by Joseph Fink
49
Diane and Jackie and Josh stood near Diane’s burgundy Ford hatchback, with its recently crumpled fender.
“Quick question,” Jackie said. “How do we get back to Night Vale?”
“Huh,” Diane answered. The three of them stood for a moment, staring at the two cars and the pile of flamingos, waiting for an idea to come to them. A voice from behind them interrupted their thought.
“Hey,” the voice said. It was the man in the tan jacket. “Troy told me that he’s leaving for good.”
“I don’t care,” Jackie said. “How do we get back?”
“That’s what I was coming to say,” he said. “It might be impossible. I’m sor——”
Jackie punched him.
The man in the tan jacket holding a deerskin suitcase fell down into a sitting position in the dirt, but said nothing. The flies did nothing.
“I’ll let you know when you’re sorry enough,” she said.
“It’s not my fault,” he said. “I just drive to where I think Night Vale is, and sometimes I get there. Sometimes I don’t. I wish I could tell you—”
“Jackie,” Diane said, “Night Vale has a way of bringing home its own. I think we could drive in any direction and still get home. We live in a weird place.”
“Man, we really do.”
“It’s superweird,” said Josh.
“The best kind of weird,” said Jackie. She waved to the mayor, who was still sitting in the dirt. “See ya.”
They got in their cars: Diane and Josh in the Ford, Jackie in the Mercedes. They would drive out the direction they had come. They would stay together, not losing sight of the other car. They would keep a plastic flamingo and a cell phone in each car, just in case.
Jackie rolled down her window and looked down at the man in the tan jacket.
“What’s the deal with the flies anyway? Why does a mayor have a briefcase full of flies?”
“You don’t make much money as mayor of a small town. I have to have a full-time job to make ends meet.”
“Fly salesman, huh?”
“Fly salesman.”
“Makes sense.”
Without breaking eye contact, Jackie gunned the engine until a fog of white smoke enveloped the fenders. There was a sharp squeal, and the smoke lifted like a slow curtain, revealing her absence.
THE VOICE OF NIGHT VALE
CECIL: . . . City Council announced today that, in addition to history, the following other things are also “bunk”: memory, timepieces, walnuts, all hawks (obviously!), most advanced mathematics (trigonometry and higher), and cats. The City Council clarified that they are not announcing this to anyone in particular, and that if anyone in particular should hear this announcement they can do with it what they will. Although they added that the only legal thing to do with it is to forget it. Forget it immediately, they repeated, swaying together and moving their digits around in a “sparkle fingers”–like motion.
Before dismissing the press conference, the City Council, looking somewhat emotionally hurt, said that it’s a nervous tick—that thing with their fingers—and that they wish people wouldn’t make fun of it by calling it “sparkle fingers.”
Oh, bad news, listeners. Our newest intern, Sheila, fell into the pit that Carlos was using to bury the dangerous plastic flamingos. Rather than touching one and reliving her life, she touched hundreds as she rolled down the side of the pit, while at the same time dying not from the length of her fall but from the subsequent change in velocity at the end of it. She awoke again as a baby in hundreds of worlds at once, all of the infant versions of herself having awareness of the gaping silence that was her one true dead self.
To the family and friends of Intern Sheila, we extend our greatest condolences. Know that she was a good and hardworking intern, and that she died doing what she loved: simultaneously living and dying in infinite, fractal defiance of linear time.
If anyone is looking for college credit or to prepare for the life-threatening dangers of a career in community radio, come on down to the station. If one of the intern shirts fits you, you’re in.
The Night Vale Council for Language Management would like to remind you of this last month’s word definition changes.
Fork now means a momentary feeling of evening as a cl[BEEEEP] passes in front of the sun.
Loss now means whatever the opposite of loss is.
Migraine now means a large scorpion perched on the back of a person’s neck where they cannot see it or feel it and would have no idea it was there if no one told them.
And of course this week’s wild-card word is brood. For the next week, it means anything you want it to mean! Which is very, very brood.
Remember that misuse of language can lead to miscommunication, and that miscommunication leads to everything that has ever happened in the whole of the world.
Larry Leroy, out on the edge of town, has announced that he has found many wonderful things in his most recent sweep of the desert. A metallic sphere that fell from the sky and whistles softly to itself as though bored. A double of himself whom he had not seen in years, and whom he growled at until the double ran away. A number of plants, all exactly where they were before, but all a little bit different, as though they were somehow alive. A rock, but he won’t tell us where. A body dressed in a gray, pin-striped suit lying sprawled on a dune. A new way of breathing that he says gives him verve and spunk. He said it just like that, punching at the air in front of him. “Verve and spunk,” he shouted. “Verve and spunk.” He seemed to have gotten off track from his original plan of listing what he had found in the desert, and ran off down the street, breathing with his new method, punching the air, and shouting, “Verve and spunk!” to passersby.
