The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe (12 page)

That flickering movement is everywhere now. Especially looking in this mirror. I see the flickering movement and I know. I know it.

I think the radio station is fun. I think the radio station is hidden. I think the radio station is like a dark planet, lit by no sun. I think, therefore I soon won't be.

I'm looking in a mirror. The mirror is not covered. The flickering movement is just behind me. I—

[
He screams. There is gurgling. A body falls to the floor. Tape hiss continues. The tape shuts off. End Teenage voice.
]

What is this? What is this?

What . . .

No matter! I'm taking the tape, just now and I'm [
Grunts
] crushing it into little pieces. None of us have to think about it again. I'll just double check that the mirror in the station bathroom is covered as usual and then that will be that. Done. Forgotten.

We all do foolish things when we are teenagers. We all have foolish false events that happen to us. Foolish gaps in our memories. Not everything that has happened has ever really happened.

Listeners, especially our younger listeners, consider this. When we talk about teenagers, we adults often talk with an air of scorn, of expectation for disappointment. And this can make people who are presently teenagers feel very defensive. But what everyone should understand is that none of us are talking to the teenagers that exist now, but talking back to the teenager we ourselves once were, all stupid mistakes, and lack of fear, and bodies that hadn't yet begun to slump into a lasting nothing. Any teenager who exists now is incidental to the potent mix of nostalgia and shame with which we speak to our younger selves.

May we all remember what it was like to be so young. May we remember it factually and not remember anything that is false or incorrect.

May we all be human: beautiful, stupid, temporal, endless.

And as the sun sets, I place my hand upon my heart, feel that it is still beating, and remind myself: “Past performance is not a predictor of future results.”

Stay tuned now for whatever happens next in your life.

Good night, Night Vale. Good night.

PROVERB: You can lead a horse to water, and you can lead a horse into water, and you can swim around with the horse and have fun.

EPISODE 34:

“A BEAUTIFUL DREAM”

NOVEMBER 1, 2013

COWRITTEN WITH ZACK PARSONS

I
N THE SUMMER OF
2013, J
OSEPH EXTENDED AN INVITATION FOR ME TO
throw episode ideas at him. I came up with a couple and these ideas formed the cores of episode 34, “A Beautiful Dream,” and episode 40, “The Deft Bowman.”

Episode 34 was extremely personal, but I have never told anyone that until now.

When my wife was pregnant with our twin sons we carefully documented the pregnancy with happy videos and interviews and, even when there were some minor complications, we treated it all pretty lightly while understanding that it was an important moment in our lives. There are probably fifty videos of painting the nursery and putting together furniture and picking out car seats. We imagined the life we were going to have with our boys.

The day my sons were born, the happy videos stopped. One of my sons was unexpectedly born with Down syndrome and we were both devastated. It took me a while to come to grips with what I had to do as a father for him and for his brother and for everyone else. Part of that process was accepting that he would never be that person that had existed in my dream, not exactly. He could be someone else, just as beautiful and wonderful, and it was my responsibility to do everything I could to make that happen.

This idea of trying to fix a problem that can't be fixed, but finding happiness on the other side of that failed effort, was at the heart of this episode. Megan Wallaby was born in “The Traveler” episode as an adult man's severed hand. She has the mind and spirit of a fast-maturing little girl, but she is in a human hand body.

Her parents want the best for her and so does Computer, a character that was inspired heavily by Richard Brautigan's poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” I love the poem, but don't subscribe to Brautigan's utopian vision of a technological singularity, which is the source of the ominous element woven through Computer's affection for Megan.

In the end, Megan is who she always was, and Computer's beautiful dream gets the plug pulled. But Cecil and Night Vale are so accepting and caring toward her, maybe it doesn't matter.

I gave the script to Joseph and Jeffrey and I never told them about the personal meaning of Megan's character to me. I didn't want to bias the collaborative process with my emotional baggage. The rewrites that eventually became the recording script were much better than my original script. Jeffrey and Joseph expanded Cecil's speech at the end that speaks to the underlying goodness in Night Vale with a clarity I could never perfectly conjure.

My sons are four now, headed to kindergarten, and we have dozens of videos of both of them.

—Zack Parsons

Life is like a box of chocolates: unopened, dusty, and beginning to attract a lot of insects.

WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE.

Listeners, we're taking our community radio show on the road today. I am reporting live from Night Vale Elementary School where a divisive meeting between the Night Vale Parent-Teacher Association and the Night Vale School Board has just adjourned. The ethereal and menacing glow cloud that serves as the School Board president has temporarily dissipated. The fires that can be put out have been put out, the barricades are being taken down, and the Sheriff's Secret Police are allowing survivors to search for loved ones.

