Mostly Void, Partially Stars

by Joseph Fink

  He’s okay.

  Never before in my career as a broadcaster have I gone through such a roller coaster of emotion and fear. To think that I had lost that most precious thing to me, the presence of Carlos in my life and then to have it brought back, so that I could appreciate it all the more. Oh Carlos, all the words I would never have said to you.

  And the news that the city is in fact only a miniature city ten feet down, that was startling as well.

  But it appears that all is well, and so I say to you, with a heart singing its way from heavy to light: Goodnight, Night Vale. Good—

  Oh no. I have just been handed a note. Oh, this is not good news. Ladies and gentlemen, in his valiant rescue of our beloved Carlos, the Apache Tracker was mortally wounded. He is bleeding profusely and it is getting all over his fake feather headdress, and he says that even his ancient Indian Magicks will not help him, which of course they won’t, because they’re not real.

  Listeners, how could I have been so wrong about this man? A racist embarrassment to our town? Maybe. A real jerk? Yes. But he also was a man with Night Vale’s best interests at heart, who worked closely with the angels and the mysterious man in the tan jacket to protect us from the miniature city under the bowling alley. And he, at the cost of his own life, saved Carlos. Carlos breathes, and soon, the Apache Tracker will not. Tell me nothing else, and still I will tell you: Here is a good man. Here is a good man dying. Here it is, the end of a good man’s life.

  The Apache Tracker spoke, not in a hoarse whisper, but with a clear ringing voice, addressing the sky hidden behind the Styrofoam panels of the ceiling: Я , это Ты можешь взять мою машину.”

  He said this and then he died. The Apache Tracker is dead. Teddy Williams confirmed. Jeremy is slumped into a folding chair, kicking his feet, and saying this is the worst birthday party anyone has ever had.

  Goodnight, brave Tracker. Goodnight. I thought you were one thing, and you were another. It is likely I will learn nothing from this.

  And, oh, a message on my phone. Carlos wants to see me. He says to meet him at the Arby’s parking lot. I am not sure what scientific exploration now needs the services of my radio audience, but I will dutifully go. Dutifully meet him. And as I go, let us all go, go now to the weather.

  WEATHER: “Sunday Morning Stasis” by Joseph Fink

  I arrived at the parking lot to find Carlos, perched on the trunk of his car in flannel and jeans, his perfect hair mussed, his perfect teeth hidden.

  “What is it?” I said. “What danger are we in? What mystery needs to be explored?”

  He shook his head.

  “Nothing,” he said. “After everything that happened . . . I just wanted to see you.”

  My heart leapt. My heart soared. My heart, metaphorically, performed a number of aerial activities, and, literally, it began to beat hard.

  “Oh?” I said, my voice more tremble than word.

  Carlos looked at the setting sun. “I used to think it was setting at the wrong time,” he said. “But then I realized that time doesn’t work in Night Vale and that none of the clocks are real. Sometimes things seem so strange or malevolent, and then you find that, underneath, it was something else altogether, something pure and innocent.”

  “I know what you mean,” I replied.

  Somewhere the tiny people of the city below have arrived in Night Vale and are beginning their war against us, having already shown themselves capable of murder. Somewhere a man in a tan jacket is whispering into the ears of our mayor, and we do not know what agenda they pursue. Somewhere the body of the Apache Tracker lies cold and still, never to speak of Ancient Indian Magicks again. This all happens, somewhere else.

  But here, Carlos and I sat on the trunk of that car, his car, looking together at the lights up in the sky above the Arby’s. They were beautiful in the hushed twilight, shimmering in a night sky already coming alive with bits of the universe.

  One year later. One year since he arrived.

  He put his hand on my knee and said nothing, and I knew what he meant. I felt the same. I leaned my head on his shoulder.

  We understand the lights. We understand the lights above the Arby’s. We understand so much. But the sky behind those lights, mostly void, partially stars, that sky reminds us: We don’t understand even more.

