by Joseph Fink
“I get it,” she said. “You have to find that thing that makes you feel at home. That’s how I came to Night Vale, wanting to be a scientist, studying scientifically interesting things. I started working for Carlos, and no one else had ever nurtured what I did so completely. He loved science and discovery even more than I did. My dad was an immigrant, he wanted me to find a stable profession that would establish our family in this country. My mom loved that I was into science, but not that I didn’t want to stay in Indiana. It was hard to explain moving to Night Vale to them. I only told them that I needed to move for new opportunities, just like my dad did at my age.”
Behind the bar were shelves and shelves of liquor. She scanned the bottles, wondering how many of them were ever poured. Were there really people ordering Goldfrapp? Or Pine-Sol?
“I remember,” she said, “when I was ten, my mom took me to this astronomy convention. Sounds silly, but I had so much fun. It was when the Mars Rover landed, and they had a live feed on a big screen. The first images from Mars came back and this whole room of people started cheering. My mom and I held hands. When she was a kid, that kind of thing was still in the pages of pulp novels, and now it was actually happening, and she got to share it with her daughter.” Nilanjana smiled at the memory, and then took Darryl’s hand. “I get what you’re saying about the threshold. If I lost my parents . . . when I lose my parents, I’ll spend my life thinking of that memory, trying to understand how that moment could be right there, but always impossible for me to go back to. I’m really sorry your parents died.”
“It’s okay,” he said, squeezing her hand. “It’s been a while. It’s okay.”
“You grew up around here?” she said, trying to lighten the tone.
“Sort of. I grew up in the neighboring town of Desert Bluffs, but I think of Night Vale as home now. You?”
“I don’t think of home as a place. It’s more the ritual of my life. The work I do every day, and the things I like to eat, and where I like to eat them. That kind of thing. And that ritual exists here, so this is, I guess, home, but . . .”
“Yeah. Sometimes where you live is just a place, no matter how long you live there.”
“Right,” Nilanjana agreed, a bit surprised no one at the bar had shouted “Interloper” at her yet. “I feel like Indiana is more my home than Night Vale, even after a few years.”
“Here are your drinks,” the bartender said, having hovered over them listening intently to what they were saying for most of the conversation. Bartenders are good listeners, which is part of the appeal of bars, and also why the government started paying bartenders to report the content of these private conversations.
Darryl’s manhattan came with an ice cube engraved with his social security number. The presentation for Nilanjana’s mojito was far less flashy, although she thought it was a nice touch when the bartender sprinkled some mulch on the bartop around them. They both took sips of their drinks.
“Interesting,” she said.
“What . . . fascinating flavors,” he said.
“That would be the splash of Pine-Sol,” said the bartender. “Let me know if you need anything else.” He slipped into the back room to radio what he had heard to his government handlers.
“It tastes, like, a little sweet and little bit like fruit, right?” Nilanjana said, once he was gone.
“Right. Just kind of like fruit,” Darryl said. They sipped their disappointing drinks again, and then left them alone.
“That’s why I was so stubborn about time when you came by the store a couple years ago,” he said. “I just think, if time is weird, then my parents’ death isn’t irreversible. Nothing is. We could go backward on anything. And that’s not the case. Time moves on, whether we want it to or not.”
“I get that, but time being weird doesn’t mean anything is possible. Only that more things are.”
“Like better drinks?”
She laughed.
“Thanks again for showing me around the church. It was more enjoyable than I thought it would be. You’re a good tour guide.”
“Oh yeah, no worries, it’s nice to have someone show an interest in that, you know? Most people act like we have some kind of disease they might catch. Or like we’re going to hold you at gunpoint and make you recite our sacred scriptures. And we only do that once a year, on Gun Day, so.”
“I don’t get religion, if I’m honest.”
“You sound like you’re honest.”
“I mean for my own life. It doesn’t make sense for me, but watching you talk about it. You get so excited, and it’s easy to understand why you believe it, even if I can’t.”
He frowned. He had been pushing the church thing too hard. “You don’t have to join the Congregation, Nilanjana. I’m not trying to convince you to—”
“I’m sorry. I’m bad at this. What I’m trying to say is your positivity is attractive. You’re attractive. You looked attractive just now when you were smiling and talking. Is what I’m saying.”
“Oh, I, thanks,” he stammered. Then it occurred to him how to respond: “You are also attractive.”
His tone made it sound like false flattery, but she was starting to understand that he was sincere even when he didn’t sound it. She grinned, not at his compliment but at his sudden awkwardness. It put them on an equal plane.
“Listen,” she said, and she pulled out a PIN pad. This was a bold and sexy move.
“Oh, wow,” he said. “Um, yeah, okay.” He pulled a stack of forms out of his bag. “I don’t want you to think I was expecting anything, but I thought I’d bring these in case.”
Sex in Night Vale, like most things in Night Vale, is heavily regulated. But that doesn’t mean that people can’t have fun with it. There is something intensely flirty and erotic about the process of filling out forms in triplicate, providing a medical history, and entering one’s individual Sex PIN to verify one’s identity and interest in the forthcoming activity.
