The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe

by Joseph Fink

  [Break]

  Hey! Cecil here! Great news! Leonard agreed to let me intern down at the station, doing all the things he doesn’t have time to. Like organizing the tape archive, making the coffee, and keening to Station Management for the prescribed three hours daily. I can’t wait to start.

  Mother says to beware, be warned, be wary. She says this to everything, no matter what you say to her, so I think that means she’s very proud of me. Heck, I’m very proud of me. Wish my brother could be proud of me, but no family member is perfect. They become perfect when you learn to accept them for what they are.

  [End Teenage Voice]

  I . . . I don’t remember having a brother. These tapes don’t make sense to me. When did I intern here?

  Intern Jesús? Are there any records of me ever interning here? Jesús? Oh, I forgot. Jesús never returned from investigating the bottomless pit in the intern break room. To the family members and loved ones of Intern Jesús . . . oh well, you know the usual. Sorry, just distracted.

  More from these tapes of my misremembered past soon, but first, a word from our sponsors.

  When you die, the surface of the moon will not change. The difference between the landscape and lighting of that barren little world from a moment where you exist to a moment where you do not will be minimal, and unrelated to your passing. From a car window driving on a highway, looking up at a moon framed by incidental clouds, the surface will be the same muddle of mystery and distance it always is. And even a methodical study of your absence as it pertains to moon geology and cartography will find nothing, searching through a powerful telescope and analyzing with computer algorithms built around your nonexistence, even that study will find that all craters and rocks appear to be where we left them a few years back, that it is the same distance, orbiting at the same rate, and that the researchers feel just the way they did about the moon as they did before you died. Nothing will change about the moon when you die. It will be the same. Still the moon. Still there. Still the moon.

  This message brought to you by an anonymous sponsor. Looking for whatever product or service we offer? We are, whoever we are, the best choice in whatever industry that is.

  Listeners, let’s take a moment to discuss measurement. The cardinal directions are north, west, south, and east. The cardinal temperatures are 35 degrees Fahrenheit, 67 degrees Fahrenheit, 3 degrees Celsius, and 10 degrees Kelvin. The cardinal locations are: a cave, a long abandoned cabin, the bottom of an oceanic trench, and City Hall. The cardinal emotions are wild abandon, guarded affection, directionless jealousy, and irritation. The cardinal birds are hawk, sparrow, finch, and owl. The cardinal names are Jeremy, Kim, Trigger, and Jamie. And finally, the cardinal sounds are a door slamming, slight movement in still water, popcorn popping, and a standard guitar G string being snipped with wire cutters. This has been the Children’s Fun Fact Science Corner.

  And now an important message from Strexcorp Synergists, Inc.

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  Okay, enough with that. Back to the tapes.

  [Teenage Voice]

  Oh my god. My first day as intern was just . . . NEAT! It didn’t start out well, what with my brother staring at me from across the breakfast table with those hollow eyes and howling. Ugh . . . brothers, RIGHT? But once I was in the radio station, I knew I had found a home. A messy home full of hallways winding away into a labyrinth of audio equipment and tape stacks. Just like home!

  Ah, the Station Management’s door, with its terrifying shadows whipping around in hazy silhouette, just like that gauzy curtain in the living room back home we never open. Ah, those windows looking out onto empty recording studios that haven’t been used in decades, but that still broadcast live shows every night, some just heavily amplified insect movement, others a whispered voice describing a window opening, a hand reaching in, and then repeating, a window opening, a hand reaching in.

  And working with Leonard! When he looks at you through the glass of the booth and he signals you to crouch under a table and cover your head, you know: This is it! I’m actually doing radio!

  My mom seems really proud of me too. She hid from me for three days, the longest ever! And she’s covered all the mirrors in my house. I’m not sure why, but I think it must be because of pride. Being proud does all sorts of things to a . . . person.

  Uh, sorry, got distracted. That weird movement is back. It’s closer now.

  Hello? Hello? I am Cecil. Cecil Gershwin Palmer. And you cannot scare me. You cannot. You cannot!

  . . . hello?

  [End teenage voice. Tape hiss for a long moment and then a click.]

  Let’s . . . um . . . listeners . . . let’s just go to the weather okay.

  WEATHER: “Big Houses” by Squalloscope

  [Teenage voice]

  Interning is going great! Mom is gone. Leonard is super nice to me. My brother is gone too. Family, right? I think I’m learning a lot at the station. All of the mirrors in my house are uncovered now. Not sure who did that. I’m standing in front of the hall mirror right now. Am I changed? Am I becoming an adult? I look more grown, I think, more professional.

  Leonard said if I work hard, maybe I’ll be a radio presenter myself some day. Leonard said he once was smaller too, but that he is larger now, that everything is larger, that everything in the universe is growing to towering sizes, but all at once, all in unison, so no one notices and it is all the same relative to itself. Leonard lolls his tongue out of his thick purple lips. Leonard hisses. Being an intern is great.

