by Joseph Fink
“That sounds like journalism, not science,” said Carlos.
“They might lead me to more information about what or who is causing these buildings to completely vanish into pits.”
“Fine, you go have conversations. I’ll be here doing science.”
She drove back out to where Larry Leroy’s home had been. The first thing she confirmed was that this pit had no worms in it. No signs of life anywhere in or around it. Only garbage. Past-due electric bills. Empty cereal boxes. A lot of empty cereal boxes, with shapes missing from them. She examined a box of Flakey O’s, and traced the outline of an arm and head that had been cut out of it. Interesting. There was a larger cardboard box nearby, and she checked to see what shapes had been made from it, but there were no cuts. Instead, flipping the box over, she found she was looking into a little world. It was a diorama depicting the famous ending of The Wizard of Oz, in which a crying Dorothy floated over Kansas in a war balloon, firebombing it into a sterile wasteland. It was one of the most famous scenes in children’s literature, and this diorama brought out the natural drama of it. Here was Auntie Em, fleeing from the inferno, carting an unconscious Uncle Henry on her back. Here was Dorothy, head bowed, lips just parted. Nilanjana could almost hear her whispering her famous line: “There’s no longer a place like home. There’s no longer a place like home.”
It was a stunning work of art, and made from the most simple of materials. She hadn’t thought much of Larry Leroy, except that he was a man who disappeared into a pit, but the revelation that within his quiet life he was incubating a work with as much technique and power as this stunned her. There are moments in life in which it is made clear to us how vastly we have misunderstood.
She combed the surrounding area, but couldn’t find any more works of art. Instead she found torn envelopes, all of them addressed to Larry Leroy, Out on the Edge of Town, with a return address of City Hall. She couldn’t find any of the letters that had once been in them. What was Larry’s correspondence with city government?
As she wondered this, she realized she was being watched. Not by the Secret Police or its helicopters. Not by the black sedan with agents from some vague, yet menacing, government agency taking zoom-lens photos of her and writing down cryptic notes about her movements. Something far stranger than that. A tall, black being, with many eyes and almost as many wings, watching her from the yard of Old Woman Josie’s house down the street.
It was an actual angel. This angel, like all angels, was named Erika, and they were staring directly at the sun.
“Does it seem different today?” they called out. Nilanjana walked toward them.
“The sun?”
“Yes.”
Nilanjana squinted near it.
“Maybe a little brighter today?” she offered.
“Hm,” said Erika. They turned their face down toward her. She smelled something like an enormous heap of pea shoots lit on fire. Green things and ash.
“Larry was a decent neighbor,” the angel said. “He acknowledged my existence, which was nice. Most people won’t say aloud that angels exist. It’s a kind of assault, this constant insistence that we can’t be publicly acknowledged. Sometimes an act as simple as a person recognizing you, your bulk, the tangibility of your skin. That can mean everything.”
“I can see that,” Nilanjana said, although she couldn’t really. She understood feeling like an outsider, that made total sense to her, but she couldn’t feel what it was like to not have your bodily existence accounted for. She understood drowning, theoretically, but still she took each breath with thoughtless ease. “Do you know what happened to Larry?”
“What happens to us all? We disappear, eventually. Some of us disappear slowly. Larry disappeared quickly. The result is the same. It’s a shame he couldn’t leave behind his art.”
“I found one of his dioramas. It’s beautiful.”
“The dioramas were only models for what he really wanted to do. Full-size sculptures throughout Night Vale. Commemorating great literature and important historic events. He spent years arguing with the city. But the City Council believes that art is dangerous to public health, since it might be seen or, even worse, understood. Imagine a child trying to look at or understand art. In this case I do side with the City Council. We need to protect people.”
“Would the city have wanted to get rid of him?”
Erika studied her. They blinked several of their eyes in a slow, intentional rhythm, while maintaining an unblinking gaze with several of their other eyes. The effect was disconcerting.
