#welcome to night vale transcripts

[static]
[slightly distorted]
The trees are dying again.
You know it, I know it.
The trees know it.
They have known it for decades, centuries in some cases.
The shiver of cyclic, symbolic death.
A rattle in the cold night air.
A rustle in the footsteps of a hungry deer.
It is October and something is different.
It is October and the trees draw the crackling red and orange curtain in the year’s final act.
It is October, and so listeners, dear listeners,
Night Vale community radio is proud to introduce
The October Monologues.  

Faceless Old Woman: I am lonely. Oh, I see people. I see lots of people every day. I see you right now. I see you, Caleb, sitting in your rolling desk chair, hunched over your computer. I am a faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home, watching you download yet another video game, Caleb.

But seeing people and being with people are different things. Different ideas altogether. I miss touch most of all. A father’s hand, a friend’s arms. A lover’s chest. I still touch, am touched, but it is not the same. It is not a mutual touch. My touch is unwelcome, unfriendly, unwanted. Yet I touch because I love.

And I love you, Caleb. I do. I know you don’t believe me after what I did to you tonight, but I do. My love is not romantic nor maternal. It’s not platonic, either. I love you the way a deer loves a cornfield. It is safe, it is nourishing. It is in its DNA to want to be there, to hide, to eat, to play. You’re very much like a cornstalk, Caleb. You are loved and you are benign. Better than benign, you are a contribution to this world. The cornstalk is unaware that a deer loves it so much that it will bend it and stomp it until its edible morsels spill out from its crumpled empty husk. The cornstalks, there are so many cornstalks, do not understand that they are so loved by the deer as to be devoured.

You’ve seen a kitten before, Caleb, I know you have. Sometimes kittens are so cute. So so so so cute that you wanna put them in your mouth. Do you understand that kind of love, Caleb, that kind of touch? You do not, no one does. And this is why I’m lonely. But I think you know that. You’re different. You’re lonely too. That’s not what makes you different, we’re all lonely in our own way.

You’re different, Caleb, because you know I am here. You see me even when I do not want to be seen. No one has been able to do that in at least 200 years.
Sometimes you speak to me. Not in terror, not in rage; I’ve heard many of these voices in my life from those who feared and detested my presence.
No, you ask me my name. I won’t tell you, not yet. You tell me about your day, I’m sorry your new boss is so mean, I will rectify this. And last night, you prepared a dinner for me. You’re not a good cook, I can smell that much, but it was your gesture of generosity that touched me. You made cashio e pepe, a recipe you learned from TikTok, and you prepared a bowl just for me. You waited to see if I would appear, and when I did not, you told me you understood wanting to eat alone, so you left it for me on the dining room table, as you went to play the new flight simulator.

Few men have ever been this kind to me before being frightened into it first, or without using their kindness as a disguise. I think you genuinely understand your own quiet desperation among the mass of men. And in turn, you understand others too.
I don’t trust the kindness of men, Caleb. I don’t trust the kindness of women, either. Or anyone else’s kindness, to be truthful, but I especially don’t trust men’s kindness. There are exceptions. Andre, whose kindness was loyalty and honesty, and Albert, although his was a much different kind of kindness.

But Caleb, 23-year-old, unshaven, video game loving, boss hating aimless Caleb, your kindness frightens me. I’m scared of what you want, what it is you plan to take from me. Kind men have stolen my childhood, my morals, my money, my love, my life, and my family. What will you take from me, Caleb, that I have not already lost? I’m afraid. I’m afraid to respond to your gentle bait of friendship, because I am afraid you will take my loneliness from me. I am lonely, and that is a choice I have made for myself.

One day, Caleb, you will die. I know exactly when. It will not be of my hand, although I will do nothing to stop it. It is my fate, my path, to know such things. And in your death, you will return my loneliness to me, and it will be a horror to behold, bloody and misshapen. My loneliness, not recognizing its former owner, will howl an unholy and unceasing cry, and I will not be able to bear it.

This is what I fear, Caleb, and this is why I took the bowl of cashio e pepe you left for me and hurled it against the wall, just missing your cheek. I’m not sad that you screamed at me, I’m happy that you did so. This is how it has to be. We are not enemies, Caleb, no no. I love you deeply. Deeper than you can know. I am your deer Caleb, and you are my corn.

Cecil: The fiery flash of fall leaves stuns us, captivates us. Fireworks in slow motion. Or the crackling embers of a finishing flame. Upon the leaves are written instructions for how to make oxygen, how to give life, with every exhalation. How  to find flair in fading grace, and how to raise new life by falling to your death. The leaves know they will return again, so much will return again. We return now to the October Monologues.

Michelle Nguyen: There’s this new song I like, but I don’t wanna tell you what it is. I find it kind of embarrassing. Usually I love to talk about my favorite music. There was that summer I was obsessed with the new single by Saint Vincent. The single came in the form of a glazed vase containing three blue flowers. Only one was ever made, and I got the only copy. I found it very catchy, but the flowers eventually died. Or the year I spent listening over and over to that new Janelle Monae album. I forget the name, but the cover was a black and white picture of a well, and if you didn’t share it with someone else in 7 days, you would die. Of course no one ever died, because the album was so good, people just couldn’t stop telling their friends to listen.

My favorite song of all time is a blank cassette tape still in its plastic wrapper. It was owned by a man named Gary Joy. He was a real estate lawyer, reasonably successful, but he always dreamed of being a singer/songwriter. He dreamed all the time of quitting his job and writing songs, but he had never even written one song. Then one day, in a fit of optimism and energy, he bought this cassette, intending to make his first memo. But the day got away from him, and then the week, and then the rest of his life, and he never quit being a lawyer, and he never even wrote one song. This blank cassette tape, still in its wrapper, contains the potential of all the songs he could have written but never did, which is better and more powerful than any song anyone’s actually managed to write. The potential of the thing is always more perfect than the reality of the thing. However, and this is the crucial drawback, the potential is absolutely useless and the reality, however imperfect, can be quite useful.
Anyway, I like to hold Gary Joy’s unwritten demo and imagine what it would be like. Hold on, sorry. There’s a customer.

[bell dings] Welcome to Dark Owl Records. What? No, no. No. No! No. OK, bye! [bell dings]
Sorry about that. Some people are so unreasonable. I don’t even know what a Taylor Swift is.

But there’s a new song I like, and it’s not cool like my other favorite songs. It’s not a song that fits the kind of image I like to project. When I put on my mirrored leggings, my extra long jorts, and my really big hat, people expect something from me. They expect me to be on the cutting edge. They expect me only to be into bands that aren’t popular yet, or will never be popular, or that frankly don’t know how to play their instruments very well.
And the song I like now is not any of those things. It’s… ordinary. It’s… popular. I don’t wanna say what it is. Remember when I only listened to the sound of beez buzzing? That was a good summer. Of course I got stung once or twice or 30 times. [sighs] Hold on, sorry, there’s a customer.

[bell dings] Welcome to Dark Owl Records! Hey. Hey! Hey! Hey! HEEEEY!
Thanks, nice to see you again. [bell dings]
Sorry about that.

I’m tired of being cool. I was going to say trying to be cool, but trying implies the possibility of failure, and there has never been a moment when I’ve failed to be cool. But here’s the hard truth I’ve come up against: being cool is a young person’s game. And that’s not because young people are better or more interesting than older people. God no. God no. God no! It’s that coolness itself is a concept tied to youth. Coolness is a reactionary manifestation of insecurity. The more insecure you are, the cooler you need to be. It’s colorful plumage.
But as I’ve gotten older, I no londer need flashy plumage. I just wanna sit in the comfort of who I am, and not worry about what that looks like from the outside.

Anyway, I can’t stop listening to “Karma Police” by Radiohead. It’s just… a good song, you know? Hold on, sorry, there’s a customer.

[bell dings] You! You’ll never catch me alive! [sound of running] [bell dings]

Cecil:An abundance of words, words falling, fluttering to the earth. Words crunching beneath our feet. They were beautiful once, the words. Now they are beginning to rot, to wilt, to compost, to ferment new growth. To fertilize new words growing upon great trunks of paragraphs and chapters, but not now. Those will come later. Now the words sputter and drop in spiraling arcs to the ground. Here, then, are the final few brightly painted words falling upon you now. The October Monologues.

Steve Carlsberg: What does it mean to be believed? I’ve always known that Night Vale isn’t like other places. As long as I can remember, I could see that. I could also see that no one else could see it. I was alone in my knowledge. Knowledge may be power, but power is often lonely. My grandfather knew. He could see that I was like him.
“Steve,” he would say, “us Carlsbergs have always been the town pariahs, but just because they hate you, doesn’t mean they’re right.”
I would sit at night as a kid and listen to Cecil on the radio. He was the same age as he is now, and at the time he seemed so wise. But I would hear him dismiss what I knew shouldn’t be dismissed. I would hear him cover up what should be uncovered, and I would know with a child’s certainty that it was wrong. I loved him still. Everyone in town loves Cecil. It is possible to love someone who you know is doing wrong. It’s terribly easy, in fact.

What does it mean to be believed?
As a teenager, I started trying to express what I saw about the world. I gave a presentation in my social studies class called “Night Vale – there’s literally nowhere like it”, and I thought it was informative. The class all plugged their ears in unison. The teacher stopped me a minute in, glancing nervously at the 8 surveillance cameras monitoring the classroom.
“Are you trying to get us all killed?” the teacher hissed at me. I remember that her breath smelled like Strawberry Jolly Ranchers, and there was a lose crumb of mascara in the sweat of her temples.
“No,” I said. I didn’t know what to say. It’s not the kind of question that demands a sincere answer. The report earned me a trip to the principal’s office, and then the re-education pit, which honestly is not as bad as its name. I mean, almost not as bad. It’s pretty bad. It’s a pit, for re-education.
So, certainly learned something from that re-education. I learned that you’re equally likely to be punished for being right as you are for being wrong.

