The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe (27 page)

“Someone has to be to blame,” she says, pointing at everything but herself.

“It was very simple,” she says. “We take buildings from the miniature city we discovered under the bowling alley. We put them in crates. We ship the crates out to various warehouses in the desert. And as a result, our interests are furthered. It could not be more simple.”

The man who is not short is not paying attention. Something has caught his eye. It is so dark and distant what he sees, it seems like it cannot possibly be real.

“Hey, look at that,” he says, pointing at what he sees. The man who is not tall and their supervisor look where he is pointing. There is nothing but the ceiling of the warehouse, with some dust and light in between.

“Very good,” says the supervisor.

“Yes, good,” says the man who is not tall. They turn back to each other.

“Oh, is it?” says the man who is not short. He squints up at what he sees. “I was worried that it wasn't very good at all.”

“Anyway,” says the supervisor. “Now the city has declared war in revenge. Although they haven't yet figured out it was us stealing the buildings. They just declared a general war, in the name of their god Huntokar, on everyone from the ‘upper world' as they call us.”

This war has been raging for almost a year now. People have died, yes, but listen: People die all the time for all different kinds of reasons. I wouldn't worry if I were you.

“Hold on,” says the supervisor.

She mumbles instructions into a walkie-talkie, and a series of “yes sirs” and “no sirs” and hawk shrieking sounds come in response.

“Sorry,” she says when she is done. “I didn't have to do that now. Wasn't urgent at all.”

“I understand,” says the man who is not tall. He understands the second most of the three people in the room.

And then the voice on the radio coming from the car changes its story. They all notice. They are told by the radio that they are noticing before they notice because that part of the narration happens before the story changes.

Even the man on the radio does not know why he changes the story, or where this other story comes from. He does not always understand everything he does. Sometimes he does understand, but hides it from you. In any case, here is a new story, one he tells, without regard for why he is telling it:

Somewhere else, not here, there is a woman wandering a desert. A desert not unlike this one. But not like this one either. It's not the same desert. I need to clarify that.

Also with her are great masked warriors, women and men of enormous size, who listen as she speaks, and follow her as she walks. She is winning them over because she has survived so much. She is young, but in her experience she is as lost and scared and ancient as the rest of them. Her feet hurt. They hurt. She keeps walking, and they keep following.

Beyond her, no longer just on the horizon, much closer than that, is a light, spreading across the desert. The light is alive and malicious and vast and encroaching. It buzzes and shines and everything about it hurts those who are close to it and destroys those who are within it. It spreads not just in the desert I am talking about. It spreads, in different forms, in deserts not unlike it. In deserts very similar to the one I am talking about now. Not always in the same form, not always as light at all. But with the same intent. To devour everything. Until there is nothing left. It is a smiling god of terrible power and ceaseless appetite.

The woman wanders the desert, followed by the masked warriors. They look back at the light on the horizon, and they know that the time when it will reach their little patch of land is coming. And so many other little patches of land as well. Soon, they will have to turn. Soon, they will have to face it head-on. And not just that woman and her desert. Not just her at all.

The man on the radio returns to the story about them. He does not know how he knew what he just said, or why he would tell it to you. He is innocent and kind. But anyway, this is a story about them, and so you do not care about anyone but them.

They, and their supervisor, are listening with interest to what just happened on the radio. The man who is not tall has taken notes.

“I'll look into that,” he says. “It is exactly as we suspected,” he does not say. He did not suspect any of that.

“Someone has to be to blame,” the supervisor says again, gesturing this time directly at the blindfolded man.

“I understand completely,” says the man who is not tall.

“Me too,” says the man who is not short, although he does not understand. He usually does not. His partner understands for him and it all works out okay.

As they leave the warehouse and the supervisor and the piles of wooden crates, the voice on the radio says something about the weather.

WEATHER: “Pretty Little Head” by Eliza Rickman

By the time they leave the warehouse it is night, or maybe the sun has just set early. The sunrise that morning had been particularly loud and strenuous.

“You know,” says the man who is not short, looking down at his crossword, “I worry every time that I'm not going to finish these when I start them. The future where I have finished seems so distant from the present where I have started.”

“I wouldn't worry about that,” says the man who is not tall. “But
you
would, I know. I know you would worry about so many things. I do worry about that, about you worrying.”

“Do you think everything will turn out all right?” says the man who is not short. “I mean everything,” he says to clarify. “Absolutely everything,” he says, as further clarification.

“Yes,” says the other. “I do.” He does not. “I do,” he says again. He does not. He glares at the radio.

They drive past the Moonlite All-Nite, a glass box of bad food and good people. They pass Teddy Williams's Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex, badly damaged by the war but still running its weekly bowling league. They pass by City Hall, which is covered in a yellow tarp, stamped with an orange triangle. Moving farther out, with absolute purpose, they pass by the used car lot, alive with the wolves that populate all car lots at night, and Old Woman Josie's house, silent and empty for months now. Then the town is behind them, and they are in the Scrublands and the Sandwastes.

