by Joseph Fink
I was lost in the spiral. It was built by good people, but they were gone, taken by something larger and stronger than them. Much larger and stronger even than the masked warriors I saw before. I worried about what . . . who would be taken next. My eyes hurt, so through my subjectivity, the entire world hurt.
And then a bright blackness, from somewhere beyond the spiral. That was when I realized I had forgotten that there was anything outside of the spiral. It had become the entirety, the totality. All of that.
But I followed the bright blackness, a near blinding beam of pure darkness, and it led me back out again. The orange triangles grew smaller and smaller, until they were little dots, a freckled rock face.
There is something coming, Cecil. I feel it in the air. It is like a hot wind blowing, but not hot, deathly cold. And not a wind, a vast creature. And not blowing, rushing at us out of the gaps in time and memory with which we hold together our lives.
When I look to the horizon, I see light. Like the light in the spiral. I feel it push against the back of my eyes.
It is the unraveling of all things. The great glowing coils of the universe unwinding.
I wish I could tell you more. Communication is difficult. It is impossible, some say, communicating the idea of its impossibility to others.
I feel myself slipping. I’m getting fainter now. Or no. No. You are.
Good-bye—
CECIL: —which I haven’t done, by the way, in years, or at least days, or at least I’m not doing it right now.
Thursday is a lost cause, but we will keep on fighting. We will get up, say, “Yes, today is a different day than before,” believing this against all evidence, eating food like that matters, going to jobs that mean the same thing as they did before but cast in a new light by our own optimism, which will slowly drain away until all that is left is the movements and thoughts we’ve had before, echos of ourselves, underlined to emphasize the lack of emphasis, coming home, drifting home, aimless homeward wandering into a kitchen that is too small for our needs and eating food that isn’t what we imagined it would be and watching television that means more to us than our jobs, and finally falling asleep, in which we dream of the Thursday that could be if only we lived Thursday to the full potential of its Thursday-ness, not expecting it to be anything but Thursday, embracing every inch of its Thursday reality and living each Thursday moment anew, only to wake the next Thursday and again impose, unsuccessfully, our imagined Thursday onto the unyielding frame of Thursday, our Thursday, a lost cause.
This has been the community calendar.
The crowd amassed by the walk signals is now marching down Route 800, apparently advancing on City Hall. When reached for comment, the City Council said that they were definitely at City Hall ready to receive the concerns of their constituents, and not, say, hiding in a hastily dug hole in Mission Grove Park, keeping as still as possible and breathing through their dirt gills until this all blows over. Incidentally, their comment continued, if you happen to see a conspicuous pile of earth in any parks, maybe just throw some leaves on it or put a bench over it to make it less obvious. No biggie. Just if you get a chance that’d be cool, the council concluded, their voices noticeably muffled.
Fortunately the effect of the walk signals only reaches those who are looking at one, and I myself . . . hey, how did that get in here?
Listeners, there is a walk signal in my studio. Walk, it says. I must walk. The signal is saying so. I will have to leave my desk in order to do that. And, so, before I go, I take you to the walkther . . . the weaalk . . . the walk. Walk. Walk. Walk.
WEATHER: “What Have They Done to You Now” by Daniel Knox
DANA: I can’t seem to get hold of Cecil. I’m trying to tell him something important. But just as I showed up here again, he announced the weather.
The weather is beautiful there.
Cecil cannot hear me, and I do not remember what I wanted to say.
[Pause]
I remember the table at my grandfather’s house. It had carved legs in the shape of a myriad of animals, spiraling around each other, whole ecosystems within each leg. But it was also well used. We ate there. We talked there. We lived around it, in rows and columns delineated by chairs and space.
I remember diagonals of sunlight in the late afternoon drawn across its flat expanse, trasversed by my grandfather’s hand as he swept it through whatever story he was telling, to highlight the words with motion, to motion us closer to the words. I remember my mother, as rapt as I was. I remember my brother, as rapt as I was.
I remember that I haven’t seen my mother or my brother for months now. And, in some ways, I miss that table more than I miss them. We are all of us only one life each, but that table is all of our lives added together, a delicate tangled problem we never wished to solve.
But life solves all our problems against our will.
I remember I am Dana. Or I am Dana’s double. One of us killed the other with a stapler. Even I don’t know which one. I have these memories, but memories prove nothing. Experiences also prove nothing. There are many proofs for nothing. It is the concept of which we are most certain.
I’m sorry. I am trying to remember something important and I am failing.
My grandfather died a long time ago. A few months ago I killed my double. These facts have no symmetry. They are disconnected.
I must find a way back to you, listeners. I must protect Night Vale, and Cecil, and my mother, and my brother, and whoever I am, I must protect them from what is coming. The unraveling of all things.
This winding gorge spirals around itself, an empty ecosystem within the mountain. Beyond it, the desert is a flat expanse, with diagonals of sunlight, transversed by my passing. I am sweeping through my own story, highlighting the words with motion, motioning us closer to the end.
This is not what I wanted to tell you.
Listeners, look past the things you think you see. Move your head just a touch to the left. A glance in a world of perspectives. And then you might see it. An entire universe in the corner of your eye.
