The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe (16 page)

You can do it. You don't need old Cecil telling you what's happening in town. No, I just report the news. I just arrange it. You figure it out. You learn from it. You take action. You create the meaning. It is all up to you. And given my current broadcasting situation, it may be up to you for a long time.

I better get back downstairs before they discover what I am doing. Stay tuned next for silence, self-reflection, a long pause to hear yourself think. Use that silence well.

Good night, Night Vale. Good night.

PROVERB: Look. Up in the sky. It's a bird. It's a plane. No. It's just the void. Infinite and indifferent. We're so small. So very very small.

EPISODE 37:

“THE AUCTION”

DECEMBER 15, 2013

COWRITTEN WITH GLEN DAVID GOLD

B
EFORE
N
IGHT
V
ALE AIRED
, J
OSEPH SENT ME AN E-MAIL PRAISING MY
work and asking if I'd write for his nascent podcast. I did what established writers have done for developing writers since the beginning of time: I blew him off. Then friends started telling me there was this show I had to listen to. One evening, driving up highway 5, I did. I know 101 is the most-cited road that doesn't lead you to Night Vale, but 5 also doesn't quite go there, and that evening, in the dark of the desolate road, with Cecil's voice narrating, me pulling into the Santa Nella Arco station, with thousands of copper-coated crickets pinging like pennies as they rained down onto the gas pumps, I felt like I wasn't so much discovering a place as having something that had been in the corner of my eye revealed. (Note: There might not have actually been crickets.)

To me, anxiety and fear are manifested in acquisition, and I wanted to write about an auction. I figured I should work in critiques of capitalism and the profound unfairness of death (two topics I try to fit into everything I do, including introductions, apparently). Joseph and Jeffrey rearranged some bits, added other bits and continuity, made a couple of smart edits and it was ready. It's one of the easiest writing experiences I've had, because the world building of the first thirty or so episodes so conflated with my own worldview it was like I was describing something that was happening, not something I was making up. Cecil's voice is, as I'm sure you know, probably what Dante's Virgil sounded like, if Virgil still had his community radio gig. I just had to follow him.

My first novel was about a magician, so I'm not into revealing all the secrets behind things but (a) my credit for a later episode is just one bit, about day-laborer baristas, and (b) I had a different ending to “The Auction.” Jeffrey and Joseph were inspired at the last minute to make the excellent change that opened up the narrative considerably: Who bought Cecil? I still listen to this episode sometimes, because I love to hear Cecil's delivery of the epic sentence about capuchin monkeys.

Did you know
Night Vale
had a fan base? I sort of did, then I really did after the episode aired—the smart commentary online was a thrill to read. The fans are awesome! When I met Dylan, he said to me, “Girl, you make fifty look like thirty-two,” which has nothing to do with the rest of this introduction, but I just wanted you all to know I'm terribly handsome.

Working in Night Vale seems to have that effect on people. Hmm. I guess that means the moral is: If you're doing well in your career, go ahead and blow off folks who have uneasy dreams. They'll be fine.

—Glen David Gold

Velvet darkness. Silken light. The rough burlap of evening. The frayed cotton of daybreak.

WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE.

First off, welcome back. Everything is fine. Nothing's happening, if you know what I mean. You shouldn't know what I mean. If you do know, you should forget. I'm not going to mention anything and you're not going to hear anything and both of us will fail to remember. No one will be named. Nothing will be referenced. And so:

Listeners, today is an exciting and important day in Night Vale. The Sheriff's Secret Police are holding their annual auction of contraband and seized property to benefit their purchase of balloons, birthday candles, yellow cake, and a piñata. They hope to raise seven point three million dollars and they say the piñata is armored and will be used to crush rebellions.

Personally, I love the annual auction. You never know what sort of fun stuff might come up. The catalog has so many interesting items. Let's see. Lot 1 is an All-Clad dinnerware set, eight pans in cast aluminum for perfect distribution of heat, new in the package. It's just waiting for you to season it with a dollop of olive oil and start cooking for friends and family, regardless of how no one comes over anymore after the last dinner party when your mother drank all the Chianti and announced you never lived up to your potential. At least that's what the description of the lot says.

Lot 2 is a glowing coin with the image of a grim, horned god on the obverse and a half-collapsed panopticon on the reverse. It's been graded MS-45 by the Sheriff's Secret Police Coin Grading Service, which in no way colludes with the Sheriff's Secret Police auction house to inflate the grade and thus the value of the coin. Lot 3 is a silver candelabra that once floated across a series of dining-rooms-turned-abattoirs to better illuminate the flying daggers that accompanied it.

Lot 4 is a set of flying daggers with maniacally detailed designs on the shaft collars. Knife collectors and maniacs alike will want to bid on those. Don't get in the way of that bidding war!

Let's see, there are also carpets, and some mid-century modern furniture—oh, those are very stylish—and look, Lot 17 is a near-mint copy of
Uncanny X-Men
number 3, 1964. It has slight foxing to the back cover, perfect registration of the color separations, off-white pages, rustless staples, high cover gloss, and no Marvel chipping. And it features the first appearance of The Blob. Not the Blob who lives in the housing development out back of the elementary school, the fictional one.

