Welcome to Night Vale

Chapter 10

“I’m going to the movies,” Diane called at Josh’s door, not stopping to wait for a response.

At first, when she started doing this, he would say, “Have fun” or “I’m just going to stay home,” because he could only hang out with his mother every so often, not every other night.

“I’m going to the movies,” Diane called out for the fifth or sixth time in two weeks, and Josh began to resent her for going out so much without him. This resentment was not conscious. He just thought it was idiotic she was going to the movies so often. Who does she think she is? Josh thought.

Who are any of us, really? the house thought.

Josh stopped answering, and Diane stopped expecting an answer. She would simply go.

It was 8:00 P.M. The movie that evening was John Frankenheimer’s 1973 adaptation of The Iceman Cometh again. Diane, like most people, had seen the film dozens of times in her life—there were nightly screenings of it by Night Vale city ordinance. She didn’t love the movie as a movie, but she appreciated it as a familiar comfort.

She would often cry, particularly when the character Larry Slade said, “As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything.” It is not a sad or emotional scene. In fact it is quite a didactic one, but hers were tears of nostalgia. She would mouth the line “It’s irrelevant and immaterial” along with Larry.

Anyway, she wasn’t there because of the movie.

Diane bought a ticket from the sentient patch of haze working in the box office. Her name was Stacy, and Diane had developed a sort of friendship with her, or at least the comfortable familiarity of recognizing each other without making a big deal of it.

Each time she went she would look for Troy while trying not to make it obvious that this was what she was doing. She sometimes was successful at keeping this even from herself, thinking as she looked around that she was just curious about new releases that had made it past the Night Vale Top Secret Censorship Board (which consisted only of a guy named Luis, who refused to watch any of the movies he judged on the risk he would see a forbidden idea or gesture) or the current price of a tub of popcorn (which Night Vale Cinemas kept strictly linked to the coal futures market for reasons no one in town understood). But really she was looking for Troy and she was not seeing him.

She waited for a night no one else was in line and no one else was in the box office with Stacy.

“Do you know a guy who works here named Troy?”

“Sure. He’s not here tonight though.”

“Oh, shoot. I’m an old friend of his. I was hoping to run into him here. Do you know when he usually works?”

There was a long pause. Stacy, a haze with no face or body to read, continued to drift around the box office booth. Diane did not know if she had made Stacy uncomfortable with the question.

“I’m sorry. You probably can’t answer—”

“No no. I’m looking at the schedule right now.”

Diane saw some papers rustling on a clipboard pinned to the wall.

“He’s working tomorrow from eleven to four.”

“Oh, great,” Diane managed. She felt like she was choking, but she was able to breathe just fine. She nodded, as casually as she could. “Thanks, Stacy.”

Diane’s life at work was no easier. No one was talking about Evan. Nobody remembered Evan. She told everyone apologetically that she must have been confused.

“Because of your migraines?” asked Janice Rio, who was assistant director of sales and, more relevantly, whose desk was closest to her lonely outpost near the server room.

“No,” said Diane. “I don’t have… no.”

“Hmm,” hummed Janice. It was what she did when she didn’t care what the other person had said but the rhythm of conversation demanded a response. She walked away before more responses might be needed.

Diane did not get much work done, which was not as responsible as she liked to think she was. Instead she spent a lot of time looking at a couple pages of notebook paper she had found on the floor of her car.

The top sheet had a phone number and an address in writing that looked like Josh’s. The address was in Old Town Night Vale and had a unit number at the end. Josh had had a friend years ago who lived in that part of town, but Diane couldn’t think of anyone he might know now who lived there.

On the second sheet of paper, a different handwriting, still by Josh. His handwriting regularly changed depending on the size and shape his writing appendage took. A tentacle and a wing and a human hand, even with the same mind behind them, will wield a pen differently through the sheer fact of mass and shape. Still, like with anything related to his transformations, Diane could always tell Josh’s handwriting. There was always something at the core of it that pinged at the place inside her where she kept all the care she had for him.

The note said, “I want to meet this guy.”

Below it, in handwriting that was not Josh’s and written in a different color ink: “I’ll get you his number, but don’t call him yet.”

Josh: “I won’t. Duh. Does he have a picture? I want to know what he looks like.”

[Who?]: “If he doesn’t I can get one.”

Josh: “What’s his name?”

And then nothing more. Diane wondered who the boy was Josh was interested in. She didn’t know if he had ever been on a date with anyone. He had never been willing to talk about dating with her.