What does it mean to be believed? I was a young man entering the workforce, and I had long ago learned to hide away what I knew about my city. I had learned the handshake and the smile, the nod and the necktie, all the signifiers that hid what I truly signified. All of life is a code, and I had been thought the key against my will.

I got a job as a bank teller at the Last Bank of Night Vale. I studied with great interest the townsfolk who came and went there. I learned about their lives and their secrets, and what kind of money they made for the whispered deals out back of quiet parking lots just before the sun went down, pulled up next to a black Sedan that contained their handler who they only knew by a false first name. but I couldn’t forget what I knew, even if I learned to playact that I had. What I know shapes who I am. I can’t close my eyes, not to this town I love. This weird and secret town I love.

What does it mean to be believed?
Then I married into the family of Cecil Palmer, host of Night Vale community radio! And he hated me, because he could see that I knew. And after all these years, my mask had slipped a little. I’d lost my interest in hiding. I wanted to speak the truth as I knew it, nothing could be more threatening to Cecil. His life and livelihood depended on speaking the truth as the City Council wanted it. Or as the Vague yet Menacing government agencies crafted it. And here I was, pointing out to him the sky. There are glowing arrows in the sky, there are dotted lines and arrows and circles. The sky is a chart that explains the entire world! I tried to tell him, and this only made him hate me more. I tried to share who I was with him, and this only made him recoil. 

Abby listened to my stories, but she never shared my enthusiasm for the truth.
“Let it lie,” she would say, “let it lie.”
But that’s he point, I can’t let it lie and I can’t lie! We’ve done that for too long! We’ve let our town sit heavy under the weight of euphemism and half truth, and unless someone just said what they saw for once, we would be crushed eventually by that weight!

And then it all changed. I wasn’t alone. The others saw that we lived in a weird place. And you know what? We kept existing. Our world didn’t end merely because we dared acknowledge it.
Cecil and I are friends now. I haven’t forgotten how he treated me, but I understand it and I forgive it.
Forgiveness and understanding are not the same as forgotten.

What does it mean to be believed?
It means everything. It means all.

Cecil: And as the leaves are done, so are the October Monologues. All that can be said has been said. And all that can be said will be said again.

Today’s proverb: Listen, it might seem like everything’s bad right now.

This is Radio Jupiter calling out to all who hear.
Please respond.
Awaiting your reply.

[different theme song]

This is Radio Jupiter. I’m not sure who is listening. I’m not sure if there’s anyone to listen. I can only verify my own existence. I can only verify the void around me, the apparent fact of stars, the swirling atmosphere of the planet below me. I cannot verify much. I don’t know who I am or where I came from. I woke up here, and all I have to go on is my call sign. So this is Radio Jupiter, reaching out to whoever there is to be reached out to.

It is so beautiful here on my perch, here in my place, in the cosmos and the universe about which I know nothing but feel everything.
I don’t know if everywhere is as beautiful, or even most places. Did I happen onto the one beautiful place in the all of it? Without perspective, there is only what is nearby. Without the burden of comparison, everything is beautiful.

If a person is the sum total of every experience they’ve ever had, is a person without memories still a person? Or are they a different creature altogether, made either limited or limitless by the possibilities of a clean slate?
I am either trapped or I am more free than anyone who can hear this. If anyone can hear this.

There is a framed photo in this room. It is an elderly woman. Maybe my mother or my grandmother or an aunt. Perhaps merely a photo I saw in a magazine once and liked for whatever reason. I have no way of knowing what kind of person I am, what kind of photo I would keep. Perhaps it is a photo of you. Do you present as an elderly woman? Would you like to?
I think perhaps I would like to, even for just a little while. But I only am what I only am, I ever am, whatever I am.

[distortion] This is Radio Jupiter calling all cars, all (species), all… [fades out]

Cecil:Is that any better? Is that better? Can you hear me? [clears throat] OK, my producer is giving me the signal that we are now back on the air. Sorry about that, not sure what that other signal was, but it completely took over ours, which is rude. We’re currently looking for the source of the signal. We’ve narrowed it down to up. Just right up there somewhere, beaming on down to us. But we’re back in control and we do not expect any more interruptions. Of course, we didn’t expect that interruption either. I don’t expect almost anything that happens to me, my life is full of mystery and surprise, as is yours I’m sure, but still, we seem to have this one technical issue addressed. With that settled, I think we can get to the news.  

Our top story concerns… [reluctantly] Susan Willman. OK. Sure.
There has been a lot of talk in town since the whole incident with the Obelisk, in which Susan Willman learned the name of an immortal all knowing being. This name now exist in her head, an object of great power reverberating through her thoughts. She has withdrawn from her duties as director of the Night Vale Community Theater and the Night Vale PTA. Oh darn, we’ll miss her and her prosaic, muddled staging and grandstanding about home-work life balance.

Susan has instead taken residence in a booth at the Moonlite All-Nite Diner. There at all hours, toying with a half drunk coffee and playing with the reflection of the sun in the back of a spoon. At night, the mint light of the sign outside sends strange shadows across her face, and her friends say they sometimes don’t recognize her at all. Steve Carlsberg, who is taking over her role at the Night Vale Community Theater, went to talk to her about some finer details of the casting process, and said that she was less than helpful. She was weeping, and the only thing she said the entire time he was there was that she was afraid to speak, lest the awful name slip past her lips.
“No one was meant to carry such death inside of them,” she whispered, and then said no more.
“Oh sure, yeah yeah, makes total sense,” said Steve, as he (-) [06:51] down some invisible pie.
Well, I think we’ve given Susan enough attention for now, moving on.

In other news, the new beer cave at the Ralphs has been closed for repairs due to occasional time loop issues reported by certain customers. Manager at the Ralphs, Dave Ball, issued a statement by spelling out words with cantaloupes in the parking lot, saying “everything is fine with the beer cave, it’s a great and refreshing addition to Night Vale. Please don’t go inside or even look at it, as we don’t know why it’s doing what it’s doing. Everything is fine, please stay safe and stay away.”
Dave then rearranged the cantaloupes to create complex fractal designs that made me dizzy to gaze upon, but were beautiful nonetheless. When reached out for a comment, Ralphs corporate said they had no records of any branch in a town called Night Vale, and were tired of receiving prank calls with bizarre tales about a made up store. When provided with pictoral evidence of Night Vale, a representative at Ralphs corporate began to bleed form the eyes while shouting: “This can’t be real! My god, this can’t be real!”
More on the story of the beer cave if anything happens [distortion, fades out]…

Agent N-223: [–] out there, out there?
Not sure if any of this is getting thru, but continuing to narrate on the off chance anyone will hear this and come, you know, to collect me.
I’ve been doing some digging through the spaceship, and I’m disturbed by what I’ve found. Weapons. Many, many weapons. Racks of guns, cases of grenades and explosives, radar that I instinctively know is for tracking combatant space crafts, even though I have no memory of receiving that training. I am armed to the teeth and ready to wage war.
But on what? There are no living beings in sight, and for all I know, there are no other living beings anywhere. Perhaps I’m here to wage war upon the planet below me, that swirling gaseous titan. Maybe someone had enough of it and sent me up here to put Jupiter back in its place. If so, I think the weapons they gave me were insufficient. I experimented by shooting off a round or two out the airlock, but the bullets soared into the upper atmosphere of the planet without slowing at all. My attack had no appreciable effect on my victim.
So maybe the planet is not my target. Could it be the stars themselves? I am sent here, a pinprick in the side of God to cast myself as the stars, shouting threats and tossing grenades until the entire (-) [09:42] of the universe cowers and surrenders. Perhaps that.

Or perhaps I am at war with you, whoever is hearing this. Maybe I was given this radio in order to threaten and terrorize before I attack. So be afraid, I am coming. O-once I figure out where you are. I have no idea which direction to start moving and I don’t even know if this space ship has any way of controlling movement or if I’m just stuck in this orbit. Either way, this is Radio Jupiter apparently declaring war. [distortion] Consider it declared and [fades out].

Cecil:Can you hear, they can hear me? OK, I apologize, we’ve been doing all kinds of troubleshooting, including shifting the angle of our broadcasting tower, updating all of our software, and yes before you ask, we did try unplugging it, doing a ritual spilling of blood and plugging it back in. The issue we’re having is that these broadcasts are being sent out on military frequencies, which unfortunately automatically override ours. I’m unclear why the military would be getting into broadcasting, that’s more of a community radio thing, so let’s all stick to what we’re good at. I’ll keep doing radio shows that inform and delight, and the military can spend three trillion dollars on a plane that instantly explodes if anyone tries to fly it.

We have reached out to Rudy DeJardin, the local representative of the military industrial complex. He has a little table set up outside of the hardware shop, and anyone who has any questions for the military can just ask him, and he’ll do his best to answer. Most of the stuff can’t answer because it’s classified or embarrassing, but sometimes he’ll say a few cryptic words. In this case, his only answer was to make “mm-hm” sounds and shake his head frantically, while rolling his eyes toward the heavens. Not clear what to make of that, but I sure love whatever this broadcast is off my frequency, Rudy. Any time you want to get on that.

And now a word from our sponsors. Today’s show is brought to you by Nature’s Caress Fountain of Youth gentle flushable wipes. Did you know in most of the world, they just wash after using the toilet? They have a whole thing specifically for doing that. It takes a couple of seconds, cleans thoroughly, and doesn’t create mountains of paper waste. If you dirty your hands, do you wipe at them frantically with an even less robust version of tissues, or do you use water and soap? Why would it be different for anything else? Because it just is, that’s why. It’s the American way, love it or leave it. Nature’s Caress Fountain of Youth gentle flushable wipes: clog the world with your debris.
This has been a word from our sponsors.

And now, as a special treat, Mr. Lee Marvin himself will perform act 3 scene 5 of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. This is the scene that contains the immortal line “I never knew the meaning of fear until I kissed Becky.” [distortion] OK, Mr. Marvin, take it away!

