The Buying of Lot 37

by Joseph Fink

  The missing persons were last seen at home and on the street, about town, about their lives, just normally living, until suddenly and unaccountably, they no longer were seen anywhere at all. Residents of the Shambling Orphan and the nearby development, the Desert Pines, expressed mild concern over their strong fears about their abject terror.

  More on this story as we grasp at narrative threads that can assuage our helplessness in the face of inexplicable tragedy.

  Listeners, last weekend I had my niece Janice over while her parents were taking a romantic long weekend in the Kingdom of the Deros, deep within the Hollow Earth, which is of course easily accessed by ordering any item from the Arby’s Market Fresh menu. It was really nice to get some time alone with Janice. She’s getting older, you know, and is moving from a child, which is something of an abstract concept, to a person with adult ideas and thoughts and feelings, a human being who you can relate to and with, which is also an abstract concept.

  We talked and watched movies. She let me put on Cat Ballou five times in a row because that was Carlos and I’s movie-night thing and I had been missing that. We ate popcorn. I asked her about any girls or boys she might be interested in and she diverted me politely but awkwardly to other subjects. I let her. It’s not for me to pry. That’s the government’s job, and if I’m ever curious I can look at the public registry of middle-school crushes, which is constantly being updated via mind-scanning satellite.

  Janice gave me a feeling of family I rarely feel anymore. It was a good feeling. I hope I will be able to visit Janice regularly.

  In an earlier program, we brought you this week’s community calendar. However it appears there were a few errors in our reporting, and so we would like to offer some corrections to our previous calendar.

  Monday, we said, was Free Hot Chocolate Day at the Moonlite All-Nite Diner. In actuality, Monday will be the day that a great craft crashes down from the heavens, and we all will surround the ominous bulk of it, still glowing hot and smoking from the impact, whispering and wondering, helpless to act.

  Tuesday, we said was sign up day for the Night Vale Adult Kickball League in Mission Grove Park. We were right about an event taking place in the park, but it appears that this event will instead be a creature emerging from the craft, towering over us and, in a language we should not understand, and yet, and yet we do understand, demanding that we worship it.

  Wednesday we described as being just a nice day to go outside and take a walk. Just a really nice day for it, we said. Just stretch those gams, we said. We said the word gams over and over, seemingly unable to say anything else. As it turns out, Wednesday is actually the day we will stage a brief but ultimately unsuccessful resistance against the horde of slimy, many-appendaged alien warriors pouring out from the landed craft.

  Thursday we said would be the day that beings from another world fully defeat us and we will line the roads and avenues on our knees, heads bowed in recognition of our new masters, our new gods. Turns out we were 100-percent right on that one, so we didn’t completely get the week’s schedule wrong.

  Friday we said would be the day that your Citizen Renewal Packets are due, you know, the reams and reams of paperwork probing every personal detail that you have to fill out in order to remain a citizen of Night Vale. Well, it’s still the day to do that, but instead of turning it in to the City Council, who will at that point be locked in a hyperdimensional prison by the occupying extraterrestrials, you will instead turn it into the supervisor of your assigned HumanPod so that they can gauge how much energy can be extracted from your body.

  Saturday we said was Caturday. We didn’t mean anything by this, we just thought it would be funny. People didn’t find it funny. They wrote and called the station, demanding an explanation. Janice Rio, from down the street, seemed especially disturbed. “WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S CATURDAY? WILL WE BE ATTACKED BY GIANT CATS? WILL THE GIANT CATS BUILD HUGE BLACK CUBES ALL OVER TOWN? WILL I BE FORCED TO ENTER A STRANGE BLACK CUBE THAT WILL ABSORB MY ESSENCE UNTIL THERE IS NOTHING LEFT OF ME? I AM ALLERGIC TO CATS!” Janice cried.

  Well, no, Janice. And I’m sorry for causing a panic. Saturday will actually be the day the invading aliens start feeding on us, so don’t worry. No cats that day. Caturday is just a fun word to say. Caturday!

