by Joseph Fink
“Love is the way her neck smells. Love is the beat of the heart and the passage of air and it’s the circulation of fluids, and it’s equilibrium. Love is . . .” She stopped, and let the mic click back into silence. She unplugged the radio, put it back in the attic, never touched it again.
That same day, a woman, slight and frail, leaned on the covered lunch area of a rest stop in eastern Colorado. She was staring up at nothing.
William Hendrick, a youth pastor driving across the state to see family, glanced at her as he headed toward the bathroom. It was a curious glance. She was holding a curious pose.
“Do you like what you see?” she said, loudly.
He was embarrassed. “No, I’m sorry, I didn’t. I’m sorry.”
“Come here,” she said. She still looked up at the sky and not at him. He was flustered, so he walked toward her. There was a strong odor. It wasn’t like unshowered human, but something else. An older, deeper scent, the smell of freshly turned earth.
“I need your help, William,” she said.
“How did you know my name?” he said. He was nervous. There were only about five feet between them, and he took a slight step backward.
“Don’t run away now, William. When a person asks you for help, you should help them.”
“What do you need?” he said.
She finally looked down from the sky. Her eyes were wrong. When he looked at them, he felt like he was looking at a place thousands and thousands of miles away. There was a depth to her eyes, and he felt vertigo like he had suddenly realized he was standing on the edge of a tall cliff.
A hand clamped onto his shoulder. The smell was even stronger now. He turned to see a man standing there, with loose skin, yellow teeth, and yellow eyes. The man didn’t say anything at all. William screamed through everything that happened next, and the woman watched with a friendly smile.
The house felt too big. Their days felt too big too. Why did they live lives that went on so long?
“They said it would be like this,” said Alice. “But think of how much time we spent looking after her. And she’ll be home for the holidays soon enough. At least we’re free for a little while.”
“Freedom can be good or bad,” said Keisha.
Alice rolled her eyes. “Sure, there can be terrible freedom. I know. You’re very profound.”
“This is pathetic. We didn’t used to be pathetic.”
She grabbed playfully at Alice, who responded playfully back, and then their touches became less playful, became heavy with desire. And they were on the living room couch, going at each other with more energy than they had mustered in decades.
“Wow, where did that come from?” said Alice, afterward.
“We still have it. Or we sometimes still have it. We have some of it, some of the time.”
Alice put a hand on the side of Keisha’s face. “I’m glad we made it this far,” she said.
“We’ll make it so much farther than this. This is still the start of something.”
It was and it wasn’t. Everything is the start of something, but the end of something too. Right then, the two of them felt both at once.
There are always open serial killer cases. Always murders that can’t be solved. Disappearances on the highways. Still, there had been a period of relative quiet, and it was apparent to law enforcement all over the country that after twenty-one years, the quiet was ending. Murders at rest stops, at small motels, at all-night diners. Descriptions varied, although many mentioned men with loose faces, and voices that sounded like the wind against a window, and sharp yellow teeth under their sagging lips. And watching over all of it, a slight woman, with a fragile voice gently suggesting new ways that the strange men might hurt their victims.
One last scene from the lives of Keisha and Alice Taylor. Nothing dramatic happens in it. There are no epiphanies. Nothing changes. It is twenty years since their daughter left for college. She lives in Chicago now and works as a graphic designer. She calls regularly, visits sometimes. Sylvia doesn’t know anything about what her mothers went through before they had her. She knows that she was named after two women, both of whom sacrificed everything so that her life could contain the happiness it does. But the details are hazy and she prefers them that way. It’s a difficult subject and makes her mothers upset. The stories of old women are the quiet, overlooked fabric of history.
But we aren’t in Chicago. We are in Northern California, in the home that Keisha and Alice have shared for so long, from before she was dead, and then after she wasn’t again. Neither of them have had a nightmare in months, which isn’t to say they won’t again soon. Some things never die. All people eventually do.
And it’s this last fact that has become more present in their lives. Because it won’t be too much longer, they suppose. But this isn’t met with fear. This is just another turn of life. Because they were born, they would someday die. Because they loved, they would someday die. It’s only a tragedy if set into the context of grief.
They are not worrying about death. Which is not to say that Keisha isn’t worrying. The anxiety will never leave her. It is not a problem that can be fixed, but a state of being she has learned to exist within. A person is not a problem with a solution. A person is their relationship to the world.