Agent N-223: This is Radio Jupiter speaking to you from a time of peace. Yes, there was that brief episode of war, and it was regrettable. I fired upon an innocent planet, although that planet seems none the worse for my crimes. In any case, that war is now over, as far as I’m concerned. I have no interest in battles and conflict, especially when I have no memory of what that conflict could involve. I have no interest in killing anyone, and I have no interest in dying quite yet.

So, peace in our time. I’m jettisoning all the guns and other weapons. Let them scatter out harmlessly into the universe, most of them swirling down the gravity well of Jupiter, where the immense pressure of the inner atmosphere will compress them into diamonds. I don’t know if that idea is scientifically sound, but I like the thought of it. All these worthless guns made glittering jewels, swirling in the endless storm of a planet that doesn’t even know they’re there.

As for me, now that I’ve declared peace upon the galaxy, I would like to know what is out there. I have found the controls for the ship and it seems I must have been trained in their use, because whatever I do appears to work as I want it to. I am turning away from the only star I’ve ever known. Because my memory is short and it’s the only star that has been there for the last two hours. I’m turning out to the dark unknown, and I’m casting myself into it.
I hope there is a grander universe out there, I’d love to see it.
This is Radio Jupiter, letting the cosmos know that I am on my way. I’ll see you soon. Or, given the size of space, most likely I won’t see you. But we’ll both exist, and [distortion] won’t that be nice?

Cecil: [clapping] Wow, wow wow wow. Thank you, Mr. Marvin, truly a performance for the ages, and what a treat… What? What happened? When? Oh not again!

This is Cecil Palmer of the Night Vale community radio station. I don’t know if you can hear these words, but if you can, we have identified the source of these intrusive broadcasts. She is agent N-223, sent during the early years of the space program on a secret mission. She was put into hibernation so that she could wake up and serve as reinforcement in the Blood Space War at some point in the future. But it appears that the hibernation damaged her memory, and anyway the Blood Space War doesn’t happen for another thousands years, so eh, she won’t be much use in that battle yet. Ah, thanks to the anonymous tipster who snuck us this top secret info. We owe you, Rudy.

Oh, uh it looks like we might be having more interference due to some
Rough weather.

[“The Faded Red and Blue” by David Berkeleyhttp://davidberkeley.com/]

Agent N-223: This is Radio Jupiter on the tail end of the tail end. If there was anyone listening back near that star, I think I’m getting out of range. I feel you getting out of range. Whatever presence I felt that I was speaking to, that feeling is getting hushed and fuzzy. The way I’m sure my voice is for you now.

You’re gonna have to go on without me, I suppose. Be brave about it. Or be scared. Your feelings are not my problem anymore, if they ever were. I have new problems now, problems of void and cosmos, problems of dark matter and lost memories. I am adrift in a universe that does not know I exist, but then you are too.
I don’t know what is out there, but I hope I live to see it. Won’t that be something, if I get to see whatever happens next? I hope I do.

Well, this is Radio Jupiter signing off for the last time. [echoing] Stay safe out there, I’ll try to stay safe out here. Goodbye.

Cecil:The signal has faded out. It seems she has finally left our world and also left my radio frequency. I’m not trying to speak badly of a strange remnant of a war that has not yet happened, floating out into the nothing beyond the nothing, but come on, please, use a different frequency. It’s just rude. The military, through Rudy DeJardin has disavowed any knowledge of Agent N-223 or her mission.
“Nope,” Rudy said through clenched teeth, “Never heard of her. Iiii certainly wouldn’t just say her name on the radio, after being asked not to. That’s not something I would do Cecil,” he said. So I dunno. Maybe we got the story wrong.

It is something, isn’t it? We are bits of life floating in a whole lot of non-life. The fact is true for us in both space and time, we are brief on any measure. And yet we can reach out our voice and be heard, even if only for a moment. And that has to mean something, doesn’t it?
Doesn’t… it?

Stay tuned next for an angry buzzing from inside your cutlery drawer, but you’ll be too afraid to open it and find out its source.

Good night,
Night Vale,
Good night.

Today’s proverb: Diamonds are a girl’s best friend. Agate is a girl’s worst enemy. Emerald is a work acquaintance who a girl hung out with once and then it just – never turned into anything more.

Quoth the raven:
[bird noises]
Welcome to Night Vale.

Listeners, some exciting news from the world of theatre!
The 100 year play is about to reach its final scene. Yes, this is the play that has been running continuously since 1920. Written by a brilliant playwright Hannah Hershman, designed to take exactly 100 years to perform. And the tireless volunteer of the Night Vale Players Playhouse have been going through those scenes, one after another, for decade upon decade.
There’s little time to rehearse, for each hour brings new scenes and each scene will only be performed once the play moves on, in order to keep up with the tight schedule needed to execute the entire script before a century elapses.

It is a monumental work of theatre, but like all work, it must some day cease. Today, specifically.
I will be in attendance at that historic moment, when the final scene is performed and the curtain closes on the 100 year play.  
More soon, but first the news.

We bring you the latest on the lawsuit “The estate of Franklin Chen vs. the city of Night Vale”. As you know, this case has grown so large and complicated that I’ve not had the time to discuss it in my usual community radio broadcasts. But instead, have started a true crime podcast called “Bloody Laws, Bloody Claws: The Murder of Frank Chen”, in which I strive to get to the truth of just what happened on that fateful night when five-headed dragon Hiram McDaniels met Frank Chen, and then later Frank Chen’s body was found covered in burns and claw marks. It’s a confounding mystery. The Sheriff’s Secret Police announce that it seems really complicated and they’re not even gonna try to solve that sucker.
“Oh, what?” a Secret Police spokesman muttered at an earthworm he found in his garden. “You want us to fail? You wanna see us fail? That’s why you want us to investigate this case, to see us fail at it?”
The family of Frank Chen say they merely want the appropriate parties, in this case the city of Night Vale, Hiram McDaniels and an omniscient conception of God, to take responsibility for their part in this tragedy. The trial is now in its 10th month, and has included spirited re-enactments of the supposed murder by helpful Players Playhouse performers in between their work on the 100 year play. 3 changes of judge and venue due to “some dragon attacks and constant interruptions from a local audio journalist, who hosts a widely respected true crime podcast”.
Still, with all this, we near a verdict. Judge Chaplin has indicated she will issue her ruling soon.
“Like in the next year or so?” she said. “Certainly within 5 years. Listen, I don’t owe you a verdict, just because you’re paying me to do a job, you can’t rush me to do it. The verdict will be done when. It’s. Done.”
Chaplin then huffed out of the courtroom followed by journalists shouting recommendations for episodes of their podcast to listen to.

I was present, you know, on opening night of the 100 year play. Ah, how the theatre buzzed! Of course this was partly the audience, thrilled to be at the start of such an unprecedented work, but mostly – it was the insects. The Night Vale Players Playhouse had quite a pest problem at the time, and still does. It’s difficult to do pest control when there is a 100 year long play being performed on stage at every hour of every day.
The curtain opened those many years ago on a simple set of a studio apartment,  a kitchen, a cot, a window overlooking a brick wall. A man sits in the corner deep in thought. A doorbell rings.
“Come in, it’s open,” the man says.
A woman enters, flustered. She is holding a newborn.
“There’s been a murder!” she says. “The victim was alone in a room, and all the doors and windows were locked.
“My god!” the man says and springs up. “Who could have done this, and how?!”
the woman tells him: “It turns out to be the gardener, Mr. Spreckle. He served with the victim in the war and never could forgive him for what happened there. He threw a venomous snake through an air vent.”
The man sits back down, nodding.
“Aah! So the mystery is solved.”
As a playwright, Hannah Hershman did not believe in stringing up mysteries a second longer than was necessary.
The baby in the woman’s arm stirs.
“Shush, shush little one!” the woman says.
The man looks out the window where he cannot see the sky.
“It might look like rain,” he says. “Who knows?”
Thus began a journey of 100 years.

And now a word from our sponsors. Today’s episode is sponsored by the Night Vale Medical Board, which would like to remind you that it is important to drink enough water throughout the day. Drink more water! Your body cannot function without water. Without water, you are just dust made animate. Water forms the squelching mud of sentience.
Try to have at least ten big glasses of water. Not over the entire day, right now. See if you can get all ten of them down. Explore the capacity of your stomach. See if you can make it burst. You will either feel so much better, or an organ will explode and you will day painfully. And either one is more interesting than the mundane now.
You should drink even more water than that. Wander out of your door, search the Earth for liquids. Find a lake and drain the entire thing, until the bottom feeders flop helplessly on the flatlands. Laugh slushingly as you look upon the destruction you have wrought. The power that you possess now that you are well hydrated. Move on from the lake and come to the shore of an ocean. All oceans are one ocean that we have arbitrarily categorized by language. The sea knows no separation, and neither will you when you lay belly down on the sand, put your lips against the waves and guzzle the ocean.
The ocean is salty. It will not be very hydrating, so you’ll need to drink a lot of it. Keep going until the tower tops of Atlantis see sky again for the first time in centuries, until the strange glowing creatures of the deep-deep are exposed, splayed out from their bodies now that they no longer have the immense pressure of the ocean depths to keep their structure intact. And once you have drunk the oceans, turn your eyes to the stars. For there is water out there too, and you must suck dry the universe.
This has been a message from the Night Vale Medical Board.

20 years passed without me thinking about the 100 year play. You know how it is. One day you’re an intern at the local radio station doing all the normal errands like getting coffee and painting pentacles upon Station Management doors as part of the ritual of the slumbering ancients. Then 20 years passes and everything is different for you. Your boss is gone and now you are a host of the community radio station, and there are so many new responsibilities and worries and lucid nightmares in which you explore a broken landscape of colossal ruins. So with all of that, I just kind of forgot the 100 year play was happening. But they were toiling away in there, doing scenes around the clock, building and tearing down sets at a frantic pace, trying to keep up with the script that relentlessly went on, page after page. And sometimes one of the people working on the play would wonder: how does this all end? But before they could flip ahead and look, there would be another scene that had to be performed and they wouldn’t have a chance. So no one knew how it ended. No one except Hannah Hershman, the mysterious author of this centennial play.