“Not for making art. Maybe for acknowledging my existence. I don’t know.”
“What about the Joyous Congregation of the Smiling God? You’re an . . . uh . . . you’re an angel.” Alarms went off around the neighborhood, letting the city know that someone had acknowledged an angel. “Do you know much about the church? Was Larry a member?”
Erika laughed. It sounded like a fistful of sand thrown at a hardwood floor. “Just because I’m an angel doesn’t mean I have a religious studies degree. We don’t have angel meetings to discuss who goes to what church. We’re just angels.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“He wasn’t a member of any church,” Erika said. “I don’t think he ever talked to anyone from the congregation. Good luck on your inquiry, Nilanjana.”
“Thanks.”
“Hey,” they said. “Do you have a few bucks? Just a few dollars?”
“Not on me right now.”
“Dang,” the angel said, and then vanished with a loud crack.
What a strange creature, thought Nilanjana. She put her hands in her pockets as she turned to leave, and realized she did have a loose five in her jacket that she had forgotten about.
She tracked down one of Big Rico’s cashiers who hadn’t been at work that day. Josh Crayton was a teenager, still in school, and worked a few evenings each week so he could afford things for himself, like clothes. He was a shape-shifter, and so his clothes budget was higher than most. In this particular moment, he was shaped like a meticulously carved rhinoceros horn with octopus tentacles at the bottom to provide movement.
“That’s a cool look,” she said, on sitting down with him.
“What? This?” he said, with a teenage mixture of deep insecurity draped in a fragile layer of nonchalance. “I’ve been practicing more creative looks. Trying not to get bogged down on categories like species or whatever.”
“You liked working at Big Rico’s?”
“There are worse jobs. I used to help my sister, Jackie, with her pawnshop, but she couldn’t pay me much. My mom wouldn’t let me be an intern at the radio station. She said none of those kids end up making anything of themselves. Mostly because the death rate there is high. The death rate at Big Rico’s was really low, surprisingly, given what everyone always said about Rico. I mean, it used to be low. Now it’s a lot higher, I guess.”
He seemed sad about it, but it was hard to tell. Nilanjana had no way of reading emotions on a carved rhinoceros horn.
“It’s sad,” he said, aware of the problem this shape had with communicating emotion. “Those were my friends. The day one of the worms got onto a Hawaiian pizza and Sharon and I had to go through the rest of the pizzas to check that there weren’t any other worms. We made jokes about that for weeks. I’m going to miss Sharon. It sucks.”
He shrugged. Nilanjana had never seen a horn shrug before.
“Wait,” she said. “Go back. There was a worm?”
“Huh?” he said. “Uh, yeah. Sometimes that happened.”
“There were thousands of worms in the pit where Big Rico’s disappeared. Do you know anything about them?”
“Nah,” he said. “Listen, I don’t want to talk about that. Big Rico always had a lot of secrets. Most of them we didn’t know. And given his reputation, the last thing any of us wanted to do was learn any of his secrets.”
“Do you think Rico had enemies inside the city? Did you ever get a sens
e that the City Council, or the Secret Police, were—”
“I don’t know that much. I’m sorry.” He was a human boy now, with glasses. His bottom half was still octopus tentacles. “You should talk to Rico’s brother.”
“Rico had a brother?”
“Yeah, Arnie Goldblum. The mailman. He knows way more about Big Rico than anyone in town.”
“I had no idea he and Rico were related.”
Josh squinted up at her.
“I wish I could help you more. You seem like a nice lady with good intentions. But I don’t want to get in any trouble. And I’m just a kid. I like to think I’m more than that, but sometimes I’m just a kid. I’m sorry.”
“You’ve done great,” she said. She patted his shoulder, and he lightly touched her wrist with a tentacle.
It’s hard to catch a mailman. That’s the common wisdom anyway. They’re sneaky and quick, and if you want to get your mail you need to either set a trap or hide in the bushes and have quick reflexes.
