

  “Story of my life,” she said, and flung open the magnetized door. Shelves of meat and produce, nothing else. There was nowhere she could see to hide.

  A crash from behind her. The blond man pushed away the pile of plates he had been hiding behind in a shout of broken ceramics. She tore after him, and they both slammed through the steel swinging doors. She was just behind him as they weaved through tables and surprised customers.

  The clipboard woman was adding something up on her clipboard, mouthing the equations as she went, apparently uninterested in the chase.

  Jackie sprinted through the diner as quickly as a person can sprint after a stranger through a diner, which was not quickly at all. The blond man burst out the front door and Jackie was moments behind him. She was younger and she was faster and she would catch him. Her feet slapped hard on the asphalt, so hot in the midday sun that she could feel the heat through the soles of her shoes.

  “I’ve got you,” she shouted, before she had him.

  “Troy!” Diane shouted, running from her car. “Troy, I need to talk to you.”

  The blond man broke right, toward the road and the abandoned gas station across the street.

  Diane and Jackie both turned to follow, and collided with each other. Subsequently they both collided with the ground.

  “Goddammit!” Jackie shouted into the blacktop, a long red scratch on her face. Diane had the makings of a bruise on her thigh but didn’t know it yet. They both looked toward the gas station, but the man was gone.

  “Goddammit!” Jackie repeated with her mouth. “Goddammit!” she repeated over and over with her palm onto the asphalt.

  Diane glared at her, rubbing her leg.

  “Why were you chasing Troy?” she asked.

  Jackie glared at her. Diane Crayton, John had said. Diane was involved, and didn’t this prove it?

  “Why was I chasing him? Why do you have that paper?”

  Diane didn’t understand what that question had to do with anything that had just happened. Jackie looked back at the gas station.

  “I almost had him, Diane. That weird dude.”

  “You almost had him? What did ‘that weird dude’ do to you, Jackie?”

  Jackie tried to come up with an explanation as to why her actions made sense. Her head hurt. “He just stares and smiles. What’s his deal? I mean . . .”

  “Maybe you’re too young to understand this, but you don’t just run after people because you want to know what their deal is.”

  Diane had slipped into didactic mom voice without meaning to, and they both heard it.

  “Ah, so the mature approach is to body-tackle people in parking lots. Awesome. I’m sure when I’m as old as you I’ll remember that.”

  Diane sighed and stood up, seeing if her body could still do that. She looked the teenager up and down.

  “If you want to be treated as an adult, Jackie, you have to act like it.”

  In her head, Jackie heard the voice of her ex-friend Noelle Connolly, brimming with parental condescension: Oh, Jackie, did you ever think of just turning twenty?

  “Screw you,” she said.

  “Oh, good. That’s good.”

  Diane turned and walked back to her car. Jackie walked after her.

  “Hey, where do you think you’re going? How do you know that guy? How did you know his name was Troy? Like, seriously, what’s his deal?”

  Diane collected herself and spoke with only a mild tremble.

  “This is none of your business. Troy is someone from my past, and I’m trying to talk to him so that things will be right with my son. My son, who is the only child I am interested in raising right now. You’ll have to find someone else to do that for you.”

  She slammed herself into her car. Jackie made a gesture through the window that succinctly responded to many of the points made. Diane shrugged and reversed the car out of the spot.

  “I’m finding out who that guy is and what you have to do with him,” Jackie shouted after her. “I’m getting to the goddamn bottom of this. You just stay out of my way while I do.”

  Diane responded with acceleration. Jackie threw the paper after her.

  “Screw you,” Jackie said.

  “KING CITY,” the paper said, back in her hand.

  “She has no idea what she’s talking about,” Diane and Jackie said simultaneously and separately, but about this they both had their doubts.

  23

  Sitting in her car, which sat in front of her house, which was not thinking anything at the time, Diane took out her phone and the paper that Evan had written on.

  Diane did not remember much from her meeting with Evan at the diner. But she did remember he had texted her. She had also taken photos of him. She had also asked him to write down his name.

