by Joseph Fink
The civilization of tiny people living below lane five of the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex did something, I’m sure, but they were too tiny to be noticed amid the action.
Which is all to say that Strex has retreated. The blood-covered office workers are gone. The old oak doors are also gone, and with them that penetrating, vicious light. We are safely in darkness again.
A very wealthy-looking and mostly nude being named Erika who introduced itself as “you know, an angel or whatever,” then wrote a check to purchase Strexcorp. While it was not technically for sale, there was no one to decline the offer, so according to American business law that’s a legal acquisition. It is not yet known what the angels will do with the vast corporation they now own.
I think . . . at last . . . we are ourselves. We are Night Vale again.
[Music starts to warp, go weird, it’s . . . triumphant? Maybe?]
Even here at the station, the office of Station Management now is just a stone slab covering a dark cave, a pulsing red glow around its edges, filling my mind with sad and monstrous visions, when I walk past that door. So it seems like our old management is back in charge. That’s . . . well, I think that’s great news, listeners.
[Music is really weird, not very triumphant at all]
It’s possible that it is instead terrifying news.
I think, I guess, we . . . won?
FACELESS OLD WOMAN: Speaking of winning . . .
CECIL: Oh, right, the election.
It looks like we didn’t quite get all the votes in yet. Let’s speed things up. Listeners, wherever you are listening to this, just follow along. When I say the name of the candidate you prefer, raise your hand. So I’ll say the name, you raise your hand, and the cameras that are everywhere in town watching your every move will count your vote. So:
Raise your hand to vote for Hiram McDaniels.
HIRAM-GRAY: Oh, I thought there would be more. Do they not like me?
HIRAM-GREEN: RAISE YOUR HANDS FOR ME OR I WILL RELIEVE YOU OF THE BURDEN OF HAVING HANDS.
CECIL: Okay, hands down. Now raise your hand for the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home.
FACELESS OLD WOMAN: I am in your home this very moment. I am, in this way, your guest. It would be rude, as a host, if you did not raise your hand for me while I was sitting right there, unseen, next to you. It might make me angry. I’ve never been angry. I wonder what I’m like when I’m angry. It will be interesting for us to find out together if you do not raise your hand for me.
CECIL: Great, hands down. I’m fairly certain that some of you voted for both, thus negating yourself. You’ll know if one of your friends did this because they will soon fade from existence. Anyway, there’s all the votes in, but of course, none of the votes matter, because the election is decided by the pulses coming from Hidden Gorge. I am being handed the results now by an election official in full uniform: plague doctor mask, off-brand snuggie, and stilts.
And the next mayor of Night Vale is . . .
HIRAM-GOLD: I thank every person who voted for me. You’re all winners in my book.
HIRAM-BLUE: We’ve recorded all of your names here in this book.
FACELESS OLD WOMAN: I just ate one of your highlighters. I’m sorry. I’m nervous. I’ll replace it with a crow’s feather just as soon as I am mayor.
CECIL: Oh. Well. It says the next mayor is Dana Cardinal.
[Beat]
HIRAM-GOLD: I’m sorry, Cecil. I don’t want to get obnoxious about this. But it’s pronounced “Hiram.” That wasn’t even close.
CECIL: I know this must be a disappointment to you both, but I’m just reading what the gorge has decreed.
FACELESS OLD WOMAN: Your former intern Dana? But she wasn’t even a candidate. And she’s so young and not ancient.
CECIL: Dana, the intern who came home, it is like I told you once. You were always important.
HIRAM-GREEN: THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. PREPARE TO BURN.
CECIL: You were always somebody. And now age has uncovered the you that always . . .
HIRAM-GREEN: GUAHHHRRHHHRHHRH.
CECIL: Hiram, please. I’m doing something right now. Was. The you that always was.
FACELESS OLD WOMAN: She can’t be mayor. She’s a murderer. She killed her own double.
HIRAM-GOLD: Well now, I don’t know if murder should necessarily disqualify someone from being . . .
