Welcome to Night Vale

by Joseph Fink

  Wednesday is Smell Like a Pirate Day. Everyone in town is encouraged to get in on the wacky fun by not bathing for weeks and rubbing yourself with ash and blood.

  Thursday, the employees at Dark Owl Records will be holding a séance to reach the ghost of Patsy Cline. If you’d like to come by and help, just enter quietly and please wear a bolo tie. We’re all wearing bolo ties now. And don’t wear those shoes. God, do we have to tell you everything? Maybe it’s better if you don’t come by. Records are not for sale, as usual.

  We are skipping Friday this week, but we’ll make up for it by having Double Friday next week. Mark your schedules.

  This has been the community calendar.

  I’ve just been handed an update. The Secret Police would like to retract their earlier statement that they will be out in large numbers tonight. That was not meant to be known.

  “You think you want to know things, but then you know them, and it’s too late. You didn’t want to know that. You didn’t want to know that at all,” the Secret Police’s press release reads. “This is one of those things you will wish you had never known.”

  The statement goes on to say that memory is a tenuous human construct, and nothing matters in the Grand Scheme, so whatever.

  In other news, a man in a tan jacket, holding a deerskin suitcase, was seen. I don’t remember anything about him or why this was news, but it had seemed important at the time. I wrote it down: “Say the important thing about the man in the tan jacket.” What was it? What was I supposed to say?

  20

  “It’s not a good idea, Josh.”

  “Why?” His shouts were muffled behind his locked bedroom door.

  “Because—”

  In the space after the word because, Diane thought through what the next words could be.

  Because he is a dangerous person? Maybe. Troy doesn’t seem to be a danger. But anyone could be a dangerous person.

  Because he will only let you down? Probably. He had disappeared before, he could disappear again. He could also just be a terrible father.

  Because it is complicated. More complicated than you can process with your young brain, she wanted to say.

  Because she didn’t have a reason exactly but felt a storm on its way, a confluence of Troy’s reappearance and Josh’s interest and the disappearance of Evan, and she wanted to wrap herself around Josh and keep him from all of whatever was going to happen next.

  “Because I said so,” Diane said.

  There was no audible response.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “Where are you going? It’s seven o’clock.”

  “Out.”

  “With who? With Don?”

  They both took the expected tone and said their lines as if from a script, but the scene had gotten mixed up and reversed somehow. They both wanted to put it back the way it was supposed to be, but neither of them knew how to do that.

  She was going out to try to find Troy again, perhaps make another visit to the movies. She needed to confront Troy now, before Josh did. Josh would inevitably find him, so it would be better if she could facilitate that on her own terms, rather than her son’s or, worse, Troy’s.

  Also, given that she had hit a dead end in her search for Evan at work and with Dawn, the only place she could get any more information was at the hall of records, but citizens were not allowed to know where public records were kept. She figured they were somewhere in City Hall basement, but unless you had high-level clearance to get into the records offices, you would become stuck in the elaborate, tricky mazes designed to trap news reporters and nosy genealogists.

  The other option was to go to the public library. Few people came back from a visit to the library.

  There was one girl a few years ago that survived the Summer Reading Program at the Night Vale Public Library. The girl, Tamika Flynn, defeated the librarian that had imprisoned her and her classmates, using the switchblade hidden in every hardback edition of Eudora Welty’s touching homecoming novel The Optimist’s Daughter.

  But few who have seen a librarian up close have survived or been in a physical condition to communicate.

  Perhaps Diane could use Troy. Police officers have access to all kinds of databases. If Diane could just have a few minutes searching Troy’s office computers, she could probably find something about Evan. Just something to point her in a new direction: real estate records, a birth or wedding announcement, any number of the mandatory dream journals that he would have had to file with the city if he were a legal resident and, if he didn’t, some kind of prison record.

  To do that she needed to be away from Josh more than she had been in his entire life, and in order to do that, she needed to keep up the imaginary thing with Dawn.

  “Yes, with Dawn.”

  “Why don’t you have Don over for dinner?”

  Diane did not reply. Josh opened his door, his wings flapping in an effortless blur.

  “Mom, there was no Ty. DeVon helped me figure out that my dad’s real name is Troy Walsh. We couldn’t find a photo, but DeVon’s seeing if his friend can get one. I want to meet my dad. So now I’ve told you the truth. I’ve opened up like you keep asking me to do. Now you. Now your turn. You’ve been going out on dates. Sometimes these dates go all night, and, okay, so that’s a thing, I guess, and I don’t need those specifics. But I’ve never had a dad, and you won’t let me meet him, and now you’re dating someone seriously and you won’t let me meet him either.”

  “Dawn’s a she,” Diane corrected automatically, based on a reality that was irrelevant to her lie, and regretted it immediately.

  “So you just really don’t want me to have a dad, do you?” he said, also automatically, based on a hurt that was not irrelevant to his life, and then immediately: “No, I’m sorry. No, that’s fine. I didn’t mean . . . That’s fine.”