Soon after becoming radio host, during the reading of a Community Calendar, I was reminded that the play was still going on, and so decided to check in. I put on my best tux, you know it’s the one with the scales and the confetti canon. And then took myself to a night at the theatre.
I can’t say what happened in the plot since that first scene, but certainly much had transpired. We were now in a space colony thousands of years from now, and the set was simple, just some sleek chairs and a black backdrop dotted with white stars of paint. A woman was giving a monologue about the distance she felt between the planet she was born on, which I believe was supposed to be Earth, and the planet she now stood on. I understood from what she was saying that the trip she had taken to this planet was one way, and that she would never return to the place she was born.
“We… are… all of us… moved… by time,” she whispered in a cracked, hoarse voice. “Not… one of us dies… in the world… we were born into.”
Sitting in my seat in that darkened theatre, I knew two facts with certainty. The first was that this woman had been giving a monologue for several days now. She wavered on her feet, speaking the entire four hours that I was there. And I don’t know how much longer she spoke after I left, but it could have been weeks. She was pale and her voice was barely audible, but there was something transfixing about it, and the audience sat in perfect silence, leaning forward to hear her words.
The other fact I understood was that this woman was the newborn from the very first scene. Not just the same character, but the same actor. 20 years later, she was still on that stage, still portraying the life to the child we had been introduced to in the opening lines. She was an extraordinary performer, presumably, having had a literal lifetime of practice. And that was the last time I saw the play, until tonight, when I will go to watch the final scene.

But first, let’s have a look at that Community Calendar.
Tonight the school board is meeting to discuss the issues of school lunches. It seems that some in power argue that it isn’t enough that for some reason we charge the kids actual money for these lunches. They argue that the students should also be required to give devotion and worship to a great glowing cloud, whose benevolent power will fill their lives with purpose.
Due to new privacy rules, we cannot say which member of the school board made this suggestion. The board will be taking public comment in a small flimsy wooden booth out by the highway. Just enter the damp, dark interior and whisper your comment, and it will be heard. Perhaps not by the school board, but certainly by something.

Tuesday morning, Lee Marvin will be offering free acting classes at the rec center. The class is entitled “Acting is just lying. We’ll teach you how acting is just saying things that aren’t true, with emotions you don’t feel, so that you may fool those watching with these mistruths.”
Fortunately, Marvin commented: “Most people don’t want to be told the truth and prefer the quiet comfort of a lie well told.”
Classes are pay what you want, starting at 10,000 dollars.

Thursday Josh Crayton will be taking the form of a waterfall in Grove Park, so that neighborhood kids may swim in him. There is not a lot of swimming opportunities in a town as dry as Night Vale, and so this is a generous move on Josh’s part. He has promised that he has been working on the form and has added a water slide and a sunbathing deck. He asks that everyone swim safely and please not leave any trash on him.

Friday, the corn field will appear in the middle of town, right where it does each September, as the air turns cooler and the sky in the west takes on a certain shade of green. The corn field emanates a power electric and awful. Please, do not go into the corn field, as we don’t know what lives in there or what it wants. The City Council would like to remind you that the corn field is perfectly safe. It is perfect and it is safe. 

Finally, Saturday never happened. Not if you know what’s good for you. Got it?
This has been the Community Calendar.

Oh! Look at the time. Here I am blathering on and the play is about to end. OK, let me grab my new mini recorder that Carlos got me for my birthday. It’s only 35 pounds and the antenna is a highly reasonable 7 feet. And I’ll see you all there.

Ah.
What’s the weather like for my commute?

[Shallow Eyes” by Brad Bensko.https://www.bradbenskomusic.com/]

Carlos and I are at the theatre! The audience is a buzz, with excitement yes, but also many of them are the insects that infest this theatre. The bugs became entranced by the story over the years, passing down through brief generation after brief generation, the history of all that happened before. The story of the play became something of a religion to this creepy crawly civilization. And so now the bugs are jittering on the walls, thrilled to be the generation that gets to see the end of this great tale.

The curtain rises on a scene I recognize well. It is the simple set of a studio apartment. A kitchen, a cot, a window overlooking a brick wall. A man sits in the corner deep in thought. A doorbell rings.
“Come on, it’s open,” the man calls.
A woman enters. She is very old, tottering unsteadily on legs that have carried for her many many years.
“Please take my seat,” the man says with genuine concern.
“Thank you,” she says, collapsing with relief onto the cushions and then looking out, as if for the first time, noticing the audience.
I know this woman. I first saw her as a baby and later as a 20-year-old. It seems she has lived her whole life on this stage, taking part in this play.
“My name,” the woman says, “is Hannah Hershman. I was born in this theatre, clutching a script in my arms that was bigger than I was. My twin, in a way. I started acting in that script of mine before I was even aware of the world. I grew up in that script, lived my entire life in the play I had written from infancy to now.”
And she rises, and the man reaches out to help, but she waves him away. She speaks, her- her voice is strong, ringing out through the theatre.
“The play ends with my death, because the play is my life. It is bounded by the same hours and minutes that I am.”
the audience is rapt, many have tears in their eyes. Even the insects weep.
“Thank you for these hundred years,” Hannah Hershman says. “This script is complete.”
She walks to the window.
“It might look like rain,” she says. “Who knows?”
The lights dim.

Thunderous applause, cries of acclaim, and Hannah Hershman dies to the best possible sound a person can hear: concrete evidence of the good they have done in the lives of other humans.

Stay tuned next for the second ever Night Vale Players Playhouse production, now that they finally finished this one. They’re going to do “Godspell”. And from the script of a life I have not yet finished performing,
Good night,
Night Vale,
Good night.

Today’s proverb: Many are called, but few are chosen. And fewer still pick up. Because most calls are spam these days.

The stars tell us our future.
They’re rarely correct, but yet there they are, blathering on night after night.
Welcome to Night Vale.

At the foot of a sandy hill, a woman explains to her son what a flower is. She’s pointing at an orange starburst atop a squat bulbous cactus.
She says: “Flowers are beautiful, aren’t they?”
I cannot hear what her son says.
She answers: “Because bees like beautiful things and flowers want the bees to take their pollen, that little bit of yellow powder, right down there inside, and give it to other plants, so they can grow up and be beautiful too.”
There’s a long pause.
Then she says: “Nature wants to make more and more beauty all the time. That’s all it wants to do. If it is not beautiful, it cannot live.”
She’s upset at her son’s next question.
“Humans wish to make beauty too, but not for nature,” she snaps. “They want computers and airplanes and factories, oh Benny, don’t touch.” She sighs.
Then she says: “The cactus hurt you, didn’t it? The cactus knows you’re human and it does not want you to watch it, and now it has let you know that, you won’t touch it again, will you? No Benny, you won’t.”

Underneath the scant shade of a dilapidated wing of an MD-90 aircraft, a middle aged man tells another middle aged man about a time he went to New Orleans. He thought the French Quarter was too crowded and the jazz scene overrated, so he drove east along the upper neck of the Mississippi Delta to a Swapshack, where he paid a man 50 dollars to take him on a hovercraft to look at alligators. “Such majestic and hideous creatures,” the middle aged man says to the other. “You know, when I was little, I cried thinking about how I would never see a real live dinosaur. All the world had left were bones. But right there in southern Louisiana lay dozens of living dinosaurs. It’s an extraordinary world when you finally realize that all life is magic,” he says.
The other middle aged man had heard the story dozens of times, but still he replies: “I hear you, I hear you.”

A young woman thinks about a job interview she never attended. She is happy without that job, yet she feels regret for what could have been.
“I cannot imagine myself behind a desk making spreadsheets and memos,” she says to no one. “But I cannot imagine a 5-dimensional horse, nor the width of the void, nor the language of whales. I cannot imagine a lot of things but the pay, the pay would have been pretty good.”

Behind a blighted Palo Verde Tree, hidden between lush acacia shrubs, two teenaged boys kiss for the 50th time or so. It is brief, as one stops to look around, on alert for overbearing parents. They kiss for the 51st time or so and then laugh. Their fingers clumsily fumbling over each other, trying to decide on the perfect grip, the perfect touch. They melt like marshmallows in the flame of inexperienced joy. This moment in their lives is as pure and powerful as they have ever felt and may ever feel again.

My mind is crowded with voices, with people living their lives all day listeners. these are the stories, they are eating fruit and playing cards. They are arguing about who said what and when. They are meditating and conversing, retelling old shows and books they remember from when they had such things. A copy of Tina Fey’s memoir “Bossy Pants” was found in  a suitcase seven years ago, and everyone in the group has read it at least once. Someone mutters that they used to have a copy of Karen Russel’s “Swamplandia!”. It was in her purse when they landed here, but someone won’t own up to stealing it. another says the book might have been used to make a fire one night, because whoever made the fire might have thought the owner was done reading it, hypothetically.

It’s been several days since the voices came into my head, and at first it was new and interesting, but already I have grown tired of it. I do not know how Amelia Anna Alfaro lived her whole life with these sounds in her mind. It’s unceasing and I’ve not gotten much sleep. The teenage lovers sneak away each night to hold hands and talk big dreams underneath the moon. It’s sweet and romantic, but at 2 AM, give it a rest boys! I could try to talk back, but none of the voices can hear me. It’s like asking the rain to return to its cloud.
But when I talk to Carlos, the voices go way. Thankfully I have my greatest peace when I’m with my favorite person. I can’t keep Carlos awake at all hours or have him skip work to be with me, so I have to learn to make peace with the voices, as they are noisy but permanent room mates in my brain now.

I do have news to report, but it’s mostly stuff you already know about. The high school basketball team has tryouts on Saturday. The library is doing open mic poetry nights on Tuesdays at 7, and we all know it’s a trap. Don’t do it unless you’re well armed. And the Opera House is extending its run of Verdi’s “2 Fast 2 Furious”, starring Renée Fleming, through the end of the month.

It’s hard to concentrate on reading these news stories with so much other language running through my head. Like this: there’s a guy who’s complaining about metal scraps that haven’t been cleaned, and the woman he’s talking to is explaining that they are conserving water for drinking and the guy is saying that it’s unsanitary to make dining utensils out of dirty metal, and she replies that they’re not making any more forks or spoons, they don’t need any more forks or spoons, they need knives but not for eating. What am I supposed to do with this information, it’s been going on nonstop for days? You cannot possibly understand what its’ like to listen to someone you don’t know, who you’ve never even met, who you can’t even see, ramble on and on about their boring personal life straight into your head, it’s awful. I can hear another person saying he’s found something. Good for you pal, way to find another rock or stick or lizard or whatever.

Wait. “Weeeee have founnnnnd ittt,” the voice says.
I know this voice. It’s the first voice that’s been familiar to me, where do I know this voice, he is saying “first weeeeeeeee found you. You who are – no where – now weeeeeee have founnnnnnnd itt.”
And other men are barking in agreement. Listeners, that voice is Doug Biondi from the asylum, and the voices around him are the agents from the National Safety and Transportation Bureau, all of whom escaped the Night Vale Asyulm two months ago. They are in nowhere, in an otherworld desert standing near a door attached to no building. Not far from a passenger set, long since rotted away. A jet that has been home to 143 passengers and crew members, one of those 143 – the pilot. Asylum warden Charles Rainier warned us of this. He had been a been a passenger on that plane, he became part of a small commune that grew into an angry cult under the leadership and telepathic influence of the pilot.
Charles told us that the pilot would find those who could help him find Night Vale. Help him find the real world, and Doug Biondi knows the way back.

The pilot found Doug and Doug found the pilot.
“Iii know the wayyy,” Doug Biondi says, laughing the laugh of a man whose smile is too big for his face.
At the foot of a sandy hill, a mother tells her son it is time.
“Stop crying, Benny. Stop crying so that there will be more flowers, more beauty.”

Underneath the scant shade of a dilapidated wing of an MD-90 air craft, two middle aged men argue over which hand made axe is sharper. At last, they agree that the one crafted from the rotor flap and held together with the hand belt is the better blade.
“No you take it,” one says.
“No, I insist you, I’m happy to use the smaller axe,” the other says, “because it is easier to manage what with my back spasms.”

And behind a blighted Paolo Verde Tree, hidden between lush acacia shrubs, two teenage boys kiss the way you kiss when you think it may be your last. They whisper impossible promises and raise high their rusty shovels, the spades’ tips having already been sharpened to deadly points. They race toward the gathering crowd.

A young woman who thinks often about the job interview she never attended shouts: “Nature is beauty!”
“We are beauty!” replies antoher woman.
They repeate these calls.
“Nature is beauty! We are beauty!”
And now every voice in my head is chanting the phrases, chanting and chanting and chanting, it’s too… it’s too much!

Silence. They’re silent suddenly. My head is clear. I can think my own thoughts.

Night Vale, I’m getting word that Sheriff Sam is barring all known passages into our town. This includes roads, trails, sewer grates, even the Dog Park which is not officially an entrance to the Desert Otherworld, but you know, let’s be honest here. We’re on lockdown, Night Vale. No one enters or leaves.

Good. This is good. If the voices can reach me, they can reach any of us. In fact, if the voices can enter my mind, then the pilot and passengers of flight 18713 may well already be here, or some of them anyway. Or maybe the voices come and go. This is the first moment of silence I’ve had alone in nearly a week. Maybe the voices aren’t always there like, like radio signals as you leave a city or, or a cell phone in an elevator, maybe the voices can’t permeate us under certain conditions or maybe… Or maybe…
The voices are silent because… they are listening.
Maybe they’re listening to their leader, their pilot who is giving instructions on what to do next, when and where to attack.

I don’t know. But I must use my moment of clarity to tell you some news.
Nope, the voices are back. A single voice is back. I know, without knowing, that it is the voice of the pilot. He says:
[in a neutral tone]
“Uh, hi there, this is your pilot speaking. Just wanted to let you know that nature is beauty, we are beauty. We propagate our pollen, we spread our seeds, we grow new life over old life, we cleanse the toxins of technology. We depose the human king and return natural instinct to its rightful throne. If you can hear my voice, then you are chosen. You are chosen to join all who join our nature. All who join our beauty. All who refuse will be recycled into the earth, destroyed and dispersed to fertilize new more beautiful life. All those who are beautiful are chosen. All those who are not, are a cancer, blight, infection and disease. All who are not beautiful will be cut away, amputated, so that the Earth’s wounds may finally leave, so the Earth may grow beautiful once again.

We have been found and we will return. Open the gates to freedom, end the tyranny of artifice. That’s all for now, we’ll be arriving in just a few moments, Night Vale. There is going to be some turbulence.”

[distraught] I’m sorry, listeners! I did not meant to do that, I did not want to do that! The voice of the pilot overtook me and I, oh, I need to lock myself inside the studio, I have to protect you from me, but first
the weather.

[“A Prayer for the Sane” by Danny Schmidt http://dannyschmidt.com]

I brought Carlos to the studio. When I talk to Carlos, I don’t hear the voices of the passengers from 18713. I don’t hear the voices even now as I look directly at Carlos while I’m speaking. Like Charles Rainier’s fishing hole or, or Amelia Anna Alfaro’s puzzles, Carlos grounds me, lets me be wholly me.

Thank you, Carlos.

Oh, I also had Carlos bring a pair of handcuffs with him that he bought at –Target on his way to the station, and used them to shackle me to my desk. If Charles Rainier is correct, then once the pilot can speak to you, he can control you. And if that should happen, it won’t happen but if it should, then now I won’t be able to leave here and do harm to anyone else.

From my window, I can see far down the street a spiral of black smoke. There are flashes of emergency sirens. Now I can see people coming up the road. They are long-haired, sun-scorched and nearly naked, wearing not much more than flat wide-brimmed hats and short tunics fashioned from seat upholstery.
These people are carrying large blades, roughly honed from scrap metal. Some have widdled down pieces of plexiglass windows into sharp points and tied them to ends of long sticks. They’re deliberately walking up the hoods of parked cars and smashing windows and caving in the roofs with their bare feet.

It is no doubt that the passengers of 18713 are here, Night Vale.
If you can hear me, sty inside and lock your doors. If you can her the pilot, then do as I have done. Secure your position so securely that not even your own mind can talk you out of it.
Sheriff Sam has stubbornly kept up all roadblocks in and out of town, so we have no choice but to stay. The long unmoving lines of traffic at the edges of the city are easy prey now for the 18713.
The pilot offered the choice of joining or refusing, but it is not a choice, not really. He either can control you or he cannot. Those whom he cannot control will be killed at the hands of those who can.

[anxiously] Carlos? You don’t hear the pilot voice, and thus cannot be controlled. But I do, and I can. I have been controlled.
We’re in trouble, Carlos. I can’t stay chained to this desk forever, can I? And if the pilot means to destroy you, he might make – me do it myself.
Just promise me you’ll run. Leave me behind if that happens, OK? OK.
But for now, do not let me out of these cuffs, not even if I use a safe word, which I hear is something quite a few people use in healthy fun intimate relationships.

The people of 18713 are climbing up storefronts and tearing off signs. I can see about 10 or 15 in normal street clothes in the crowd now, which means the group is growing. They are recruiting quickly.

But something else is eating at me. In the asylum, in Doug Biondi’s journal and among the myriad voices in my mind, I still have not seen nor heard Amelia Anna Alfaro, the first person to make contact with the pilot. She disappeared in 2012 and no one has heard from her since. I need to find her. Somehow, if anyone can solve this, it might be her. She was always the best at everything.

Stay tuned next for the sound of me talking to Carlos forever and ever.

Good night,
Night Vale.
[creepily] Gooood night.

Today’s proverb: People who live in glass houses shouldn’t hire that realtor again.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are written about on Wikipedia.
Welcome to Night Vale.

Charles Rainier grew up in Becket, Massachusetts, nestled in the rolling small hills of the Berkshires. The fiery fall leaves, pristine winter snowfall, lush spring flowers and sparkling summer lakes belied the average life of young Charles. He went to school, passed his classes, he spent time with friends seeing popular movies and playing popular games. His family ate food together and generally got along. When he wanted to be alone, he went to a small pond, hidden in the woods, to fish. He studied sociology at Amherst College and graduated in the top 50 percent of his class. Nothing about his unremarkable upbringing indicated he would one day be standing in the middle of a desert, behind a roadblock, holding a rifle and a flashlight, and searching for fugitives from his own asylum.

Last month, a dozen inmates of the Night Vale Asylum escaped during a production of a play. As an attendee of that play, I would say that while the escape was clearly not part of the original draft of the script, it made for an exciting resolution. I mean, bout 30 minutes in Carlos and I were like, is there going to be a car chase or a shootout or something, I mean that play was bo-o-o-orring! And then suddenly, there was both!
But the warden, Charles Rainier from Becket, Massachusetts, did not like the last minute edits to the plot, as he and the Sheriff’s Secret Police have yet to round up any of the inmates now on the run, somewhere in our vast desert.
Night Vale citizens have expressed deep concerns about their safety. A scathing op-ed in yesterday’s Daily Journal by Leann Hart read: “Warden Rainier should never have been in charge of such an important institution. His unchecked irresponsibility will lead us all to be killed by psychopaths, who surely hide now inside our basements, our attics, our laundry hampers, perhaps inside our own pants pockets.” The editorial continued: “They wield knives, ropes, wrenches, candlesticks, or pipes. And when we least expect it, these crazed killers will leap out at us, screaming bout eating our faces or feeding us to rodents. Or whatever other evil actions those two very funny women are always describing on “My  Favorite Murrderrr”.
Charles Rainier called Hart’s claims “neurotypical ableism”, saying that we become too biased from movies and TV shows that play up harmful tropes about mental illnesses. He added that none of the peoples inside were of immediate anger to any individual in Night Vale. The Night Vale chapter of the ACLU then responded, calling for in investigation into a public facility that would imprison people who had committed no criminal acts and were of no harm to society.
Charles Rainier replied: “I said they wouldn’t hurt any individual. I didn’t say they were of no harm to society.”