  And Sunday . . . well, we were right about Sunday, so there you go. Just as we said, Sunday will be the day that Tamika Flynn and the beings who claim to be angels team up to lead a dramatic attack against the occupying force with the help of every Night Vale citizen, driving away our new masters and reinstating our old masters, who are brutal and awful, but who at least are a brutal and awful we know and understand.

  This has been corrections. Or . . . the community calendar. Community corrections. I don’t know. This has been what it was.

  Fashion Week continues, and the sphere is huge and pulsing. Everyone is screaming and running and looking just as fashionable as they ever have in their soon to be ended lives.

  Director of Emergency Press Conferences Pamela Winchell is ostentatiously using decorated cigarette holders of ludicrous length, despite the fact that she does not actually smoke. She’s not holding them delicately between her first two fingers but instead gripping hundreds of cigarette holders in her fist like a quiver of arrows.

  “See how hip,” she is saying, in a booming voice, levitating, quite fashionably, three feet off the ground. “See how absolutely of the time I am.”

  The sphere hums next to her for a moment, and then it rolls by leaving her be. So it seems like this year holding a quiver of cigarette holders is very “spared from the sphere” indeed. Good survival tip there.

  Old Woman Josie, speaking from the headquarters of Strex Operatic Ltd., said that the new Old Night Vale Opera House is complete and that rehearsals are under full swing for opening night on June 15 of a brand new opera written, composed, directed by, and starring legendary screen actor Lee Marvin, who will also form the entirety of the cast and will be selling concessions during intermission. Josie said that Night Vale citizens should expect some of the usual disruptions resulting from rehearsal of any kind of live performance, namely stop-and-go traffic in a several-block radius around the theater, a wake of buzzards circling over the city, and a slight uptick in the number of patients at the emergency room.

  So it sounds like this opera, whatever opera means and whatever it is, will be a blast.

  And now traffic.

  A man came and went. He was here before and now isn’t. How briefly, the moment of is before the endless was. He was not a serious man, but then, this is not a serious life. We all heard him speak, did we not? We still do. He is speaking still even though he is not anything else at all. How comforting the continuation of communication past that point. He was our tour guide through the cosmos, he would say, and then apologize for saying it. He was not a serious man, but then, this is not a serious life. A man came and went. He was here before and now isn’t.

  We miss him.

  This has been traffic.

  The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home made a public statement that she will not wait any longer. She will destroy Mayor Dana Cardinal once and for all, and claim the mayorship for herself. In her statement, which was stitched into the inside lining of my jacket this morning, she said, “You want opera? You want grand performance? On opening night, you will see a spectacle indeed. A spectacle indeed.”

  Meanwhile, still no word from Hiram McDaniels, the literal five-headed dragon and the Faceless Old Woman’s previous partner in crime. According to local normal citizen Frank Chen, Hiram left town weeks ago and won’t be seen around here again. Frank’s other four heads agreed, except the purple head, which had a bag over it and was mumbling “Please don’t include me in your foolish schemes ever again. If it were up to me, things would be very different. Things are different every time it is up to me.”

  The other heads hushed the head with the bag over it and reiterated that they are just a regular guy l
ike you or me or anyone else who identifies as a regular guy with things like a pickup and pieces of denim clothing and enjoyment of certain types of music and being completely wingless, despite how powerless this must feel.

  Oh, hear that? Listeners, the time has come. The sphere has arrived at the station. It hums, looming, it considers, humming, it looms. The sphere will decide whether this station and the souls within it are hip enough to be spared. I tell you now that I did not prepare for the sphere. It is not that I forgot. It is that I do not care and I am not afraid. I dunno. I wore leather pants and a Hawaiian shirt and a baseball hat made of honeycomb. I just wore the same thing I slept in last night. If I get ingested by a fashion-conscious sphere for wearing comfy casual clothes, then that’ll just be what happened to me. I don’t write the story of my life, I only live it. So while the sphere does whatever it will do next, I take you all, well all of you hip enough to still remain, to the weather.

  WEATHER: “Evelyn” by Kim Tillman and Silent Films

  Back from the weather. Still here. The sphere moved on, and is now out in the scrublands and sandwastes, deciding which cacti and cottontail rabbits are of the now and which must be assimilated into the pulsating dark innards of the sphere.

