Welcome to Night Vale

Chapter 25

There was a Troy who swept up at the movie theater.

There was a Troy who never left his home.

There was a Troy who was a therapist.

There were so many Troys, and Jackie tracked them all. She had a notebook and a camera, and soon she had a record of every Troy in town. She kept a lot of notes, not because she was good at investigating, but because it gave her something to do, and helped keep her from drifting off into confusion and despair over the terrifying implications of Troy’s multiplicity.

If she stopped note-taking long enough to think, she would grow dizzy in a spiral of questions: Do they know each other? Are they the same age? Were they all born, or were they just there one day? When she found herself thinking for too long, she would make another note, maybe about how humid it was (“neck feels sticky, even in the shade”) or what color the clouds were (“green with purple stripes—looks like rain”).

Today Jackie was following the Troy who was a loan manager at the Last Bank of Night Vale (“We put our customers second, and our apocalyptic prophecies first!”). This Troy had very regular hours, not just at his work but in his life outside of work, and so he was especially easy to tail.

It was the third hour of work for him, and he would be going to lunch soon. Lunch was usually a salad or something light, except for the one day a week he went to Big Rico’s Pizza. She watched him through the window, humming and smiling at customers.

There was a Troy who drove a cherry red Vespa while wearing a light blue helmet.

There was a Troy who drove a 1997 Plymouth minivan.

There was a Troy who drove a taxi.

Do some of them live together? Are they working on a single plan? Were they artificially created by the government?

Too much thinking, she was feeling nauseous. She wrote a note about the lunchtime crowd in the street (“it’s lunchtime. there’s a crowd in the street.”).

Troy was eating at his desk today. Salad. He did nothing unusual with the salad. He ate it. She watched him eat it from her car. No one cared about a woman staring through binoculars from a parked car. It was a common sight. There were three other cars with binoculared, watching women just on that block, and that was light by Night Vale standards.

She hadn’t been able to get Troy to stop and talk to her. They always avoided her, most not with the same sprinting desperation as the Troy who worked at the Moonlite All-Nite, but with the same result. Not a single Troy would get close enough for her to ask questions. She had even tried making an appointment with the therapist Troy, but when the time had come a short, balding man in a vest had been sitting across from her instead.

“I’m afraid there’s been an illness going around,” he said. “He’s asked me to cover his clients for a bit. Now tell me, what do you remember, specifically, about your childhood?”

She had gotten up and walked out without saying a word. She would stay focused. No matter what Diane had said, she was old enough to concentrate and do this. It was probably better that she was young. Her body was stronger and faster, her mind was more open. Youth was better than age. It was good that she had been young for so long.

The next day the Troy therapist had been back at work, no sign of an illness. But Jackie knew that, if she burst into the building, the balding man would be back, asking her about her childhood.

There was a Troy who lived in an apartment building near the community radio station.

There was a Troy who lived in the housing development of Coyote Corners and collected windowsill cacti.

There was a Troy who simply vanished for long periods of time, and so she wasn’t sure where he lived. That was the Troy who did lawn care and gardening.

She made notes and intentionally breathed. Troy ate his salad.

“Eating salad,” her notes said. “Still eating it.”

One of the notes was a doodle of a cat. She didn’t know how to be an investigator. All she had ever known how to do was run a pawnshop. She looked up, and stopped writing in her journal.

Troy wasn’t eating salad anymore. He was talking to someone. Or he was turning away and shaking his head while someone was trying to talk to him. She couldn’t see who it was. Troy got up, tossed the rest of his salad in the trash, and walked quickly out of the bank, still shaking his head. Jackie got out of her car to follow, but stopped when she saw Diane approaching Troy on the sidewalk. Of course Diane was here. Who else could it have been?

She watched Diane follow Troy until they turned a corner and were gone. She threw down her notebook and swore. A man in a suit seated on a folding chair next to her car and making notes on her every action winced.

“Relax, man,” she said, and then cursed again, deliberately, louder than before.

There was a Troy who knew what all this was about.

There was a Troy whose actions had somehow led to the end of the routine that sustained her.

There was a Troy watching her, and now she would watch him until he slipped up, until some part of the mystery was revealed to her, until she understood.

When she came the next day to watch the Troy who worked at the bank, he wasn’t there. She went in and asked. The woman at the teller’s desk stopped chanting, “And thus the world falls,” from a book bound in strange leather long enough to tell her that he had resigned last night without giving a reason. But Jackie knew the reason. Another lead lost to Diane.

There was a Troy. There was a bunch of them. And one of them would answer to her eventually.