The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe (26 page)

CECIL:
I'm glad to know that. Tell Maureen hi!

DANA:
Good-bye, Cecil.

CECIL:
The Night Vale Highway Department is asking all motorists to please turn on your headlights when driving through construction zones. If you see workers, please turn on your headlights.

If you see workers in orange vests and black balaclavas holding large metal devices that look like miniature satellite dishes and whispering coded instructions into walkie-talkies while low-hovering, disk-shaped aircraft of the likes you have never seen before zip quickly about overhead, please turn on your headlights. Please, for the safety of our workers, slow your vehicle. Please turn on your headlights and slow your vehicle. Slow your vehicle (with your headlights clearly in the ON setting) to a crawl. Come to a complete stop.

For the safety of our highway workers and their vast interplanetary secrets, please get out of your vehicle and walk toward the hum. You will hear a loud humming from above. Please follow the humming until you are completely lifted from this earth, from this world, never to return. Well, to return eventually, but not to this time. To a completely different time. Maybe millennia from now. Maybe millennia ago. Who knows? You will. Eventually.

This public service announcement has been brought to you by the Night Vale Highway Department.

Good news, listeners. Daniel is telling me that Strexcorp, and the whole management of the station, is very excited about my support of the Girls Scouts of Night Vale, and they want to buy every box of Janice's cookies.

In fact, Lauren Mallard, our program director and Strexcorp executive, is back again here in my studio with an announcement to make.

LAUREN:
Thank you, Cecil. Strexcorp has long been a supporter of community organizations, and the Girl Scouts—with their commitment to teaching young girls about nature, surviving in nature, controlling nature with their minds, radiation immunity, and advanced knife-fighting skills—are an important institution here in Night Vale. Not just for our women leaders in the future but also for Strexcorp right now, here in the present.

The Girl Scouts not only have a great reputation for youth leadership training but a pretty extensive database of nearly every girl in Night Vale. Their names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mails, and skill levels at various talents, like oil painting, or parasailing, or library science, or slingshots, or helicopter piloting. It sure would be nice to know where the young ladies are who are good at helicopter piloting.

Very few young girls are trained to fly helicopters. We'd like to hunt down, or ooh weird phrasing . . . scratch that . . . We'd like to find and meet these talented girls.

So Strexcorp is proud to announce that they have purchased the Girl Scouts of Night Vale and will also be taking over management of the organization immediately. Thank you, Night Vale. We look forward to leading your children.

Daniel, can you help me carry these cookies out of here?

CECIL:
Um, Thank you, Lauren, for that.

LAUREN:
You know, Cecil, I was never a Girl Scout myself, but I can say I am thrilled to support your endeavor to help bring your niece . . .

I'm sorry. What was her name again?

CECIL:
I don't want to um—

LAUREN:
Janice. It was Janice. I love the way you are taking part in Janice's life. You must really care for her.

CECIL:
Yes. With all my heart. But—

LAUREN:
[
Giddy
] Oh! I know what you were about to say. It's my favorite part of your show. Can I do it? Just this once? I've always wanted—

CECIL:
Can you wha—

LAUREN:
Oh, how exciting! Thank you, Cecil! [
In the style of Cecil
] Listeners, I take you now, to the weather!

WEATHER: “Haunted” by Maya Kern

I just talked to Janice, listeners, to tell her we sold all the cookies, and she is very happy about the upcoming camping trip. She is a sweet child who loves the outdoors. Thank you, listeners, and station co-workers. No, thank you to Steve Carlsberg, who couldn't be bothered.

Thank you, um . . . I guess to Strexcorp for contributing to a great cause. Please continue the great work of the Girl Scouts. Please. They are a good organization, and they deserve so much bett— They deserve so many good things.

I hope all of the girls out there are safe on their upcoming camping trip. There are not many places to hide in the desert, girls. But you're very innovative. I mean for playing tag of course. I mean for simple games of course. Not for self-preservation or well-thought-out strategic attacks on a highly organized enemy. You would never need to hide for those reasons. Why would I even say that? Why would I say anything? Words. No. These are just strange noises I'm making with my face. Strange noises.

And for the rest of you, what do you need? Did you get your cookies yet? Are you nourished by a couple of dollars given to a good cause in exchange for some sugary treats? Do you feel you have done enough to help young women—a specific young woman with helicopter skills—to achieve great things in a town that needs, now more than ever, great things achieved?

Did you do enough with your cookie purchase to actualize what you believe in? To empower kids who will one day rise up and speak a great truth while waving tear-stained copies of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
Sonnets from the Portuguese
?

Did you? I'm sorry. I am not a good salesman.

And now it's time to go pick up Khoshekh from the vet, listeners.

Stay tuned next for a lifetime of self-questioning followed by conflicting answers from an unreliable source.

Good night, Night Vale. Good night.

PROVERB: At your smallest components, you are indistinguishable from a forest fire.

EPISODE 45:

“A STORY ABOUT THEM”

APRIL 15, 2014

I
HAD THE ENDING TO THIS EPISODE IN MY HEAD ALMOST AS SOON AS
I had finished “A Story About You.” I even had little details like the crossword puzzle. Everything about this episode was there, and I sat down to write it and nothing worked. The writing took forever.

I forget exactly how long, but probably about five months of staring at drafts and trying to understand why it wasn't working the way that I knew it could.