  Goodnight, Night Vale. Goodnight.

  PROVERB: Fun game. Say “toy boat” over and over. Do it for the rest of your life. Retreat from society and live on alms. Whisper “toy boat” as you die.

  DISPARITION MUSIC CORNER

  DISPARITION IS A PROJECT I BEGAN IN 2004 AS AN OUTLET FOR ORIGINAL electronic and instrumental compositions. Over the years, under the Disparition name, I have released a number of albums in styles ranging from synth-based ambient to beat-driven Intelligent Dance Music (IDM), often incorporating field recordings and live instruments, and covering topics ranging from twentieth-century geopolitics to early modern alchemy.

  In 2007, I was living in California and met Joseph Fink through a humor site called Something Awful where we both worked as moderators, and became friendly due to a mutual interest in religious history and music. In 2008 I relocated to New York City and began working in the publishing industry as an online community manager for Barnes and Noble’s website, and met up with Joseph, who had moved to the city around the same time. I later hired him to moderate a religious literature discussion board for B&N.

  Over the next couple years I continued to work day jobs in publishing and marketing while becoming increasingly involved in sound design and composing for various experimental theatre projects at venues such as Dixon Place, NYTW, and 3LD. I kept in touch with Joseph, who was similarly working various day jobs while becoming involved in experimental theatre, specifically with the New York Neo-Futurists operating out of the Kraine on East Fourth Street, and developing his own fiction.

  In 2012, Joseph told me about a new project he was working on, the fictional podcast we now know as Welcome to Night Vale, and asked if he could use Disparition music as the soundtrack. Joseph initially described Night Vale to me as a town “in a universe where all conspiracy theories are true.” As I am a fan of and subscriber to many conspiracy theories myself (and so wrote most of my music in a world where all conspiracy theories are true), I was taken with the idea, and readily assented.

  In general, I have very little involvement with the making of any given Welcome to Night Vale episode. Joseph takes the music from my albums (as well as random one-off pieces that I release online) and sorts it into several categories according to mood, and then inserts these as background in podcast episodes. The song that he chose for the theme, “The Ballad of Fiedler and Mundt,” from the album Neukrk, takes its inspiration from the classic John le Carré novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and is meant to illustrate that novel’s opening sequence. Other pieces used frequently in the podcast include Hvar, a tribute to the tranquil atmosphere of the island of that name in Croatia, and Nieuwe Utrecht, a piece used for the podcast’s introduction that features percussion and drones sourced from New York City’s subway system—a tribute to Brooklyn’s early Dutch settlements.

  Now that my music has been used in Welcome to Night Vale for several years, it’s strange to realize that there are many people out there who have heard these songs and have very different associations than my own. Fans of the podcast might strongly associate a particular song with one of the characters or major plot point, while perhaps I had intended it as political commentary or a reflection on a moment from my life. Partially in response to this, I have started writing lyrics, in order to leave more of a presence or clear statement in my music. But this has also caused me to think back on my favorite artists and what their music meant to me while I was growing up, and how much the creator’s intentions can differ from the audience’s experience and interpretation of a piece of art.

  LIVE SHOW:

  “CONDOS”

  AS PERFORMED ON DECEMBER 18, 2013, AT TH
E BELL HOUSE, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

  CAST:

  CECIL BALDWIN—Cecil Palmer

  DYLAN MARRON—Carlos

  JACKSON PUBLICK—Hiram McDaniels

  MARA WILSON—Faceless Old Woman

  THIS IS THE FIRST NIGHT VALE LIVE SHOW PERFORMED, ALTHOUGH NOT the first one planned. We had booked the live show that would become “The Debate” (available in Volume 2) over the summer of 2013 and it had sold out in seconds. As we waited for that to happen, a variety of non-Night Vale–related circumstances ended with me, Cecil, and the voice of the credits and eventual emcee of our live show, Meg Bashwiner, all in San Francisco.

