Welcome to Night Vale

by Joseph Fink

37

  Jackie knocked on her mother’s door. After a moment, it opened.

  “Hello, dear. Come in.” Her mother turned and walked back to the kitchen, and Jackie limped after her. She tenderly sat down across from the woman she did not recognize.

  “Mom,” she tried calling her. “Mom, it’s been a rough couple days. Let’s start there. I can’t work anymore. And if I’m not working then I’m not sure who I am. Maybe that’s not healthy. Probably isn’t. But it’s all I’ve done as far back as I can remember. Which. Okay. Memory. Wanna talk about that in a moment.

  “But I’ve been trying to figure all this out. Feels like running up a slide while other people are trying to slide down it.”

  Jackie picked up one of the perfect, wax-looking apples. She sniffed it. It was real.

  “I’ve been spending some time lately with Diane Crayton. Not like that, but. You know, Diane? Does stuff with the PTA? Works at that office no one is sure what they do? Anyway, Diane and I got into this thing where we didn’t like each other. But I think I was wrong about that. I think I’m wrong about a lot of things.

  “My car got hit, and the other person just drove away. And I think that other person was Diane’s kid, who’s missing now and I sympathize with him. I do. But my body feels as wrecked as my car. I can’t move right and I feel slow and tired.

  “I understand that kid. Sometimes you need to run away. I feel bad because I said that to Diane, but it’s true. I’m sorry, Mom. You probably feel different, but I think maybe he’s right to leave. Diane cares so much for him. It’s not other people that hurt us, but what we feel about them.”

  Her mother didn’t respond. She wasn’t even looking at Jackie. Her eyes rested on the ceiling.

  “It got me thinking about what you said to me. And I don’t. I don’t remember my childhood. I don’t think I’ve ever been in this house. I don’t know who you are. I don’t remember ever being any other age than what I am now, and I don’t remember doing anything but what I’ve been doing. I’m not normal, am I? I mean, I understand that many things in Night Vale aren’t what they are in other places, but, even for Night Vale, I don’t think I’m normal.”

  Her mother took the apple from her and put it back in the bowl. She stood.

  “Let’s step out into the backyard, shall we?”

  They did. Her mother put a hand on her arm.

  “Jackie, what I want you to understand, about both me and Diane, is this. It’s not easy raising a child in Night Vale. Things go strange often. There are literal monsters here. Most towns don’t have literal monsters, I think, but we do.

  “You were my baby. But babies become children, and they go to elementary schools that indoctrinate them on how to overthrow governments, and they get interested in boys and girls, or they don’t, and anyway they change. They go to high schools, where they learn dangerous things. They grow into adults, and become dangerous things.

  “But none of that is as difficult as the main thing. We all know it, but most of you don’t spend any time thinking about the consequences of it. Time doesn’t work in Night Vale.

  “You were a child, and then you were a teenager, and then you were old enough that I thought it might be time for you to run my pawnshop for me. Just some days. Just sometimes. I could use the time off, after running it for years while also raising a child on my own.

  “I taught you how pawning an item works. ‘Pawnshops in Night Vale work like this,’ I said. I showed you the hand washing, and the chanting, and the dying for a little while, and how to write out a ticket. I showed you how to bury the doors at night so they wouldn’t get stolen. I showed you this and then you started running the shop on your own, and I was so proud.

  “But time doesn’t work in Night Vale. And so one day I woke up to find you had run that shop for decades. Centuries, even. I’m not sure. You held on to the pawnshop but let go of me. I happened to offer eleven dollars to the first customer we helped together, and in the years of being nineteen you forgot that moment between us and only retained the offer of eleven dollars as a meaningless, unchangeable ritual. People in town couldn’t remember a time when you weren’t the one running the store. But I could. Because, from my point of view, you’ve only been running it a couple months. It’s all so fresh for me. The course of your life is so linear. But meanwhile you. It had been so long for you that you’d forgotten me, and forgotten the house you moved out of last month. Your entire childhood, gone for everyone but me. All those years spent with me. All those years I gave up everything to spend with you.”