That’s it from me for now, listeners. But something in me says that this is no ending. The night outside is bright and breezy and full of dangerous secrets. There is a taste in the air like tarnished silver, like the flesh of an extinct animal now only remembered through our spinal cord and the hairs on our back.
Something in me says that this is only the start. The moment after which all other moments will come. And looking back at the point we are at now, we will know that this was before, and that all of our nows from here on out will be after. This is the only way we know time works.
Stay tuned next for the sound of a creaking spine and the soft collapse of paper onto itself. And as always, good night, Night Vale.
Good night.
50
Jackie knocked on Lucinda’s door. Diane answered.
“Come on in. You look great. How are you feeling?”
Jackie pulled her close with her completely healed left arm and let the hug go long past what is casually comfortable.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Jackie said.
“Glad you’re here too,” said Diane, through the constriction of the embrace. It seemed that Jackie had recovered her strength.
Lucinda met them in the kitchen and gave Jackie a kiss.
“It’s always wonderful to see you, dear.”
“You too, Mom.”
In the months since their cars had, only a few hours after leaving King City, rolled across the Night Vale city line, Jackie had hired Diane as a part-time bookkeeper at the pawnshop while she continued to look for a more permanent job. This had allowed Jackie some free time outside of work and given her someone to pass the time with.
She saw every day what an active mother Diane was in Josh’s life, talking regularly to and about him, helping him with school and society, allowing him to be a child and to become an adult, and this reminded Jackie to visit her own mother. Diane also often literally reminded her.
“We should stop by and visit Lucinda,” Diane would say after work.
Today all of them were at Lucinda’s house for a barbecue. There was everything you needed for a barbecue: a small plastic bucket full of mud. Everything.
“Happy birthday,” Diane said to Jackie. “Sounds like someone has decided to finally
grow older. How old are you now?”
“Twenty-one. I skipped twenty. Not everyone has to turn twenty. Don’t know when I’ll turn twenty-two. Maybe in a few years, when I’m ready. Is Troy coming?”
The Troys had settled in the barista district. It turned out that he was an excellent barista, just as he had been excellent at everything else he had done. Carlos had taken to issuing each Troy a pink flamingo, which had the double effect of removing the flamingos from Night Vale for good and taking each Troy out of his current reality and into a reality of his own, where he could be a helpful and competent individual, rather than a helpful and competent horde. It was a highly scientific solution, and Cecil would not stop talking on the radio about how brilliant it was that Carlos had thought of it. “Nothing is more attractive that someone who is good at their job,” Cecil often said.
“Josh invited him, but honestly I think even he doesn’t really want his father to come. Speaking of which, how about you and Troy?”
“There is no me and Troy,” said Jackie. “It’s too late for that. Besides. I already have a family.”
She took her mother’s arm. Lucinda laughed and patted her hand.
“That’s nice of you, dear, but I don’t mind if you want to spend a little time with Troy. Not for him—I could care less about him—but you might get something out of it.”
“Have you remembered any of your childhood?” asked Diane.
Lucinda let go of her daughter’s hand.
“No,” said Jackie. “We’re working on it, but might be it’s gone for good.”
“Even if we don’t have the then, dear, we have the now,” her mother said, biting into one of the wax avocados, as she always did when trying to process her feelings.
“You really should stop eating those, Mom,” Jackie said. “They’re not real.”
“‘Should’ and ‘will’ are different words,” said Lucinda, taking a second big bite.
Jackie shook her head and went out the sliding glass door into the backyard. Josh came barreling into her.
“Jackie!”
He was small, and round, with broad, feathered wings and wide green eyes.
“Looking good,” said Jackie. “Have you ever tried flying with those?”
“No,” he said, flapping self-consciously. “I wouldn’t know how.”
“You’ve flown as a housefly before.”
“That’s different. I don’t go high or far at all. I wouldn’t know how to fly with wings this big.”
“You won’t know until you try, man.”
“Can I help you at the pawnshop sometime? I’ve never had a job. It sounds kind of awful and kind of fun.”
“It’s exactly both,” she said. “Tell you what. If you can fly higher than the roof, I’ll let you do a shift with me tomorrow.”
Josh grinned nervously, but first he turned to Diane, who was watching the conversation unfold with something less than enthusiasm.
“Is it okay, Mom?”
“It’s okay, Josh,” she said, not sure if it was okay. She hid her anxiety behind smiling eyes.
I’ll always be a mother, she thought, but I’ll always be a lot of things. I wonder what the next of those things will be?
Josh looked back at Jackie, who nodded and gave him a thumbs-up with her empty left hand, and then he looked up at the sky. His wings worked and his body slowly lifted off the grass.
“Please try not to hit any windows, dear,” said Lucinda from her lawn chair.
