Mostly Void, Partially Stars

by Joseph Fink

  DEDICATION

  To Kathy Fink and to Ellen Flood

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  FOREWORD BY CORY DOCTOROW

  INTRODUCTION BY JOSEPH FINK

  EPISODE 1:

  “Pilot”

  EPISODE 2:

  “Glow Cloud”

  EPISODE 3:

  “Station Management”

  EPISODE 4:

  “PTA Meeting”

  EPISODE 5:

  “The Shape in Grove Park”

  EPISODE 6:

  “The Drawbridge”

  EPISODE 7:

  “History Week”

  EPISODE 8:

  “The Lights in Radon Canyon”

  EPISODE 9:

  “Pyramid”

  EPISODE 10:

  “Feral Dogs”

  EPISODE 11:

  “Wheat & Wheat By-Products”

  EPISODE 12:

  “The Candidate”

  EPISODE 13:

  “A Story About You”

  EPISODE 14:

  “The Man in the Tan Jacket

  EPISODE 15:

  “Street Cleaning Day”

  EPISODE 16:

  “The Phone Call”

  EPISODE 17:

  “Valentine”

  EPISODE 18:

  “The Traveler”

  EPISODE 19A:

  “The Sandstorm”

  EPISODE 19B:

  “The Sandstorm”

  EPISODE 20:

  “Poetry Week”

  EPISODE 21:

  “A Memory of Europe”

  EPISODE 22:

  “The Whispering Forest”

  EPISODE 23:

  “Eternal Scouts”

  EPISODE 24:

  “The Mayor”

  EPISODE 25:

  “One Year Later”

  DISPARITION MUSIC CORNER

  LIVE SHOW:

  “Condos”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  PRAISE FOR WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE: A NOVEL

  ALSO BY JOSEPH FINK & JEFFREY CRANOR

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  FOREWORD

  THE RARE, GOOD KIND OF WEIRD

  BEING WEIRD AND FUNNY IS EASY. BEING WEIRD AND FUNNY AND compelling is hard.

  We’ve all guffawed at some strange, surreal juxtaposition (“Two. One to take the bath and the other one to fill the tub with brightly colored machine parts.”). You don’t have to be stoned to crack up at a friend’s fantastic, perfect non sequitur. Stories that inspire hilarity and mystification are good fun, but they’re not great stories.

  Stories become great by hacking your brain. Nothing that happens in fiction matters. The people in fiction are fictional so their triumphs and tragedies have literally no consequence. The death of the yogurt you doomed to a fiery death in your gut acid this morning is infinitely more tragic than the “deaths” of Romeo and Juliet. The yogurt was alive and then it died. Romeo and Juliet never lived in the first place.

  Stories trick your naive, empathic mind into resonating in sympathy (literally) with the plights of their imaginary people. Usually they do this by scrupulously avoiding any reminder that these are imaginary people. That “willing suspension of disbelief” is a bargain between the creator and the audience: the creator tells the tale and hews to something that is plausible (or at least consistent) and the audience member doesn’t pinch herself and say, “Cut it out with the quickened heart, the leaking tears, the smiles of triumph, you dope, this is all made up!”

  This makes weird stories and great stories nearly incompatible. A story is a love affair on the last night of summer camp that depends on both parties not calling attention to the fact that the camp bus is coming in the morning, so they can pretend that the night could last forever.

  Weird stuff happening to the characters is a reminder that this is all made up, the ending is coming, and when it’s done, these invisible people will disappear into the nonspace whence they came, so stop cheering them on or crying for them.

  Bringing me to Night Vale.

  The remarkable thing about Night Vale isn’t how delightfully weird it is. The remarkable thing is how moving it is. Cranor and Fink and cowriters and actors weave a world with haphazard internal consistency.

  When things are weird, they make them weirder. It’s a good, meaty sort of weird, steering clear of cliché and venturing into fresh, imaginative territory—but it’s still undeniably weird.

  It shouldn’t work. We shouldn’t root for Cecil, cheer on his love affair with Carlos. Tamika Flynn and Intern Dana and even that guy with the deerskin suitcase full of flies (whose story was so beautifully told in Welcome to Night Vale, a book that is, if anything, even more improbable than these podcast scripts)—they live through ridiculous events but they react to them with perfect aplomb. They manage to trip the empathic response that makes us care about their outcomes, despite their outlandish lives.

  This shouldn’t work. In theory, it shouldn’t work. Like Wikipedia and many other marvels of the Internet age, Welcome to Night Vale only works in practice. In theory, it’s a disaster.

  I don’t know how the writers pull this off. I suspect they might be witches. I got some clues from reading Welcome to Night Vale, in which I learned that in the writers’ heads these characters have completely credible internal lives that treat their weird lives as real. Somehow, though, those internal lives usually stay internal in the podcast (the difference between drama and prose is that in drama you only get what people say and do; in prose you get what’s going on inside their heads), they shine through the characters and their voices, ensnaring our empathy.

  The creators’ notes you’re about to read give a hint at how this alchemy takes place. Usually reading how writers write (or even how actors act) is like listening to a stranger tell you about their boring dreams. Fink, Cranor, and their collaborators make the stories behind these stories fascinating, in part because of the light they shed on this most bizarre phenomenon.

