Miss Vicks watched Mary start down the street.
“Goodnight, Miss Vicks,” Mary said.
“See you tomorrow, Mary,” she replied.
In the brick houses the clocks kept ticking away the time, chipping off pieces of it, some big ones piling thick and heavy under the brass weights of the grandfather clock in Eddie’s parents’ hallway, others so small and fast even the round watchful eyes of the cat clock in Mary’s parents’ kitchen couldn’t track their flight. The crickets were rubbing their hind legs together, unrolling that endless band of sound that when combined with the sound of the sycamore trees tossing their heads in the heat-thickened breeze could cause even a girl as unsentimental as Mary to feel like she’d just left something behind on the porch stoop she couldn’t bear to live without.
Miss Vicks waited on the grass verge in front of number 24 for her dog to complete his business. He always deposited it in the same place between the curb and the sidewalk; she would scoop it into a bag and then it would get carried into the heavens by a scow. The street was empty, the materialization of the silver-gray car having driven everyone inside.
Thinking of the sorcerer, Miss Vicks became aroused. He had his way of doing things. When he drove he liked to rest his one hand lightly on the wheel and leave the other free to stroke her between the legs. His fingernails were perfect ovals like flower petals, and he had eyes so black and so deep-set sometimes she thought they weren’t eyes but holes. Even when they seemed to be looking at the road she knew what he was seeing was himself.
He’d been with a woman he left to be with her, and another woman before that, and before that many other women—Miss Vicks had heard the stories. Once she saw him escorting a blonde woman into a restaurant, his hand at the small of the woman’s back, and to her shame she realized her jealousy was nothing compared with her vicarious sense of excitement at the thought of his touch. He wasn’t promiscuous though, or so he claimed the one time she confronted him. He was just having difficulty finding the right woman.
“I’m not like you,” he’d told her, as if that were justification enough. They were lying on her bed with all the lights on, the way he liked it, and he was slipping one hand under her expensive Italian camisole while guiding her lips to meet his with the other. Of course she knew he was right, though probably not the way he meant it. The sorcerer could make things appear or he could make them vanish; he could make them turn into other things or he could make them vibrate at unprecedented frequencies, the explanation for his great success in bed. It was only things, though. When the sorcerer looked at the street he saw it crawling with souls like the earth with worms. It was no secret that even the lowliest of the unruly, uncontainable beings living there could partake of love’s mystery, and his envious rage knew no bounds.
The dachshund had finished and was kicking up grass blades with his hind legs. From far to the west came a rumble of thunder; Miss Vicks grew aware of the changing temperature of the air. In this latitude summer storms moved in quickly and did a lot of damage before moving away. “Come on,” she said to the dog, who seemed frozen in place, staring at nothing. Dark spots appeared on the sidewalk, a few at first and then more and more. She yanked the leash. Face it, she told herself. The man is a beast. You’d be better off without him. She could hear windows closing, the sound of Mr. O’Toole yelling instructions at Mrs. O’Toole. The back door—something about the back door swinging in the wind.
On the sidewalk outside number 37 (another prime) came the first flash of lightning, just a flash like a huge light had been turned on; for a moment it was as if it was possible to see everything in the world. Then there was another flash, this one displayed like an X-ray image of the central nervous system above the even-numbered houses on the other side of the street. Everyone knew the family inside number 37 were robots. Mr. XA, Mrs. XA, Cindy XA, Carol XA—when you saw them outside the house they looked like people. Carol had been in Miss Vicks’s class the previous year and she had been an excellent if uninspired student; Cindy would be in her class starting tomorrow. The question of how to teach—or even whether to teach—a robot came up from time to time among the teachers. No one had a good answer.
By the time Miss Vicks got to number 49 the storm was making it almost impossible to find her front door. Often it happened that the world’s water got sucked aloft and came down all at once as rain. She swept her little dog into her arms and felt her way onto the porch. They were both completely drenched, the dog’s red coat so wet it looked black. For a while they sat there in the glider, surrounded by thundering curtains of rainwater. 1511MV—what kind of a license plate was that? One plus five plus one plus one equaled eight, a number signifying the World, the very essence of the sorcerer’s domain. If you knocked eight on its side it became the symbol of infinity.
As she sat there on the porch she tried getting a sense of what was going on in number 47, the house attached to hers where Mary lived. If she had ever had a daughter the girl would have been like Mary—they even looked a little bit alike, both being bird-boned and pale, and parting their limp mouse-brown hair girlishly down the middle. Miss Vicks’s part was always ruler-straight, though, whereas Mary’s jogged to the left at the back of her head, suggesting a lack of interest in things she couldn’t see. Her teeth were too big for her mouth, too, making her appear more vulnerable than she really was.