But who were the people in the asylum? Carlos and I attended the production of the play “18713/NTSB”, partially to have a nice date night, just the two of us. But also because I was curious if I would see Amelia Anna Alfaro there. The air traffic controller has not been seen since 2012, after hearing voices from the missing flight, Delta 18713. There were rumors she was checked into the asylum. Other rumors, that she had gone off to find the missing plane, and other other rumors, that she was disappeared by a Vague yet Menacing Government Agency.

Amelia was not inside the asylum the night of the breakout. But Doug Biondi was there. He played the pilot of the missing plane in the play we saw. Doug was the impetus for this entire story, really, because it was Doug who, according to Sheriff Sam, had real information about the missing plane.
Members of the National Transportation and Safety Board had also come to Night Vale to talk to Doug about what he knew, and Sheriff Sam obliged by sending those agents from Washington DC on an undercover investigation into the asylum.
Yet, like Doug and the dozens of other inmates in that fearful place, they did not return.

According to to Doug Biondi’s journal, which Carlos and I found inside the asylum after the play, warden Charles Rainier developed a paradoxical logic for dealing with these inmates. He encouraged them to talk openly bout their feelings under the guise of healing them, but the more they expressed their thoughts and emotions, the more the warden used this information as proof of their insanity, and by extension, ineligibility for release. But as Doug elaborates, if inmates refused to talk, they were deemed uncooperative and of course, ineligible for release.
Reading further into Doug’s journal, I realized it’s just like that novel, “Catch-22”, in that there’s a bunch of talk about airplanes.
What stood out most to me, though, was the fact that every other inmate Doug mentions also talked about the missing Delta flight. Every single person in there either heard voices of the passengers, or had theories about what happened or were, in the case of NTSB agents, just open to find survivors of a missing plane.
Doug railed against the collusion between the warden and the sheriff to imprison people simply because they knew something, anything, about flight 18713. “This is the last thing,” Doug wrote the day he escaped. “This nefarious conspiracy runs deep. Deeper than we can imagine. There are innocent people on a missing plane, and our government wants to destroy us for seeking the truth. Oh well. In other news, they fixed the TV in the rec room so I’m hoping to finally watch ‘Cheer’ on Netflix. Everyone says it’s super good.”
Doug makes a compelling claim here, but he is wrong. About the conspiracy thing, not about “Cheer”, that show is super good.

So. Back in 2015, my devoted husband and devoted scientist Carlos, was heading a research project into a desert otherworld, a place very similar to our own. We spent almost a year apart while Carlos was in this alternate dimension performing experiments and drawing charts and pouring bubbling liquids back and forth between flasks. It was hard. We had only been dating a year when he left, but we kept in touch talking almost every day, sending each other text messages at night, like a kissy face emoji with a big red heart emoji. Or sometimes we sent racier messages, like [naughty voice] the safety goggles emoji with the police siren emoji and the first place ribbon emoji. Oh, sorry if that’s a little too graphic.

Anyway. Carlos made friends during his many months out of town, and so when he finally decided to return to Night Vale, some of those he met followed him. They came through a portal Carlos discovered in the Desert Otherworld: a one-sided door. It was difficult to find in a never-ending sandscape, but it is still there. And as Carlos said, once you know the way, you never forget it.

One of the people who came with Carlos through the portal in 2015 was Charles Rainier of Becket, Massachusetts. It was not easy for most of these new arrivals to find comfort or employment in Night Vale, but in just a few months, Charles had become friends with our new Sheriff and secured himself a job at the Night Vale Asylum.
Few people looked deeply at the asylum, nor at Charles Rainier’s quick appointment as warden. Few people, in fact, looked closely at anything to do with mental disorders. It it almost as if we prefer not to see the mental illness at all. It is almost exactly like that. Well below the radar of public attention, Charles settled into his new position. And because there are no accounts of what went on in the asylum, and thus no stories of failure, it was inferred that he did a good job.
But Carlos discovered something this week. In reading Doug Biondi’s journal, Doug makes passing mention of warden Rainier cautioning his inmates against listening to the voice of the pilot. The warden warns them that the pilot can control other beings with his mind. It is odd that the head of a mental health institution would patronize his patients with their own inner demons. Carlos at first thought the warden was manipulating the mental stability of his charges to stir up their fear and confusion in order to keep them there. We don’t know if the warden profited from retaining inmates or if he just felt an evil thrill from playing these games. But in Doug’s notes, the warden apparently said: “It is possible to escape the allure of the pilot. The power of his voice. Some have, but it is rare. And it is dangerous that you can hear him at all.”

Carlos remembered when he first met Charles Rainier, five years ago in the Desert Otherworld. Charles was so enthralled with Carlos’ stories of Night Vale. Charles Rainier could not wait to see this fantastic town and more importantly, to leave the terrible place in which he lived. He told Carlos that he escaped some – frightening people there. Charles Rainier said he had live in a commune for a couple of years. It began OK, they foraged and hunted their food, they helped each other and shared shelter inside the fuselage of an old plane. Everything was fine. They were alive, but soon the group became cult-like and aggressive, fashioning weapons and manufacturing enemies. The constant threat of violence toward other, towards themselves, shackled Charles’s every move. But he could not leave. Every time he tried, he heard a voice that called him back. So he trained himself to block out the voices. It took him weeks of determined practice, but finally he broke free.
Carlos said to me: “Cecil, sweetie, my hypothesis is Charles Rainier was flying home from Detroit to Albany on June 15, 2012.”
And I said: “What are you saying, honey-pop?”
And Carlos said: “Babe, his plane blipped out of the sky and into the Desert Otherworld.”
And I said: “Are you saying, kitty-cake, that Charles ws a passenger on Delta 18713?”
But then Carlos aid: “You know, little piggy-pie, all this work talk is exhausting. Let’s have a glass of wine, sit out on the deck, and enjoy the nice weather.

[“Breathe” by Tanja Daub http://tanjadaub.bandcamp.com]

Listeners. I called Charlies Reinier, and I told him what Carlos and I talked about, and he confirmed what we discovered. He was indeed a passenger on 18713. They landed roughly but safely in the Desert Otherworld in June 2012. They ate their few food items and drank their water stores in two days. And soon they began spreading out to find civilization. But the desert was vast and seemingly uninhabited. They were too afraid to venture far from the plane, the only symbol of recognizable society. The pilot lead expeditions to find plant life and sources of water. He exuded calmness and clarity, and the passengers followed his example, occasionally finding peace in this unpleasant and frightening desert. Within a few months, they had developed a rhythm. They were finding food to eat, water to drink, the pilot seemed to know exactly where to hunt, exactly what to say, exactly how to behave.

Every passenger fell in line. They all had jobs to do, roles to fill, in this little commune. The fuselage kept them sheltered from the searing white days and the icy black nights. Sometimes they sang together, walked together, taught each other how to sew, how to cook, how to make tools. The passengers’ fear became comradery, which became unity, which became family. Which eventually became religiosity.

One day they were making salves from cacti, and the next they were crafting weapons. Charles hadn’t realized it at first, but every person on that plane could communicate telepathically. They could speak without talking – no, without learning. They were becoming a single organism separated into dozens of bodies. The loudest voice in their heads was the pilot. They had grown too complacent, and the pilot began to fill them once again with fear, fear of outsiders, of the rest of the world. They began to make barbaric expeditions hoping to find people or things to destroy.
“I tried to escape,” Charles said to me. “I tried to escape over and over, but the voice was too strong. It was only when I thought about a little fishing hole down near Stockbridge that I would go to in summers by myself, to get away, to be alone.”
Charles said he began to pantomime fishing, casting his imaginary lure on an imaginary line into and imaginary pond on hot desert sand. And when he did this, the voices quieted in his mind. He could free himself from the pilot’s voice, from the pilot’s control.
I asked Charles why he and Sheriff Sam were locking away people just for knowing about the plane.
He said: “Cecil, I locked up Doug Biondi before anyone else. He’s from that Otherworld, and he knows how to get back, and if he knows how to get back, he’ll join the 18713 and lead them into Night Vale.”
Charles said he was protecting our little town from the threat of the passengers of Delta flight 18713. “If the pilot enlists Doug and gets into Night Vale, he’ll recruit who he can and destroy the rest.”
“But why odes he communicate only through Doug? I-I mean why not Carlos or, or Dana Cardinal or Sheriff Sam themself? Why not recruit everyone who knows the way into Night Vale?”
“I don’t know, Cecil,” Charles snapped back. “But I don’t will into existence by yapping about it either, so drop it!”

Listeners, Doug Biondi is about six foot tall. With an unsettlingly… long smile and dark nightmarish eyes. If you see him, contact the Sheriff’s office immediately. If you do not see Doug Biondi, then close your windows, hold your family close, and repeat a mantra that will clear your head of all outside thoughts.

Stay tuned next for a meditative oummmm.
A single oummmmmm.
For one full hour, uninterrupted by breath and commercial free.

Good night,
Night Vale,
Good night.

23:07 time traveler
30:32 pottery class

Our moral compass has been demagnetized.
Welcome to Night Vale.

Night Vale, Carlos and I went to see a new play the other night. It’s been ages since we went to the theater. I think the last show we saw was “Hamilton”, which is a Tony and Pulitzer winning hip hop musical about figure skater Scott Hamilton, who died in a duel to fellow Olympian Katarina Witt. “Hamilton” was wonderful, but live theater is so expensive. It’s a rare treat for us to get out of the house, what with the cost of tickets plus dinner, parking, a babysitter, tuxedo rentals and all that time spent watching YouTube makeup tutorials for jamming facial recognition cameras.

