Welcome to Night Vale (25 page)

CECIL: . . . at a loss for words, at a profit for hand gestures, and more or less break even on eyebrow movements.

Night Vale Auto Insurance Co. announced today that because of rising costs, they will no longer offer replacements, repairs, or compensation for any accidents involving automobiles. “It's really expensive to fix or replace a car,” said Bob Sturm, vice president of finance. “I mean, think about how many accidents there are. Those add up. How are we supposed to pay for all of that?”

When asked if they will lower premiums since they are no longer covering any form of repair, Sturm said no, but they will send customers kindly worded sympathy cards, and customers who have been in an accident can come by any one of their ten area locations for a hug and an it'll-be-okay pat on the shoulder.

Sturm concluded the announcement by coughing up a little bit of blood and laughing.

And now an update on Sheila, down at the Moonlite All-Nite, with her clipboard and pen, living her life over and over in a sad, empty reenactment of what was once an organic experience. She said that the loop finally seems to be broken, and that things are looking up.

I asked her if it wasn't then maybe time to leave the studio and return to her life, but she said she couldn't imagine doing that. Not anymore. So I offered to let her become a station intern instead. Isn't
that just the best? I gave her the intern tunic and told her about the usual duties (mimeographs, making coffee, editing my slash fiction). I think she'll do just a great job, and she'll learn a lot while working here.

I'm pretty sure that all of our interns have gone on to do great things with their lives. I haven't followed up with any of them or even thought about it for very long, but I'm sure they are all better off for having done their internship here.

Sheila is so happy, she took the clipboard she had once used to mark down people at the Moonlite All-Nite and broke it over her knee. Which is a waste, Sheila. Do you think community radio stations have the kinds of budgets that allow us to just waste clipboards like that? Don't do that again, Sheila.

Moving on, many of you have written to the station asking for more information about our annual fund drive, which was held two months back. It seems that the tote bags and mugs and DVD sets of
Mad About You,
Seasons 2 and 5 have still not arrived for many donors.

We here at Night Vale Community Radio apologize for the delay. Please know that all donor rewards have been mailed out—were mailed out weeks ago—but, as we all know, time is weird here in our beautiful community. As a result, those weeks may have been experienced by you as mere seconds and the delivery would seem instantaneous, or those weeks may be experienced by you as millennia, and you will be a terrible, vacant, ancient form of yourself by the time you receive your reward. These possibilities and all other possibilities remain . . . possible.

Please know that our station exists because of donors like you. It also exists because a long and terribly improbable series of galactic events over the course of billions of years conspired to bring us to this very moment in our station's existence. And we thank you for your support. Again, we apologize for the delay in receiving your items, and also for the absurdity of time.

Next on our program, I will describe a boring photo in a thousand slow, interminable words.

Jackie knocked on her mother's door. After a moment, it opened.

“Hello, dear. Come in.” Her mother turned and walked back to the kitchen, and Jackie limped after her. She tenderly sat down across from the woman she did not recognize.

“Mom,” she tried calling her. “Mom, it's been a rough couple days. Let's start there. I can't work anymore. And if I'm not working then I'm not sure who I am. Maybe that's not healthy. Probably isn't. But it's all I've done as far back as I can remember. Which. Okay. Memory. Wanna talk about that in a moment.

“But I've been trying to figure all this out. Feels like running up a slide while other people are trying to slide down it.”

Jackie picked up one of the perfect, wax-looking apples. She sniffed it. It was real.

“I've been spending some time lately with Diane Crayton. Not like that, but. You know, Diane? Does stuff with the PTA? Works at that office no one is sure what they do? Anyway, Diane and I got into this thing where we didn't like each other. But I think I was wrong about that. I think I'm wrong about a lot of things.

“My car got hit, and the other person just drove away. And I think that other person was Diane's kid, who's missing now and I sympathize with him. I do. But my body feels as wrecked as my car. I can't move right and I feel slow and tired.

“I understand that kid. Sometimes you need to run away.
I feel bad because I said that to Diane, but it's true. I'm sorry, Mom. You probably feel different, but I think maybe he's right to leave. Diane cares so much for him. It's not other people that hurt us, but what we feel about them.”

Her mother didn't respond. She wasn't even looking at Jackie. Her eyes rested on the ceiling.

“It got me thinking about what you said to me. And I don't. I don't remember my childhood. I don't think I've ever been in this house. I don't know who you are. I don't remember ever being any other age than what I am now, and I don't remember doing anything but what I've been doing. I'm not normal, am I? I mean, I understand that many things in Night Vale aren't what they are in other places, but, even for Night Vale, I don't think I'm normal.”

Her mother took the apple from her and put it back in the bowl. She stood.

“Let's step out into the backyard, shall we?”

They did. Her mother put a hand on her arm.

“Jackie, what I want you to understand, about both me and Diane, is this. It's not easy raising a child in Night Vale. Things go strange often. There are literal monsters here. Most towns don't have literal monsters, I think, but we do.

“You were my baby. But babies become children, and they go to elementary schools that indoctrinate them on how to overthrow governments, and they get interested in boys and girls, or they don't, and anyway they change. They go to high schools, where they learn dangerous things. They grow into adults, and become dangerous things.

“But none of that is as difficult as the main thing. We all know it, but most of you don't spend any time thinking about the consequences of it. Time doesn't work in Night Vale.

“You were a child, and then you were a teenager, and then you were old enough that I thought it might be time for you to run my pawnshop for me. Just some days. Just sometimes. I could use the time off, after running it for years while also raising a child on my own.

“I taught you how pawning an item works. ‘Pawnshops in Night Vale work like this,' I said. I showed you the hand washing, and the chanting, and the dying for a little while, and how to write out a ticket. I showed you how to bury the doors at night so they wouldn't get stolen. I showed you this and then you started running the shop on your own, and I was so proud.

“But time doesn't work in Night Vale. And so one day I woke up to find you had run that shop for decades. Centuries, even. I'm not sure. You held on to the pawnshop but let go of me. I happened to offer eleven dollars to the first customer we helped together, and in the years of being nineteen you forgot that moment between us and only retained the offer of eleven dollars as a meaningless, unchangeable ritual. People in town couldn't remember a time when you weren't the one running the store. But I could. Because, from my point of view, you've only been running it a couple months. It's all so fresh for me. The course of your life is so linear. But meanwhile you. It had been so long for you that you'd forgotten me, and forgotten the house you moved out of last month. Your entire childhood, gone for everyone but me. All those years spent with me. All those years I gave up everything to spend with you.”

Her mother was crying. Jackie suddenly remembered that her mother's name was Lucinda. Lucinda was crying. Jackie was crying too, but wiping it away as quickly as it came, even now uncomfortable with the feeling of it.

“Dear, be kind to the mothers of Night Vale. Have pity on
us. It'll be no easier for Diane. Things go strange here. Your children forget you, and the courses of their lives get frozen. Or they change shapes every day, and they think that just because they look completely different you won't be able to recognize them. But you always will. You always know your child, even when your child doesn't know you.

“Maybe Josh thinks it's right to run away. Maybe you do too. But all I know is Diane is in the same place I am. We don't have our children. We have the faint, distorted echoes of our children that this town sent back to us.”

Jackie took Lucinda into her arms, not sure of what she could say but sure that a gesture would say it as well as any stuttered cliché. Her mother cried, but not into Jackie, still turned away from her, and Jackie started to feel as though it was her mother comforting her. Maybe Jackie needed comfort.

Jackie looked up, eyes bleary, to see that Troy was standing there, watching them. His face was not expressionless, but his expression conveyed little. Lucinda did not seem surprised to see him. Her expression also conveyed little. Jackie's expression conveyed anger and confusion, mostly with her eyes and eyebrows. Troy was already gone again.

“Who is that man, Mom? Why is he in your backyard?”

Her mother waved in the direction where Troy had been standing like she was waving off a fly or a small surveillance drone.

“Don't worry about him. Come, let's go inside. That's just your father.”

“Troy is my father?”

Jackie perched uneasily in her chair. Lucinda sighed.

“Depends on what you mean by father, dear. He contributed some genetics to you, yes. Never was much good for anything else.”

“But Troy was with Diane. He's Josh's father.”

“Yes, he went on to her some time after me. He was still so young then. He's a strange one, and I'm not sure that time works for him either.”

