by Joseph Fink
Her mother lived in the neighborhood of Sand Pit, which was between the developments of Palm Frond Majesty and the Weeping Miner. It was a neighborhood of single-family homes, with small front yards, mostly kept gravel by water-conscious residents, and backyards that rose steeply into hills unsuitable for planting without extensive and time-consuming terracing.
Her mother’s house was like any house that was pink with green highlights, or any house with a manually opening wooden garage door fallen half away to splinters, and any house with a rosemary bush slowly encroaching its way into every other plant in the yard, and a front gate that sagged into rusted hinges, and a thick green lawn that frustrated her water-conscious neighbors. Her house could easily be mistaken for any other house that happened to be identical to it.
Jackie felt unease she could not express with any sort of coherent gesture or incoherent word when she eyed the house. Something about the house was unfamiliar to her. Her heart was beating in her chest, which is where it usually beat. She got out of the car and thought about all else that she could be doing now. Like driving through the desert in that Mercedes that was in her pawnshop, destination unknown (or no, glancing down at her hand, she knew exactly the destination, didn’t she?), with the top down, searing air and dust running through her hair, pretending that the discomfort of driving with the top down was enjoyable because it, as an action, signified enjoyment. Or finally treating herself to a nice prix fixe dinner (with wine pairings and complimentary antivenoms) at Night Vale’s hottest foodie spot, Tourniquet. Or standing very still out in the dunes at night until the lights came down around her and she felt herself lifted by cold alien hands, taken away somewhere secret and far away for research, never to return. All the fun she could be having, except she had never done any of those things, and if she were honest, and she sometimes was, she had never wanted to. What she liked was routine. Her routine was her life.
If she thought about it, her life hadn’t added up to much at all, but she never thought about it. Except now, every time she saw that paper in her hand, she thought about it. It was ghastly, all this thinking.
Her mother was waiting at the open door.
“Oh, Jackie, I’m glad you came.”
Jackie followed her inside. The house was immaculate, as though no one lived there. Some people prefer to make their homes so neat that there is no evidence of life anywhere at all.
“You had something to say, I think,” Jackie said. “I came by to hear it.”
“You were always quick to the point. Even as a child.”
Her mother led Jackie into the kitchen, which was as pristine as the living room. The colors were teal and raspberry, the same as every other room in the house, with accents of mint. It resembled a model home, and Jackie wondered if the perfect oranges perfectly arranged in the glass bowl on the counter were just wax.
Jackie looked again at the oranges, the kitchen, the clean walls and furniture. She was not sure she had ever been inside this house. Of course, she must have grown up here. Unless her mother moved after she had grown old enough to move away, but she would have heard about it, probably been involved in the moving process, possibly even the process of picking a new place. Also, at nineteen, she couldn’t have moved away from home very long ago. But nothing about the house was familiar to her. She looked around the kitchen trying to guess which drawer held the silverware, the surest sign of kitchen familiarity, and she hadn’t a clue.
“Do you remember years ago, when we had your best friends Anna and Gracia over for a birthday party and you were annoyed because your birthday wasn’t until the next day?” asked her mother.
“Ah,” Jackie said. “Mmm,” she said. She slipped open a drawer, trying to appear like a person who casually knows where the silverware is. The drawer was full of dish towels.
“I tried to explain that the next day was a school day, and the elementary administration sends armed posses of schoolchildren after truants, but you just wouldn’t listen. Always stubborn, you.” Her mother’s eyes were wide and her lower lip was folded under her teeth. Her fingers were pressed pale into the Formica counter.
Jackie tried another drawer. It was full of an opaque, fatty liquid, simmering from some invisible heat source.
“No,” Jackie told herself. She hadn’t been looking for the hot milk drawer. The silverware drawer. If she knew where that was, then she knew the house. If she didn’t, then.
“I’ve never been inside this house,” she said. Her mother didn’t look surprised.
“When you were ten you hit your head on this counter here. I thought you’d be hurt but instead you were laughing. You said it reminded you of a character in a movie doing a funny fall, and that picturing it that way, from a distance, made it hurt less. You couldn’t stop laughing.”
“How did I even know how to come here?” Now Jackie was afraid again, and it made her angry. In her anger she slammed open another drawer, but again not silverware. “This is where silverware should go, if you think about the kitchen in terms of workflow. And who even has two hot milk drawers?”
“You had a knack for hurting yourself but a natural tendency to not really feel it,” said her mother. “I remember when you got stung when your birthday piñata was filled with bees. That taught you a valuable lesson about birthdays in general. Remember that?”
“I remember the pawnshop. I remember days at the pawnshop. Going back and back. What I don’t remember is where your silverware drawer is. Where is it? Where is the drawer?”
There had never been information more important to her. She crumpled the slip of paper in her left hand, and then fanned herself with it, not a single crease in it.
“I don’t have one, dear. You know that. We’re both getting worked up. You’d better sit down. We’ll figure this and everything else out if we just have more water. It’s important. It will help with your migraines.”
“I don’t get migraines!”