But my friend Charles Raynor invited us as his special guests to watch the premiere of a new play at the Night Vale Asylum, where Charles is the warden. The play was called “The Disappearance and Cover-up of Flight 18713 as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Night Vale under the Direction of Undercover Agents from the National Safety and Transportation Bureau.” Or, “18713/NTSB” for short. I’m used to seeing plays at the New Old Opera House or in the high school auditorium. There’s also the Black Box Theatre, which presents some of Night Vale’s most experimental drama from young performance artists. No one has seen any of these shows, or if they have, they’ve never emerged from that doorless black box, its walls perfectly smooth and faintly warm.

But this particular play was at the asylum itself. The Night Vale Asylum perches atop a craggy peak in the Sand Wastes. It’s brutalist concrete walls intermittently slashed with slivers of windows. I do not personally know anyone inside this intimidating institute, other than warden Raynor himself. And I’ll admit to being a bit nervous venturing out at night to a heavily guarded home for the criminally insane.
But Carlos put me at ease by rolling his eyes. He said it was neurotypical ableism that makes us think this way. That movies and TV shows often play up harmful tropes about psychopaths and lunatics, planning daring escapes so they can return to a life of criminal misdeeds. Carlos explained that asylums are merely places where we hide away the people who most remind us of the inexplicable fragility of the human brain.

Driving out past the Scrublands under an indigo sky, the full moon low over the horizon backlighting the Night Vale Asylum atop its jagged rocky ridge, my nerves returned. I thought I heard coyotes howling in the distance, but it was the car stereo. Carlos had put on his favorite new Frank Ocean album called “Various Animals Screaming”.
When we arrived, warden Raynor greeted us at the gates. Two guards wearing army style green dress uniforms flanked him. Their right breasts were laden with medals, chevrons and stripes. They each were armed with billy clubs, tasers and slingshots, and one of them was wearing an eye patch, but it was positioned in the middle of his forehead.

The warden escorted Carlos and me to our seats, which were simple wood chairs. There were only ten seats total, all in a single row along the rear wall. There was no standard stage to speak of, no curtain. The actors were all in costume in the center of the room, already in character. The other seats were already filled. Warden Raynor, Sheriff Sam, three of Sam’s secret police officers, two of Sam’s overt police officers, and an angel I had never met before, but who introduced themself to me as Erika. With a K, they added.
“Nice to meet you, Erika,” I said.
“You got ten bucks?” Erika asked.
“Uh, sure,” I said. “What for?”
“Not everyone gets to know everything,” they said. “You either got it or you don’t, man.”
So I handed them ten bucks and minutes later my lower back pain, which has plagued me for the last six months, was gone. I looked back at Erika and I saw the wink at me, or I think they winked? They have ten eyes, so it could have just been an asynchronous blink. It’s hard to even tell what they’re ever looking at.

The play began with an introduction by warden Raynor, who welcomed us all to this unusual night. The first ever performance of an original play by inmates in his asylum. He introduced the writers/directors of the piece. There were three of them, each dressed in an electrical blue jumpsuit. One of them had a blister on his upper lip, another a swollen red lump along the cuticle of his right index finger. One of them had an unceasing nose bleed. I recognized them as the agents from the National Safety and Transportation Bureau in Washington, who had come to Night Vale two months ago to investigate the disappearance of Delta flight 18713.
Sheriff Sam had placed these agents undercover in the asylum to try to meet with an inmate named Doug Biondi, who claimed to have pertinent information about the missing aircraft. Upon remembering this, I flipped quickly through my playbill to find the ensemble members’ names. And there on the title page was the name Doug Biondi, who was cast as airplane pilot.
As the warden returned to his seat and before the house lights dimmed, I leaned over to Sheriff Sam and asked, “How is the undercover operation going, Sheriff?”
Sam glared at me and said, “I’ve no idea what you mean.”
“You know, with the NTSP officers here in the asylum trying to interview Doug Biondi?” I asked perhaps a little loudly for a theater.
“The NTSP officers are criminally insane, Sessil,” the Sheriff said unironically and with more than a touch of scold in their tone. “That is why they are here. They are a danger to themselves and others.”
I had many more questions, but before I could say anything, the lights faded to black, and I heard the first voice of the play.

“Find us,” called the voice in the dark.
“Find us,” it echoed again.
A faint glow coated like frost the wild-eyed faces of the inmates on stage. The frantic visages made all the more panic by deep eyeliner, rouge and lipstick. Most were dressed in common street clothes: slacks, jeans, buttoned-down shirts, mid-length pattern skirts. Two were dressed as flight attendants and one as the pilot.
I could only presume a small budget, as the uniforms worn by the latter groups were largely suggested by navy blue hats and little plastic wings on their lapels. The pilot wore anachronistic aviation goggles and so it was difficult for me to see and remember the face of this actor, this inmate, Doug Biondi. But I could see his mouth, which was unusually white. The corners of his lips extending well past the width of his eyes. He had an unusual number of teeth in his harsh smile, a smile which never abated, even in his most somber of scenes.

“Weeee surviive,” said Biondi’s pilot character. “Weeeee livve. Weee cannot dieee. Noot here, noot in No..Where.”
He said it not like the vague concept of “in no place”, but “No Where”, two words capitalized, like the name of a specific place.
Each actor was seated in short tight rows of four, a narrow aisle in between, mimicking the floor plan of a common fuselage. At the front of the troup sat Doug Biondi, as airline pilot.
“How did we get here, in No Where?” said one of the passengers.
“And how shall we return?” said another.
“Only,” they said in unison, “when you find ussss.”
This last line they said with a quick twist of their necks towards the audience. Then the scene shifted, the chairs cleared and all of the actors stood in the profile of a Greek chorus. They explained the flight from Detroit, the view of lake Erie, they told stories of different passengers. One who had a job interview, one who was looking for an apartment, another who went to Palm Springs on vacation. They told the story of a bright light and a loud pop, and suddenly the engines were silent. The plane felt still, unmoving, and then the chorus all pantomimed the leaning, concerned gaze out airplane windows. Instead of tops of clouds or distant shapes of great lakes, though, they looked out and saw – children in a gymnasium. They heard the squeak of sneakers and the joyful cries of playful exercise. It felt like minutes, maybe a whole hour. They could not understand what they were seeing. They could not comprehend an elementary school gym six miles above southern Canada. But they were not six miles above southern Canada. They were only a few feet above the American Southwest, inside an airplane, inside an elementary school gymnasium, in a town called Night Vale. And as quickly as they had appeared there, they disappeared. Off the radar, gone from the skies, out of known existence.
Throughout this chorus, the speakers filled our ears with the joyful shouts of children, the hollow metallic thumps of red rubber balls, and the collective panicked inhale of a 143 passengers and crew of a displaced plane, and then it was silent. And then it was dark.

A single green light appeared on the far wall, a dot, a blip. A radar blinking on, then off. And the voice of Doug Biondi said: “Weeeeeee are not passengers on a plane. Weeeee are actors. Weeee are inmates of the Asylum of Night Vale, but weeeee do not belong here. Weeee are people who know truths. People who know more than is allowed, and for that, weeeeeeeee are kept in cages. Weeeeeeee are fed poisoned pills and circular logic.”
And at this point in the play, I felt movement in our small audience. The warden had stood up and was shouting: “This is not in the script, Doug!” But Doug spoke louder, faster.
“Iiiii am not insane, I say! Only the insane would say such a thing they say. Then I am insane, I say. Yes you are, they say. I am trapped, I am framed, I spit out your poisoned pills! I reject your propagandist blather. I know what I know I say. Hold him down they say.”
Warden Raynor had gone to the tech board and turned on all the lights. He shouted “code blue” into a radio receiver, and we saw half a dozen security officers in their green medal laden uniforms lurch from the corners of the room, penning the ensemble of inmates into a tight circle in the center.
“Return them to their rooms,” the warden called.

But as the guards encroached, the three men from the NTSP stepped to the perimeter of the mass of inmates. They were holding little plastic wings just like those on the costumes of the actors playing flight attendants.
One of the NTSP agents, the one with an unceasing nose bleed, opened the back of the wings, revealing a long sharp pin, and thrust it into the neck of a guard. Simultaneously, the other NTSP agents and several other actors did the same, and the guards fell to the ground. One of the NTSP agents, the one with a blister on his upper lip, grabbed the keys and weapons from an unconscious officer.
“Dearest audience,” he said in verse. “We mean them no harm. ‘tis but a sleep, a little pharmaceutical rest for a uniformed guard who kept us confined, made life hard for us low level agents doing our jobs, trapped ‘neath the lies of a warden who robs our freedom and murders our spirit. At last we can go, approach the wall and clear it, but heed my warning: as we this coup fly, every man for himself, better run – or die.”
And upon this last line, the alarm bells of the asylum rattled my ears and my nerves, shaking Carlos and me from our seats. The inmates scattered in every direction as Sheriff Sam and their officers gave chase. Carlos was nearly stepped on by one of the escapees, and as I bent to help him up, I was knocked over by two officers in full sprint.

When the commotion died down, I looked up and saw Erika still sitting calmly in their chair, and I asked: “Erika, what is happening?”
Erika looked down at their playbill, and then back at me, and said: “I think it’s intermission.”

And now the weather.

[“One One Thousand” by Raina Rose rainarose.com]

After 15 minutes, Carlos and I returned to our seats hoping, but not truly believing it really was an intermission. We’ve seen immersive theater before, like “Sleep No More”, an interactive show in New York City where audience members are placed inside a huge warehouse of actors dancing out the plot to “Macbeth”, and at the end everyone is granted the ability to live out the rest of their lives without sleep. It’s expensive and not for everyone, but totally worth it if immersive theater is your thing.
But this show was not that. No. “18713/NTSP” had gone wrong. Or, perhaps it had gone right. Under the strict critique of plot structure, character development, and production value, the play failed terribly. But as a piece of political or (agit prop) theater, it was a rousing success. The Sheriff’s Secret Police have placed roadblocks around the entire city, hoping to keep these supposedly dangerous inmates from leaving the area. It is bad optics, to say the least, for the entire population of the town’s asylum to escape custody.