They stop the car, and get out. Pebbles crunch in the sand in response to their movement. The radio murmurs behind the closed doors of the car. The headlights illuminate only a few stray plants and the wide dumb eyes of some nocturnal animal. The two men don't look back at Night Vale. They look forward at the darkness that stretches out as far as anyone here can imagine. Most anyone here tries to imagine as little as possible. There is no need to imagine here.

“Well, get him out,” says the man who is not tall, and the man who is not short opens the rear door of the car and guides the blindfolded man out. The blindfolded man stumbles a little, but not much, and there isn't anything specific he stumbles on. He stumbles like a stage direction, like the next in a bulleted list of items.

“Put him over there,” the man who is not tall says unnecessarily. We all know the drill. We all know how this and everything else ends.

The blindfolded man walks fifteen feet or so in the direction of the darkness, so that the men and the car are between him and the distant dome of light that is Night Vale. He walks to a certain point in the cool sand and then stops, partly because the man who is not short guided him there but mostly because he has taken himself there, as we all eventually take ourselves to that point where we will not be able to take ourselves any farther.

The man who is not tall, still by the car, pulls out a knife. It is not stained, does not look used, but he speaks its brutal history in his posture, in the way he holds it. The blindfolded man breathes normally, his shoulders loose, his covered face slightly down. His feet sink a little in the sand. Behind him, in practical terms as far away as anything has ever been, is the town he is from.

The man who is not short, standing next to the blindfolded man, looks up at the sky. The man who is not tall walks up to join them with the knife.

“What is that?” says the man who is not short, pointing at the sky.

“What is what?” says the man who is not tall from just behind him.

“That planet up there,” says the man who is not short. “It's so dark, and so close. It's looming. It's so close. I wonder if I could—”

He reaches up. The man who is not tall makes a gesture with the hand that holds the knife. The man who is not short is no longer reaching up. He is no longer standing up. In many ways, he no longer exists at all.

“Someone has to be to blame,” says the man who is not tall. Or no, he sighs this. Or no, he thinks it out loud, but it comes out more thought than speech.

He looks up at a night sky that is absolutely clear of anything but void and stars and the occasional meteor and mysterious lights moving at impossible speeds and the faint glimmer of spy satellites looking back down from the nothing to the something.

“I'm sorry,” he says, although not to anyone that still exists and can hear him. He just says it, leaves some undirected words in the hot night air and then returns to the car. He may be crying. I know if he is or not, but I am choosing not to tell you, because this is private information, and you have no real need to know it.

The blindfolded man removes his blindfold and looks down at the man who once was not short and now is not anything at all. He, the man who can see, is also not short. He follows the man who is not tall to the car.

The man, not short, not blindfolded, gets in the passenger seat.

“Always an unpleasant business,” he says. He does not comment further. He does not need to.

“Looking forward to working with you,” says the man who is not tall.

“The same to you,” says the man who is not short. “Ah, the same as well to you.”

This has been a story about them. The radio moves on. News. Traffic. Political opinions, and corrections to political opinions. But somewhere in the desert, there is one person who does not move on. This was also a story about him.

Stay tuned next for as long as you can, until you cannot stay tuned anymore.

Good night, Night Vale. Good night.

PROVERB: Knock knock. Who's there? Orange. Orange who? Orange you glad I didn't say your mother's in the hospital. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Is there anything I can do? Listen. I'll drive you over there. We'll leave right now. Grab a coat; it's a little cold out. I'm so sorry.

EPISODE 46:

“PARADE DAY”

MAY 1, 2014

GUEST VOICE: DYLAN WARREN

T
HE PHRASE “UNRELIABLE NARRATOR” IS REDUNDANT
.

Cecil is a newsman. He's a storyteller. He sees what he sees and he says it into a microphone. He can't experience everything everyone in town experiences, so much of Night Vale goes unreported when all we have is Cecil's point of view available to us.

Unreliable or not, his point of view is important and it is true to us, whether or not it is 100 percent factually accurate or complete. This will become clearer in a couple of upcoming episodes.

But here is an episode where Cecil needs to speak in untruths, to tell us lies in order to get to the truth. He obfuscates exactly what he wants to say to us because of the threat of a totalitarian corporate military carefully controlling his radio station.

In this case, Cecil is reliable insofar as we respect him and trust his judgment. He, like we, is against Strexcorp, even if his literal words indicate something otherwise. But tapping codes and heavy subtext give rise to revolution.

Cecil doesn't always seem so clued in (see: the fates of station interns) but in this episode, we get to see him rise to the occasion to try to save his town. He risks a lot in his thinly veiled codes on the air, and ultimately pays a price for his treason against Strexcorp.

Night Vale, by real-life standards, seems like a terrifying and impossible place to live, but compared to the authoritarian Strexcorp, Night Vale's intrusive government and hooded figures seem like a tropical paradise.

Cecil's reporting is often an exercise in cynical listening, in questioning of a likable (if dubious) narrator, but Parade Day is why we like him. Despite how differently we might see the world from Cecil, we know deep down he cares for our well-being, for the health and vitality of our little desert city.

—Jeffrey Cranor

Act natural. Act like all of nature. Act like the entire cycle of life and death and change and rebirth.

WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE.