Welcome to Night Vale (31 page)

“I'm with you,” Jackie said gently. “Let's go.” She hooked her injured arm through Josh's tentacular arm and led them both out the door and back up the hall.

The man in the tan jacket followed them into the hallway.

“Where are you going? Come back here at once.” The flies buzzed around him. None of the three looked back, and the buzzing grew faint as they pushed open the front door into the dusty night air.

“You must choose. You must choose,” said a distant voice, and then the door closed and it was silent once again.

“Troy,” Jackie shouted.

“Get out here right now, Troy,” Diane shouted.

The first Troy who emerged from the bar was the one with the shiner, bloomed now to violet. He looked dazed, possibly concussed.

Jackie held the door open and ushered them all out, helping with a pull on the sleeve or a shove on the shoulder in case any of them hesitated. Some were wobbly from the beer. Others strong and chipper and ready to drive home. Troy Walsh was prepared for all contingencies. Troy Walsh was confused about what was happening.

“Troy. Get out here. Come on.” Jackie herded them all outdoors.

Imagine a thirty-two-year-old man. Imagine a thirty-two-year-old man who is many men. They all look like the same man because they all are the same man, have always been the same man. Imagine a thirty-two-year-old man who could fix your car and file your taxes and mix you an intoxicating cocktail and paint your miniature collectibles.

Imagine a thirty-two-year-old man born with the ability to be all things to all people but nothing to any one person. Imagine the look on his face when he steps out of a bar, a multitude of him, and sees the woman he, for a short time, always loved fifteen years ago.

Imagine the look on his face when he sees a boy he does not recognize, but knows exactly who he is.

Imagine his mouth opening slightly. Imagine the crack of verbal thought widening across his many countenances. Imagine the words visible in his eyes as he looks up, trying to shake out the logic and dislodge the emotions as the crack opens wide and humid breath hums in to prepare for a flood of words.

“Shut your mouth,” Diane said. “Don't say a word.”

She extended her arm in front of Josh, who had also stepped forward to speak.

“I will let you speak in a moment, Josh.”

Diane looked at Troy. She looked at each and every one of him. Stay there, her eyes said. If I can see you, you cannot move.

“This is your son: Josh. I call him your son because words can mean certain things. It is not the right word but it is the correct word. Behind you is your daughter: Jackie.

“I am not here to ask for support. I am certainly not here to ask for anything on behalf of Josh or Jackie. I am here to tell you something on behalf of me and all those you are affecting.

“You are to come home, Troy Walsh. You are to come back to Night Vale and leave this town. You are many, and you are helpful, and you are kind. But meaning well is not doing well. You mean well, but you do not do well. You are destroying this time and space by bringing the strangeness of our time and place into it. We belong in Night Vale, all of us. It is our home. Go home, Troy.”

The Troys all glanced at each other. Some had looks of sincere grief and shame. Some had doubtful grins and smug elbows. One waved her away and staggered back toward the bar, but Jackie kicked him in the shins and shoved him back to the group. Diane persisted.

“You have helped many people with your many skills, but also you're an irresponsible little shit. Both of those are true. Truth can be contradictory. You are not forgiven your lapses by your nonlapses. How many children do you have? How many have you left behind? Forget it, I don't care. What I care about is: What is Jackie's mother's name? How old is Jackie? What does your son look like? Behind all the physical forms, what does your son look like? What's his favorite food? Is he dating? What's the person's name?”

Troy looked at each other. One scratched his head, one burped, one stood straighter, uncertain but willing to give the questions a shot.

“No, don't try to answer. You don't know the answers. Don't waste our time guessing. Here's another question you can't answer: What does a father do? What kind of job is that? In all your infinite incarnations, is there one single good dad or partner in there?”

“Hey now, hey.” The Troy who had tried to leave was stumbling forward, the sober Troys unsuccessfully trying to restrain him, shaking their heads and muttering discouragements. “No, hey, I'm going to respond. I'm not just going to listen to this. I did come back. I'm living in Night Vale again.”

A few of the other Troys nodded, although they said nothing.

“I was going to come see you guys, come see Josh, but I just hadn't gotten around to it. There were some other jobs to do first. People needed my help. But I was coming. I would have been right there.”