  I decided to reach out on Twitter to see if anyone might have a place where we could do a show. Lauren O’Niell, now a good friend, who works at The Booksmith on Haight Street in San Francisco, e-mailed us offering her bookstore for the show, and we took her up on it. We put tickets up and they sold out more or less instantly. We added a second show, and that too sold out. And just like that, we had two different live shows coming up.

  I wrote this script a week before the show. No script has ever made me feel more nervous and unsure. Was it good enough to be our first live show? What did that even mean? I was not very confident as we headed into the day of the show.

  That afternoon, we did a read through in an apartment I was renting in the Mission. We ate snacks from Bi-Rite and I tried to figure out what Disparition songs on my iTunes to play behind Cecil talking.

  And then the show started. And it’s a moment I will never forget. The room was filled with 350 people who were there to see a thing I wrote, and, sitting at my laptop in the YA section running sound from my laptop, I got to watch them experience it. I had never had anything like that happen.

  We have since had bigger shows, and better shows, and shows that I can’t believe we were able in our lives to do. But we never had another first show. And I never got to watch an audience listen to our stories for the first time again. It was magical. It was the start of something.

  —Joseph Fink

  There’s an amazing synthesis between writing and performance throughout Welcome to Night Vale, and “Condos,” being our first official live show, is one of the best examples of how the script and actors play off each other in real time. The prose in this live show is gorgeous and lush; the dialogue is funny and quick. It is a joy to read, and even more so, a true delight to perform.

  What fun it was to breathe life into this script in front of a live audience. No . . . with an audience. There’s a give-and-take between actor and audience for any piece of theatre, but this has so many instances where being present in the room truly makes the show soar. For example, the traffic report with the car and lake is a real dance between the performer and spectator. Pause too much or work the joke too hard, and the through-line of the whole falls apart. Run through it too quickly or ignore the audiences’ experience in the moment, and it begins to feel rhetorical.

  I know you’re probably silently reading this collection of Night Vale scripts, but just for a lark, do an experiment and read this episode out loud to yourself. Or, if you want to be even bolder, get a few friends together and take turns reading “Condos” to each other. But here’s the trick—read the script in your own voice. Don’t try to impersonate Mara or Dylan or me. Just take each sentence as it is written, and I promise you will begin to hear the cadence and rhythm of Joseph and Jeffrey’s writing. There’s a brief moment in Hiram’s story of wanting to be mayor where he describes an unflappable man on the street as letting out a “loud hoot.” But that wasn’t the original line. At first, the line was, “He lets out a deep hoot.” Just take a moment to say the words deep hoot out loud a few times, and you’ll understand why we thought it best to do a little, tiny rewrite. Words can be silly and fun, right?

  There is one other reason why “Condos” is right at the top of my favorite Night Vale scripts—the denouement about the nature of perfection. Yes, this is a “love conquers all” ending, but what makes it truly beautiful and chilling is Cecil’s realization that perfection is unrealistic. All “squees” and “feels” aside, what kind of world would this be where absolute perfection is expected of our loved ones? Or ourselves? One filled with disappointment, to be sure—a world of expectation rather than existence. Instead, this episode leaves us with the challenge to truly look at the love in our lives, honest and imperfect, and cherish that love for what it is, rather than what it should be.

  —Cecil Baldwin, Voice of Cecil Palmer

  At last, we are alone. At last, we are all of us alone together. At last, every human, alone together, on this earth.

  WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE.

  Thrilling news, listeners. It has come to our attention that there will be condos for sale right here in Night Vale. Details on them are a little hazy. For instance, we don’t know what these condos will look like, where they will be located, who is building them, and what they will cost. But, in the official brochure for the development, it does say CONDOS FOR SALE in a thick all-caps black scrawl.

  One local Realtor, speaking under the condition of anonymity and from within the belly of a grazing deer, said that condos are a great investment.