It took them a while to get all of the paperwork done, and there wasn’t much chance to talk, what with having to work through the sometimes complicated and often contradictory questions on the forms. When they were done, and the bartender, who moonlighted as a notary public, had stamped everything, they took a moment and looked at each other.
“So, yeah,” he said.
“I’m sorry, this wasn’t too soon? I don’t know how it works with your beliefs.”
“No, it’s okay. For some people, worship of the Smiling God is all about some imagined purity, but that’s never what it’s been about for me. Shall we?”
“Go to the doctor and have the blood tests done? Let’s get it over with.”
A couple hours later, having received all the necessary results, they were back at Nilanjana’s apartment. She hadn’t cleaned it before going on the date, as part of a half-baked plan to not invite him home when she really wanted to. The plan hadn’t gone well, and now she could only apologetically kick aside laundry and research papers. Being a neat person, she was annoyed at herself about the mess she had left. All he noticed about her apartment was her.
“This is a nice place, I like the, uh—” he said, and she kissed him before he could say anything else.
Sex in Night Vale has a lot more steps leading up to it than it does in many other places, but once it actually happens, it works like it does anywhere else. In this case, it worked wonderfully.
There was a moment, right in the middle, when she saw his face close to hers, sweaty, a few stray hairs from his sideburns sticking out, and she thought, How strange we are, how strange this is, but how nice, how good, but how strange.
Their bodies formed a crescent on the bed, her bed, which was pushed up against the wall in her bedroom, which was just off the living room–slash–kitchen combination of an apartment on the second floor of the Homely Prospector Apartment Complex. The complex was not within the crime-ridden science district, but near it, because Nilanjana didn’t want to have to walk home too far at night.
From her window, if either of them had been looking, they could have seen the blinking light of the broadcast tower off in the desert. From the tower, theoretically, a person could see her window, but it would just be a light among many lights. Easily lost in a universe that was full of light, and a lot of other things too.
14
The light on the tower still blinked the next morning, but it seemed feeble against the blue-white brightness of the sky. It did not have the strange divinity that it had in the darkness, blinking out from distance and from nothing. Instead, just metal struts and beams, and the dirt service road leading to the highway, leading in turn to the center of Night Vale. And near the center of Night Vale, the Moonlite All-Nite Diner, a twenty-four-hour place for food and drink and a reminder that other people are alive and exist, even in the most quiet and lonely hours of the night. Framed by the window, among the morning crowd, were a couple of people scanning the room for an open table. Not a couple by any definition except quantity, a pair with no specific affiliation except the pleasurable memory they both shared of the night before.
“Take any table you want,” said Laura, bustling by with two cups of coffee on a tray, the cups no more a couple than the people she was speaking to. Long branches sprouted from Laura, although in this season they had no leaves. For a few weeks in November she would shed leaves all over the dining room, apologizing and raking them up when she had the time.
“By the window, do you think?” Darryl said, right when Nilanjana said, “Just at the bar?” and then they both agreed with each other, and then switched back again, and after some confusion settled on a booth by the window. As they started for it, Jackie Fierro, owner of the local pawnshop came in.
“Hey, Nilanjana,” she said. “Hey . . .”
“Darryl,” he said.
“Hey, Darryl. So, breakfast, you two?” The only thing subtle about Jackie was that she didn’t give a giant wink and elbow nudge.
“Yes,” Nilanjana said, answering the implication.
“Cool, man, cool.” Jackie genuinely seemed to find it cool. “I’ve been going on some dates myself. Never went on dates before, you know?”
“Oh, we’re not,” said Darryl.
“Or whatever it is. Relax. It’s breakfast time. I find breakfast highly relaxing. Anyway, now that I’m twenty-five, I feel like dating is maybe long past due.”
“You’re twenty-five already?” said Nilanjana.
Jackie had been nineteen for a long time, decades maybe, and had recently started to age again. Time doesn’t work in Night Vale, Nilanjana thought, resisting opening that argument with Darryl again.
“Right, yeah, I skipped a few years. Felt like I had some catching up to do, and I was ready to be twenty-five.”
Darryl had no response to this contradiction to his belief that time isn’t weird. He was used to a world that contradicted his beliefs, and was comfortable operating on faith.
“That’s brave of you,” Nilanjana said. “I mean, you can’t go back, so jumping forward like that . . .”
“Can I not go back?” Jackie frowned for a moment and then shrugged. “Who wants to go back? It’s like my mom says, ‘You can’t change the past without creating a cascading series of unintended consequences.’ She says that every morning and cries.”
“Wise woman, your mom,” said Nilanjana.
“Right? I’ve been dating a particular someone. They have a job high up in city government, so we’re keeping it pretty quiet. You know how it is with any small-town government official, their life is a complex network of secrets and lies. But they’re really nice, once you get past what people think about them and anyone else that works in government.”
“That’s so wonderful,” Darryl said. “Well, we’ll leave you to breakfast.” He liked Jackie, but he was hungry enough that he liked food more in that moment.
“Sure thing,” she said. She held up her left hand for a high five and he was starting to do his rotating fist thing, but adjusted to meet her hand. She held it up for Nilanjana. “You too, dude.” Nilanjana gave it a solid slap. “All right. Well, talk to you all later.”