“No one needs your help,” said Jackie, sneering at her father, a man who expressed multitudes but contained nothing. “It's you that needs the act of helping. You do it for yourself and not for anyone else, or you would have left this town when your
‘help' knocked it off the map. Instead you nudged a smatter of you back to Night Vale, like crumbs at birds. That's not a return. That's a toe in the water. That's a minimum of effort. You help and help, but you're lazy. You're goddamn lazy.”

The more drunk Troys glanced at each other, nervous. One of the sober Troys stepped forward.

“I didn't feel I had earned that yet,” Troy said, looking only at Diane, who he seemed less intimidated by. “I didn't feel I was ready to see you. I was really young, you know, and that's a terrible excuse, but it's what I was. And now I'm older. I can be many things. I've learned I don't have to run. If you would have me. All of me.” He gestured to all of him around him. “I would happily be part of your lives again.”

“This is not an invitation to be part of our lives,” said Diane. “This is a demand that you return home.”

“Asshole,” said Jackie.

The Troys, en masse, turned to Josh. “Josh, this is a strange way to first meet, and you don't have to let me be your father. I need to earn that, but I'd like to earn it. I will be there. I will do my best, much better than before, to be a man you can trust as a father. Or whatever relationship we can build. I owe you that.”

Diane allowed her son to answer for himself, against every instinct. Jackie nodded reassurance at her. Josh didn't answer, instead turning to Diane, his eyes pleading, his face looking similar to Troy's for the first time in his life.

“You don't have to ask permission,” she said. “Speak your mind. Say what you want.”

Josh swallowed. He was quiet. The Troys were quiet. Everyone waited. When he spoke, the words were soft but clear.

“Okay,” Josh said, and the Troys flashed proud grins. “But you've been gone fifteen years. She raised me just fine without
you, so it's a little, um, it's a little shitty for you to talk to me like I need you. Sorry, Mom, for saying ‘shitty.'

“I mean . . . Jackie. Jackie runs her own store, and she's awesome. She's doing great. Right, Jackie?”

“You tell him, antlers.” Jackie smiled with her voice, not her mouth. Josh blushed, one hand gently and unconsciously touching the structure coming out of his head.

“I'd be interested in getting to know you,” Josh continued. “But you don't get to send four or five of yourselves. You don't get to be everywhere. You live in Night Vale or nowhere. And when you're there, it's all of you or none of you.”

Troy opened his mouths. He closed his mouths. He looked, with sober eyes and drunk eyes, around at himself.

“Lucinda,” Jackie said.

“Huh?” he said.

“My mother's name is Lucinda,” Jackie said. She turned and limped away, having nothing left to say or any desire left to hear.

A few, but not all of the Troys, nodded knowingly at this. A few, but not all of the Troys, looked at their shoes.

“Is this all of you?” Diane said.

“Most of us,” the Troys said, in unison.

“Get the rest of you together. You're moving home. Now, Troy Walsh.”

Diane followed Jackie, but Josh stayed, watching the men, all of them gaping at him, doing nothing. Then, one by one, they went back into the bar. The especially drunk one leaned on the doorframe and held his son's stare for a moment, then he was gone too.

“I don't think he's coming, Mom.”

Diane and Jackie just kept walking. There was nothing left to say. Either the right thing would be done or it wouldn't.

Josh stayed where he was, watching the empty outside of the bar. He felt like crying, but his current physical form wasn't able to do that. He had thought for a moment that things would be different, but they were the same. He looked down at his hooves for a long time, trying to gather himself enough to give up and leave. He brought his head up at the sound of a door opening.

The drunk Troy was back. He nodded at his son. And the Troys, one by one, came out of the bar, a slow, staggering army of them, following the women back home.

Diane and Jackie and Josh stood near Diane's burgundy Ford hatchback, with its recently crumpled fender.

“Quick question,” Jackie said. “How do we get back to Night Vale?”

“Huh,” Diane answered. The three of them stood for a moment, staring at the two cars and the pile of flamingos, waiting for an idea to come to them. A voice from behind them interrupted their thought.

“Hey,” the voice said. It was the man in the tan jacket. “Troy told me that he's leaving for good.”

“I don't care,” Jackie said. “How do we get back?”

“That's what I was coming to say,” he said. “It might be impossible. I'm sor——”

Jackie punched him.

The man in the tan jacket holding a deerskin suitcase fell down into a sitting position in the dirt, but said nothing. The flies did nothing.

“I'll let you know when you're sorry enough,” she said.

