by Joseph Fink
Also a thin dribble of the growth solution, snaking its way toward the edge.
“Shit,” she said.
“Huh,” said Luisa.
She had the table next to Nilanjana. Luisa’s experiment had something to do with being visibly disappointed in potatoes, and she was, even as she cocked her head toward Nilanjana, keeping up a performative scowl at the pile of spuds on her own table. Her table wasn’t messy, except that any table would look messy next to Nilanjana’s. Luisa’s table looked messy. There was a stack of paper toppling slowly over the entire desk, and her potatoes were in a haphazard pile, placement randomly assigned so as not to affect the outcome of the experiment, whatever that was supposed to be.
“No,” said Nilanjana. “Nothing. Well, I just spilled. I mean, just a bit.” She pointed.
“I’m extremely disappointed in you,” said Luisa.
“What?”
“Sorry, that was for the potatoes. I have to provide a verbal reminder of my disappointment at set intervals along with the visual cues. Just in case they respond mainly to sounds.”
“Do they respond to sounds at all?”
“Only one way to find out,” Luisa said brightly. Her face was still stern and frowning. She shook her head. “You’re not living up to your potential.”
“Do potatoes have a potential?”
“No, not them. You, Nils. What is that experiment you’re doing anyway?”
“Ah, see, that’s actually interesting. I’m adjusting the pH level of this growth material by an incremental amount each—”
“Nils, is that even science?”
“Yes.”
“Is it? Oh, I’m still not sure what science is. That sounded more like performance art.”
She poked at a potato and it rolled off to the side of the pile. She either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
“In any case, you shouldn’t be wasting your time on tiny experiments like that one. You should be working bigger, more prestigious projects. The kind of stuff that wins awards. Like the Best Science Award. And the This Science Was Good award from the Society for Good Scientists. Look at me and the potatoes.”
She made a gesture that invited Nilanjana’s gaze, but Nilanjana was already looking at them, so she widened her eyes to indicate that she was looking even harder.
“Do you know how many grants I’ve gotten for this potato thing? All goes according to plan, I can spend the rest of my career being disappointed in these potatoes, and getting all the big media attention that goes along with it.”
Nilanjana didn’t care much for scientific grants and awards. There were many wealthy, tabloid-famous scientists, but that was not why she got into science. She simply wanted to study the nature of the world. She was happiest coming to the lab every day, working on her bacteria, developing fringe, noncommercial things that benefit society, like pharmaceutical drugs or pesticides.
She had been studying these bacteria for the past three years to develop a natural pesticide. Up until then, farmers mostly got rid of bugs by setting them on fire, but this tended to have an adverse effect on the crops the bugs lived on. She had made some breakthroughs. Earlier this year, she managed to create a spray solution that kept wood-boring beetles off of trees, but the beetles tended to scream when in contact with the spray. They screamed a lot. It was off-putting. So she was trying to refine the formula.
For her, science was a process toward perfection. Every answer created new questions, branching out to more and more answers. She wanted to fill in the empty circle of human knowledge with facts and evidence, so we didn’t have to explain the unexplainable with conjecture and legend. The less of life that belonged to the realm of myth, the better off humanity would be. If there were prizes or cash grants for all of this, great. But Nilanjana wasn’t looking for approval. She was looking for scientific order and tidy knowledge.
“Right. But, Luisa. See. I like this experiment. It’s interesting. And if it’s interesting, it’s important. That’s what Carlos always says.”
“Oh, Carlos. He’s a great scientist, Nils, but he doesn’t have the head for the career stuff. Stick with me. I’ll help you get there.”
“Okay, yeah, but.” Nilanjana indicated her dish of bacteria, which was when there was a sudden, ear-crushing bang followed by a fluorescent flash, and her hand flinched right into the dish, knocking the whole thing over.
“Sorry!” said Mark. His station was behind them both, and he had invented a machine that was supposed to make a blinding flash followed by a startling bang, but it had been getting the order wrong for weeks now.
“Oh, now. Goddammit,” Nilanjana said. “That was a month’s work right there. I need a paper towel. Excuse me.”
Luisa shrugged.
“Suit yourself. Let me know if you ever want more advice. I just want what’s best for you, and you’re letting all of us down.”
“That’s a bit strong, we barely—”
“No, I’m sorry, Nils. That was for the potatoes again.”
Nilanjana stood to get something to wipe the spreading mess on her desk. There was growth solution on practically all of a small part of the table. It was overwhelming.
Mark winced apologetically as she passed him.
“Sorry about that. I should have sounded the warning air horn right behind you to let you know I was about to test this, but you know how it is. I got caught up in the experiment.”
She nodded, waving the slight away with her hand. She knew exactly how it was. She liked Mark, and was sorry his experiment wasn’t going well, even if his tinkering on it was liable to cause her serious psychological or physical harm.
“Don’t listen to her,” he said, as he unscrewed a hatch on his machine, trying to understand what the problem was. Its light weakly flickered and it let out an unstartling burble. He shook his head. “At least that was in the right order,” he muttered.
“I can listen to her but not listen to her, you know?” said Nilanjana. “I’m proud of my experiment. It’s about something that interests me and it works. Or it worked. It worked until I knocked it over.”