Jackie took a seat at the counter, and Nilanjana and Darryl sat themselves in a booth.
“I hope it’s okay I said that we’re not dating,” Darryl said. “I don’t want to make it like I’m definitely not interested. I mean we did go on a date, right?”
“Oh yeah,” Nilanjana said. “But way too early to put labels on things. Or, I guess, like in my day-to-day job I love putting labels on things. Labeling bottles, labeling beakers, my favorite thing to do is organizing and labeling. But when it comes to this, labeling is different. I mean.”
She knew they weren’t dating, and she was fine with that. In her own head she agreed fully with Darryl’s not-dating stance. They’d had drinks at a nice bar and later slept together. That’s not dating. But his saying it aloud drew attention to it.
It was like being overweight. Nilanjana was fine carrying extra weight and did not feel uncomfortable about her body for that, but when others drew attention to it, she felt like she should be different, and she was made uncomfortable.
Hypothesis: There was no need to put a label on what she and Darryl were doing.
Evidence: She felt fine.
She placed her hand on his, to show how fine she was, but also to touch his hand again. He lightly squeezed her hand. His palm was warm and dry. His eyes were on hers, not needy or searching, just glad.
Any reprise of physical longing was put on pause with a sweep of Laura’s long, bare branches. Nilanjana had to duck to avoid getting conked.
“What can I get you?” Laura asked.
“Omelet,” Darryl said, decisively. Nilanjana hadn’t even looked at the menu yet.
“Uh, do you have some sort of smoothie or something?” she said.
“We have waffles,” said Laura.
“That’s not much like a smoothie though,” Nilanjana said.
“No, I suppose not,” said Laura. She waited expectantly, her pen over a pad.
“I’ll have the waffles then, I guess,” Nilanjana said.
“Great.” Laura carefully worked her branches between the eating customers back toward the kitchen.
The momentum of their conversation disrupted, Darryl and Nilanjana sat across from each other in friendly silence. He nodded. She tapped a rhythm with her knuckles on the tabletop.
Across the room, Laura filled Jackie’s coffee cup and winked at her.
“I’ve been hearing some whispers about you and a certain Sam,” Laura said.
“Don’t believe everything that ruffles your leaves,” said Jackie, winking back, but Laura looked devastated.
“Jackie, that’s so offensive. At this time of year?” She gestured to her bare branches.
“Shit, I’m sorry, man. I wasn’t thinking. That was my bad. Yeah, me and Sam have been seeing how things are. Sorry again.”
Laura shrugged curtly and whisked her branches expertly past the stacked dishes behind the counter without bumping a single one.
“If I can ask,” Darryl said, just as Nilanjana was saying, “I don’t think I even like waffles,” and then they both said, “Oh, sorry, you go,” and then both stopped.
“No, really, please ask whatever question it was,” she said, laughing a bit at their conversational stumble. “I was just putting out words to fill up the space.”
“Okay. These last couple days have been nice. Last night was especially nice.”
She smiled out of reflex. Maybe she did want to date someone. He had kind eyes, said kind things, touched her in kind ways.
“But I was curious,” he continued. “If you definitely aren’t interested in joining the Congregation, which is fine, can you tell me more about what brought you by the church that day? I would like to be of help, if I can.”
She considered Darryl, the way his face looked in the morning light through the window, the way he threw one arm up on the back of the booth next to him, the way he cr
ossed his legs. He seemed like a man at ease, a man not hiding any other version of himself. Simply a man who was the man he was in the moment he was it.
But what did she know about him really? He belonged to an organization that she believed might be involved in terrible things, and was, a possibility she hadn’t eliminated yet, trying to keep Carlos from properly studying the nature of the other desert world, and the strange house that served as a gateway to it. And here he was in the jittery afterglow of their first night together bringing up her visit to the church.
Darryl was likable. But there is a difference between likable and good. In many ways, Nilanjana felt like one of the most important parts of growing up, and of approaching the world as an adult, was understanding the difference between likable and good, and recognizing that one often had no effect on the other.
She had no way of knowing what he wanted from her, and so the question here was how much of her life did she want to live with the comfort of trust, and how much did she want to live with the painful necessity of suspicion? This balance, she felt, was the rest of what it meant to be a grown-up. And she decided that the kind of adult she wanted to be was one that lived openly as much as possible, even if that occasionally meant being open to pain.
“It’s hard to explain,” she said.
“Reasons for coming to church often are.”
“Right, sure. I’m sure, but not like that. See it started with a laser.”
He laughed.
“Okay, you got me. That is the first time a reason for interest in our religion started that way.”
“Well, not a laser, I guess, but more a house. Wait. Let me start over.”
And she told him most everything that had led to this point. The house that doesn’t exist but looks like it exists. The desert otherworld, an empty place that could be reached through the house. Carlos trying to study this otherworld, and how an unknown force or group or groups was trying to prevent him. How something was destroying Night Vale, great pits opening up in the earth, swallowing buildings, people, entire lives, whole. How that something was maybe the same thing that was trying to stop Carlos from discovering more about the desert otherworld.