Usually in the summer with the windows open Miss Vicks had no trouble eavesdropping on Mary’s family, but now the rain was drowning out everything except itself. Could that have been the piano? Her ears often played tricks on her, making voices come from things that couldn’t speak, especially machines that had a rhythmic movement like the washer. She’d been feeling uneasy ever since she heard Mary ask where Eddie was and Roy Duffy say he disappeared. Even after the rain had stopped pouring from the sky and dripping from the trees and streaming from the gutter spout—even after the street was restored to silence, the only thing she could hear besides the porch glider squeaking on its rusting joints and the yip her dachshund let out when she made a move to get up was a loud whispering coming from Mary’s parents’ living room, a sound that always suggested urgency to her and made her feel powerless and left out, cast back into the condition of childhood in a world where the adults were too busy to notice whatever those things were that were tunneling under the streets and slipping from their holes at night to dart under porches and along the telephone wires. Then the bells would start to peal, a stroke for each soul. She gave up and went inside and went to bed.
It was only when everyone on the street was asleep that the robots came flying out of number 37. There were four of them, two the size and shape of needles and two like coins, their exterior surface burnished to such a high state of reflective brilliance that all a human being had to do was look at one of them for a split second to be forever blinded. The robots waited to come out until after the humans were asleep. They’d learned to care about us because they found us touchingly helpless, due in large part to the fact that we could die. Unlike toasters or vacuum cleaners, though, the robots were endowed with minds. In this way they were distant relatives of Body-without-Soul, but the enmity between the sorcerer and the robots ran deep.
In the morning Miss Vicks handed out sheets of colored construction paper. The students were to fold the paper in half and in half again and then in half again, the idea being that after unfolding the paper they would end up with eight boxes, in each of which they were to work a problem in long division. Mary filled her boxes with drawings of Eddie, some of them not so bad; arithmetic bored her and besides, it was her plan to be an artist of some kind when she grew up. A feeling attached to the act of being given instructions involving paper and folding it, a feeling of intense apprehension verging on almost insane excitement.
From time to time Mary looked to her left to where her model usually sat. His seat was empty, his yellow pencil lying in the groove at the top of the desk, covered with tooth marks. Eddie chewed on the penci
l when he was nervous; he was a high-strung boy, sensitive and easily unhinged. One day last summer Mary had lost control of her bicycle in front of the Darlings’ house. She had fallen off and skinned her knee and Eddie stood for a long time staring at the place on the sidewalk where he could see her blood. “I shouldn’t have let it happen,” he said, even though he’d been at the dentist having a cavity filled at the time.
They were too young, really, to understand the implications, but their bond was of the kind Miss Vicks still hoped for, exquisite and therefore unbreakable, according to the rules governing chemical bonds, in this universe at least.
“Do you know where Eddie is?” Mary asked the teacher when she came around to collect the papers. “Does anyone know where he went?”
“I’m sure he’s fine,” Miss Vicks replied, even though she wasn’t. If Mary’s failure to do the assigned work troubled her she kept it to herself.
At recess Cindy XA climbed down from the top of the jungle gym to sit beside Mary on one of the wooden seats of the swing set. “Scooch over,” Cindy said, shoving her with her little butt to make room.
Cindy was petite, her bright blonde hair cut very straight, the bangs kept back from her face with red bow-shaped barrettes—Mary didn’t like her all that much. They’d tried trading cards throughout the summer but the deals had been oddly unsatisfying. Cindy always gave in without a fight. Being immune to desire, she found the enterprise pointless. As a robot she knew that human bodies had been created to an identical template, one that had been established long ago and owed almost everything to the skeletal structure of the great apes. Apes or humans—we all made the same mistake, tempted by shifting leaves or the smell of sex, by music or a ripe banana. She also knew Miss Vicks didn’t have a clue what had happened to Eddie.
“Hang on,” Cindy said, linking arms with Mary and pushing off from the playground with her new brown oxfords.
A robot’s pressure is slight yet forceful. The swing began to go higher, propelling the two of them back and forth and up and down at a speed so swift as to make Mary increasingly bilious as she watched the iron fence posts blur into a heaving wall of black interrupted by blobs of green and patches of bright blue sky. Eventually she and Cindy were no longer visible.
I think the robot was trying to warn her about what was going to happen.
I think this because the story of what was going to happen is also my story, the story of girls everywhere.
Mary wanted to ask Cindy to make the swing stop but her lips wouldn’t move. The trees at the far side of the yard whirled their tresses, shaking all the little birds out, the red ones and the blue ones and the brown ones, and suddenly Mary was alone in the corner of the playground the trash blew into that smelled like cat piss.
When she reached into her pocket she pricked her finger on a pinlike object she hadn’t known was there. What is this horrible thing? she wondered. She took it out of her pocket and dropped it to the ground where it lingered briefly before flying back home to its companions.
JOSEPH FINK AND JEFFREY CRANOR
Episode 15: Street Cleaning Day
A transcript FROM Welcome to Night Vale, a podcast
15.1
Bananas are hardly that slippery. But watch your step, anyway. Welcome to Night Vale.