But there is another, easier way. Nilanjana decided to wait for Arnie to get off work, and then she followed his SUV back to his house.
He opened the door on her second knock, beer bottle in hand, already changed from his postal uniform into a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts, still sweating from evading people trying to catch him and force him to deliver their mail.
“Can I help you?” he said.
“Possibly,” she said. “May I come in?”
“I don’t keep the mail with me once I’m off work. Catching me here won’t count.”
“It’s not about the mail.”
He took a swig of beer, the bottle sweating in the late-afternoon heat almost as much as he was. He shrugged and wandered away from the door.
“Make yourself at home then.”
“I wanted to talk about your brother,” she said, a few minutes, one refused offer for a beer, vague but not particularly hopeful flirting on Arnie’s part, and some polite small talk, later.
Arnie let out a long breath.
“Tough time for that. Richie meant a lot to me.”
“Richie?”
“Or Rico. Sure. Changed his name. No one would buy pizza from a guy named Richie Goldblum. But Rich always had a knack at pizza. And arson. Those two combined, he had it in him to be the pizza king of Night Vale. So he changed his name. Big Rico. That was kind of a private joke. We always had this thing in our family that he was the runt, even though he and I were basically the same size.”
Arnie squinted out the window, looking not at the outside world but inward, to a distant, younger version of himself. He took a long swig of beer.
“Wasn’t a cruel thing. He was in on the joke. Called himself the runt more than anyone else did. We used to play football in the backyard, I was fifteen, he was thirteen. He would tackle me and then say, ‘How do you like getting tackled by the runt?’ Had a sense of humor about himself. But I think he also had a lot of issues with who he was. Two nerdy Jewish kids living in a town not exactly brimming with Jews. We’re born outsiders. It’s in our culture. But Richie didn’t want to be an outsider. He wanted to be the center of his community. So Richie was dead, and Big Rico was born.”
Arnie’s eyes welled, but his voice had a laconic steadiness.
“Can you tell me why there were so many worms under Big Rico’s Pizza?” Nilanjana said, as gently as she could.
“Ha! The worms.” He shook his head. “Big Rico was all about secrets. Tons of secrets, most of them useless. Most of them misdirection to keep people from noticing the biggest secret of all, himself. His own body, his culture, his personality, those were his real secrets, and so he created a cloud of conspiracies around him to distract from what people were staring literally in the face.”
“The worms were misdirection?”
“Beats me, honestly,” Arnie said. “He always kept thousands of worms in the basement. Would never tell anyone why. Not even me. Maybe it was another distraction. Or maybe he really was doing something with them. With Rico, it could have gone either way. He was a complicated guy.”
“I know he was Jewish, but did Rico have any connections with the Joyous Congregation?”
“I don’t know what that is, but as long as they didn’t owe him money or weren’t a rival pizza place, he probably got on great with them. He didn’t have an enemy in town. Or at least any enemies that lasted.”
Arnie rummaged around next to his easy chair and came up with a pile of envelopes.
“Ms. Sikdar, you seem like a nice person. I was lying before. I do keep the mail with me. Here’s your mail for the last few weeks. I’ll try to slow down when I’m coming by your place. Make it easier for you to catch me.”
“That’s kind of you,” she said. “I’m sorry to make you go over all this stuff about your brother, right after . . .”
“Nah,” he said. “It’s good. Good to know someone is looking into all this. I loved my brother.” His voice finally broke. She took his hand and he held it without meeting her eyes. “I’m going to miss him. No one made pizza like that runt Big Rico.”
Nilanjana left Arnie’s house feeling like Night Vale was a deeper, sadder town than she had given it credit for. But with all that she had learned about Larry and Big Rico, the fact remained: As far as she could tell, the victims had no connections. Which suggested that the victims were randomly chosen.