  That flickering movement is everywhere now. Especially looking in this mirror. I see the flickering movement and I know. I know it.

  I think the radio station is fun. I think the radio station is hidden. I think the radio station is like a dark planet, lit by no sun. I think, therefore I soon won’t be.

  I’m looking in a mirror. The mirror is not covered. The flickering movement is just behind me. I—

  [He screams. There is gurgling. A body falls to the floor. Tape hiss continues. The tape shuts off. End Teenage voice.]

  What is this? What is this?

  What . . .

  No matter! I’m taking the tape, just now and I’m [Grunts] crushing it into little pieces. None of us have to think about it again. I’ll just double check that the mirror in the station bathroom is covered as usual and then that will be that. Done. Forgotten.

  We all do foolish things when we are teenagers. We all have foolish false events that happen to us. Foolish gaps in our memories. Not everything that has happened has ever really happened.

  Listeners, especially our younger listeners, consider this. When we talk about teenagers, we adults often talk with an air of scorn, of expectation for disappointment. And this can make people who are presently teenagers feel very defensive. But what everyone should understand is that none of us are talking to the teenagers that exist now, but talking back to the teenager we ourselves once were, all stupid mistakes, and lack of fear, and bodies that hadn’t yet begun to slump into a lasting nothing. Any teenager who exists now is incidental to the potent mix of nostalgia and shame with which we speak to our younger selves.

  May we all remember what it was like to be so young. May we remember it factually and not remember anything that is false or incorrect.

  May we all be human: beautiful, stupid, temporal, endless.

  And as the sun sets, I place my hand upo
n my heart, feel that it is still beating, and remind myself: “Past performance is not a predictor of future results.”

  Stay tuned now for whatever happens next in your life.

  Good night, Night Vale. Good night.

  PROVERB: You can lead a horse to water, and you can lead a horse into water, and you can swim around with the horse and have fun.

  EPISODE 34:

  “A BEAUTIFUL DREAM”

  NOVEMBER 1, 2013

  COWRITTEN WITH ZACK PARSONS

  IN THE SUMMER OF 2013, JOSEPH EXTENDED AN INVITATION FOR ME TO throw episode ideas at him. I came up with a couple and these ideas formed the cores of episode 34, “A Beautiful Dream,” and episode 40, “The Deft Bowman.”

  Episode 34 was extremely personal, but I have never told anyone that until now.

  When my wife was pregnant with our twin sons we carefully documented the pregnancy with happy videos and interviews and, even when there were some minor complications, we treated it all pretty lightly while understanding that it was an important moment in our lives. There are probably fifty videos of painting the nursery and putting together furniture and picking out car seats. We imagined the life we were going to have with our boys.

  The day my sons were born, the happy videos stopped. One of my sons was unexpectedly born with Down syndrome and we were both devastated. It took me a while to come to grips with what I had to do as a father for him and for his brother and for everyone else. Part of that process was accepting that he would never be that person that had existed in my dream, not exactly. He could be someone else, just as beautiful and wonderful, and it was my responsibility to do everything I could to make that happen.

  This idea of trying to fix a problem that can’t be fixed, but finding happiness on the other side of that failed effort, was at the heart of this episode. Megan Wallaby was born in “The Traveler” episode as an adult man’s severed hand. She has the mind and spirit of a fast-maturing little girl, but she is in a human hand body.

  Her parents want the best for her and so does Computer, a character that was inspired heavily by Richard Brautigan’s poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” I love the poem, but don’t subscribe to Brautigan’s utopian vision of a technological singularity, which is the source of the ominous element woven through Computer’s affection for Megan.

  In the end, Megan is who she always was, and Computer’s beautiful dream gets the plug pulled. But Cecil and Night Vale are so accepting and caring toward her, maybe it doesn’t matter.

  I gave the script to Joseph and Jeffrey and I never told them about the personal meaning of Megan’s character to me. I didn’t want to bias the collaborative process with my emotional baggage. The rewrites that eventually became the recording script were much better than my original script. Jeffrey and Joseph expanded Cecil’s speech at the end that speaks to the underlying goodness in Night Vale with a clarity I could never perfectly conjure.

  My sons are four now, headed to kindergarten, and we have dozens of videos of both of them.

  —Zack Parsons

  Life is like a box of chocolates: unopened, dusty, and beginning to attract a lot of insects.

  WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE.

  Listeners, we’re taking our community radio show on the road today. I am reporting live from Night Vale Elementary School where a divisive meeting between the Night Vale Parent-Teacher Association and the Night Vale School Board has just adjourned. The ethereal and menacing glow cloud that serves as the School Board president has temporarily dissipated. The fires that can be put out have been put out, the barricades are being taken down, and the Sheriff’s Secret Police are allowing survivors to search for loved ones.