HIRAM-BLUE: Irrelevant. There is a 50 percent chance that the victim was Dana original and not Dana double.
HIRAM-GOLD: Oh yeah. Thanks, Blue. Forget that other thing I was saying. She has no proof that she is not a double of herself.
CECIL: Not proof, no . . .
FACELESS OLD WOMAN: Everyone knows that a double is one of the few manifestations of reality that cannot be Night Vale mayor. I do not accept these results. I am continuing my campaign and I will make sure that Dana does not stay “mayor” for long.
HIRAM-GOLD: I find myself agreeing with the Faceless Old Woman. We will not rest until one of us is rightfully mayor.
HIRAM-GREEN: OR UNTIL NIGHT VALE BURNS TO ASH AND FUMES.
HIRAM-GOLD: Yes, Green. Exactly yes.
CECIL: I really must object to all of this.
FACELESS OLD WOMAN: Come Hiram. You and I have planning to do.
CECIL: Well, once again it’s just you and me, listeners. The bustle of the day has come and gone, and now there is the quiet night.
The universe is unraveling. It still is.
We won the day. We won the battle. We won whatever unit of measure you care to say we won. We returned to the dangerous equilibrium we had before, which we can only assume, or hope, or wish, is better. But of course we did not stop the unraveling of the universe.
The universe is not a thing that is. It is not a thing at all. It is the very action of its going. It is, in fact, its own dissolve. And our lives, the entire span of human existence going back and back and, if we’re lucky, forward and forward, that entire span is spent within the dissolve.
Look at the fleeting stars with fleeting eyes, and feel how the earth beneath you gives. It is all a temporary manifestation of particles. It is all unraveling back to particulate silence. The bustle of the human day will come and go, and then there will be the quiet night.
But how beautiful these moments within the dissolve. What a temporary perfection we can find within this passing world. Everything good ever done, everything good done today, all the good people doing it, and back and back and forward and forward, all of that beauty within a universe unraveling.
Be proud of your place in the cosmos. It is so small. And yet it is. How unlikely! How fantastic and stupid and excellent!
And . . . oh sorry. Hm . . . it looks like I have a voice mail from Carlos. He must have called during the weather. I apologize, listeners. I have to check this.
Stay tuned next for more of us and more of me, until that inevitable, distant point where I, and this, and everything, must end.
Good night, Night Vale. Good night.
PROVERB: “Wonderwall” is the only ’90s song visible from space.
DISPARITION MUSIC CORNER
THROUGHOUT THE EARLY YEARS OF DISPARITION I PERFORMED LIVE ON rare occasions, usually for very small audiences at house shows or other small events. One of these was the very first live Night Vale event in 2013, which was held in a small bar within New York’s Webster Hall as part of a quarterly salon featuring a number of comedians and musicians. The audience was around forty or fifty people, and the setup was very basic, but this first show was similar in format to what we do today: Cecil reading and acting out an episode while I accompany him with a combination of prerecorded loops and improvised live keyboard parts.
Two years or so into Night Vale’s existence, the podcast suddenly began to attract a much larger audience, and we decided this was an opportunity to put on our first “big” live show, complete with special guest actors and a full band version of Disparition. We performed it at Roulette in d
owntown Brooklyn, for an audience of four hundred people or so, which was at the time the largest audience I’d ever performed original music for. I chose several Disparition pieces which had been used frequently in the podcast, and wrote new arrangements of them for guitar, violin, viola, and cello. Joining us as a musical guest at this show was Seattle-based troubadour Jason Webley, whom I had never met, let alone played music with. Nevertheless, we conspired over e-mail to do a cover version of Joseph Fink’s song “These and More Than These” at the end of the show as a special surprise for him. We had no time to rehearse it prior to the show, but we managed to pull it off, if in perhaps a somewhat chaotic style. Later, Jason would end up touring with us in the US and UK, and remains a good friend of the show.
Beginning in the spring of 2015, Night Vale began to expand its touring operations and I started touring with the show full time, not only providing a live score but also taking on the role of technical director, working with venue sound operators and lighting designers.