They are reading. It’s afternoon. They both had chores to do, but then both separately got caught up in books. And now they are absorbed in their reading. Keisha looks up from her book. Her wife, on the couch across the room, is framed perfectly in a ray of sun. It hits her like a spotlight, and Keisha is reminded all over again of how much she loves her. She watches her for a while. Finally, Alice looks up and sees her watching. They look at each other from across the room. Alice smiles.
A life does not have to be satisfying or triumphant. A life does not have to mean anything or lead anywhere. A life does not need a direction or a goal. But sometimes a person is lucky enough to have a life with all that anyway.
That same sun shines on a woman walking waist deep through the water of a ditch by a highway. The water is opaque, a glossy rainbow of gasoline on the top. Plastic bags, and wrappers for chips, and trash of all other kinds float by her. The woman moves at a steady, easy pace. She sings as she walks. “O, martyrs,” she sings. “O, soldiers of a lower cause.” Her voice is thin and high. When the uneven surface of the ditch makes her rise a little from the water, it is apparent that her entire body is still dry. Soon she will be back to the level of power and influence she had possessed when those awful women came into her life. And then eventually she will be destroyed again. And then born again. She does not mind the low times, but she grins with a furious excitement at the rush of being back at one of the peaks.
From atop the frame of what had once been a car, deep in the shadows where they would be impossible to spot, a person in a hoodie sits and watches the woman’s progress. The person in the hoodie is here, in this moment, keeping an eye on the monster, but they are many other places too. They are fighting alongside other people in hoodies against a vicious army of Thistle Men. They are a scared runaway, trying not to seem scared, being taken in by a scared woman trying not to seem scared, and together driving to Atlanta. They are standing over the body of their mother and telling themself to hide, continually maintaining the moment in which they saved their own life. They are fighting the Thistle Men again, several years from this day, and then several more years beyond that, again and again, a wave that sweeps in and pulls back but is never gone. But if they concentrate, they can go even beyond the bounds of their life. They can see the land as it had once been, before the colonizers stole it, before the indigenous people found their home, before humans at all, when the ditch and the car frame and everything else was a dense forest without a name or the possibility of being named. Far in the other direction, they can see a universe that has gone still and dark, long after the struggle is over. Focusing in on smaller time spans, they can stand invisibly in a study room when a college student named Keisha saw
a college student named Alice, thought about her plan to be single, and then thought: Well, shit.
Welcome to Night Vale
Here we both are, at the end of this book. Maybe you read the book. Maybe you just flipped ahead to read the last sentence. I’m ok with that if you are.
If you enjoyed this book, I encourage you to check out the Alice Isn’t Dead podcast, which provides an entirely different take on the story of Keisha and Alice. All episodes are available right now at NightValePresents.com.
The Alice Isn’t Dead podcast is a proud member of the Night Vale Presents podcast network, which has a number of other great fiction shows, like Within the Wires, an immersive mystery series; or the hit Welcome to Night Vale, a community radio show from a desert town where every conspiracy theory is true; or Sleep with Me, which tells gently rambling stories designed to lull even the most restless insomniac into a blissful sleep. If you’ve never tried podcasts before, they are free and provide hours of great storytelling, and you are going to be stunned at how easy they are to discover and listen to. Join us at NightValePresents.com and find out for yourself.
Acknowledgments
Thanks first and foremost to Jasika Nicole and Jon Bernstein, who joined with me in telling this story when very little of the story existed to tell.
Thanks to everyone who made this book and show possible: Amy Baker and everyone at Harper Perennial, Adam Cecil, Roberta Colindrez, Jeffrey Cranor, Kassie Evashevski, Christy Gressman, Monica Gasper and Hank Green and the whole PodCon team, Mark Flanagan and the Largo, Erica Livingston, Andrew Morgan, and, of course, the indomitable Jodi Reamer.
To my family: Kathy Fink, Jack and Lydia Bashwiner, and all the Barbaras, Bashwiners, Davises, Finks, Pows, Zambaranos, and various other wonderful people with various other wonderful last names.
And to my wife, Meg, whose road trip this also was.
About the Author
JOSEPH FINK created the Welcome to Night Vale and Alice Isn’t Dead podcasts. He lives with his wife in New York.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by Joseph Fink
(coauthor with Jeffrey Cranor)
It Devours!: A Welcome to Night Vale Novel
Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel
Mostly Void, Partially Stars: Welcome to Night Vale Episodes, Volume 1
The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe: Welcome to Night Vale Episodes, Volume 2
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
alice isn’t dead. Copyright © 2018 by Joseph Fink. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover design by Rob Wilson
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition OCTOBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-284416-3
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-284413-2
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