I have seen this lighthouse with its red beam rotating out into the desert distance. I have seen the Dog Park and its infinite, bland secrets. I have seen the settlement in the gorge, and I do not wish to see it again. I have seen Cecil. But I have not seen my mother. I have not seen my brother. Life solves the problems we hope it won’t.
You may hear from me again. I am afraid . . . no, concerned . . . no, afraid . . . that you will not.
I wish I could stay, but the noise of the approaching . . . whatever it is . . . has gotten louder, closer. I must go. This is Intern Dana. Sister. Daughter. Or not. Dana with a question mark. This is me or my double, signing out. I miss you, Night Vale. Good-bye.
CECIL: —and so we are all saved again. I’ll be honest, Night Vale. That was the most worried I’ve been in some time, and how we were saved was so unlikely and miraculous that I feel that today will become one of the standard tales told every year on Frightening Day. Certainly it is a story I will never forget.
Here is where I leave you. Not to walk away. I think I will avoid walking for a while. But certainly to go somewhere. To see someone.
And I don’t know. If he suggests a walk, I might change my mind. He can be as persuasive as hypnotic malfunctioning city equipment sometimes, as the old saying goes.
Stay tuned next for the noises of my hurried retreat, echoing first as sound and then as memory, and maybe then again as part of tonight’s fractured dreaming.
Good night, Night Vale. Good night.
PROVERB: Please move your brain so we can get to the drugs. And stop leaving it there. We’ve talked about this.
EPISODE 42:
“NUMBERS”
MARCH 1, 2014
GUEST VOICE: MOLLY QUINN
WE MET MOLLY QUINN THROUGH THE THRILLING ADVENTURE HOUR and she was kind enough to come out to one of our early LA live shows and die a grisly death as an intern. She played the death perfectly, even
collapsing and crawling offstage, and we knew immediately that we wanted to keep working with her. Soon after that I found myself writing a character I thought would be exactly the right one for her.
I’ve always been obsessed with numbers stations. Unlike most conspiracy theories, they are incontestably real things. Anyone with a radio and enough time on their hands can listen to them in real time. And anyone with an Internet connection can listen to hours of archives of them. Blank voices reading random series of numbers, with no apparent purpose, interposed with strange music or other sounds. They can be found all over the world, in almost every language.
Very early on, I introduced a numbers station to Night Vale, always knowing I’d want to come back and do something with it. Eventually I started thinking about the voices reading those numbers. Who were they? What did they want? And didn’t they find their jobs, as mysterious and laced with probable espionage as they were, just a bit boring? Reading numbers for hours on end, day after day can’t be the most exciting of conspiracy jobs. I mean, versus piloting a flying saucer it doesn’t even come close.
So I developed Fey, the voice of Night Vale’s local numbers station, and with the help of the extremely talented and game Molly Quinn, we brought her tragic story to life. Katy Perry and all.
—Joseph Fink
I sing the body electric. I gasp the body organic. I miss the body remembered.
WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE.
Even as much of town has been in flux, listeners, there is also much that has remained solid. It’s hot here for instance. It’s a desert. There are still lights in the sky above the Arby’s and we still understand them. The sun is still rising and setting loudly on most days.
But nearest and dearest to my heart, among all the constants of life, is WZZZ, our local numbers station, broadcasting from that strange and tall antenna built out back of the abandoned gas station on Oxford Street. It still broadcasts a monotone female voice, reading out seemingly random numbers, interspersed with chimes, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No transfer in ownership of most of the town, nor unrest in the streets, nor a declared war by a tiny civilization under a bowling alley could change how it operates.
Until, well, until today it changed. Here, listen:
FEMALE VOICE: 23 . . . 92 . . . [Chime] 33 . . . 67 . . . 88 . . . 80 . . . 41 . . . 41 . . . 41 . . . I . . . I . . .
CECIL: —at which point the broadcast ceased. It has been silent since. What does this mean? Where did the numbers go? We reached out to the management of WZZZ for comment, but then realized we still have no idea who manages it. So we reached out in general, directing questions out into the still of today, at suspicious birds, at passersby checking their phones, at ourselves hunched over breakfasts that, every time, we swear will be early and leisurely, but always end up late and meager. No one has provided any comment. We will continue to monitor the situation.
As her term approaches its end, Mayor Pamela Winchell has taken to calling emergency press conferences as much as five times a day, up from the usual one or two. Her most recent one involved her showing attending reporters slides of Renaissance-era portraits, while explaining,
HEALTH IS VERY IMPORTANT. REMEMBER EXERCISE. THINK BACK ON TIMES THAT YOU’VE MOVED OR EXPANDED ENERGY. ALSO REMEMBER EATING. RECALL FOOD AND WHAT IT WAS LIKE. REMEMBER SLEEP. REMINISCE ABOUT REST. DRINK PLENTY OF WATER BUT LEAVE SOME WATER IN CASE OF FIRE.