As of this writing I have performed in around a hundred live Night Vale shows and have several more shows and tours currently scheduled. We tend to tour one particular episode for a year or so, with minor variations in the script according to which guest actors are available on which different legs of a given tour. The core of my live setup is a piece of software called Ableton Live, which is a digital audio workstation known for its versatility in both composition/studio production and live performance. For Night Vale shows, I use Ableton to control different sets of simultaneous loops (basic elements of songs divided up according to roles: ambient, melodies, harmonies, drums, and percussion), which I fade in and out as appropriate during the show. On top of these loops I play improvised and composed parts with live instruments. When I first started touring with Night Vale, I exclusively used a keyboard, but I have since expanded to include the mandolin, an instrument I chose both for its stylistic adaptability and its portability (it fits in the overheard compartment on even the smallest airliners). I run them both through a number of effects in Ableton—and more recently, I’ve been experimenting with adding live shortwave radio into this mix.
It has been a joy to spend time working and living closely with the Welcome to Night Vale crew and the different guest musicians who have toured with us. It is surprising how easily we all get along, and it’s inspiring to travel with a group in which everyone is always working on something interesting and making plans for new creative projects. In fact, I began working with Joseph Fink this year on one such project, a road trip–themed horror podcast called Alice Isn’t Dead, whose story was heavily inspired by many of the experiences and atmospheres we encountered on the road. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Cranor is writing another new podcast with the music and audio production by Mary Epworth, a British psych rock musician who toured with us in 2015. I look forward to seeing what shape Welcome to Night Vale takes in the future, as we continue to develop both the podcast and live show, and to see the creative results that will arise from these other collaborations.
“THE DEBATE”
PERFORMED OCTOBER 10, 2013, AT ROULETTE, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
CAST:
Cecil Baldwin—CECIL PALMER
Kevin R. Free—KEVIN
Mark Gagliardi—JOHN PETERS, ANNOUNCER/AD
Marc Evan Jackson—MARCUS VANSTON
Hal Lublin—ERIKA 1, STEVE CARLSBERG
Jackson Publick—HIRAM MCDANIELS
Annie Savage—DIANE CRAYTON, ERIKA 2
Mara Wilson—FACELESS OLD WOMAN
IT’S GREAT BEING BOOED.
When I first received the script for “The Debate,” I saw that I was playing a couple of characters: Erika the Angel and some guy named Steve Carlsberg. At that point, I had only listened to one or two episodes of the show, and hadn’t heard Steve mentioned yet, so I had no idea who he was. All throughout the first show, leading up to my entrance I heard the audience going crazy for Cecil, going crazy for Jackson Publick, going crazy for Mara Wilson, and it made sense—they were famous people and well known within the world of the show. When I took the stage for my one line, I just wanted to make sure I gave Cecil something fun to play off of, because he had a great rant about me, after which I was supposed to exit.
I opened my mouth, said, “Hi, this is Steve Carlsberg—,” and then a wall of sound changed my life forever.
As a cast member of the Thrilling Adventure Hour, I’ve been fortunate to play in front of very generous crowds, but the wall of sound I encountered just by revealing which character I was took me completely by surprise. All of a sudden I felt like a basketball player who hit a last-second, game-winning shot. I’ll never forget that.
I thought it would be fun to play the exit like I was the most positive person on earth, almost immune to Cecil’s rancor. The audience ate it up. In between shows, Joseph casually said something to the effect of “I’m surprised that they didn’t boo you. Steve Carlsberg is generally a disliked character.”
The audience for the second performance must have heard him.
When I made my entrance and identified myself, I was met first with a raucous wall of cheers, and then a downpour of boos. It’s as if they first had to acknowledge that they were excited to see Steve Carlsberg given a voice, and then play their role of a disapproving mob. I loved every moment of it. Getting to play a character that elicits strong emotions in people is a privilege that not every actor gets. I relished the boos as much as the cheers.
Joseph and Jeffrey got me hooked on being Steve Carlsberg. I’ve had the privilege.
