The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe (35 page)

WEATHER: “Call Off Your Ghost” by Dessa

[
CARLOS enters
]

[
Sound cue: Cecil voice mail and beep
]

CECIL:
[
Recording
] Hi, you've reached the voice mail of Cecil Palmer. I'm off doing some important journalistic work or maybe just petting Khoshekh, but either way, leave me a message.

[
Beep
]

CARLOS:
Cecil, hey. It's Carlos. I hate that I got your voice mail. But listen, I figured it out.

We can't shut the oak doors unless everyone is back where they belong. And every moment those doors are open, more of that light gets through into Night Vale.

I couldn't figure out why we couldn't just keep the doors closed for good.

It was really frustrating to have a problem I couldn't solve. And then I got sad because I couldn't solve it. But then I did solve it and felt happy. Those are some but not all of the emotions I had.

Here is what I found: Night Vale is a place that is difficult to leave and difficult to enter. And connecting a place as weird as that with a place as weird as this was causing a lot of strain on linear time and space.

So those native to Night Vale: Dana, John, the angry woman in the intern shirt, all had to return home, and the masked army all had to come back here. Which they did. Just moments ago the last of them came back through the door.

It's so exciting when you make a scientific discovery like that. I was very happy.

But then, as the last of the masked army members came through the door, it slammed shut and vanished. And I remembered that I am not from Night Vale. I remembered that, as far as the laws of the universe are concerned, it is not where I belong.

Cecil, I don't even remember how I got to Night Vale in the first place. I mean, where is Night Vale even? But I promise, I will find my way back. It'll just take a couple of days. A week, max. I'll be fine. I'm a scientist, Cecil. A scientist is usually fine.

Maybe a few weeks. I don't know.

The upside is Dana was right. I've had 97 percent battery all day and decent reception. So we'll at least get to talk every night. Best of luck at home. I love you.

[
CECIL enters
]

CECIL:
[
Normal lighting
] Listeners, Night Vale fought together, every citizen.

[
Music cue: triumphant music
]

High school football coach Nazr al-Mujaheed, in response to the Strex workers' ghastly smiles, showed them that thing he can do with his tongue, which made many of them stop smiling and run screaming away.

A balaclava-clad man wearing a mitre, cloak, and a giant silver star, and speaking through a vocoder—you know, the man we all believe to be the Sheriff of Night Vale?—was dropping heavy bricks down on the invaders from his hover-office in the clouds.

Simone Rigadeau, the transient who lives in the earth sciences building at the community college found some experimental fish in the lab closet there and put them into the fuel tanks of the yellow helicopters, which were already incapacitated by several plastic bags that had blown out of the forbidden Dog Park and wrapped themselves up in the rotors.

Old Woman Josie and her supposed “angel” friends protected the empty lot where she plans to rebuild Night Vale's Old Opera House. The Strex attackers were picked up by her winged friends and flown far into the sky, higher even than the Sheriff's hover-office.

And of course a group of teenagers led by Tamika Flynn chased out everyone at Strexcorp headquarters by slingshotting copies of Steven Covey's bestselling self-help book
7 Habits of Highly Effective People
.

The civilization of tiny people living below lane five of the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex did something, I'm sure, but they were too tiny to be noticed amid the action.

Which is all to say that Strex has retreated. The blood-covered office workers are gone. The old oak doors are also gone, and with them that penetrating, vicious light. We are safely in darkness again.

A very wealthy-looking and mostly nude being named Erika who introduced itself as “you know, an angel or whatever,” then wrote a check to purchase Strexcorp. While it was not technically for sale, there was no one to decline the offer, so according to American business law that's a legal acquisition. It is not yet known what the angels will do with the vast corporation they now own.

I think . . . at last . . . we are ourselves. We are Night Vale again.

[
Music starts to warp, go weird, it's . . . triumphant? Maybe?
]

Even here at the station, the office of Station Management now is just a stone slab covering a dark cave, a pulsing red glow around its edges, filling my mind with sad and monstrous visions, when I walk past that door. So it seems like our old management is back in charge. That's . . . well, I think that's great news, listeners.

