by Joseph Fink
There was a Troy who drove a taxi.
Do some of them live together? Are they working on a single plan? Were they artificially created by the government?
Too much thinking, she was feeling nauseous. She wrote a note about the lunchtime crowd in the street (“it’s lunchtime. there’s a crowd in the street.”).
Troy was eating at his desk today. Salad. He did nothing unusual with the salad. He ate it. She watched him eat it from her car. No one cared about a woman staring through binoculars from a parked car. It was a common sight. There were three other cars with binoculared, watching women just on that block, and that was light by Night Vale standards.
She hadn’t been able to get Troy to stop and talk to her. They always avoided her, most not with the same sprinting desperation as the Troy who worked at the Moonlite All-Nite, but with the same result. Not a single Troy would get close enough for her to ask questions. She had even tried making an appointment with the therapist Troy, but when the time had come a short, balding man in a vest had been sitting across from her instead.
“I’m afraid there’s been an illness going around,” he said. “He’s asked me to cover his clients for a bit. Now tell me, what do you remember, specifically, about your childhood?”
She had gotten up and walked out without saying a word. She would stay focused. No matter what Diane had said, she was old enough to concentrate and do this. It was probably better that she was young. Her body was stronger and faster, her mind was more open. Youth was better than age. It was good that she had been young for so long.
The next day the Troy therapist had been back at work, no sign of an illness. But Jackie knew that, if she burst into the building, the balding man would be back, asking her about her childhood.
There was a Troy who lived in an apartment building near the community radio station.
There was a Troy who lived in the housing development of Coyote Corners and collected windowsill cacti.
There was a Troy who simply vanished for long periods of time, and so she wasn’t sure where he lived. That was the Troy who did lawn care and gardening.
She made notes and intentionally breathed. Troy ate his salad.
“Eating salad,” her notes said. “Still eating it.”
One of the notes was a doodle of a cat. She didn’t know how to be an investigator. All she had ever known how to do was run a pawnshop. She looked up, and stopped writing in her journal.
Troy wasn’t eating salad anymore. He was talking to someone. Or he was turning away and shaking his head while someone was trying to talk to him. She couldn’t see who it was. Troy got up, tossed the rest of his salad in the trash, and walked quickly out of the bank, still shaking his head. Jackie got out of her car to follow, but stopped when she saw Diane approaching Troy on the sidewalk. Of course Diane was here. Who else could it have been?
She watched Diane follow Troy until they turned a corner and were gone. She threw down her notebook and swore. A man in a suit seated on a folding chair next to her car and making notes on her every action winced.
“Relax, man,” she said, and then cursed again, deliberately, louder than before.
There was a Troy who knew what all this was about.
There was a Troy whose actions had somehow led to the end of the routine that sustained her.
There was a Troy watching her, and now she would watch him until he slipped up, until some part of the mystery was revealed to her, until she understood.
When she came the next day to watch the Troy who worked at the bank, he wasn’t there. She went in and asked. The woman at the teller’s desk stopped chanting, “And thus the world falls,” from a book bound in strange leather long enough to tell her that he had resigned last night without giving a reason. But Jackie knew the reason. Another lead lost to Diane.
There was a Troy. There was a bunch of them. And one of them would answer to her eventually.
THE VOICE OF NIGHT VALE
CECIL: . . . I couldn’t taste anything at all for weeks afterwards. No one does a dinner party like Earl Harlan.
Folks, I’m pretty excited about this next bit of news. The staff of local advocacy group Citizens for a Blood Space War have put together Night Vale’s first ever flea market. This Friday at the Rec Center, craftspeople, artisans, antique trainers and breeders, and cold patches of air indicating the likely presence of a ghost will bring their wares to town.
The Last Bank of Night Vale will be the title sponsor of the flea market. There will be plenty of free parking and helicopters monitoring all shoppers from above. The Last Bank Flea Market will also bring in food from some of Night Vale’s most popular eateries, like Big Rico’s Pizza, Pieces o’ Glass, Shame, Tourniquet, and Pinkberry. Admission is five dollars and supports our local charity Citizens for a Blood Space War.
The Last Bank of Night Vale will also be offering no-fee checking accounts to those looking to follow local laws, which were recently changed to require every single person to have a checking account at the Last Bank of Night Vale. You can bank wherever you like, as long as you bank at the Last Bank of Night Vale.
The City Council would like to remind all citizens to please use proper methods for organizing regular trash and recycling. For instance, recycling must be divided into paper, plastic, feathers, teeth, and glass, each in a color-coded bag. Also, regular trash pickup is every Tuesday and Friday morning, whereas recycling is taken from your home at unannounced intervals. You will know recycling has been picked up because your recycling bags will be gone and there will be a large, reddish brown smear across your front door roughly in the shape of an X. Or maybe it’s a cross. It’s not clear in the brochure I’ve been handed, which has no words, only dark black-and-white photographs of angled shadows along brick walls. I mean, municipal one-sheets are kind of useless, but this one is at least haunting.