What else? Lot 37 is . . . um . . . Cecil Palmer. (
Beat
) There is no description. (
Beat
) Listeners, we'll have more on this auction as it develops.

On the lighter side of the news, today an invincible, all-powerful alien presence with telepathic powers came to Night Vale to enslave us all. It planned to bend every sentient being to its will, ending violence and conflict by subjugating all of us to its omniscient telekinetic powers. Hilariously, this all-powerful but bumbling alien presence didn't know we were already subjugated to the omniscient force that's been controlling our thoughts for years. We're guaranteed to continue our violent and irrational ways, so in your face, inept newcomer presence.

Toddlers of Night Vale, the Night Vale Community Preschool invites you to fulfill your potential. Commit to a new and demanding educational curriculum while exploring your ultimate dream. The same dream that every toddler has: economic opportunity! That's right—you too can learn to be a chimney sweep. Clean the many, many chimneys of leading citizen, and friendly billionaire, Marcus Vanston.

What a good man Marcus Vanston is. Every one of his houses, from his smallest penthouse apartment atop the dirigible hangar to his forty-six-room hilltop estate, has multiple chimneys. He has built chimneys even in places where he has no houses so his well-deserved carbon credits can go to good use. There are numerous chimneys on his shopping mall, his office buildings, his dirigible, his moon-rock-plated recreational vehicles, and, due to new and creative laws that allow eminent domain for the generous Marcus Vanston, every other house in town as well.

He has strapped traveling chimneys onto the pushcarts of festive peddlers, whose rags, hunched shoulders, nagging coughs, and forced tin-whistle merriment accompany the sad antics of their emaciated, vest-and-marching-band-cap-wearing capuchin monkeys holding tin cups rattling with a single penny from some defunct, outmoded currency, asking us to contribute to their upkeep, as we turn up our collars, clear our throats, and make convenient excuses to walk a little faster until, instead of embarrassment about their fates, we find our way to feeling superior about our fragile position on the economic ladder. Marcus Vanston understands. He doesn't want you to be a lowly peddler or a capuchin monkey. He wants you to be a chimney sweep. So, little ones: lower your standards, smother your dreams in carbon, and enroll in the preschool chimney sweep academy. Make good old Marcus Vanston happy for a few brief moments.

An update on our earlier story: Violence has broken out among bidders in the Sheriff's Secret Police auction. Bidding has been frantic and angry. It is confirmed that there has been hair pulling. Unfortunately, attendees have been using their bidding paddles to slap each other across the face, a motion the auctioneer has been repeatedly mistaking as indication of a new bid. Thus Lot 1, the All-Clad dinnerware set, sold for one hundred seventy-five thousand dollars, and that's before the buyer's premium.

Listeners, I have been in touch with the auction staff about Lot 37, which is of a certain interest to me. I want Lot 37. I want it badly. I asked if they might take a photograph of it and send it to me. Well, the peals of laughter that broke out in response were a cross between sleigh bells and the cackles of hunched, gray-faced court jesters. You know how that sounds. Listeners, in order to learn more about Lot 37, it's likely I will need to visit the auction myself. More as it develops.

The Night Vale mayoral race is heating up in preparation for the mayoral election this next June. The Faceless Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home has taken to leaving leaflets inside the wiring and pipes of your appliances, to be found when the sparking and the shaking become so much that you must hire or capture a repair person. The leaflets are tastefully designed, with an anatomically detailed drawing of a sparrow's heart and the simple slogan: “You are fragile and blind and wanting and stepping alone into the great darkness of the future.” It also has her five-point policy platform, which is mostly interesting facts she has learned about bees.

Meanwhile Hiram McDaniels, in the interest of saving time, has taken to standing on corners giving five different campaign speeches, one with each of his heads. His heads have radically different personalities and agendas, leading to some discord in their messages, but they all agree that they would like to be elected, that youth sports programs are important, and that the “Time of the Lizard” will soon be upon the helpless human race.

Oh, and speaking of the good-hearted and great-walleted Marcus Vanston, he has also thrown his hat into the proverbial ring. He actually constructed a special proverbial ring in the middle of town with an LCD light display and a fountain with an hourly waterspout show, and commissioned a gold-plated hat with remote-controlled hat launcher for just that purpose. As the hat flew into the ring, a forty-piece children's choir sang a song composed for the occasion, titled “Hi, I'm Running Too I Guess. Oh, I'm Marcus Vanston. Whatever. Anyway, I'm Going to Be Mayor. Thanks.” Many tears were shed by onlookers, due to civic pride and some helpful gas Marcus had added to the air supply.

Well, this is starting to look like a mayoral campaign for the ages. When reached for comment, outgoing mayor Pamela Winchell showed us a collection of mosses and explained the songs that must be sung to each of them for proper growth.

Hey, kids. Ever go walking in the woods and wonder whether a fairy ring of mushrooms is poisonous? Well, look at its center. If there's a body no older than yourself lying there, the ring is perfectly fine. If the body is also screaming, the ring is perfectly fine.

Everything is perfectly fine. There is nothing under your bed. There is nothing in your closet. Your parents are most likely actually your parents, regardless of what the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home might tell you. Do not fear the black helicopters or the black, windowless school buses that circle your block at night. You need not be afraid of the boogieman. There hasn't been a sighting of a boogieman for several months, or at least a couple weeks.