—Hal Lublin, Voice of Steve Carlsberg
About seven months into Night Vale’s run, Ben Acker and Ben Blacker of the Thrilling Adventure Hour reached out to us to say (1) hey like your show/good work and (2) we’ll be in New York City soon and would love to meet up. They quickly became champions of our little show and mentored us through some early stages of our show and our business.
I assume you know, but just in case you don’t, the Thrilling Adventure Hour is a live comedy—audio recordings of these shows were made into a podcast—done in the style of the Golden Age of Radio. The acting ensemble—the WorkJuice Players—features some of the funniest people in Los Angeles. They helped us get some of our first live shows on the stage at Largo at the Coronet in West Hollywood, where TAH performed and recorded for years.
When we first met the Bens in the spring of 2013, we had not really done a full-fledged live Night Vale show. Later that October, around the weekend of New York ComicCon, TAH was returning to New York Comic Con for a live show at the Bell House and to attend the convention.
Night Vale was putting on its own live show the night before Thrilling Adventure Hour’s. We asked the Bens if any of the WorkJuice folks would be interested in being in a live Night Vale show. And five of their cast showed up: Annie Savage, Marc Evan Jackson, Jackson Publick, Mark Gagliardi, and Hal Lublin.
Joseph had written the Condos live script, so I led the charge in writing The Debate. It was our first show with such a large cast (additionally, Mara Wilson and Kevin R. Free joined us that night). Plus we had no characters for any of the WorkJuice crew, so I set to work figuring out how to take a show that was mostly a Cecil monologue and turn it into a show for eight actors.
Given his incredible voice work on his hilarious Adult Swim show, The Venture Bros., Jackson was obvious to play the five-headed dragon, Hiram McDaniels. And knowing Jackson would be involved help seal the deal that there would be a Hiram vs. Faceless Old Woman (played by Mara) debate that night.
But the rest of the casting was pretty much random. And thankfully it played out the way it did. Mark has remained our John Peters (you know, the farmer?) and Hal Lublin is the only man who could have ever played Steve Carlsberg. Marc was the billionaire turned angel Marcus Vanston and Annie was excellent as Diane Crayton, who later became one of the main characters of the first Night Vale novel.
Acker and Blacker helped us out in a lot of meaningful ways our first couple of yea
rs, but getting to work with these actors has been the best gift of all.
—Jeffrey Cranor
We found a little piece of heaven here. It is black, smooth, oblong. It hums a soft, but discordant note, and we are afraid to touch it.
WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE.
Listeners, we have a first here in Night Vale: a mayoral debate! Many of you know that Mayor Pamela Winchell will be stepping down soon and that this is entirely her own decision. She issues daily press releases in shaky, uncertain handwriting explaining (emphatically) that she made this choice on her own and that no one is soul-merging with her and forcing her to leave office. Each press release is signed “Yours truly (though not me truly), Pamela . . . PS:”, and then there’s just a sticky black sludge for a PS.
And we have some new candidates for this coveted office, all of whom I am welcoming in the studio. This is a great day, the first ever mayoral debate the town has seen. Since this is America, and we are a democracy, mayors have always been chosen by counting and interpreting the loud pulses coming out of Hidden Gorge. That’s still how it will be done, but we thought we’d offer a chance for citizens to hear from the candidates they’ll have no impact on electing.
But first, this breaking news.
The City Council announced the closure of Route 800, for the following reason: deer. The City Council spoke in low singsongy chants, a steady digital bass ululation underneath their unified voice. They stood atop a makeshift pyramid built out of heavily charred copies of the official biography of Sean Penn, heroic mementos of our recent victory over the Night Vale Public Library, and announced that the deer have taught themselves advanced mathematics, telepathy, and short-range time travel.
No official word yet on what these deer have done to cause the only highway in and out of town to be shut down, but the council is asking anyone still out on the roads right now to please return home. If you are not a citizen of Night Vale but cannot currently get out of town to your home because of the road closings, then congratulations. You now live in Night Vale. Please pick up a new citizen welcome packet and mandatory orange poncho at City Hall.