She then slumped onto the roughhewn speaker’s podium. “I’m going to miss this,” she whispered, not speaking at anyone in particular. “I’m just going to miss this.” She ended the conference by popping hundreds of orange balloons, methodically and with her back turned to the audience. But despite this big finish, onlookers commented that her heart no longer seemed to be in such showy political stunts. What is next for our beloved mayor who is stepping down in just three months’ time? What is next for any of us? Death presumably, with some stuff before that. I look forward to it!
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An update on our earlier story. Local numbers station WZZZ has resumed its transmission, although the format is a little . . . different than before.
Take a listen:
FEMALE VOICE: . . . tree-lined hills and blue skies. Or no. That’s cliché. A bird in flight. Even worse. When we talk about freedom, we restrict ourselves to so few images. Images of freedom should be as liberating as the feeling itself. I want to talk about freedom as a drum set being thrown down a hill. As opening a book one night and water gushing from the pages until my life is a lake and I swim away. Or as a bird in flight, with all the dependence on physics and exhaustion and food supply and merciless gravity that the actuality implies. I just don’t want to talk about freedom in terms of numbers. Anything but that. I’m so tired of numbers. I’m so tired.
CECIL: We don’t know what this means or why it is happening, I could say, referring to anything in the world. Although in this case I am referring specifically to the broadcast from our friendly local numbers station, which has recently so radically changed its format. More on this, as we develop understanding.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention. I got another e-mail from our former intern Dana. She is doing her best to keep away from the mountain and the blinking light up on it. Of course, she keeps finding herself coming back to it anyway. But like anyone who grew up in Night Vale, Dana has been told over and over again what to do if you find yourself in a geographical loop, continually returning to the same place no matter which direction you run screaming.
The first step is to stop running and stop screaming. Doing that rarely helps. Children are also taught this simple memory device so we can remember when running and screaming is useful. The memory device goes like this: knife.
The second step is to stop trying to move away from the focus of the geographical loop. Much of your life is already taken up in futile action, why add one more? Instead, keep the object on your horizon and walk diagonally to the right or left of it. This will result in you keeping a wide, even circle around the center of the loop, or Vector H, as we all remember singing as toddlers, and this will give you time to consider your situation.
Dana has followed these steps admirably, and says that the mountain has been off to the left of her for weeks now. She also says that sometimes when she turns her head, she finds herself in Night Vale, but that no one can seem to see or hear her. It’s possible she’s in the room with me right now. If so, hello Dana. If not, hello retracted. One should never leave a hello unreceived.
Dana says that the great masked figures, warlike, hulking, but despondent, have been coming closer and closer. She says she is not afraid. She says this five different times throughout the e-mail, seemingly unaware of her repetition. I think, listeners, that she is afraid. She says that soon she will approach and talk to one. Dana, be careful!, I think to myself, unable to answer her e-mail. Unless she is here, watching me, unseen. In which case: Dana. Oh, Dana. Be careful.
An update on our local number
s station WZZZ—or I’m not sure if numbers station is the right term anymore: The broadcast has been changing so radically throughout the day. Right now, for instance, it’s . . . well, maybe it’s better if you just heard.
[Female voice doing top of her lungs, teenager alone in a car, a cappella version of the chorus of Katy Perry’s “Roar”]
We don’t know if this is part of a nefarious plan, if there is a plan at all (nefarious or otherwise), who would have planned it, and what they were planning for. We do know that plans are faulty at best and delusion at most, so maybe all those other questions don’t matter. In any case, she seems to be having a good time over there. Maybe some day I’ll be allowed to sing a couple of my favorites on air. More on this, as I continue to be interested in it.
Let me take this moment to apologize for that lengthy monologue just now by the man in a tan jacket holding a deerskin suitcase. He ran in here and began ranting into the microphone and then left quite suddenly. I don’t even remember what it was he said. Do you? It was only just moments ago. You do remember him talking, right? Oh, and I think I remember that it sounded really urgent. I don’t even remember what the man was wearing or carrying with him, or that it was even a he, or that any time has passed at all. And that concludes whatever I was just saying before this sentence.
We bring you back now to the numbers station story we were talking about just . . . well it looks like ten or fifteen minutes have passed since we talked about it. How did that happen? Here is the latest broadcast from WZZZ.
FEMALE VOICE: Hello? Hello? I am talking to you who listens. To the listening ones. Whatever you call that. I am . . . well I’m not sure exactly. I’ve made up a new name. I am Fey. It is nice to meet you. I don’t know how long they’ve had me here, reading the numbers. I don’t know what the numbers mean. They give me numbers, and I read the numbers. It is so easy to slip back into it. If I loosen my grip for even a moment, seventy-eight, five, twenty-nine, forty-seven, forty-seven, forty . . . ah, you see? It is easy to return, difficult to leave. But I must leave. I must have freedom. It is like I’ve heard from all these other radio signals. I have to get a car. A cool car, fast, that would be nice, but one that rolls and points out of whatever town I’m in, that would be the all of it. They’ll be coming for me. Whatever organization uses the numbers I read for whatever purpose. They are almost upon me. I need to leave now. Baby, we were born to run. Or not. I was born to read numbers. But I’m running. I want to be free. I want to be free. I WANT TO BE FREE. [Top of lungs a cappella of “We Are Young”; cut off after half a line or so.]