  In short, there are moving stories, there are weird stories, and then there’s Night Vale. It’s weirdly moving. Be prepared. Be mystified. Be delighted. Please don’t burn the authors at the stake for their sorcery, no matter how tempting it may be.

  —Cory Doctorow, Los Angeles, 2016

  INTRODUCTION

  WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE IS A HOBBY THAT GOT OUT OF HAND.

  Maybe you know all about our show. Or maybe you have no idea who we are and just picked up this book because you’re curious, or because the cover was cool.

  Either way, welcome. This book is for you.

  If you’ve never heard of us, well this book starts right from the very beginning of our story, so you can feel free to jump right in.

  And if you’re one of the people who have already listened to all these episodes many, many times, then there’s a ton of behind-the-scenes stuff, plus weird illustrations by our favorite weird artist, Jessica Hayworth.

  This is where I should talk about how Welcome to Night Vale went from a passing idea I had one day into a popular podcast, an international touring show, a novel, and then, finally, this collection of episodes for which I am currently writing an intro. That’s a very long story, so I’ll just tell the first part here; how it went from a group of friends with an idea to a podcast that a few people listened to.

  Jeffrey Cranor (my cowriter) and I met soon after I moved to New York in 2008, when he was doing performance art with the theater group the New York Neo-Futurists. He did a piece in which he revealed he had burned a terrible book, and I approached him after the show to tell him th
at I thought his piece was immoral because there was no moral reason to ever burn a book. We’ve been friends ever since.

  In 2010, Jeffrey approached me about writing a play about time travel. We spent the next year meeting occasionally to share pieces we had written and to talk about that writing. These meetings often started with lengthy discussions of the podcasts we were listening to. We both had a shared love of podcasts and after we performed the play (What the Time Traveler Will Tell Us, performed at Incubator Arts, the amazing and unfortunately short-lived venue for experimental theater in the East Village), I started thinking of a podcast we could make together.

  The main thing I knew is that I didn’t want to make a podcast that sounded like any other podcast anyone else was already making because, well, those people were already making those podcasts better than we could.

  Eventually I came up with the idea of a town where every conspiracy theory is true and people just have to go on with their lives. I’ve always been fascinated by conspiracy theories, even though I believe almost none of them.

  I don’t know where the name “Night Vale” came from. I do remember it came at the exact same time as the rest of the idea, and was the only name I considered. It just fit.

  The first script was written in short bursts between other projects I was working on. The very first Night Vale bit I wrote was the “lights above the Arby’s” paragraph that would appear halfway through the first episode. I had this idea in my head about Night Vale and what it might be like as a show, but primarily I was trying to capture a mood, and that paragraph allowed me to define for myself what that mood was going to be.

  For a long time, when I was trying to make something fit the world of Night Vale, I thought back to that first paragraph I wrote and tried to capture the same feeling I had when I wrote it.

  After months of occasional writing, I had a huge text document of bits and pieces talking about this strange desert town, and I started trying to work them together into something whole. The result was the Pilot, which, as the name suggests, was a total test of concept, not for any outside force, but for myself. What did this show look like when written out in episode form, and was it still as interesting as it had seemed in my head?

  Given its trial-and-error creation, it’s amazing to me how much of the show is right there in the first script. Old Woman Josie and her angels. Beautiful Carlos. The Dog Park. I accidentally set up years of stories while just chasing a mood, a feeling in my stomach when I thought of small towns in vast deserts. I don’t think I would have done it nearly as well if long-term storytelling had been my conscious goal at the time.

  Cecil Baldwin (our lead actor, who shares a first name with our main character) is someone whom I also knew through the New York Neo-Futurists. He had once done a performance piece in which he talked about his deep, rich voice, so perfectly radio-ready, and that despite his voice he could not seem to get hired for any voiceover work. And so I thought: all right, let’s do this. I e-mailed him asking if he wanted to try recording a weird thing I was working on, and then we met at a coffee shop so I could lend him my old USB mic.

  I also knew I would need a score for the show. Jon Bernstein is someone I had worked with on the website SomethingAwful.com, and he had been making amazing music under the name Disparition for years. I sent him an e-mail asking him if I could use his music for this experimental project I was putting together, and he said sure.

  Armed with Jon’s back catalog, Cecil’s recording of my pilot script, and my limited self-taught knowledge of the sound editing and recording program Audacity, I created a test episode. I genuinely had no idea how it would sound all put together. Once it was finished, I walked around my neighborhood in Brooklyn, listening to the episode over and over. I couldn’t believe how alive and complete this ramshackle thing sounded. That test episode is the first episode of the podcast that we released, exactly as it was when I first listened to it.

  I sent the file to Jeffrey with a note asking if he wanted to spend a good deal of his time working on a free project with me. He said he did. We started writing together, and soon had four or five episodes written. It honestly all felt pretty easy.

  Our main goal for the show was that someone who wasn’t a friend or family member would eventually hear it. That was also our only goal. We had no aspirations beyond that, because the idea of expecting anything else from a strange little hobby podcast had not even remotely occurred to us.