Her mother glanced out the window, and Jackie followed the glance, physically, to the window. Her anger was a creature now, and it walked behind her, pushing her along.
There was her mother’s yard, neat grass bordered by gravel. The grass kept alive with an artificial life-support system of pumps and machines stretching hundreds of miles to the nearest reservoir, its roots barely clinging to the sandy topsoil, mixed heavily with chemical fertilizer. Beyond the lawn, terraced on the steep hill, were plants more suited to the climate. Cacti, and sagebrush, and metallic trees that changed size each day.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever been out there,” she said as she sat down at the kitchen table with her mother.
“Of course you’ve been out there,” her mother said. “Let’s talk together about memories you have of being out there.”
Her mother rolled an avocado back and forth on the spotless tabletop. The floor and the tabletop and the walls were all the same clean color, and everything was equally clean and unused. The avocado was, of course, fake, as all avocados are.
Then her mother looked up with pleading eyes. She gestured with the avocado, as if that were what she was trying to say, or at least an approximation of that.
“When you were five years old, we held a birthday party for you in Mission Grove Park, in the birthday party area. The one that’s fenced in and kept secure in case there’s another one of those occasional birthday . . . accidents.
“It was a simpler time. Because I personally had less memories and so less to superimpose upon the world, and so it was much clearer, and also I was younger. Thus, the world was simpler. I’m getting lost.
“We had a birthday party for you. There were presents and guests and a banner that said: HAPPY BIRTHDAY.
“Your father picked you up and swung you around. Parents sometimes show love through velocity. I don’t have that picture anymore, but at one point I did. Your father picked you up. It was your birthday. Do you understand?”
“I don’t remember having a father.”
“Well, dear. He
left quite some time ago.”
“I don’t just not remember having a father. I don’t remember you ever telling me I didn’t have a father.”
Her mother gripped the avocado and searched Jackie’s face, presumably for some sense that communication had occurred.
“What ever happened to Anna and Gracia?” Jackie asked.
“Who?”
“The other girls from one of my birthday parties?”
“Oh, I don’t know. We all lose touch with friends as we get older.”
There was a sound of movement in the backyard. Her mother lowered her eyes as Jackie sprang up and went to look out again.
Still the backyard, and the lawn, and the plants, and the gravel. But now also a shape in the gravel, against the fence. At first, vaguely man-shaped. Then, specifically man-shaped. Her eyes filled in the details as they were discovered. Blond hair. A warm smile. Was that a smile? It was the man from the kitchen at the Moonlite All-Nite.
“Who the hell is this guy?” Jackie said, eyes and fists tightening.
The Sheriff’s Secret Police were always easy to summon, as quick as shouting “Hey, police!” out your door or whispering it into your phone. The phone didn’t even have to be on. But calling for help was not something Jackie Fierro was likely to do.
What she was likely to do, she thought as she did it, was charge out the back door directly at the man, shouting, “Coming for you, creep!”
There weren’t even footprints in the gravel. That’s how gone he was. She stumbled to a stop. No one. She jumped at a loud hiss behind her.
“I’m not afraid,” she declared, and she wasn’t. She was angry, which is the more productive cousin of fear.
The sprinkler popped up, and the water hit her full-on. And then the rest of the sprinklers, one by one, tossing their burden into the hot desert air to nourish the grass, or to float away and evaporate.
“I have definitely never been out here,” she said, water streaming down her hair and face into her clothes and shoes. “How did I even know how to get to this house?”
Her mother, visible faintly through the kitchen window, took a deep, slow bite out of the wax avocado and, not looking back at her daughter, began with difficulty to chew.
10
“I’m going to the movies,” Diane called at Josh’s door, not stopping to wait for a response.
At first, when she started doing this, he would say, “Have fun” or “I’m just going to stay home,” because he could only hang out with his mother every so often, not every other night.
“I’m going to the movies,” Diane called out for the fifth or sixth time in two weeks, and Josh began to resent her for going out so much without him. This resentment was not conscious. He just thought it was idiotic she was going to the movies so often. Who does she think she is? Josh thought.
Who are any of us, really? the house thought.
Josh stopped answering, and Diane stopped expecting an answer. She would simply go.
It was 8:00 P.M. The movie that evening was John Frankenheimer’s 1973 adaptation of The Iceman Cometh again. Diane, like most people, had seen the film dozens of times in her life—there were nightly screenings of it by Night Vale city ordinance. She didn’t love the movie as a movie, but she appreciated it as a familiar comfort.
She would often cry, particularly when the character Larry Slade said, “As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything.” It is not a sad or emotional scene. In fact it is quite a didactic one, but hers were tears of nostalgia. She would mouth the line “It’s irrelevant and immaterial” along with Larry.
Anyway, she wasn’t there because of the movie.
Diane bought a ticket from the sentient patch of haze working in the box office. Her name was Stacy, and Diane had developed a sort of friendship with her, or at least the comfortable familiarity of recognizing each other without making a big deal of it.