Diane wondered how to bring this up to Josh, and then she wondered if this was even the kind of thing you bring up with a teenager.

“So you’re interested in dating?” she could ask, but expecting what? A yes? Then what?

“What’s his name?” she followed up in her daydreamed conversation.

“I don’t know. Someone else knows,” she projected him saying as he looked down his thin beak at his hands, which had twice as many fingers as her own.

“You wanted to ask what the boy’s name was. Why didn’t you pass the paper back to your friend?” she imagined herself asking.

“Why are you reading my notes?” she pictured him shouting. His eyes pink, his long teeth bared. He was crying, his wings flapping.

She imagined this conversation a few times at her desk, and it never ended any better.

She stuffed the note in her pocket and lied to Catharine that she was having a migraine (Catharine had said: “I can see that.” Diane didn’t understand how someone could even see a migraine.) and left work early—sometime between the hours of eleven and four.

She was anxious and driving fast, listening to the radio turned up to a loud but sensible volume. Cecil Palmer was talking to that scientist, who was explaining how clouds are made of moisture and aren’t cover for alien crafts or appendages of a great sky being. It seemed ridiculous, like most things on the radio these days. He was bending facts to create an absurd argument just to get listeners stirred up.

She was disappointed, because Cecil and the scientist were dating, and interviewing your partner for a news program seemed to be a conflict of interest. And, more important, the scientist was talking nonsense.

“… tiny, tiny droplets that are invisible individually, but as a whole form a puffy white cloud,” the scientist said.

That was when she heard sirens, which at first she thought were muncipal censorship to spare regular citizens from having to hear this kind of talk on community airtime, but then she realized were actually on the road behind her.

She was doing almost fifty in a thirty zone. Okay, she thought, so this I deserve.

As she pulled her car over, she looked at the clock on her dashboard and realized there was no way she was going to get to the theater in time to see Troy. A feeling that had risen to the top of her chest slipped back down into her belly. She couldn’t tell what that feeling was or if it was good or bad.

There are no regular police in Night Vale. There used to be, but it was decided that a regular police force wasn’t secure enough. Everyone knew that the regular police existed; someone could use that information against Night Vale somehow. No one was sure how, but the threat was enough. There had been community meetings and then the police had vanished with no official explanation. A couple days later, the Sheriff’s Secret Police force appeared around town, driving dark red sedans with gold racing stripes and black seven-pointed stars on the sides that say SECRET POLICE on them, staffed by the exact same people who had previously been regular police officers. Everyone felt much safer after that.

Which is why it was so odd that the car that had pulled her over was an old-fashioned police cruiser, light bar on top and Crown Victoria body. The officer getting out of the vehicle was wearing just a regular police uniform without the cape or blowgun belt.

She dug around in her glove compartment for her insurance card and registration, and then in her pocket for her license. She pulled out Josh’s crumpled-up note.

She stared at the note. She must have stared at it for a while; she wasn’t sure.

There was a loud tapping in her left ear.

She looked up, confused. There was a knuckle rapping on the window a few inches from her face.

She screamed, but she wasn’t scared. Her body screamed before she could do anything about it. The knuckle stopped hitting the glass.

She held her hand to her chest. Her other hand pressed the window button.

“I’m sorry,” she said, exhaling, long, slow breaths.

“License and registration, please.”

The voice was vaguely familiar, but she was too in her own thoughts to care.

“Here you go.”

Silence. Diane saw khaki pants, khaki shirt, a black leather belt, and elbows as he read her documentation, and elbows as he wrote out a ticket.

This took several minutes because, by law, police are required to describe the nature of the sunlight at the time of the infraction in verse, although meter and rhyme are optional.

“Searing, yellow, and there’s a sort of purplish halo around it before it fades into the mundanity of sky. It is a reminder—this sun—of our near-infinite smallness in a near-infinite universe. But today, as I write this speeding ticket, I feel I could crush the sun like a grape underfoot, and that the universe is an umbrella that I may fold up and put away,” the officer wrote on Diane’s ticket.

Diane thanked the officer when he handed her the ticket, but her eyes were on Josh’s note on the passenger seat.

“Just be careful, umm… Diane,” he said, and her head cleared enough to recognize where she knew that voice from. She looked up.

He was blond and his teeth shone. They briefly made eye contact—or she assumed they made eye contact through his mirrored shades—and then he was gone, walking quickly back to his cruiser.

She tried to breathe in and missed.

It was Troy.