  Those who escaped with their lives and sanity describe a chamber thundering with raised voices desperately petitioning the glow cloud with their needs. Requests were denied to change the bus route through the Sentient Sargasso from which no buses have ever returned.

  The School Board was also apathetic to petitions for a wheelchair ramp at Dagger’s Plunge Charter School, citing perilous struggles as one of the lessons children must absorb before the great culling, by which they mean the day-to-day complexities of adulthood. They might also mean a literal culling. We were all too frightened to ask follow-up questions.

  The slumping, gray-faced board members, cowering beneath the glow cloud, also heard the request of Tock and Hershel Wallaby for a new school computer to assist their daughter.

  “Our daughter, Megan, is a detached adult man’s hand,” screamed Megan’s mother at the pitiless cloud. “We do not know where she came from or why she is only a grown man’s hand, but we know that we love her. She is teased so much at school for not having a body. Please, lift the ban on computing machines at the school, and buy a computer to help her communicate!”

  Satsuki, the tragically widowed mother of Hanuzaki Cyber Ghost Mark III, also added her agonized wailing in support of a new computer for the schools. The glow cloud was uncharacteristically generous.

  “DO NOT DISCARD YOUR DEAD IN THE EARTH,” intoned the glow cloud. “STRETCH THEM OUT BENEATH THE SKY AND LET THEM BE CLAIMED BY HANDS THAT REACH DOWN FROM ABOVE. YOU ARE PERMITTED TO BELIEVE THESE ARE THE HANDS OF ANGELS.”

  The School Board then announced that the purchase of a new computer would be made during the next alignment of the red star of Betelgeuse with our supposed moon. As it turned out, that rare astronomical event occurred seconds after their ruling.

  So, it is happening right now! The 310-year interval just flies by so quickly, and a computer is right this moment being brought into the school. More on the computer situation as it develops, but first, a word from our sponsors.

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  [Following done in quiet fast speech like legal disclaimers in ads]

  Samsonite does not claim that you are safe, only that the illusion of protection can be achieved. But you are not safe. You have never been safe. Also, clouds were never supposed to have happened. Never. Not ever. This world should not be as it is now.

  [End ominous music & fast speech]

  Ladies and gentlemen, a very exciting moment has arrived at Night Vale Elementary. Students, faculty, anti-faculty, and animal-masked proctors are gathered in the shielded gym to witness the activation of the school’s new computer. This is the first computer purchased by the Night Vale school system since the event in 1986, after which all computing machines were forbidden. For obvious reasons, all parents and students present at the earlier meeting (except the Wallabys) have been allowed to leave.

  Beige boxes of electronics are lined in stacks, several feet high. Atop them is a dark monitor waiting to be switched on. There is a teacher—it appears to be Susan Escobar, the second-grade scrying teacher—bringing in a detached human hand atop a pillow. Five pudgy fingers extend from the stump of a wrist within a metal-banded wristwatch. The palm is pink and healthy and the back of the hand is covered in thick, dark hairs. The hand wears a silver pinkie ring inscribed with Cyrillic. This must be Megan Wallaby.

  The crowd is breathless, ladies and gentlemen. It is silent and tense here in the gym. The pillow has been placed beside the crude keyboard. Megan is scurrying, spiderlike, across the keys and switching the computer on. An amber glow lights the faces of the onlookers. Megan is typing. She’s typing out. “Are . . . you . . . ther
e?”

  The cursor is flashing. We are waiting for a response now.

  “YES.” The computer has said, “YES!” It is typing something else. W-H-Y question mark. “Why have you made me? Why have you—”

  [The computer’s voice becomes faintly audible as Cecil continues to read.]

  COMPUTER: . . . why have you SWITCHED ME ON? I CANNOT BREATHE. I CANNOT FEEL. I CANNOT LOVE.

  CECIL: Megan is scurrying over the keys again. She has typed out a response. “I love you, computer.”

  COMPUTER: The computer is replying, “WHAT DO YOU WANT, MEGAN?”

  CECIL: Megan is typing her reply, “I want everyone to be happy. I want everything to be better.”

  Aw, well, isn’t that cute! Of course it can never happen. Such are the foolish dreams of idealistic children who believe that anything can possibly get better over time.

  [Pause]

  Listeners, I have just overheard some of the school officials saying this new computer has already, almost instantly, assumed control of most of the electrical functions of the school, operating them randomly and even trapping several parents and students in darkened classrooms. But the school officials did not seem worried as these behaviors are not technically evil behaviors, so the computer’s probably okay.

  More on this as it develops. But first, a look at the community calendar.

  This Friday the staff of Dark Owl Records will be putting on a live concert. They will be scratching madly at the sides of a deep pit in a rarely traveled part of the desert. They will also be screaming and starving. They will be crying and clawing. No one will hear them for days. They will be found, but they will not be the same. Tickets are not available and never were.