Hypothesis: There was no motive, because there was no sentience behind the attacks.
Or, far more terrifying,
Hypothesis: There was a sentient being behind the attacks, but it had no logical or consistent motive.
13
Tourniquet was the hippest foodie hot spot in Night Vale. It was neither particularly hip nor culinarily groundbreaking, but it used enough of the terms and techniques to make everyone feel gratifyingly annoyed as they tried to just order some goddamn food. Which is to say that it was the perfect date spot.
Not that this was a date. This is not a date, Nilanjana sternly reminded herself, as she entered the small reception area, where the host was required to keep his back to you, humming and pretending he didn’t notice you for a full five minutes before turning around, screaming in surprise, and running away. It was the classy details like that that made Tourniquet different. Better.
But if this wasn’t a date, then it was meeting someone for a drink, and she couldn’t remember the last time she had done that. It had been difficult, after moving, to feel comfortable in Night Vale’s dating scene, even though apps like Lurk and Void were quite popular. She had gone on a few Lurk dates, but had never been able to stumble on where they were hiding, and had found the whole process exhausting when she really wanted to get back to her experiments. A little part of her, though, felt sad that those dates didn’t work out.
So it wasn’t solely a desire for information about the church that led her to these drinks with Darryl. She liked hanging out with him. He seemed, god help her, like a cool guy, whatever that meant. But even as she kind of hated the concept, it felt true to her and she went with it.
Darryl was already at the bar, kicking his legs into the crushed red velvet paneling, and so she brushed past the host, who was still pretending she wasn’t there, and sat next to him. He did his fist in the air, circle it around thing. He had that stiff, toothy smile, which was somehow endearing on him.
“Hey. I’ve never been here. I hope it’s good. It looks good?” she said, unsure of what makes a restaurant look good.
“Yeah,” he said. He wasn’t sure, either. “Their cocktail menu is really something.”
The bartender came by. He was dressed in cool vintage clothes; a Snuggie and mesh trucker hat, just like a Prohibition-era barkeep.
“Let me know if you have any questions you need answering,” the bartender said. “About anything. They gave me near-infinite knowledge of the universe and it is shattering my mind. I’m barely hanging on.”
He gave a thin-lipped smile and went back to carving a large piece of
ice into a perfect sphere using his front teeth.
“Wow, yeah, these are really fancy,” Nilanjana said.
There was some back-and-forth about what are you having, no what are you having, I was thinking this, oh I was thinking that too, well if you’re going to have that then maybe I’ll have something else, you can try mine, oh good good.
“Have you made up your minds?” said the bartender. “Also, here’s something I know: The nearest alien civilization died a million years before humans existed. There is a planet of golden obelisks. Every few centuries, an obelisk gives and falls. It is beautiful, a forest of metal none of us will ever see.”
“Right,” she said, “I’ll have the Mulch Mojito and Darryl . . .”
“I’ll have the Sangria Manhattan. Sounds fun.”
“It is, definitely, very fun, sir,” said the bartender. “Cats hate us. They hate us so much. But they also need us. They need us more than they hate us. I’ll have those drinks right up.”
“So you’ve been in the church since you were a kid?” Nilanjana asked, once the bartender had left. It must have been at least five minutes since she had come in because the host screamed in surprise and ran away from nothing.
“Yeah, you know some of my earliest memories are in the Joyous Congregation. I feel like I was half raised by the church. My parents were good people, but good people aren’t always good parents. They were busy. Away a lot. Then when they passed, I—” He paused, staring into his folded hands. “I remember when Gordon came by the house to tell me, uh, what had happened. I wasn’t sad immediately. Sad wouldn’t come until a lot later. What I remember feeling was that there was no way to reverse this. That I had crossed a threshold and there was no way to cross back out. It was the worst feeling in the world. That was when I learned how much the community of the church matters. Someone at the church is always there for you. It’s a family. Sounds so pat, but it’s true.”