She opened up the lab’s emergency station, which contained a roll of paper towels and nothing else.
“Or I don’t know. I guess maybe that’s what I do, you know? I work on small experiments by myself. Maybe that’s just what’s in store for me. That would be okay.”
“Whatever makes you happy, Nils.” He poked at the machine with a screwdriver. “Not being flippant. Really whatever makes you happy. Are you happy?”
“I’m fine.” She glanced back at the small dribble of growth solution on the table, shuddered, and spooled a large portion of the paper towel roll around her hand, tearing it off with a hard tug. “I don’t need to be happy when I’m fine.”
As she wiped the growth solution up with the huge wad of paper in her hand, she considered whether she was even fine. How was someone supposed to know that? What was the objective test of happiness, let alone fineness? What data could be collected? Could “fine” even be demonstrated objectively?
She considered the other scientists. There were several tables around the large lab, each with a scientist working on their own experiment. Some of the experiments sparked or sang, others oozed or gelled. Only some of the experiments thought or felt. On one wall was a whiteboard with various project names and experimental observations. “Bees?” said one. “Hypothesis: Everything is frightening and we should hide,” said another.
The lab was in the science district, a rough, industrial part of town, made dangerous by frequent feuds between rival groups of scientists. Astronomers and ornithologists in particular were always picking fights with each other, street corner ambushes that would start with the reading aloud of peer-reviewed research papers and end with the thrust of a broken bottle. Nilanjana stayed out of these disputes, but it was still unsettling walking by a faint bloodstain or the torn page of a thesis, marking the site of a particularly violent battle.
Still, she w
as fine with it. She was fine with her experiment. She was fine with Luisa and Mark. She was fine sitting in a large room full of smart people she respected, even if she didn’t know them well. She was fine coming to work and talking about science, or maybe just life. She was fine going home alone at night and not being in a room full of people. She was fine limiting the people she knew to select hours of the day and then restricting them from other hours of the day when she could be by herself. She was fine being an outsider—the people of Night Vale regularly reminded her she was not from here. She had always been an outsider, and this was fine. She was fine growing up a girl who liked killing bugs and looking in microscopes and organizing microbes into even patterns. She was fine not having friends who understood or liked this. She was fine not being picked on or derided, but also not being invited to parties. Maybe she wasn’t happy. Maybe what she was doing wasn’t important or helping anyone. But it was fine. “I’m fine,” she was fine with telling herself.
“Nilanjana?” said a smooth, oaky voice. She looked up from her table, which she had been wiping over and over with the paper towels, not even noticing the motion of her arm.
Carlos was standing in the door of his office. He looked frightened. No, concerned. No, frightened.
“Nilanjana, can you come in here? I need your opinion on . . . Just come in here please.”
Carlos did not often call other scientists into his private lab. That was where he did his own special experiments, ones that involved the saving of Night Vale from the various supernatural threats that besieged it, and also where he put together construction paper collage love notes for his husband. It was all important work and he preferred to not be disturbed. Nilanjana couldn’t remember the last time she had been asked into his office.
If she had known all the events that would spiral out from the conversation she was about to have, she would have felt terrified, and maybe overjoyed, and terrified all over again. She would have felt so many things she hadn’t felt since coming to this strange town where she didn’t quite belong. As it was, she only felt confused.
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll be right in.”
“Ugh,” said Luisa, waving dismissively at her potatoes.
3
Nilanjana had no interest in Carlos and anyway he was married to the local community radio host, Cecil Palmer. Still, she couldn’t not notice that he was, in his way, stunningly handsome. Even his frown was perfect, and he ran his hands perfectly through his perfect hair.
In science, of course, there’s always a lot of pressure to look good. Appearances are a major part of a science career, and top scientists face all sorts of accusations of plastic surgery and unhealthy diets, a constant scrutiny in gossip magazines and tabloid blogs. But Carlos stayed out of all that. He was a beautiful person, but that never interested him much. He only cared about two things: his scientific work, and his family.
Nilanjana didn’t know Carlos’s family well. She knew his teenage niece, Janice, was born with spina bifida, and while her frequent checkups of eyes, kidneys, and spine came back healthy each time, Carlos would take days off work to be with her and his brother- and sister-in-law.
Nilanjana knew that his husband, Cecil, sometimes faced serious dangers as a reporter in a town as full of terrible secrets as Night Vale, and those dangers sent Carlos into a worried stupor. He would pace about the office, trying not to call the station to ask if Cecil was okay. Not much got done in the lab when Carlos fretted for Cecil’s safety. She could tell when Carlos had a date night planned, because he put gel in his hair and wore his most striking lab coat.
She was uncertain why Carlos wanted to talk to her now. She hoped that the problem was with his scientific work. She didn’t have much to say on the subject of being in love. Not that she hadn’t had boyfriends. She was a human being of adult age with an interest in other human beings, and she had been in relationships starting from high school. But she did not feel qualified to offer advice on the subject. She was just stumbling along, the same as anyone. It was occasionally fun and often lonely, whether she was with someone at the time or not.