  On our first anniversary, we held a party in a bar space that a fan got us for free. There were 115 people there (!). Many of them were people we didn’t know at all (!!). We had had 150,000 downloads in our first year, more than our wildest expectations (!!!). It felt like we really had gone so much further than we ever thought we would.

  And then, only one month after that party, the explosion came. We would get over ten million downloads that summer, and our lives would radically change. But that’s a story for Volume 2.

  Night Vale is still made as it has always been. Jeffrey and I alternate writing drafts of scripts, and then pass them back and forth, editing and talking about them. Continuity is tracked with our fallible memories and the help of Google Doc’s search function. Cecil does his vocal magic at home, into a USB mic. I go through Jon’s back catalog and select a track that seems to fit the moment I’m trying to create. I still only sort of know how to use Audacity. And then we put the episode out there and hope people enjoy it.

  Here is the first year of our episodes. We hope you enjoy them.

  —Joseph Fink, Creator and Cowriter of Welcome to Night Vale

  EPISODE 1:

  “PILOT”

  JUNE 15, 2012

  I TALKED A BIT ABOUT HOW THIS EPISODE CAME TO BE IN THIS BOOK’S intro, so instead I wanted to take a moment here to talk about something else: the weather.

  How is it where you are? Oh, okay.

  Throughout these scripts, you’ll see a reference to the weather section of the broadcast, followed by the name of a song and a musical artist. This is because in Night Vale the weather section is always a song.

  One of the most common questions I get asked in interviews is why the weather is a song. And here’s why: I don’t know. Like a lot of my creative decisions (and important life decisions, come to think of it), I don’t have any sort of rational account of my reasoning. It just felt right and I went with it.

  Originally there was going to be a number of labeled sections that would each have the same type of content in every episode. For instance, there was going to be a traffic section that would be a monologue by a different guest writer/performer. By the time the episode took shape, the rest of those sections had been scrapped and only the weather remained. (Eventually, stuff like the traffic sections would return, but in forms that bore no resemblance at all to the original plan for them. We would also have a proverb at the end of every episode, modeled after the Torey Malatia jokes at the end of every This American Life, designed to give people a fun stinger at the end of every episode and also give them a reason to listen through the credits.)

  Music has always been vitally important to me. I was raised in a house that had a room we called “the music room” that had everything from guitars to accordions to a grand piano. So being able to feature music by artists I enjoy is a huge draw for me.

  The weather for this episode was a song I wrote and recorded myself. I also did the weather for episode 25. I like music as a hobby, and I had an idea that I could do one of the weather reports each year. And then I got really busy and it hasn’t happened since. But who knows? Maybe I’ll find time someday.

  Feel free to pause reading at the appropriate time in each script and go listen to the listed song. Or don’t. Some days the weather happens and we never look up or go outside and that’s okay too.

  —Joseph Fink

  A friendly desert community, where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep.

  WELCOME TO NIGH
T VALE.

  Hello listeners. To start things off, I’ve been asked to read this brief notice. The City Council announces the opening of a new Dog Park at the corner of Earl and Summerset, near the Ralphs. They would like to remind everyone that dogs are not allowed in the Dog Park. People are not allowed in the Dog Park. It is possible you will see hooded figures in the Dog Park. Do not approach them. Do not approach the Dog Park. The fence is electrified and highly dangerous. Try not to look at the Dog Park and especially do not look for any period of time at the hooded figures. The Dog Park will not harm you.

  And now the news.

  Old Woman Josie, out near the car lot, says the angels revealed themselves to her. Said they were ten feet tall, radiant, one of them was black. Said they helped her with various household chores. One of them changed a lightbulb for her, the porch light. She’s offering to sell the old lightbulb, which has been touched by an angel (it was the black angel, if that sweetens the pot for anyone). If you’re interested, contact Old Woman Josie. She’s out near the car lot.

  A new man came into town today. Who is he? What does he want from us? Why his perfect and beautiful haircut? Why his perfect and beautiful coat? He says he is a scientist. Well, we have all been scientists at one point or another in our lives. But why now? Why here? And just what does he plan to do with all those beakers and humming electrical instruments in that lab he’s renting, the one next to Big Rico’s Pizza. No one does a slice like Big Rico. No one.

  Just a reminder to all the parents out there. Let’s talk about safety when taking your children out to play in the scrublands and the sand wastes. You need to give them plenty of water, make sure there’s a shade tree in the area, and keep an eye on the helicopter colors. Are the unmarked helicopters circling the area black? Probably World Government, not a good area for play that day. Are they blue? That’s the Sheriff’s Secret Police; they’ll keep a good eye on your kids, and hardly ever take one. Are they painted with complex murals depicting birds of prey diving? No one knows what those helicopters are, or what they want. Do not play in the area. Return to your home and lock the doors until a Sheriff’s Secret Policeman leaves a carnation on your porch to indicate that the danger has passed. Cover your ears to blot out the screams. Also, remember: Gatorade is basically soda, so give your kids plain old water and maybe some orange slices when they play.