[
Music is really weird, not very triumphant at all
]

It's possible that it is instead terrifying news.

I think, I guess, we . . . won?

FACELESS OLD WOMAN:
Speaking of winning . . .

CECIL:
Oh, right, the election.

It looks like we didn't quite get all the votes in yet. Let's speed things up. Listeners, wherever you are listening to this, just follow along. When I say the name of the candidate you prefer, raise your hand. So I'll say the name, you raise your hand, and the cameras that are everywhere in town watching your every move will count your vote. So:

Raise your hand to vote for Hiram McDaniels.

HIRAM-GRAY:
Oh, I thought there would be more. Do they not like me?

HIRAM-GREEN:
RAISE YOUR HANDS FOR ME OR I WILL RELIEVE YOU OF THE BURDEN OF HAVING HANDS.

CECIL:
Okay, hands down. Now raise your hand for the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home.

FACELESS OLD WOMAN:
I am in your home this very moment. I am, in this way, your guest. It would be rude, as a host, if you did not raise your hand for me while I was sitting right there, unseen, next to you. It might make me angry. I've never been angry. I wonder what I'm like when I'm angry. It will be interesting for us to find out together if you do not raise your hand for me.

CECIL:
Great, hands down. I'm fairly certain that some of you voted for both, thus negating yourself. You'll know if one of your friends did this because they will soon fade from existence. Anyway, there's all the votes in, but of course, none of the votes matter, because the election is decided by the pulses coming from Hidden Gorge. I am being handed the results now by an election official in full uniform: plague doctor mask, off-brand snuggie, and stilts.

And the next mayor of Night Vale is . . .

HIRAM-GOLD:
I thank every person who voted for me. You're all winners in my book.

HIRAM-BLUE:
We've recorded all of your names here in this book.

FACELESS OLD WOMAN:
I just ate one of your highlighters. I'm sorry. I'm nervous. I'll replace it with a crow's feather just as soon as I am mayor.

CECIL:
Oh. Well. It says the next mayor is Dana Cardinal.

[
Beat
]

HIRAM-GOLD:
I'm sorry, Cecil. I don't want to get obnoxious about this. But it's pronounced “Hiram.” That wasn't even close.

CECIL:
I know this must be a disappointment to you both, but I'm just reading what the gorge has decreed.

FACELESS OLD WOMAN:
Your former intern Dana? But she wasn't even a candidate. And she's so young and not ancient.

CECIL:
Dana, the intern who came home, it is like I told you once. You were always important.

HIRAM-GREEN:
THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. PREPARE TO BURN.

CECIL:
You were always somebody. And now age has uncovered the you that always . . .

HIRAM-GREEN:
GUAHHHRRHHHRHHRH.

CECIL:
Hiram, please. I'm doing something right now. Was. The you that always was.

FACELESS OLD WOMAN:
She can't be mayor. She's a murderer. She killed her own double.

HIRAM-GOLD:
Well now, I don't know if murder should necessarily disqualify someone from being . . .

HIRAM-BLUE:
Irrelevant. There is a 50 percent chance that the victim was Dana original and not Dana double.

HIRAM-GOLD:
Oh yeah. Thanks, Blue. Forget that other thing I was saying. She has no proof that she is not a double of herself.

CECIL:
Not proof, no . . .

FACELESS OLD WOMAN:
Everyone knows that a double is one of the few manifestations of reality that cannot be Night Vale mayor. I do not accept these results. I am continuing my campaign and I will make sure that Dana does not stay “mayor” for long.

HIRAM-GOLD:
I find myself agreeing with the Faceless Old Woman. We will not rest until one of us is rightfully mayor.

HIRAM-GREEN:
OR UNTIL NIGHT VALE BURNS TO ASH AND FUMES.

HIRAM-GOLD:
Yes, Green. Exactly yes.

CECIL:
I really must object to all of this.

FACELESS OLD WOMAN:
Come Hiram. You and I have planning to do.