15.2
Ladies, gentlemen, you: Today is Street Cleaning Day. Please remain calm. Street Cleaners will be upon us quite soon. We have little time to prepare. Please remain calm. The City Council has issued a statement in 20 point all-caps type, saying “RUN! RUN! FORGET YOUR CHILDREN AND LEAVE BEHIND THE WEAK! RUN!” We have contacted those experts who have not already gone underground or changed their identity, and have been told that Street Cleaners focus on heat and movement, and so the best strategy is to be dead already. Then the experts all swallowed pills and fell, mouths frothing, at my feet. If you have doors, lock them. If you have windows, board them up. If you still have ears, cover them, and crouch, wherever you are. It is Street Cleaning day. Please remain calm.
15.3
John Peters, you know, the farmer? He reports finding an old oak door standing unsupported by any other structure out in the scrubland. He says that he’s sure it wasn’t there yesterday, or pretty sure anyway. As sure as he can be since the accident. Apparently, there is knocking from the door, as though there were someone from some other side that does not exist in our narrow, fragile reality, trying to get in. He has added several deadbolts and chains to the door on both sides, unsure which direction the door opens. Which is, by the way, a huge design flaw. One should always know which way a door opens merely by looking at it if the designer has done their job, and this holds true whether it’s a bank of glass doors at the local mall, or an unspeakably old wooden door leading to other worlds than these. John, meanwhile, says he will keep a sleepless vigil upon the door, as any sleep merely leads to dreams of blurry shapes in the dim distance, advancing, hissing, upon this vulnerable planet. He also says the imaginary corn is coming in real good, and we should have a nice crop to choose from soon, especially now that it will be available for sale at the Green Market.
15.4
The staff of Dark Owl Records announced today that they are only listening to, selling, and talking about Buddy Holly. If you want to buy music at all, you had better like Buddy Holly. If you dress like Buddy Holly, that’s cool, too.
They also announced that Buddy Holly will be performing live there this Saturday night at 11 to promote his newest album, which is called I’m Trapped in Between Worlds, Existing Only in the Form That You Knew Me; This Is Not Who I Am; Leave Me Alone and Just Let Me Die, Please.
15.5
Organized crime is on the rise, Night Vale. The Sheriff’s Secret Police and the Night Vale Council for Commerce are cracking down on illegal wheat & wheat byproduct “speakeasies.”
Two months ago, the City Council abolished forever all wheat & wheat byproducts, but a black market appears to have formed for those depraved addicts who can’t get enough wheat, nor its byproducts.
Big Rico’s Pizza was cited this week for hosting an illegal wheat & wheat byproducts joint in a hidden basement space. Big Rico’s, in light of the new laws, has had to alter its menu to mostly just bowls of stewed tomatoes, melted cheese wads, and gluten-free pizza slices.
His storefront seemed to be the model of a wheat-free & wheat byproduct-free society, but even the most honest businesses can turn to crime when their livelihood is on the line.
Fortunately for Big Rico, he is a very nice person and apologized to the City Council in a way that did not include blackmail or secret campaign contributions or special favors. Big Rico is just truly sorry for what he has done.
The Sheriff’s Secret Police say they are upping their efforts to stop these illicit wheat & wheat byproduct manufacturers. They are mostly just sniffing the air until they smell bread. It’s pretty easy, actually, the Sheriff said from his hoveroffice in the clouds.
15.6
More information now on Street Cleaning Day, which has come upon us just as we always feared it would. The information is that Street Cleaning Day is terrifying, and that we should all perhaps fall to our knees, letting out moans and rubbing our forearms absently. The City Council has issued a statement indicating that they forgot they had vacation plans this week, and so are currently on a plane to Miami, as they had been planning and looking forward to for some time. They said their vacation, since it was definitely planned, has a pre-established end-date, but that they cannot tell anyone what that end-date is until the Street Cleaners are completely gone. In the meantime, they are leaving Paul Birmingham in charge. Paul, the vagrant who lives in a lean-to behind the library, could not be reached for comment, as he has faked his own death in an elaborate scheme to escape Street Cleaning Day unscathed. More, if there ever is more for any of us.
15.7
And now a word from our sponsors. Today’s broadcast is sponsored by Target. Target is a great place to shop, and they would like you to con
sider the variety of silence in this world. The deathly silence when an argument has reached a height from which neither party can see a safe way down, and the soft, wet silence of post-coital breath catching. Silence in a courtroom, moments before a man’s life is changed completely by something so insignificant as his past, and the silence of a hospital room as a man, in front of everyone he loves, lets the heat from his clenched hands dissipate into the background hum of the universe. The quiet of outdoor distances, of wilderness, of the luxury of space, and the quiet of dead air on the radio, the sound of a mistake, of emphasis, of your own thoughts when you expected someone else’s. [pause] Shop at Target.
15.8
From time to time, listeners, I like to bring a little education to our show, throw out some interesting facts, or “mind fuel.” Today, I’d like to share some fascinating facts about clouds.
[STRUCK-OUT WORDS SHOULD BE READ NORMALLY BUT WILL BE BEEPED OUT]
Clouds are made up of tiny water droplets.
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 Page 22