“It's not my fault,” he said. “I just drive to where I think Night Vale is, and sometimes I get there. Sometimes I don't. I wish I could tell you—”

“Jackie,” Diane said, “Night Vale has a way of bringing home its own. I think we could drive in any direction and still get home. We live in a weird place.”

“Man, we really do.”

“It's superweird,” said Josh.

“The best kind of weird,” said Jackie. She waved to the mayor, who was still sitting in the dirt. “See ya.”

They got in their cars: Diane and Josh in the Ford, Jackie in the Mercedes. They would drive out the direction they had come. They would stay together, not losing sight of the other car. They would keep a plastic flamingo and a cell phone in each car, just in case.

Jackie rolled down her window and looked down at the man in the tan jacket.

“What's the deal with the flies anyway? Why does a mayor have a briefcase full of flies?”

“You don't make much money as mayor of a small town. I have to have a full-time job to make ends meet.”

“Fly salesman, huh?”

“Fly salesman.”

“Makes sense.”

Without breaking eye contact, Jackie gunned the engine until a fog of white smoke enveloped the fenders. There was a sharp squeal, and the smoke lifted like a slow curtain, revealing her absence.

CECIL: . . . City Council announced today that, in addition to history, the following other things are also “bunk”: memory, timepieces, walnuts, all hawks (obviously!), most advanced mathematics (trigonometry and higher), and cats. The City Council clarified that they are not announcing this to anyone in particular, and that if anyone in particular should hear this announcement they can do with it what they will. Although they added that the only legal thing to do with it is to forget it. Forget it immediately, they repeated, swaying together and moving their digits around in a “sparkle fingers”–like motion.

Before dismissing the press conference, the City Council, looking somewhat emotionally hurt, said that it's a nervous tick—that thing with their fingers—and that they wish people wouldn't make fun of it by calling it “sparkle fingers.”

Oh, bad news, listeners. Our newest intern, Sheila, fell into the pit that Carlos was using to bury the dangerous plastic flamingos. Rather than touching one and reliving her life, she touched hundreds as she rolled down the side of the pit, while at the same time dying not from the length of her fall but from the subsequent change in velocity at the end of it. She awoke again as a baby in hundreds of worlds at once, all of the infant versions of herself having awareness of the gaping silence that was her one true dead self.

To the family and friends of Intern Sheila, we extend our greatest
condolences. Know that she was a good and hardworking intern, and that she died doing what she loved: simultaneously living and dying in infinite, fractal defiance of linear time.

If anyone is looking for college credit or to prepare for the life-threatening dangers of a career in community radio, come on down to the station. If one of the intern shirts fits you, you're in.

The Night Vale Council for Language Management would like to remind you of this last month's word definition changes.

Fork
now means a momentary feeling of evening as a cl[BEEEEP] passes in front of the sun.

Loss
now means whatever the opposite of loss is.

Migraine
now means a large scorpion perched on the back of a person's neck where they cannot see it or feel it and would have no idea it was there if no one told them.

And of course this week's wild-card word is
brood
. For the next week, it means anything you want it to mean! Which is very, very brood.

Remember that misuse of language can lead to miscommunication, and that miscommunication leads to everything that has ever happened in the whole of the world.

Larry Leroy, out on the edge of town, has announced that he has found many wonderful things in his most recent sweep of the desert. A metallic sphere that fell from the sky and whistles softly to itself as though bored. A double of himself whom he had not seen in years, and whom he growled at until the double ran away. A number of plants, all exactly where they were before, but all a little bit different, as though they were somehow alive. A rock, but he won't tell us where. A body dressed in a gray, pin-striped suit lying sprawled on a dune. A new way of breathing that he says gives him verve and spunk. He said it just like that, punching at the air in front of him. “Verve and spunk,” he shouted. “Verve and spunk.” He seemed to have gotten off track from his original plan of listing what he had found in the desert, and ran off
down the street, breathing with his new method, punching the air, and shouting, “Verve and spunk!” to passersby.

That's it from me for now, listeners. But something in me says that this is no ending. The night outside is bright and breezy and full of dangerous secrets. There is a taste in the air like tarnished silver, like the flesh of an extinct animal now only remembered through our spinal cord and the hairs on our back.

Something in me says that this is only the start. The moment after which all other moments will come. And looking back at the point we are at now, we will know that this was before, and that all of our nows from here on out will be after. This is the only way we know time works.

Stay tuned next for the sound of a creaking spine and the soft collapse of paper onto itself. And as always, good night, Night Vale.

Good night.