“Just be careful please,” said Diane.
Josh banked around experimentally. He was a little lower than the rooftop. Diane watched him, one hand over her eyes, one over her heart.
“Watch your head,” she said, but to remind him of something he already knew, not to tell him something he didn’t.
Jackie gave him another thumbs-up, and he returned it to her. He tried a loop, and managed a wavering somersault instead.
Troy watched all this, sitting in his car just outside the house. He had both hands on the wheel and he was smiling. It was definitely a smile. He had been sitting there for a couple minutes trying to make a decision. As he watched Josh, he thought about what Jackie had said about helpfulness, and what Diane had said about his role in their lives, and he made a decision.
From where he was flying, Josh could see the other red-tiled rooftops of Sand Pit, between the identical rooftops of Palm Frond Majesty and the Weeping Miner, and other housing developments with elaborate names and houses failing to live up to them, and just down the way the strip mall with Big Rico’s Pizza and Carlos’s lab, and beyond that City Hall, draped in black velvet for the night, and a young woman walking to her car, Mayor Cardinal, yes, but also Dana again for the night, going to meet her recently cured brother for a celebratory dinner at Tourniquet, and beyond that the tall black walls of the forbidden Dog Park, and, in the parking lot of the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex, Cecil from the radio station and Carlos the scientist with bowling bags in one hand and the other’s hand in the other, strolling inside for League Night, a kiss before they opened the door and then they were gone, and beyond that the Moonlite All-Nite Diner, which, true to its name, was as busy then as it was at any other hour, with Laura offering fruit from the gnarled branches of her body and Steve Carlsberg digging heartily into a slice of invisible pie, and beyond that Diane’s old office, full of computers and tables where work could be done although no one knew why they did it, where Catharine had stayed late to finish up some work at a desk which was tarantula-free, although she still flinched at imagined light touches on her hand, and beyond that the low bulk of the public library, outwardly quiet, quietly seething with librarians, and near that his own house, which was just now thinking of him, and where a faceless old woman was secretly refolding all of his clothes, and beyond that the Night Vale Daily Journal building, whose sole occupant was considering a wall of hatchets, ready to get down to the bloody business of local journalism, and beyond that the movie theater, its blinking lights showing through the sentient haze of Stacy as she prepped the box office for the midnight movie audiences, silent customers who fade into being in their seats at exactly midnight, watching movies that play on the screen even with the projector shut off, before fading back away into nothing without even waiting for the ending credits to finish, and beyond that the hole in the vacant lot out back of the Ralphs, and the Ralphs itself, offering fresh food and low, low prices, although never at the same time, and beyond that Old Woman Josie outside her house, no paper in her hand, and Erika, and Erika, and Erika as well, all outside in the garden, and the tower of Night Vale Community Radio, blinking light atop, and Jackie’s Pawn Shop, formerly Lucinda’s Pawn Shop, a place that was just then closed, that was now closed more often than it wasn’t because its owner wanted to be somewhere else sometimes, and the windows of the hospital, doctors flitting from one to the next in an unexplained instant, and the car lot where used car salesmen loped joyfully over their car-strewn territory, barking at a moon that they did not understand but then no one else did really, and the Brown Stone Spire, ancient and humming a malevolent tone, and a cordon of helpful helicopters keeping everyone free, and out past all of that the sand, a small eternity of sand, desert like there would never be anything else, and beyond that, eventually, something else, because there is always something else, and King City, no longer forgotten, an ordinary town, with an ordinary mayor, who was just then taking off his jacket, a man in a short-sleeve shirt holding a deerskin suitcase, and stepping into his house where a family greeted him with his correct name at last, and beyond it and around it all other ordinary towns, and all ordinary people, who were sleeping or not sleeping, who were metaphorically or literally alive, or metaphorically or literally not, gone but alive in our hearts, or gone and forgotten, all existing somewhere on a spectrum of loss, and beyond them and around them the oceans and forests, momentarily teeming with life before the great planetary hush, and out beyond that a sky that was coming around slowly to th
e idea of sunset, or was, somewhere else, just having the first thought of day, and beyond that the wavering red lights of spy satellites, watching, and the steady blue lights of unidentified spacecraft, watching, and the white light of what we mistakenly assume is the moon, watching, and beyond that void, and void after that, void on and on, with a scattered vanishing of non-void mixed in, and beyond that so many mysteries that it didn’t seem to Josh that he would be able to solve even one of them, not if he had all the time in the world, and he didn’t have all the time in the world, and he would never solve even one mystery.
He looked down, past a rooftop which was way below him now, at Diane, who was laughing, with her arm around Jackie, who was laughing, hand in hand with Lucinda, who was laughing.
“Wow,” he said. “I’m higher up than I thought.”
“Nah, man,” Jackie said. “You can go way higher than that.”
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