Jackie leaned forward. Her mother leaned back. There was nothing aggressive or defensive about the movements, but they happened in response to each other.

“Josh is my half-brother.”

“I think you'll find, dear, that relationships like that don't come in halves. He's not at all your brother now, but if you wanted I suppose he could be entirely your brother. It would depend on how you related to him.”

“And Diane is sort of my stepmom?”

“She is the mother of the person who could be your brother, if you both wanted. It sounds like maybe she's also a friend. But that's it.”

Jackie opened her mouth, but Lucinda cut her off.

“Dear, please don't ask me why I didn't tell you this earlier. You always do that. I've told you this so many times, and every time you are stunned and swear you won't forget. But then the
memory recedes for you and you don't know me again. You can't remember me making you lunch when you were five, or tying your shoes for you, or helping you through the awkward lessons of puberty, or even where I keep the silverware.”

“Where
is
the silverware drawer?”

“I don't have one, dear. You knew that once. I have a silverware trapdoor. It's under one of the hot milk drawers.”

“Under the hot milk drawer.” Jackie tried to say this as though it were something she was finally remembering, and not something she had just learned.

She thought about Diane and she thought about Josh, and Diane's face when she found out that Josh was missing.

Good for him, she had thought, even as she had sympathized with Diane's pain.

[bottomless chasm of regret and pain],
she thought now, thinking back on it. Jackie loved Diane for missing Josh. She loved Diane for living her life in spite of Troy.

She also felt more uneasy about Diane now. Was she a mother, a friend, a sister, a stranger? Jackie didn't know how to proceed with this new knowledge.

Diane experienced time in a normal progression. Her memories were immediate and consistent. Her actions begat reactions and consequences. She could feel the terror of loss or the fear of pain or develop complicated and loving relationships with those around her. Jackie could not. Even things that had happened moments ago would start to fade away into long-ago distance for her.

“I'm sorry,” she said, and she took her mom in her arms. She held her tight, as though this would keep their experience of time from diverging. “I'm sorry I don't remember, Mom.”

Lucinda smiled.

“You will age someday, dear. We all age. Some of us take longer than others. You are always nineteen now. Someday you will never be nineteen.”

Jackie moved over to the couch to sit next to her mom. The couch was spotless. Her mother just really liked things clean.

“I'll remember for as long as I can,” she said.

She hugged her mom tight, and, after a moment, her mom reciprocated.

“I'm sorry that it was this way, Mom. Not I'm sorry like an apology. I'm sorry as in sorrow.”

“Me too, dear. Me too so very much. Oh, I suppose you should have this.”

She opened a drawer in the coffee table and rummaged around. Finally she pulled out an old photo. An extremely old photo, yellowing and cracked, and bending at the edges. In it, there was a man who was definitely Troy. He had his arm around a little girl.

“That's you and your father.”

She handed it to Jackie, who made a strangled sound.

“I took that when you were quite little. Before he left both of our lives.”

“But, Mom, this photo. This photo had to have been taken at least a hundred years ago. That's City Hall downtown, but there are dirt roads and wood cabins instead of stores, and instead of cars there are horses with huge wings. People haven't flown wild horses in, well, in I literally don't know how long.”

“Well, dear, you've been stuck the age you are for so many decades. I took this photo just fourteen or fifteen years ago. It was a regular Polaroid then. Now look at it. It has changed to match your years, and I still remember it as it was. It's very much like you. You should have it.”

Jackie put the photo in her pocket. Lucinda smiled weakly.

“It will be different from now on,” Jackie said.

She looked earnestly at her mother.

“I promise.”

She looked waveringly at her mother.

“It will.”

She looked away.

“The effort is what counts, dear. That's certainly what we tell ourselves.”

“Mom, I have to go.” Jackie grunted through the strain of lifting her injured body from the seat. “I'll see you again soon.”

“He's not a bad man, your father. He's just not a very good man either.”

Jackie walked to the door. She felt the firm flatness of the photo in her pocket and the sharp crumpled edges of the paper in her cast.

Lucinda sat where she had been left, but soon she would move on to other things. She would clean and read and work on the car in the garage and all the other things she did to fill her days. She had a life of her own, after all.