  Her mother was crying. Jackie suddenly remembered that her mother’s name was Lucinda. Lucinda was crying. Jackie was crying too, but wiping it away as quickly as it came, even now uncomfortable with the feeling of it.

  “Dear, be kind to the mothers of Night Vale. Have pity on us. It’ll be no easier for Diane. Things go strange here. Your children forget you, and the courses of their lives get frozen. Or they change shapes every day, and they think that just because they look completely different you won’t be able to recognize them. But you always will. You always know your child, even when your child doesn’t know you.

  “Maybe Josh thinks it’s right to run away. Maybe you do too. But all I know is Diane is in the same place I am. We don’t have our children. We have the faint, distorted echoes of our children that this town sent back to us.”

  Jackie took Lucinda into her arms, not sure of what she could say but sure that a gesture would say it as well as any stuttered cliché. Her mother cried, but not into Jackie, still turned away from her, and Jackie started to feel as though it was her mother comforting her. Maybe Jackie needed comfort.

  Jackie looked up, eyes bleary, to see that Troy was standing there, watching them. His face was not expressionless, but his expression conveyed little. Lucinda did not seem surprised to see him. Her expression also conveyed little. Jackie’s expression conveyed anger and confusion, mostly with her eyes and eyebrows. Troy was already gone again.

  “Who is that man, Mom? Why is he in your backyard?”

  Her mother waved in the direction where Troy had been standing like she was waving off a fly or a small surveillance drone.

  “Don’t worry about him. Come, let’s go inside. That’s just your father.”

  38

  “Troy is my father?”

  Jackie perched uneasily in her chair. Lucinda sighed.

  “Depends on what you mean by father, dear. He contributed some genetics to you, yes. Never was much good for anything else.”

  “But Troy was with Diane. He’s Josh’s father.”

  “Yes, he went on to her some time after me. He was still so young then. He’s a strange one, and I’m not sure that time works for him either.”

  Jackie leaned forward. Her mother leaned back. There was nothing aggressive or defensive about the movements, but they happened in response to each other.

  “Josh is my half-brother.”

  “I think you’ll find, dear, that relationships like that don’t come in halves. He’s not at all your brother now, but if you wanted I suppose he could be entirely your brother. It would depend on how you related to him.”

  “And Diane is sort of my stepmom?”

  “She is the mother of the person who could be your brother, if you both wanted. It sounds like maybe she’s also a friend. But that’s it.”

  Jackie opened her mouth, but Lucinda cut her off.

  “Dear, please don’t ask me why I didn’t tell you this earlier. You always do that. I’ve told you this so many times, and every time you are stunned and swear you won’t forget. But then the memory recedes for you and you don’t know me again. You can’t remember me making you lunch when you were five, or tying your shoes for you, or helping you through the awkward lessons of puberty, or even where I keep the silverware.”

  “Where is the silverware drawer?”

  “I don’t have one, dear. You knew that once. I have a silverware trapdoor. It’s under one of the hot milk drawer
s.”

  “Under the hot milk drawer.” Jackie tried to say this as though it were something she was finally remembering, and not something she had just learned.

  She thought about Diane and she thought about Josh, and Diane’s face when she found out that Josh was missing.

  Good for him, she had thought, even as she had sympathized with Diane’s pain.

  [bottomless chasm of regret and pain], she thought now, thinking back on it. Jackie loved Diane for missing Josh. She loved Diane for living her life in spite of Troy.

  She also felt more uneasy about Diane now. Was she a mother, a friend, a sister, a stranger? Jackie didn’t know how to proceed with this new knowledge.

  Diane experienced time in a normal progression. Her memories were immediate and consistent. Her actions begat reactions and consequences. She could feel the terror of loss or the fear of pain or develop complicated and loving relationships with those around her. Jackie could not. Even things that had happened moments ago would start to fade away into long-ago distance for her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and she took her mom in her arms. She held her tight, as though this would keep their experience of time from diverging. “I’m sorry I don’t remember, Mom.”