And now let’s have a look at traffic.
There is a man with a gray pin-striped suit and without a job. He is sitting on the hood of his nice car, looking at other cars as they go places. He is not going anywhere. He knows that now.
All this time he had lived for the future. The future had been the firm ground he stood on, and the present was only the slight haze in the air. But now he understood that the future was a joke without a punch line and that whatever he had in the present was what he would have always. He did not have much in the present. He had a very nice car.
He called someone. It doesn’t matter who. It was his lover. They called each other that. It was the name they preferred. It didn’t matter to them what anyone else thought of the word.
“Where are you?” his lover said. “They said you didn’t come in.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Are you okay? Are you hurt? When are you coming home?”
Was he hurt? He stopped to consider this. He didn’t think so. He examined his body. He took off his suit and his silver watch, laid them in the dirt, and stood there with his phone, naked, looking at himself. No, he wasn’t hurt, he thought. Not physically.
He opened his mouth to answer, but looking up he saw something in the sky. It was a planet of awesome size, lit by no sun. An invisible titan, all thick black forests and jagged mountains and deep, turbulent oceans. It was so far away that he couldn’t be sure he was even seeing it, and yet it felt more real and present to him than the cars driving on the highway below him.
He hung up without answering, which was, in its own way, an answer. He looked up. He couldn’t see the planet anymore. He put his suit back on. He picked up his watch. It was covered in dirt. He got back in his car and drove.
This has been traffic.
And now a word from our sponsors. Or not now, but later. Much later. You won’t know it when it happens. It’ll be just one of many words you’ll encounter that day. But it will come leaden with unseen meaning and consequence, and it will slowly spread throughout your life, invisibly infecting every light moment with its heaviness. Our sponsors cannot be escaped. You w
ill see their word. And you will never know.
26
When the phone rang, Diane flushed.
That morning she was at work, but she was not working. She was looking up information about King City on her computer. It seemed like a normal enough place. A highway. Some restaurants. Houses. Probably filled with people who have dreams and wishes and nightmares and crippling doubt and feel things similar to or exactly like love.
Diane was making broad assumptions based on the small amount of data that was her entire life. She was lost in her research, face close to the screen.
When the phone rang, she closed her browser and opened a spreadsheet, out of instinct. Her face felt warm as she pressed her office phone to her ear.
“Can you come in here, Diane?”
“Sure, Catharine.”
“Everything okay? You sound out of breath.”
“I’m fine.” Diane remembered to exhale.
Catharine’s door was open, but Diane knocked anyway. Catharine turned around in her desk chair and cut a line through the air with her upturned palm. “Sit, please,” her hand said.
Diane sat. The tarantula was perched in Catharine’s thick, wavy hair. It wasn’t moving much. A slight stretch of a front leg every so often. Catharine, from time to time, would scratch the side of her head with a letter opener. The tarantula would change position by an inch or so to avoid being hit.
Catharine had felt her scalp itch all morning. She thought about the qualities of various shampoos, whether she was using the correct brand. She thought about the dry air here in the southwest desert. She did not think about the tarantula hanging from her hair, because she did not know about the tarantula hanging from her hair. Had she known at all that there was a tarantula in her hair, Catharine might have behaved in a surprising and unsafe manner.
The tarantula had no idea where it was or what was happening. It felt movement from time to time, and it would, in turn, move carefully to accommodate for a possible predator or a possible prey. The tarantula knew about hunger and gravity.
“Diane, I’m troubled by something,” Catharine said. “Someone was in my office the other night. I’m not accusing you of snooping around in my office the other night after work, but what were you doing snooping around in my office the other night after work?”
She slapped the desk with her palm, and Diane jumped. The tarantula did not react visibly.
Diane regularly lectured Josh about trust, and now she had violated her boss’s trust in much the same way. Just be honest, she told herself. Be honest and accept the consequences.
“I might have looked in here, yes,” she said.
“You might have looked in here.”
“Yes.”
Catharine sighed and put her hands together. At that moment the tarantula put its front legs together, but the timing was coincidental.
“Why might you have looked in here, Diane?”
Diane started to talk about Evan McIntyre, but Catharine waved her words away.
“Entering my office without my permission was inappropriate behavior. We can agree on that, right?”
Diane hated this. She hated being talked to in the way she talked to Josh. Except she was right when she talked that way to Josh. And Catharine was right in what she was saying now. But still it was awful to receive. She understood how Josh felt being talked to like this, whether the reasons were good or not.
“Yes. I’m sorry, Catharine.”
“We can’t have people behaving inappropriately. The office is not a place for inappropriate behavior. This is a place for appropriate behavior, right?”
She was right, and Diane told her so.
“Diane, I need you to leave the office. You’re not fired or anything. We never fire anyone here. Let’s call it a ‘permanent unpaid leave’ while I consult the relevant agencies.”
Diane couldn’t make herself believe what was happening, even as she completely understood it. Her life was changing, here in front of her, so casually, and in a few simple words.