  He was flustered, back on the defensive and unsure of how he had gotten there.

  Diane did nothing. She breathed, unintentionally. The faceless old woman who secretly lives in their home crawled by on the ceiling, but neither of them noticed.

  Josh matched Diane’s stare for a second, then slithered backwards and shut the door.

  There are a lot of things we don’t understand about orange juice, the house thought.

  Diane walked to the kitchen and swung open the fridge. She did not want anything from inside it, and so stood in front of the open fridge for several moments, unsure of what she was doing next.

  Her phone buzzed. A text. “Hello.”

  She texted back to the unknown number, “Hello?”

  Diane stared at the carton of orange juice in the fridge, at the bright round fruit logo, its straw hat shading unseen eyes on the pocked face, a tight grin with perfect human teeth, separated slightly, and a pink, leaf-shaped tongue. She didn’t know why she was fixating on the orange juice, but she didn’t know why she was doing anything.

  Troy was everywhere. There were so many of him, and Josh wanted to meet just one of him. It was a meeting she didn’t think she was going to be able to prevent, so she needed more time to understand who Troy was now, and what he wanted. And then there was Evan. Why was she looking so hard for Evan?

  It seemed to her that her life had slipped loose somehow, its progression all off track. Josh and Troy, that was one thing. But she felt a larger shift, and that shift had all started when Evan disappeared and became forgotten by all but her. There was something wrong, in her life, in Night Vale, maybe in the world. The magnitude of the thing was unclear, but wherever it was, she was inside it.

  Her phone buzzed.

  “it’s been a while”

  She didn’t know what that meant, and didn’t want to reply. She should go to the movie theater. She was going to go to the movie theater.

  She walked back to Josh’s closed door.

  “Josh, I’m sorry. I know this all doesn’t make sense to you. It doesn’t all make sense to me either.”

  Nothing.

  “I
love you.”

  A long nothing.

  “I’m not perfect. I’m not. I’m sorry.”

  There came a faint “Love you, too.”

  She exhaled. Her phone buzzed again.

  “do you remember me?”

  She stared at the phone. The area code of the texts was a postage-stamp-size photo of a burnt-out forest alive with luminescent snails in an array of vivid colors. She didn’t recognize that area code, but it wasn’t local.

  Buzz.

  “you remember me diane”

  “Who is this?” she typed.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  She was tired of waiting for things to happen to her; she would make something happen. She would just call the number. She put the phone to her ear.

  It buzzed warm in her ear, and she yelped at the proximity. Another text.

  “evan”

  There was a photo attached.

  It was a man. She was sure she had never seen his face before. He was wearing a tan jacket and holding a small brown suitcase. It looked to be leather. He had dark gray slacks and a light blue shirt, open at the collar.

  She looked at his face. She stared for a long time, trying to recall his eyes, his mouth, the curve of his nose, his hairline. It wasn’t that he was unfamiliar to her, it was that she couldn’t keep her eyes focused on him. Every time she would look at his cheeks or his ears or his chin, she found herself instead looking at his tan jacket or his leather suitcase.

  And when her eyes did land on his face, it was like the first time she had ever seen him. There was no recognition.

  Buzz.

  “remember?”

  “evan. i remember, but no one else does.”

  “no one ever does diane”

  “i’ve been looking for you. where are you.” Diane was reaching for a pen to write down this number. She needed physical, not just digital, evidence of his existence.

  “i’ll come to you”

  She began to type “actually I was just heading out. let’s meet up in town” while grabbing her purse and walking to the front door.

  Halfway into writing that: Buzz.

  “Here!” said the text.

  There was a loud knock on the front door directly in front of her. Diane suddenly remembered that she had left the fridge open.

  21

  Diane was sitting in a corner booth at the Moonlite All-Nite Diner without any clear idea how she got there. She glanced to her right and saw her car parked in the lot.

  “Don’t turn your head.”

  Across the table sat a man wearing a tan jacket. He looked familiar.

  “Keep your eyes on me, Diane.”

  In her lap were some notes in her handwriting. One said “Evan McIntyre.” One said “King City?” The second one was circled twice and underlined.

  How had she ended up here? Think back through it. What had been done to her? Or what had she done to herself? She felt like she was outside of herself, looking at her life through a stranger’s eyes, and she didn’t love what she saw.

  She looked back across the table, and the man was not there. She blinked for a second, and he returned.

  “Keep your eyes on me,” he said, “or you will forget.”

  “Evan,” Diane said uncertainly.

  “My name is not Evan,” said the man whose name was not Evan. Then he said his name.

  “Evan,” Diane said uncertainly.

  He repeated his actual name.

  “Evan, I don’t care what your name is. I’m sorry, I don’t. Why did you disappear from the office?”

  She wondered how long she had been at the Moonlite, and if Josh was worried about her. She worried more about his worrying than she worried about him. At the same time she felt a victory inside herself that Evan was real, that he was sitting in front of her, that there was some confirmation that he had existed and had worked at her office.

  The man sat up straight, widening his shoulders, a gesture simultaneously receptive and defensive.