  Lucinda smiled.

  “You will age someday, dear. We all age. Some of us take longer than others. You are always nineteen now. Someday you will never be nineteen.”

  Jackie moved over to the couch to sit next to her mom. The couch was spotless. Her mother just really liked things clean.

  “I’ll remember for as long as I can,” she said.

  She hugged her mom tight, and, after a moment, her mom reciprocated.

  “I’m sorry that it was this way, Mom. Not I’m sorry like an apology. I’m sorry as in sorrow.”

  “Me too, dear. Me too so very much. Oh, I suppose you should have this.”

  She opened a drawer in the coffee table and rummaged around. Finally she pulled out an old photo. An extremely old photo, yellowing and cracked, and bending at the edges. In it, there was a man who was definitely Troy. He had his arm around a little girl.

  “That’s you and your father.”

  She handed it to Jackie, who made a strangled sound.

  “I took that when you were quite little. Before he left both of our lives.”

  “But, Mom, this photo. This photo had to have been taken at least a hundred years ago. That’s City Hall downtown, but there are dirt roads and wood cabins instead of stores, and instead of cars there are horses with huge wings. People haven’t flown wild horses in, well, in I literally don’t know how long.”

  “Well, dear, you’ve been stuck the age you are for so many decades. I took this photo just fourteen or fifteen years ago. It was a regular Polaroid then. Now look at it. It has changed to match your years, and I still remember it as it was. It’s very much like you. You should have it.”

  Jackie put the photo in her pocket. Lucinda smiled weakly.

  “It will be different from now on,” Jackie said.

  She looked earnestly at her mother.

  “I promise.”

  She looked waveringly at her mother.

  “It will.”

  She looked away.

  “The effort is what counts, dear. That’s certainly what we tell ourselves.”

  “Mom, I have to go.” Jackie grunted through the strain of lifting her injured body from the seat. “I’ll see you again soon.”

  “He’s not a bad man, your father. He’s just not a very good man either.”

  Jackie walked to the door. She felt the firm flatness of the photo in her pocket and the sharp crumpled edges of the paper in her cast.

  Lucinda sat where she had been left, but soon she would move on to other things. She would clean and read and work on the car in the garage and all the other things she did to fill her days. She had a life of her own, after all.

  39

  Steve Carlsberg left a couple of messages saying he wondered if maybe Josh’s disappearance had something to do with King City and that Steve had this great idea that Diane should go to King City and that he could drive and to call him back when she could.

  No one else had called. Diane tried saying “Secret Police” into the microphone above her fridge, but no one came.

  She went to the garage and grabbed Josh’s bike. She had never had much money, and, given the loss of her job, she thought it best to not keep getting cabs. Plus, Night Vale cabdrivers couldn’t always be relied on to pick you up or drop you off in a timely manner, as they stopped constantly to take improv classes and pottery workshops.

  Josh’s bike was dusty and the rear tire was nearly flat. He had been anxious to leave the bike behind. It was definitely a kid’s bicycle, with a thick frame and smaller wheels and brightly colored decals of scenes from Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.

  She stuck to side streets, riding slowly, with care. The trip took a little under an hour, and Diane was feeling a pulsing pain in her calf by the time she pulled up to the front of the pawnshop. There was a black sedan with tinted windows at the end of the lot—the windows cracked down enough for her to see two sunglassed agents of a vague yet menacing government agency. One of them raised her camera and tried to take a photo of Diane, but the camera flashed, only reflecting the car window back at the lens. The agent swore. Diane waved a cursory hello at them and walked into the store.

  Jackie slouched over the counter. She had her eyes closed and was breathing slowly and was inattentive to the living world around her and was deep in a complexity of vivid, nonsequential mental imagery, but she was not asleep.