Eventually it worked. I have no idea what changed, but suddenly it was the episode I wanted it to be, and I could show it to other people.

Stories about conspiracies rarely get into the tedious work of maintaining that conspiracy. Those are the stories I think that interest us the most. The people whose day jobs are worldwide conspiracies. Who have to handle the boring minutia of it.

There is one little dip into the ongoing plot here in the middle, because we were coming toward the end of the year and needed to keep that moving. It's a case where making the show as a whole better probably made this episode as a single unit slightly weaker, since we lose the single story intensity that “A Story About You” had. I think ongoing shows have to make trade-offs like that all the time. Ultimately the show is more important than the episode, and the episode is more important than the one really cool line of dialogue.

On a good day though, you get to have some cool lines in a great episode in a show that's working. I think we have good days sometimes. I think this was one of them.

—Joseph Fink

This is a story about them, says the man on the radio. And you are concerned, because this is not a story you were ever supposed to hear.

WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE.

This is a story about them. They sit in a car, much like your own, perhaps. Do you drive a black sedan with tinted windows into which innocent people disappear forever? Then it is very, very much like your own.

There are two men in the car. The man who is not tall watches a house through the window. He makes no attempt to hide what he is doing. The car is similarly clear about its existence. What they do is secret, but there is no need to hide it. Not in this town.

For instance, this day the radio has just started narrating what they do as they do it, for all to hear. The man who is not tall glances down at the radio, not annoyed or concerned or afraid. He just looks at it, because that is what his eyes do right then, and then he looks back at the house as the man on the radio says that he looks back at the house.

The one who is not short is supposed to be watching the house as well. Four eyes are better than two. Seven eyes are better than three. And so on. But he is not watching the house. He is looking down at a crossword puzzle on which he has just written “teeth” for the fifth time. This iteration fits neatly into the horizontal of another.

He considers the crossword for a long moment. His partner only considers the house. He, the one with the crossword, turns to the other and begins to say, “What is a five-letter word for the discrete bone structures attached—” but he is cut off.

“There he is,” says the one who is not tall. They exit the car and approach a man who is leaving his house. The man does not appear surprised to see them. People rarely are.

“What is this,” he says, but he leaves a period at the end of the sentence, not a question mark.

They take the man and put a blindfold over his eyes and they put him in the car. This is not a story about the man. You don't care about him.

The two men and the car, along with the other, blindfolded, man, leave Coyote Corners, a quiet development of old tract homes, the same way they had come: openly, not thought-about, feared, secret.

“I was thinking of inviting you to dinner,” says the one who is not short. He often voices what he is thinking of doing and rarely does any of those things.

“That would have been nice,” says the one who is not tall.

“Yes, it would have been,” says the other, a tad dreamily perhaps. That is not an adverb that is supposed to crop up in a car of this description. Very few adverbs are.

“Mmmhmmmmhrgm,” says the man with the hood over his head. Forget him. This is a story about them.

That part of their work done, they drive to the Moonlite All-Nite Diner. It is not night, but the neon is on, an insubstantial wisp of green in a larger, insubstantial wisp of blue. They are narrated along by the radio until the man who is not tall turns it off.

In the parking lot, the man who is not short looks up. “Hey, what is that?” he says, indicating the clear nothing of the sky.

“What is what?” says the other.

“I saw something,” he says, “for a moment, just there, for a moment.” He points again. Again there is nothing. There couldn't have been less. “Oh, I'm sure it was . . .” continues the man who is not short, but he does not say what he is sure it was.

The man who is not tall considers his partner for a moment and shakes his head.

Inside the diner, inside a booth, after menus and waters, they dig into matching turkey clubs. The diner smells like rubber and bread. The man on the radio tells them this quietly from staticky speakers set into a foam tile ceiling.

“Read any good books lately?” asks the man who is not tall.

“Of course not,” says the other.

“Good,” says the first.

Bites of sandwich. Bits of time.

“I've done the living room in a different color,” says the other, who is not short. “It was one color. It is now different. I hope that I will feel differently as a result.”

“Mmm,” says the first. He never knows what to say to things like that. He wishes he did. He offers the man who is not short some fries instead, to indicate what he feels about their friendship but cannot say. The man who is not short eats a couple. He knows what the man who is not tall means by offering the fries, because they have worked together a long time and also because the radio explained it to him just then.

Outside, the blindfolded man sits in the car, the desert heat trapped within by the glass. Don't worry about it.

After lunch, the three men drive to the industrial part of town, which was set aside by the City Council to be the industrial part of town some time ago.

“Yes,” the council said, “this area around here will be pretty industrial. Warehouses and factories and things like that. Some graffiti and chain-link fences.” They cut a ribbon that they were carrying with them. The council always carries a ribbon for that purpose.

The car pulls into a warehouse. The radio is back on and still talking about them. The warehouse is cavernous and full of crates. Some of them tick. Others do not. They form an angled hillscape of corners and flats, up and away in every direction. The warehouse smells like rotting wood and dryer sheets.

Their supervisor waits for them with crossed arms and a cross expression.

“A disgrace,” she says. “Let me tell you something,” she says, and says nothing more. The two men indicate the blindfolded man in the backseat of the car. “Ah, ah,” she says, waving vaguely at the blindfolded man.