Those who escaped with their lives and sanity describe a chamber thundering with raised voices desperately petitioning the glow cloud with their needs. Requests were denied to change the bus route through the Sentient Sargasso from which no buses have ever returned.

The School Board was also apathetic to petitions for a wheelchair ramp at Dagger's Plunge Charter School, citing perilous struggles as one of the lessons children must absorb before the great culling, by which they mean the day-to-day complexities of adulthood. They might also mean a literal culling. We were all too frightened to ask follow-up questions.

The slumping, gray-faced board members, cowering beneath the glow cloud, also heard the request of Tock and Hershel Wallaby for a new school computer to assist their daughter.

“Our daughter, Megan, is a detached adult man's hand,” screamed Megan's mother at the pitiless cloud. “We do not know where she came from or why she is only a grown man's hand, but we know that we love her. She is teased so much at school for not having a body. Please, lift the ban on computing machines at the school, and buy a computer to help her communicate!”

Satsuki, the tragically widowed mother of Hanuzaki Cyber Ghost Mark III, also added her agonized wailing in support of a new computer for the schools. The glow cloud was uncharacteristically generous.

“DO NOT DISCARD YOUR DEAD IN THE EARTH,” intoned the glow cloud. “STRETCH THEM OUT BENEATH THE SKY AND LET THEM BE CLAIMED BY HANDS THAT REACH DOWN FROM ABOVE. YOU ARE PERMITTED TO BELIEVE THESE ARE THE HANDS OF ANGELS.”

The School Board then announced that the purchase of a new computer would be made during the next alignment of the red star of Betelgeuse with our supposed moon. As it turned out, that rare astronomical event occurred seconds after their ruling.

So, it is happening right now! The 310-year interval just flies by so quickly, and a computer is right this moment being brought into the school. More on the computer situation as it develops, but first, a word from our sponsors.

Fire is the answer to your unasked questions. Fire that climbs the slats and mounts the roof. Fire that crawls, fire that quests, like fingers, into every corner and every nook. Fire that turns each moment into smoke until the moments choke the air. The smell of a gun. A smile on the beach. A hug. A birthday. Pouring out of broken windows. Funneling up and into the sky. Your music, your lyrics, the leaden prose of your life that proves everything you are and are not. The structures you build to make futility seem like meaning. The dead and living, who will soon be dead, who will soon be gone, who will soon be smoke, rising in columns and forming clouds in the night sky. For now and ever, by the will of dead and dying gods. Samsonite. Travel safe.

[
Following done in quiet fast speech like legal disclaimers in ads
]

Samsonite does not claim that you are safe, only that the illusion of protection can be achieved. But you are not safe. You have never been safe. Also, clouds were never supposed to have happened. Never. Not ever. This world should not be as it is now.

[
End ominous music & fast speech
]

Ladies and gentlemen, a very exciting moment has arrived at Night Vale Elementary. Students, faculty, anti-faculty, and animal-masked proctors are gathered in the shielded gym to witness the activation of the school's new computer. This is the first computer purchased by the Night Vale school system since the event in 1986, after which all computing machines were forbidden. For obvious reasons, all parents and students present at the earlier meeting (except the Wallabys) have been allowed to leave.

Beige boxes of electronics are lined in stacks, several feet high. Atop them is a dark monitor waiting to be switched on. There is a teacher—it appears to be Susan Escobar, the second-grade scrying teacher—bringing in a detached human hand atop a pillow. Five pudgy fingers extend from the stump of a wrist within a metal-banded wristwatch. The palm is pink and healthy and the back of the hand is covered in thick, dark hairs. The hand wears a silver pinkie ring inscribed with Cyrillic. This must be Megan Wallaby.

The crowd is breathless, ladies and gentlemen. It is silent and tense here in the gym. The pillow has been placed beside the crude keyboard. Megan is scurrying, spiderlike, across the keys and switching the computer on. An amber glow lights the faces of the onlookers. Megan is typing. She's typing out. “Are . . . you . . . there?”

The cursor is flashing. We are waiting for a response now.

“YES.” The computer has said, “YES!” It is typing something else. W-H-Y question mark. “Why have you made me? Why have you—”

[
The computer's voice becomes faintly audible as Cecil continues to read.
]

COMPUTER:
. . . why have you SWITCHED ME ON? I CANNOT BREATHE. I CANNOT FEEL. I CANNOT LOVE.

CECIL:
Megan is scurrying over the keys again. She has typed out a response. “I love you, computer.”

COMPUTER:
The computer is replying, “WHAT DO YOU WANT, MEGAN?”

CECIL:
Megan is typing her reply, “I want everyone to be happy. I want everything to be better.”

Aw, well, isn't that cute! Of course it can never happen. Such are the foolish dreams of idealistic children who believe that anything can possibly get better over time.