  Diane put her hand on the glass counter.

  “Jackie?”

  No response.

  “Jackie.” Diane slapped the counter.

  Jackie’s eyes opened and focused on the counter. She knew that Diane was there but was too overwhelmed by the new information she had learned to care. It was an issue she was having with the world in general that day.

  “Jackie, I need your help.”

  Diane reached into her bag and pulled out a plastic bag marked “nope!”, and took out a piece of paper with “KING CITY” all over it in Josh’s handwriting. She placed it on the counter.

  Jackie winced. She batted the paper off the counter.

  “Jackie I need you to—”

  “Why did you bring that here?”

  Diane didn’t know what to say. There were a lot of reasons, but it sounded like Jackie didn’t think any of them would be good reasons.

  “This is not an arts and crafts project, Diane. I am living with this. This is real.” Jackie shook her cast, and they could both hear the rustle of paper inside. “I only just got out of the hospital.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “You don’t dress like a person and suddenly you’re twins. You don’t get the same haircut and suddenly you’re best friends. I’m not going to King City, okay? I can barely move. My mind doesn’t seem to connect the way it used to. I don’t have a car. I can’t do my job. If no one would remind me of that goddamn paper I could sit here forever and never think of it or anything else again.”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m sorry. I know this is hard for you. I know this is so painful. You’re a mother and you’re trying very hard. But I can barely hold it together to just sit here. I can’t help you. I can’t even help myself.”

  “I found that in Josh’s room.” Diane did not raise her voice. She did not flush in anger or frustration. She did not cajole or cater. She said what she knew as she knew it and hoped it would be enough. “I don’t know if it’s somehow related to Troy, but I know that Josh has gone to King City. I don’t know how I know, but I know. He’s not in Night Vale anymore. One of the last things Ev . . . um . . .”

  “Evan.”

  “Evan mentioned to me was Josh. He tried to give Josh a paper like yours. I didn’t give him the paper, but I think Josh got it. And I think Josh went to King Ci
ty.”

  Diane felt at a loss to the depth of her, an exhaustion that was not physical but that slowed her body all the same. Jackie felt the same exhaustion, her body a single, dull ache. They felt this next to each other, neither woman realizing it.

  “But everything I do circles me back to King City,” said Diane. “Every attempt I make on my own to get there fails. I don’t know what else to do. I think if we went together, I think if we worked together, then we could get there. We could make it.”

  Diane leaned across the counter, meeting Jackie in her slump, so that their faces were very close. They felt each other’s breath.

  “Jackie,” she said. “Jackie.”

  Jackie heard, but did not indicate it.

  “I pawned that tear to you all those weeks ago for a reason. And I don’t know what that reason was. Everything I do is for a reason, and I know none of them. Everything makes sense, and the sense is hidden from me. We live in a pattern that we’ll never detect, and that will shuffle us through invisible hierarchies to the actual death of us.”

  She had thought none of these thoughts before, exactly, but it was like a script before her. The sentences were obvious and immediate, and she said them as she came to know them.

  “We are together on this. And I don’t know why, and I never will, and we just are. Jackie?”

  “Yeah, Diane?”

  “I’m sorry I do such a bad job of expressing it, but I respect you a lot. There’s no one I trust more to help me find my son than you. There’s no one, okay?”

  Diane felt warm around her eyes.

  Jackie shrugged. “I feel bad for you, man, I do. I’ve learned some things today that I didn’t remember before. I wish I could help you. But I hurt all over. I’m slouching onto my bones.”

  “I can’t heal you. You’re going to hurt, hurt bad, either way. But I think if you come with me, we can find answers, Jackie. We made it out of the library together. We work well together, for whatever reason. I’m not asking you to . . . I’m just asking . . . I just want us to try.”

  She drew her hands together in front of her chest like a person in prayer. Jackie considered this woman, the mother of what could one day be her brother. She thought of what Lucinda said about being a mother, slowly losing a child.