“You know there are relevant agencies, yes?” said Catharine.
“Yes.”
“There are always relevant agencies.”
“I’m sorry. I just got carried away.”
“You can go now.”
Catharine scratched at her hair again. The tarantula moved again.
Diane stood up, still staring down.
“I’m sorry, Catharine.”
“Close the door on the way out.”
Diane did. As the door shut, she could see Catharine scratching her head vigorously with the letter opener, her teeth gritting and neck wrinkling with tendons and veins. The tarantula—having apparently had enough—dropped down to the desk behind her.
Diane gathered up her belongings as unnoticeably as she could. She wanted to look like she was just leaving for lunch, which in one sense was all she was doing. She just was never going to come back.
It wasn’t until she was outside that the gulf of what had happened opened up inside her. She didn’t even like this job, but she didn’t dislike it. It was a large part of her life, and now that part of her life was over. She felt adrift, but also, she felt hungry. The hunger was unrelated, but it became tied up in all her other feelings.
After a quick stop to use the ATM at the Last Bank of Night Vale, Diane walked toward the Missing Frog Salad Bar. She wasn’t sure if she wanted salad or not, but they also served richer fare, like bowls of capers and orangemilk. She just needed to clear her mind, and if that meant eating something a bit heavier, so be it.
It took her a moment, but she realized that the man down the block from her was Troy, wearing a dark suit. He had a shoulder bag and a burgundy-and-silver tie, and was absently looking at his phone as he came toward her.
It made her furious, her life coming apart around her, let go from a job where she had always been quiet and responsible and respected, and her son at a distance that had never existed between them before, and here was Troy, in yet another guise, walking down the streets of her city like he belonged here. Like he had just as much right to be here as she did.
She walked faster, not sure what she was going to do next.
Just a few feet away, Troy glanced up. She could not tell if he saw her or not. His upward glance turned quickly to his watch. He stopped, and, in one complete gesture, like a short modern dance, he looked from his watch to the street signs while pivoting his body in the opposite direction, a complete movement phrase that told the story of a man who was late and accidentally walking down the wrong road.
She followed him, thinking about what she would like to do to him, and also about what she was actually going to do to him. When she had difficulty catching up to him (how fast was he walking? She was practically running now), she called out, “Troy!”
As she said this, a car revved nearby, the driver grinding the wheels over the concrete, a great screech, a tiny puff of smoke, and burning rubber stench that hid her shout.
Diane looked at the car and the dark black marks and the thin white puffs of smoke. The driver was Jackie Fierro. Of course, Jackie would be lurking, always watching. Jackie was swearing, and looking past Diane down the street.
When Diane looked back to where Jackie was looking, Troy was already lost in the lunch crowd.
And it was at that moment that she knew there was only one other possible option. She needed information, and she couldn’t use the resources at work anymore (there was that shame shuddering through her again).
It was time to go to the library. The library would have records on Troy Walsh.
Diane had survived librarians before. She and Josh had gone on many quests to the Night Vale Public Library, as well as the less treacherous, but still life-threatening, libraries at Josh’s schools.
She drove home and grabbed the things she would need to check out a book: strong rope and a grappling hook, a compass, a flare gun, matches and a can of hair spray, a sharpened wooden spear, and, of course, her library card. Sh
e couldn’t remember exactly, but she made a silent prayer that she had no outstanding fines.
She put on all blue clothing. (It was widely known that librarians could not see the color blue. This was probably just an urban legend, but Diane was willing to do anything to put the odds more in her favor.)
On her bed she spread out four different maps of the library. She noted the inconsistencies in each map, trying to determine which paths were truth and which were certain death. All four maps indicated that the European history section was located on the second floor, northeast corner, but Diane knew this to be untrue, as there has only ever been one book of European history ever written, and it was a pamphlet about the small country of Svitz and it had been lost to a fire during last year’s Book Cleansing Day festivities. The pamphlet was not meant to be burned, but it had a picture of a giraffe on the cover (the national tall mammal of Svitz), and the Book Cleansers mistook the giraffe for a handgun. A giraffe can look a lot like a lot of things to someone wearing a hazardous materials uniform and a welder’s mask, so the mistake was understandable.
Without that book, there couldn’t possibly be a European history section anymore. She threw the maps out as obvious forgeries. Realizing she wouldn’t know what to do with them even if they were needed, she tossed the pile of supplies and makeshift weapons as well.
She would have to go off memory and instinct. Mothers of teenagers are good in libraries. They are wise and attentive from their years of experience, and they are unrelenting and fearless because of their focus on a good education for their kids.
Before getting in her car, Diane stopped by Josh’s room. That day he was a desk lamp.
“Josh, I love you. I just wanted to tell you.”
“What? Where is that coming from?” He was a vase full of sunflowers now.
“Nothing. Just saying that I love you.”
“I love you too,” he said, his petals cocked to the side in wary confusion.
“Everything’ll be fine,” she added, not knowing at all if everything would be fine.