  “Invest your money in condos,” said the Realtor. “Invest your time in condos. Invest your life. Invest emotion and hope. Invest your ideas about the future. Invest your disappointment with your ongoing now. Invest drops of blood. You lose blood all the time on frivolous accidents, now is the chance to imbue it with purpose and verve. Spill your blood before the condos.”

  The Realtor was then cut off when the deer was spooked by a passing car and ran away.

  Listeners. I don’t know much about condos. I don’t know much about anything at all, honestly. But I do know this. Condos are coming to Night Vale. They will be for sale. And this is great and exciting news for us all!

  Well, it seems that just about half the town of Night Vale is lined up outside of the condo rental office, which is located in the abandoned gas station on Oxford Street. Everyone is there! Janice Rio, from down the street, who was practically hopping up and down with excitement over owning a new condo, whatever a condo is, whatever it looks like. Leann Hart, publishing editor of the Night Vale Daily Journal, who was holding a bloodied hatchet in case she came across any bloggers or online journalists who might threaten her grip on the printed word. Carlos the scientist, ah Carlos the scientist, he was there, wearing a business casual lab coat and analyzing those around him with complicated devices he couldn’t explain without eventually just shaking his head and muttering “Science.” I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this on this show, by the way, but Carlos is totally my boyfriend. Just didn’t know if I had brought that up. He’s very handsome and into science and he’s learning to be better about calling when he needs to cancel dates to get some experiments done.

  Where was I?

  Ah yes. Even the dreaded Glow Cloud was there, hurling dead animals down upon those in line and intoning to all that would listen: “THE SUN WILL NOT SET AGAIN ON YOUR LIVES. ALL THAT YOU ONCE WERE NOW BELONGS TO ME. BURY YOUR FACE INTO THE BREAST OF THE EARTH AND WORSHIP THAT WHICH YOU CANNOT UNDERSTAND.” You know, it makes total sense that the Glow Cloud would want one of these condos. I mean, after joining the school board and sending your kid to the local school, you need to have a nice place in which to raise whatever strange and terrible creature it is that constitutes your family.

  No one could see into the abandoned gas station, so no one knew what the condo rental office looked like. There was only a bubbling dark movement, like a pot of boiling squid ink, and the occasional pinpoint of light, like distant, dying stars. People began to shove each other, trying to catch a glimpse of what the condos might be. There was shouting. Roger Singh started to point at every object in his sight, blades of grass, the rust shell of the former gas pump; Janice Rio, from down the street, asking, “Is that a condo? Is that a condo?” in a high, cracked voice.

  And . . . all right, this is out of no
where I know but: At what point in a relationship is it normal to think about living together? Is, say, buying a condo a sign that you want to move to that stage? Is that what an action like that might hypothetically be indicating?

  Oh yeah, also Roger was holding a freshly separated spine of an unknown animal or possible person, waving it at the bubbling dark window and howling, “Give me a condo. What is a condo? Give me one. Will this buy me a condo?” As of press time, no one had told him whether a spine would buy him a condo.

  . . . But do you know what I mean? Like could this be a sign that he wants to move things in that direction? I wish he would communicate more directly sometimes, but scientists don’t communicate directly. Everyone knows that. They communicate using a series of obscure and arcane codes and signals. That is what it means to be a scientist.

  Roger has started flailing at people with the detached spine. Several people have been trampled. It is still not known whether he will be able to buy a condo with the spine. Probably not.

  [Phone rings]

  Oh, I’m sorry, listeners. I have to get this. Hello?

  CARLOS: Cecil?

  CECIL: Carlos?

  CARLOS: Yes. Scientifically speaking, that is who I am.

  CECIL: I’ve been meaning to tell you. You sound different lately.

  CARLOS: Yes. I put in new vocal cords recently.

  CECIL: I didn’t know you went in for surgery.

  CARLOS: No, no. I’m a scientist. I put them in myself. Easy. It’s important that a scientist update his or her vocal cords once in a while. Otherwise . . . throat spiders.

  CECIL: No, I knew that. Obviously I knew that. I’m very into science. But listen, I’m in the middle of a show.