  Laura came by the table and poured them both coffee. Diane ordered lunch. Laura drew a picture of a cow skull on her notepad, using her finger and a small pot of ink clipped to her pad. It was a detailed picture that took her a few minutes, while Evan and Diane patiently waited for her to be done, and when she showed them, they both agreed it captured the beauty and impermanence of physical life.

  Before heading back to the kitchen, Laura said, “I’m sorry, dear, what did you order again?”

  “Just the coffee,” Evan said. “Thank you.”

  “You have pretty eyes,” Laura said. She didn’t know why she had said it. She also did not believe in free will, but that is not important to mention.

  “Me or him?” Diane said, jokingly, although she did want to know.

  “What, dear?”

  “Which of us do you mean?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Did you mean me or Evan?”

  “Who’s Evan, dear?”

  Diane looked back to Evan, but he wasn’t there.

  “You came here alone, Diane. Just a few minutes ago.”

  There was only one coffee cup on the table. Only one place setting. The Naugahyde chair across from her was empty and pushed snugly under the table.

  “Never mind. Thanks,” she said.

  Laura turned to leave, her branches swinging through the empty air where Evan had been.

  Diane breathed with effort.

  She looked where Evan’s eyes would have been. She could not recall what they looked like, but she could guess their approximate location. She did not see him appear. He was just there again, matching her gaze. She wanted to look away.

  “Focus,” he said, visible again.

  “This is hard for me.”

  “This is hard for me too. Almost no one remembers me. Not even back where I’m from. But you do. You remember me. I need your help, Diane.”

  Diane gripped her coffee cup hard. She thought of the last time she’d talked with Josh, and she let that anger carry her through the strangeness of the conversation.

  “You don’t just get to ask me for help. I don’t know you. You show up at my office. You insinuate yourself into my memories and then you vanish from my life. You keep vanishing even now.”

  “It’s not something I can control.”

  “I don’t want excuses.” She slid a pen and a piece of blank paper across the table, her eyes still on his. “I want you to write your name down.”

  He opened his mouth.

  “Do it quickly. No talking.”

  Diane is a nice person. Nice people are not good at being direct. Nice people do not like to make others feel rushed or indebted or insulted. Nice people like to make others feel nice. It is difficult to maintain niceness while being assertive. You can be respectful and assertive, of course, but that has nothing to do with being nice.

  “And while you’re doing that I’m going to take pictures of you. I’m not going to be put in this position of ridicule again.”

  She held her phone up.

  “I’m not trying to ridicule you, Diane. I’m happy to help you in whatever way I can,” he said, writing out his name on the page. Diane looked at the name, nodded, and immediately forgot it.

  “Help me? Evan, I don’t remember how I got to this diner. Do you know how uncomfortable that makes me?”

  Laura returned before he could reply. She placed a bowl of fruit and a pile of pumice stones in front of Diane. She refilled both coffees.

  “Here’s your Greek salad,” Laura said. “And here’s more coffee, handsome.” She glanced at the man and raised her eyebrows at Diane, grinning. Diane did not move her eyes from the man. Laura shrugged, walked away, and forgot what had just happened.

  Diane took several pictures of him.

  “It’s hard to expl——,” he said.

  “Try,” she interrupted.

  The man in the tan jacket holding a deerskin suitcase explained. Diane understood. She nodded. S
he protested. She decided she would never do what he said, and then she agreed to think about it.

  She took a sip of coffee. She had no memory of what he had just said.

  “You’ll need this.” He handed her a slip of paper that said “KING CITY.”

  “What is this?” she said.

  Instead of answering, he pointed at the man in the white apron with blond hair walking past their table.

  “That is who I mean. That is who I mean,” the man in the tan jacket whispered in Diane’s left ear even as he sat across the table from her, his mouth not moving.

  “Troy?” She followed Troy with her eyes. “How do you know him?”

  She turned back to where the man in the tan jacket had been sitting. He was, of course, gone. His chair was pulled out, his coffee half empty. Some currency that was clearly marked as American but that she did not recognize lay on the table.

  “I already explained that to you. Remember?” came his whisper in her right ear. “Give that paper to Josh. I want to meet Josh.”

  “What do you want with Josh?” At her son’s name, her bewilderment tunneled into a feeling of intense protection. Like hell would anyone be dragging a child into this mess. There was no answer. She looked out the window.

  The man in the tan jacket was running out to the desert. She could just barely see him at the edge of the parking lot’s radius of light. His arms were swinging wildly, his suitcase swinging along. His legs were flailing, great puffs of sand kicked up behind him, his head thrown back, sweat running down his face visible even from where she sat. The kind of run that was from something and not toward. Then he left the faint edge of the light and was gone.

  She looked down at the slip of paper in her hand. It read “KING CITY.” She gathered up her things, hiding the pen in her bag, mortified that she’d left a potential misdemeanor out on the table for anyone to see.

  She was still uncertain how long she had been at the diner. Had she said good-bye to Josh? Did he know where she was? She would text him.