  Of course, radio is always hip. Radio is timeless. Community radio exists outside of time and space and so is the most fashionable thing of all. Of course. We all know this.

  So it’s good that our station was spared and that I will continue doing radio for the foreseeable future. I’m not stopping radio broadcasting. I won’t be doing it here, but I’ll be continuing to do it.

  Right, so.

  I guess it’s time then. At the start of all of this I promised News, capital N. Here is the News.

  My next broadcast as host of Night Vale Community Radio will be my last in Night Vale. I am moving to the desert otherworld to spend more time with sweet, talented Carlos and the community he has built out there in that vast, sandy, alternate dimension. There is a radio station there, built by Kevin, who seems to have himself pretty under control, and his studio only has a little bit of blood, so I should be able to continue doing what I’m doing just fine. I won’t be doing it in a way that you’ll be able to hear. But that too, is just fine.

  I’ve missed Carlos greatly, and I’ve also grown weary of a mayor that can’t protect herself, of a town that fears outsiders, of a faceless old woman who secretly lives in my home and publicly wants to do me harm. And I think of a desert otherworld where it is always sunny, the mountains are real, there is a helpful masked army that can build anything, and your cell phone battery never dies even if reception is 4G at best.

  There is the question: Is Night Vale worth it? Is Night Vale good? Is it a good town? Well.

  I will, for the first time in my long life, live somewhere other than Night Vale. But as a poet once said, “No matter where you end up, you’re still from your hometown.”

  I’ll be back to visit from time to time of course. I need to see Janice and my old friend Josie, and many others besides. I am not gone. But I am going. I’m going to live somewhere I can feel good about, somewhere newer and better for me.

  Stay tuned next, eventually, for me reporting on the opening of the opera house, and then not reporting on anything else here ever again.

  Penultimately, good night, Night Vale. Good night.

  PROVERB:Dress your dog for the job you want, not the job you have.

  Episode 70A:

  “Taking Off”

  JUNE 15, 2015

  GUEST VOICES: KEVIN R. FREE (KEVIN), DYLAN MARRON (CARLOS)

  FIRST CONFESSION . . .

  I love Dylan Marron.

  It’s not much of a confession, because, um, who doesn’t? It makes sense that I’d love him, because: a) he’s a genius, and b) he’s my friend. But this here episode, 70A, in which Carlos leaves Kevin and goes back to Cecil, made me so happy as we recorded it, because I recorded it with Dylan at Joseph’s house. Dylan would practice the cute voice of Carlos before we recorded each section as I looked on adoringly; we made jokes about things (I can’t remember which things, because we’ve made so many jokes about so many things); then we recorded the episode. At the end, Kevin’s sadness was real—but it wasn’t really, really real until I heard the episode. Because I don’t see Dylan enough. I don’t see anyone in the Welcome to Night Vale universe enough. And that’s sad. So yeah, I love Dylan—and Jeffrey and Joseph and Meg—and I don’t see any of them enough. Poor Kevin.

  Second confession . . .

  Kevin loves Carlos.

  I imagined all kinds of things about Carlos and Kevin. Imagined how often they had sat in Carlos’s kitchen and talked about the desert otherworld, about the giants who were building the world for them, about Cecil, glossing over questions about whether they were colonizers of the giants’ land. I thought about how Kevin and Carlos probably cooked dinner together in the kitchen of Carlos’s apartment every day for a year. The kitchen, from the description in the episode, seems to have an open floor plan, which was helpful for when Kevin and Carlos sang and danced every night for Doug and Alicia after dinner. Their favorite duet I think is the Streisand version of “Being at War with Each Other,” which they always played from their phones because the melody is so difficult and because their phones never lost their charge in that place and because they both wanted Doug and Alicia to reach out to other giants in love and peace, in the same way that Carlos and Kevin had forged their relationship. Kevin was waiting waiting waiting for Carlos to love him like Carlos loved Cecil. That’s not true. Kevin didn’t wait. He proceeded in love because he assumed Carlos was too. Poor Kevin.

  Final confession . . .