Carlos interrupted this reverie by pulling down a chart that said in large letters SCIENCE.
“Today’s topic of discussion is science. I’ve provided a visual aid.”
Oh thank god.
He gestured for her to sit, but she didn’t like sitting much, and so she gestured that she would rather stand, and there was some gesturing back and forth that neither of them understood. Finally, Carlos sat and she remained standing.
“I know you are aware of the house,” he began.
“The general concept of houses?”
“No, uh, sorry, the house that doesn’t exist.”
He pulled down another chart. It had a picture of a house on it.
“Yes,” she said, “I know that house. It doesn’t exist. It looks like it exists. Like it’s right there when you look at it, and it’s between two other identical houses, so it would make more sense for it to be there than not, but . . .”
“ . . . it doesn’t actually exist,” he finished.
“Right. It’s a weird house. Or it isn’t a weird house. It’s weird but not a house? Hard to know how to talk about it.”
Everyone in town knew about the house that looks like it exists but doesn’t. There was a common dare among scientists to knock on the door and then run away. Carlos himself had once entered the house. He didn’t talk much about this. Anytime the topic came up, he would wave it off or try to change the subject.
What Nilanjana had learned from his research notes was that its interior was entirely different from that of the common prefab house it seemed to be when one peered through its windows. Seen from the inside, the house contained no furniture, and no decorations, except a small black-and-white photo of a lighthouse. The house was not a house but an entryway to a desert otherworld: vast and empty. There was a single mountain in that otherworld, and it was completely believable to all who saw it. At the top of the mountain was the lighthouse from the photo. There had been a cold light emanating from all around, though the sun was never visible.
Hypothesis: The desert otherworld had been cold and empty, and had made Carlos feel lost to the people he loved. Carlos cared more than anything about the people he loved, and so a place with no one and nothing in it had been traumatizing for him.
Ever since Carlos’s return from the otherworld a few years back, everyone in the lab knew he had been obsessed with the house. And like most obsessions with the truth, this had made the City Council nervous.
“Your job is being a scientist,” the council had told him via an empty-eyed child messenger who had helpfully lunged out at him from the shower when he had gotten up to pee in the middle of the night. “So look pretty and write papers. Don’t go searching around for the ‘truth.’ You’re a scientist, not a snoop.”
“Man,” said Nilanjana, as he told her about the message from the council.
“Yes, it was upsetting,” said Carlos. “And then of course I was stuck with an empty-eyed child messenger, and you know how long it takes the City Council to come back around and pick them up. We ended up having to give her rides to school for the next three weeks. We’re going to her eighth-grade graduation tomorrow.”
“Oh cute.”
“Supercute. But I won’t let the City Council dissuade me from preventing anyone else from being hurt by that otherworld. They’ve been trying to stop me.”
It went like this.
Carlos had come up with the idea of performing measurements on the house that doesn’t exist, using a wall-size machine in his office. The machine employed radar and microwaves and lasers to take measurements, spitting out numbers and making a high-pitched whirring sound.
Often, especially on hot days, the windows of the house that didn’t exist were left open in the front living room, and he could try to get a reading of the distance between the house’s nonexistent exterior and its parallel universe interior. A check
for entrances into parallel universes and laser readings of their depths are common parts of any new home inspection, and so he had just applied this construction tool to his experimental problems. If one looked through the window, it seemed like a typical living room: armchair, settee, loudspeaker without volume control for the distribution of government propaganda, emergency backup settee. The usual stuff. But he knew this was only an optical illusion, which is a fancy, scientific phrase for a lie.
When he had switched his machine on, things had gone all wrong. There was a rumbling, deep from below the sand of the desert. It shook the ground. It was almost like an earthquake, but not human-made or scheduled on the municipal community calendar like a normal earthquake. The vibration and noise had made all of his readings useless.
Science was meant to be hard. After all, what was science but a bunch of bored human beings trying to challenge themselves when faith became too easy? So he had set up the machine again, carefully calibrating it, and then turning it on. Again, the moment after his finger hit the switch, there had been the rumble. The experiment was ruined.
“Someone is watching me. Every time I try to do the experiment, the rumbling starts up and ruins it. Someone doesn’t want this house investigated. I think whoever is trying to stop me has their own counteractive machine to disrupt my research.”
He pulled down a third chart, this one a map of where the rumblings had been concentrated. A series of orange blotches in the desert, surrounding the town.
“Along with the seismic action to throw off my numbers, there appears to have been violent displacement of earth. People have gone missing.”
“But who would want to cover up the truth?” asked Nilanjana. “Besides the Secret Police, the City Council, the mayor, any number of world governments, and the invading forces from other worlds?”
“Exactly,” Carlos said. “The City Council is the most likely, since they had already warned me.”
Carlos had demanded an audience with the City Council, a brave move. Whatever multiform, extradimensional beast inhabited the council chambers, issuing forth smoke and brimstone and city ordinances, it had a ravenous taste for humans. But Carlos put science and his community before all other concerns, so he had taken a flame-retardant lab coat, slipped on a blindfold to keep him from the horror of seeing the writhing forms of the council, and gone to City Hall.