Each time she went she would look for Troy while trying not to make it obvious that this was what she was doing. She sometimes was successful at keeping this even from herself, thinking as she looked around that she was just curious about new releases that had made it past the Night Vale Top Secret Censorship Board (which consisted only of a guy named Luis, who refused to watch any of the movies he judged on the risk he would see a forbidden idea or gesture) or the current price of a tub of popcorn (which Night Vale Cinemas kept strictly linked to the coal futures market for reasons no one in town understood). But really she was looking for Troy and she was not seeing him.
She waited for a night no one else was in line and no one else was in the box office with Stacy.
“Do you know a guy who works here named Troy?”
“Sure. He’s not here tonight though.”
“Oh, shoot. I’m an old friend of his. I was hoping to run into him here. Do you know when he usually works?”
There was a long pause. Stacy, a haze with no face or body to read, continued to drift around the box office booth. Diane did not know if she had made Stacy uncomfortable with the question.
“I’m sorry. You probably can’t answer—”
“No no. I’m looking at the schedule right now.”
Diane saw some papers rustling on a clipboard pinned to the wall.
“He’s working tomorrow from eleven to four.”
“Oh, great,” Diane managed. She felt like she was choking, but she was able to breathe just fine. She nodded, as casually as she could. “Thanks, Stacy.”
Diane’s life at work was no easier. No one was talking about Evan. Nobody remembered Evan. She told everyone apologetically that she must have been confused.
“Because of your migraines?” asked Janice Rio, who was assistant director of sales and, more relevantly, whose desk was closest to her lonely outpost near the server room.
“No,” said Diane. “I don’t have . . . no.”
“Hmm,” hummed Janice. It was what she did when she didn’t care what the other person had said but the rhythm of conversation demanded a response. She walked away before more responses might be needed.
Diane did not get much work done, which was not as responsible as she liked to think she was. Instead she spent a lot of time looking at a couple pages of notebook paper she had found on the floor of her car.
The top sheet had a phone number and an address in writing that looked like Josh’s. The address was in Old Town Night Vale and had a unit number at the end. Josh had had a friend years ago who lived in that part of town, but Diane couldn’t think of anyone he might know now who lived there.
On the second sheet of paper, a different handwriting, still by Josh. His handwriting regularly changed depending on the size and shape his writing appendage took. A tentacle and a wing and a human hand, even with the same mind behind them, will wield a pen differently through the sheer fact of mass and shape. Still, like with anything related to his transformations, Diane could always tell Josh’s handwriting. There was always something at the core of it that pinged at the place inside her where she kept all the care she had for him.
The note said, “I want to meet this guy.”
Below it, in handwriting that was not Josh’s and written in a different color ink: “I’ll get you his number, but don’t call him yet.”
Josh: “I won’t. Duh. Does he have a picture? I want to know what he looks like.”
[Who?]: “If he doesn’t I can get one.”
Josh: “What’s his name?”
And then nothing more. Diane wondered who the boy was Josh was interested in. She didn’t know if he had ever been on a date with anyone. He had never been willing to talk about dating with her.
Diane wondered how to bring this up to Josh, and then she wondered if this was even the kind of thing you bring up with a teenager.
“So you’re interested in dating?” she could ask, but expecting what? A yes? Then what?
“What’s his name?” she followed up in her daydreamed conversation.
“I don
’t know. Someone else knows,” she projected him saying as he looked down his thin beak at his hands, which had twice as many fingers as her own.
“You wanted to ask what the boy’s name was. Why didn’t you pass the paper back to your friend?” she imagined herself asking.
“Why are you reading my notes?” she pictured him shouting. His eyes pink, his long teeth bared. He was crying, his wings flapping.
She imagined this conversation a few times at her desk, and it never ended any better.
She stuffed the note in her pocket and lied to Catharine that she was having a migraine (Catharine had said: “I can see that.” Diane didn’t understand how someone could even see a migraine.) and left work early—sometime between the hours of eleven and four.
She was anxious and driving fast, listening to the radio turned up to a loud but sensible volume. Cecil Palmer was talking to that scientist, who was explaining how clouds are made of moisture and aren’t cover for alien crafts or appendages of a great sky being. It seemed ridiculous, like most things on the radio these days. He was bending facts to create an absurd argument just to get listeners stirred up.
She was disappointed, because Cecil and the scientist were dating, and interviewing your partner for a news program seemed to be a conflict of interest. And, more important, the scientist was talking nonsense.
“. . . tiny, tiny droplets that are invisible individually, but as a whole form a puffy white cloud,” the scientist said.
That was when she heard sirens, which at first she thought were muncipal censorship to spare regular citizens from having to hear this kind of talk on community airtime, but then she realized were actually on the road behind her.
She was doing almost fifty in a thirty zone. Okay, she thought, so this I deserve.
As she pulled her car over, she looked at the clock on her dashboard and realized there was no way she was going to get to the theater in time to see Troy. A feeling that had risen to the top of her chest slipped back down into her belly. She couldn’t tell what that feeling was or if it was good or bad.