  Kevin R. Free is not Kevin from Desert Bluffs.

  Kevin R. Free loves pasta salad. The colder the better. No mayonnaise, please. Oil and vinegar and onions and tomatoes and black olives and feta cheese, red and green pepper and a little mustard. Stoneground. Salt (pink Himalayan, duh). Sesame oil or hoisin, just a dash of either, and red pepper flakes for heat. That Kevin from Desert Bluffs doesn’t like it was a shock to me. Poor Kevin.

  —Kevin R. Free

  KEVIN: We all have to start somewhere. We all have to end somewhere too, but let’s concentrate on the other thing. Welcome to . . . well . . . hrmm.

  WELCOME TO A DESERT OTHERWORLD.

  We should come up with a better name for this place. Names are, after all, extremely important.

  Hi, I’m your radio host, Kevin. I’m speaking to you from our brand new station, and this is our inaugural broadcast. I’m so excited to be back on the air. I’m not sure we have any listeners, yet, but we will. We will.

  Later in the show we’ll be talking to Doug and Alicia, leaders of the army of masked giants who roam this desert and who have been instrumental in building our new city. They’ve been so welcoming to us outsiders. Not all outsiders, though. They are, after all, a violent and territorial army, but some outsiders. People like me, and like my friend Carlos. He’s a scientist. He’s a beautiful man who does beautiful things. I have Carlos on the phone with us right now, with some breaking news. Carlos, tell everyone about the huge project you’ve been working on this past year.

  CARLOS:Hi, Kevin. Thanks for having me on the show. First off, Doug and Alicia are here in my kitchen. Alicia built a refrigerator from some cactus pads, twine and three different kinds of birds, and now they’re making a bunch of pasta salad for lunch this week. They’ll save some for you, if you’d like.

  KEVIN:How delightful! I’m totally disgusted by pasta salad. Can’t stand the taste or the smell. In fact, to look at it causes me to heave. But thank you, that’s so kind.

  CARLOS:Right. So this new experiment—and I have to tell you, I’m really excited about it. You know how our cell phones always work in this desert otherworld even though there are no towers and how they never seem to run out of battery?

  KEVIN:Yes, I love taking these facts for granted!

  CARLOS:Well I’m on the verge of unco
vering what’s causing that. Here in my laboratory—which Doug and Alicia and one of the soldiers whose name is [VOCAL FRY] built for me!—I’ve been hard at work, pacing about in front of a row of conical flasks, beakers, and Y-tubes, furiously writing Greek letters and Arabic numbers, and I think later today I will make an enormous breakthrough.

  KEVIN:What did you find out?

  CARLOS:I can’t say yet. I’m just waiting on my computer to finish calculating the—

  KEVIN:Everything okay?

  CARLOS:I don’t know. Alicia and Doug look really agitated. They’re jumping up and down by the window. The other giant soldiers are running into formation outside. I need to see what’s wrong.

  KEVIN:While Carlos checks on our favorite soldiers, let’s get an update now on the roller coaster inhabitants. I’m referring to the roller coaster Doug and Alicia built for our new town months ago. It looks terribly fun. It has a tall first hill and a ninety-degree drop off that is almost six hundred feet, I am told, and then it goes into a series of loops and turns, and figure eights. Then some spirals where the riders go upside down several times per second. And then there’s a sheet of flames that as you approach, it looks like you’re about to go right through the fire, but at the last second, the track spirals again and you go through the fire upside down!

  Anyway, it’s an exciting-looking ride. I haven’t been on it yet. That’s because after they started it on its first trip, they haven’t been able to stop it. They didn’t invent brakes, so that’s an issue. And even though they cut the power to the ride, it’s still going with the same passengers caught in an interminable cycle of fun.

  Oh, we have Carlos back on the line again. Carlos?

  CARLOS:Doug and Alicia are gone. It turns out the commotion was over another army marching along the horizon. Doug and Alicia ran screaming around the house and though the kitchen, overturning my cutting board and grabbing their weapons. Alicia took my chef’s knife and Doug made a makeshift slughorn out of one of my large funnels so that he could call their army to action.