  She remembered Jackie chasing after Troy. Diane, thinking of this moment, rubbed the burn marks on her left forearm. Why was Jackie looking for Troy? There was a great pit of the unknown under the rickety bridge of her and Josh’s relationship, and every time she looked down the pit was deeper than before. She felt annoyed with Jackie but furious with Troy. Another young person caught in the wake he was creating as he moved lightly through his careless, carefree life.

  She looked at the piece of paper. It said “KING CITY,” and on the back it had Evan’s name. His name was not Evan. She looked at the name on the page and said it aloud. She said it again, and then put the paper down.

  “Evan McIntyre,” she said aloud, and shrugged. “That’s just what it’s going to be then.”

  Diane opened her photos and looked at one of the pictures she’d taken of Evan at the diner. He was wearing a tan jacket. She stared at the picture, then closed her eyes, hoping to burn the image into her mind, or onto the backs of her retinas, or into the mystic cloud of the collective unconscious, whatever it is that makes us remember images. She was no scientist.

  She muttered his name with her eyes shut, trying to hold on to the image of him. His eyes, nose, mouth, hairline. Nothing. She looked back at the photo. She took in his lips, and thought about the many adjectives that could be used to describe them. Then she looked at his nose, and took in the adjectives that could be used to describe it.

  Upon staring at the nose, she forgot those adjectives she thought about the lips. She looked back at the lips and forgot the nose. She never even got to the ears.

  Diane searched her text history and tried texting Evan back. Another way to remember someone is to create more memories with that person. The more there is to forget, the longer forgetting takes.

  She typed: “Hey, good talking to you the other night. Let’s do it again.”

  It sounded like a date. She deleted the text without sending.

  A horsefly sitting on the right rear headrest flew to the left rear headrest.

  Diane saw it do this.

  She wrote a different text: “Evan, I can’t remember what we talked about. Can you come back?”

  She hit send.

  Her thumb seized up in a sharp moment of pain. She didn’t cry out, just winced. Her text remained unsent. She tried again. Another sharp pain, almost to the bone. A small bead of blood ballooned on the middle of her right thumb.

  This is a common feature on smart phones. If a person is unreachable by text or if the underground government agencies that control the phone companies don’t want a person to be reachable, the phone is allowed to cause mild physical harm. She put the thumb to her mouth to clean it off.

  The day before, the phone had caught fire while she tried to call him. She smelled burnt hair most of the morning, and had to stop by the drugstore to get calamine lotion for the top of her ear and then stop by a garden nursery and place the side of her head onto aerated topsoil for fifteen minutes, per her doctor
’s orders. She didn’t know why the doctor would tell her to do that, but no one knows why doctors do anything they do. Doctors are mysterious creatures.

  Diane looked at the horsefly on the left rear headrest through the rearview mirror. She stared at the fly. She could feel the fly staring back. It shuffled its half dozen legs. It moved a little left, a little right. It stood tiny and alone in the middle of what was, to it, a vast cloth field. There was no place to hide.

  “I see you,” she said.

  “It’s not what you think,” the horsefly said.

  “What do I think?”

  “You think I’m spying.”

  “Yes, I do. And what is it you are doing instead, Josh?”

  He flew to the front of the car and landed on the dashboard.

  “I wanted to hop a ride with you.”

  “I’m going to work.”

  “Then I’ll just fly.”

  “You will do no such thing. You walk or ride. You are not to fly outside until you are eighteen. It’s dangerous.”

  The horsefly moped.

  “Josh, you can’t hide in my car. How am I supposed to trust you if I can’t trust that my private space is private?”

  “I didn’t think you’d see me.”

  “That’s the trust thing I’m talking about.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Despite the fact that horseflies are incapable of dropping their heads in a gesture of penitence and submission, and despite the fact that, even if they could do this, it would be so subtle as to be unnoticeable by human eyes, she heard this action in Josh’s voice. She didn’t need to see her son in human form to understand his physical language. Even when Josh took the form of a sentient patch of haze (he rarely did, only once or twice after watching a scary movie, when he had felt that, if he had no physical form, no monsters or ghosts could get him), she could still tell when he was rolling his eyes or slumping or smirking or not paying attention.

  “I can always see you, Josh. I’m your mom. You could be anything, and I would know it was you.”