CECIL:
Well, once again it's just you and me, listeners. The bustle of the day has come and gone, and now there is the quiet night.

The universe is unraveling. It still is.

We won the day. We won the battle. We won whatever unit of measure you care to say we won. We returned to the dangerous equilibrium we had before, which we can only assume, or hope, or wish, is better. But of course we did not stop the unraveling of the universe.

The universe is not a thing that is. It is not a thing at all. It is the very action of its going. It is, in fact, its own dissolve. And our lives, the entire span of human existence going back and back and, if we're lucky, forward and forward, that entire span is spent within the dissolve.

Look at the fleeting stars with fleeting eyes, and feel how the earth beneath you gives. It is all a temporary manifestation of particles. It is all unraveling back to particulate silence. The bustle of the human day will come and go, and then there will be the quiet night.

But how beautiful these moments within the dissolve. What a temporary perfection we can find within this passing world. Everything good ever done, everything good done today, all the good people doing it, and back and back and forward and forward, all of that beauty within a universe unraveling.

Be proud of your place in the cosmos. It is so small. And yet it is. How unlikely! How fantastic and stupid and excellent!

And . . . oh sorry. Hm . . . it looks like I have a voice mail from Carlos. He must have called during the weather. I apologize, listeners. I have to check this.

Stay tuned next for more of us and more of me, until that inevitable, distant point where I, and this, and everything, must end.

Good night, Night Vale. Good night.

PROVERB: “Wonderwall” is the only '90s song visible from space.

DISPARITION MUSIC CORNER

T
HROUGHOUT THE EARLY YEARS OF
D
ISPARITION
I
PERFORMED LIVE ON
rare occasions, usually for very small audiences at house shows or other small events. One of these was the very first live
Night Vale
event in 2013, which was held in a small bar within New York's Webster Hall as part of a quarterly salon featuring a number of comedians and musicians. The audience was around forty or fifty people, and the setup was very basic, but this first show was similar in format to what we do today: Cecil reading and acting out an episode while I accompany him with a combination of prerecorded loops and improvised live keyboard parts.

Two years or so into
Night Vale
's existence, the podcast suddenly began to attract a much larger audience, and we decided this was an opportunity to put on our first “big” live show, complete with special guest actors and a full band version of Disparition. We performed it at Roulette in downtown Brooklyn, for an audience of four hundred people or so, which was at the time the largest audience I'd ever performed original music for. I chose several Disparition pieces which had been used frequently in the podcast, and wrote new arrangements of them for guitar, violin, viola, and cello. Joining us as a musical guest at this show was Seattle-based troubadour Jason Webley, whom I had never met, let alone played music with. Nevertheless, we conspired over e-mail to do a cover version of Joseph Fink's song “These and More Than These” at the end of the show as a special surprise for him. We had no time to rehearse it prior to the show, but we managed to pull it off, if in perhaps a somewhat chaotic style. Later, Jason would end up touring with us in the US and UK, and remains a good friend of the show.

Beginning in the spring of 2015,
Night Vale
began to expand its touring operations and I started touring with the show full time, not only providing a live score but also taking on the role of technical director, working with venue sound operators and lighting designers.

As of this writing I have performed in around a hundred live
Night Vale
shows and have several more shows and tours currently scheduled. We tend to tour one particular episode for a year or so, with minor variations in the script according to which guest actors are available on which different legs of a given tour. The core of my live setup is a piece of software called Ableton Live, which is a digital audio workstation known for its versatility in both composition/studio production and live performance. For
Night Vale
shows, I use Ableton to control different sets of simultaneous loops (basic elements of songs divided up according to roles: ambient, melodies, harmonies, drums, and percussion), which I fade in and out as appropriate during the show. On top of these loops I play improvised and composed parts with live instruments. When I first started touring with
Night Vale
, I exclusively used a keyboard, but I have since expanded to include the mandolin, an instrument I chose both for its stylistic adaptability and its portability (it fits in the overheard compartment on even the smallest airliners). I run them both through a number of effects in Ableton—and more recently, I've been experimenting with adding live shortwave radio into this mix.