But as Carlos and I left the theater space, we walked down the long corridors, cells and rooms open, no security detail in sight. In one of the cells, below a cot, was a journal. It was the journal of Doug Biondi. Page after page was filled with monologues, narratives and conversations from various people. People who were on a plane, people in transit between checkpoints of life, between relationships, between homes, between jobs, between vacation and work. These stories were written as verbatim dialogue, as if Doug Biandi had transcribed them himself. As if he could hear the voices of those very people. Like former air traffic controller Amelia Anna Alfaro. I wonder if Doug heard the same voices. The same passengers of the missing plane.
I had my intern Seamus go down to the library and look up public records on Doug Biondi, hoping to find some connection between Doug and Amelia, but Seamus still has yet to return with that information . I even double checked my playbill looking for Amelia’s name in the cast or crew, but she was not listened here. She was likely never in the asylum.

One thing I did find, though, was a note in the back of Doug’s journal. This note seemed to be in Doug’s own voice. “They tell us we are kept here for our safety, but they keep us here for their safety. They fear what will happen when the people on that plane are found. But I think they have already been found. They should be afraid of what happens when the people on the plane find us.”

Night Vale is on lockdown, so stay home and stay safe, listeners. I do not believe any of us to be in danger from those who escaped the asylum, but I do believe us to be in danger of most everything else.
Stay tuned next for a serious of audio clicks, which is definitely not federal agents tapping your radio. Don’t worry about it.

Good night,
Night Vale,
Good night.

If it walks like a duck, and sings like a duck,
And excretes slime like a duck,
Then it’s a d- uh, you know?
I don’t think that’s a duck.
Welcome to Night Vale.

The future is here, listeners. The future is now.
Dying has become a bad joke, and we wonder how we ever put up with it.t
The Quality Cryogenics Corporation, run by one Casper Rhodes, is offering a simple solution. They will remove your brain upon death, freeze it, and then revive you hundreds of years from now, when the technology exists to live eternally.
The town was recently traumatized by time working correctly and us all having to deal with aging, so this solution is exactly what we are looking for. And it only costs 10,000 in cash, no refunds. I am currently getting together the funds to purchase this service for both myself and my husband Carlos, because I believe that the two of us can live together forever. No more is there this awful time limit ticking down from the moment of our meeting until the moment of our parting. Now our brains will sit snugly next to each other, until we are weakened anew to a bright future.

Carlos says he is a little unsure about this, because he thinks that death is one of the most scientific processes of all. But he’ll come around. We’ll just talk about it, and he’ll see it my way. After all, we have the rest of our lives. And our lives – will never end.

Here’s the news.
Now that we all know we’re going to get to live there, all any of us can talk about is the future. What is it going to be like? Will there be trees? Will we still have that insufferable moon? These are the questions we are all having to consider now that we will live forever. And one person is claiming to have those answers. A professional futurist and digital prophet named NZ has released a lengthy report outlining what the future is like. Apparently, skyscrapers will be twice as all, but also twice as thin. Each floor will only hold about one medium room or three very small rooms. But also, skyscrapers will have thousands of floors. The biggest revelation in NZ’s report is that in the future, menial labor will be done by robots! Robots will wash our cars, clean our toilets, and cook our food, leaving us all the time in the world to quietly boil in existential dread. According to NZ, these robots first enter the market in about a hundred years, and then really catch on until everyone has three or four at their disposal. And also everyone is so, so bored.

Man, the future sounds great. I can’t wait to get there!
This has been the news.

Let’s have a look at today’s horoscopes.
Leo. This is a fantastic month for new business plans, travels, meeting new people, and breaking out of the windowless prison cell you woke up in this morning. Good luck on all those exciting ventures!

Virgo. I hope you are not too attached to your left hand. Either way, you won’t be soon.

Libra. You will walk out from your house. The sun will look strange to you, even though you think it perhaps always looked like that. It will look like it always has, and it will look so strange. As you walk down the street, you will see a path you’ve never noticed before, leading away from the familiar into a dark and twisted wood. You will follow this path, the warm dirt softly crunching under your feet. At the end of the path, you will come to a small and cozy home. In the window will be a boy, and he will give you a sign. A hand to the side means it is safe to go on, a hand by the air means the burrowers are hungry tonight. A covered mouth means the time is nigh. You may proceed accordingly. Even the stars do not know what happens next.

Scorpio. You’re a great brother-in-law, husband, father and friend. And if it’s up to me - and let’s be honest, it is – the stars will never say another mean thing about you again.

Sagittarius. You are really walking on thin ice here, buddy! No really buddy, you are walking on thin ice, buddy look down, the ice is about to crack and the waters below are so cold and clear. You have never seen anything so beautiful.

Capricorn. You have spent your life searching for your soul mate. Finally, having given up on love, you have volunteered to board a starship destined to never return to our world. You will live out decades on that vast arc, developing close but platonic relationships with the few fellow humans that are with you. Finally, in your 83rd year, you will land on a planet that’s surface will appear to be made entirely of silver. You will step out onto that foreign terrain, and waiting for you will be an alien being made entirely of vapor, a wisp of a creature whose droplets will curl around you, and you will smile and realize that you have finally found your soul mate.

Aquarius. Your lucky number is five, which is also how many days you have left. That’s an auspicious coincidence!

Pisces. Everyone knows your terrible secret, and they think it’s really boring.

Aries. This just says “spiders” in increasingly large fonts for about seven pages. Aww, that’s cute!

Taurus. Turn your eyes to the heavens. Honestly, it’s better not to see what’s approaching from below.

Gemini. There will come a day in which you will have to go to the ocean. Who knows when that day will come. You might be hundreds of miles away form the ocean, you might be in an airplane or working on a farm in Ottawa. But there will come a day in which you will have to go to the ocean, and so you will travel in whatever attire you were wearing when you were called, barefoot and groggy, walking day and night until you see the glitter of water, until you hear the hush of the waves. And then you will walk into the ocean until only your head is above the surface, and you will laugh and laugh and laugh. And the ocean will laugh with you. But today is not that day. Who knows when it will come?

And lastly, Cancer. Uh huh. OK. Yeah. Everything is basically fine with you, yeah. You’re good. Nothingggggg tooo report.

This has been horoscopes.

Demand has become so high for the services of the Quality Cryogenics Corporation that Casper Rhodes announced that he has run out of space for brains. “Gotta stuff these head blobs somewhere,” he said, “but where to toss ‘em?” City Council agreed that this is an important problem, and immediately requisitioned large swaths for Night Vale real estate to serve as eventual brain storage locations. There are rumors that this move was made in exchange for free use of cryogenic services by the City Council. But the council vehemently denied the allegation and said to prove their innocence, they would arrest anyone who tried to say that they were guilty.
Initially, the public library was one of the buildings intended to be converted to brain storage. But a single librarian scuttled out from the front door and stood eye to eyes with the City Council, until the City Council whimpered and backed down. At which point the librarian silently retreated, their deadly point made, their library safe.
This is quite a change from when the only customer of Casper Rhodes was Charlie Bear, weekday shift manager at the Ralphs. Now there are only a few people left in town who haven’t signed up. I am a little ashamed to say that Carlos and I are one of those few, it’s y-, eh, taking me longer than I thought to scrape together the money and Carlos still wants to talk about it more but don’t worry, we will definitely join you all in the future. I will see you there!

Speaking of which, local futurist and digital prophet NZ is giving a seminar on the future. But attendance is expected to be low. Frankly, people find NZ’s predictions a little silly. After all, what does this NZ know about the future that we don’t? All any of us know about the future is that some day we will end up there, and by the time we get there, it won’t be the future. In any case, we expected more exciting predictions. Frequent space travel, miracle cures to the disease, and contact with more alien species than the three we know about in our primitive time. But NZ just won’t shut up about robots, and how much of the future is defined by robots serving us hand and foot. Only three people showed up to NZ’s seminar, one of whom was your faithful reporter, and one especially upset attendee even threw popcorn and led a chant of “Booriing!” during the part about the robots. And I’m not sorry I did it, either. It was very boring.

The family of missing person Frank Chen has filed a lawsuit against the city, declaring criminal negligence in allowing a five-headed dragon to claim the identity of their one-headed human family member, merely because the dragon carried about Frank’s ID.
“You are all monsters,” said Frank’s sister Lauren. “Monsters! Monsters! Monsters!”
She said this through a bullhorn, as she drove her convertible up and down the city streets.
“But how could we have known?” the City Council fumed. “What, are we supposed to look into every suspicious disappearance in Night Vale? We only have 18 hands, we are doing the best we can.”
The lawsuit will start with a document review and depositions. Currently, they are seeking all records on the suspected killer of Frank Chen, one Hiram McDaniels, who has not been seen in town for a couple years now. They also want to interview friends of Hiram, including a radio host who wouldn’t describe himself as a friend, more a dedicated observer.

And now a look at the stock market. [squeals] Wheee, ahahahaha! Ahahaha ooh, oo-hohoh, whaaaaaaaaa, hahah, wow!!
This has been a look at the stock market.

Now let’s go over to – hello? Oh sorry, wha-what are you doing here? Listeners, the futurist NZ has entered the studio. They are waving at me frantically and holding up signs, um let me just put on my reading glasses. Embarrassing, but I suppose we all eventually reach that age. I never thought I would, but now that time is working correctly and I have aged – yes. Yes, no I see you, pointing at the sign, screaming NZ just give me a moment now where did I put those glasses? It’s in my pocket, oh [chuckles]. Now there’s some sort of metal man next to NZ. Oh, yes you have a sign, OK alright, alright, here’s my glasses!
[clears throat] Uh, NZ’s sign reads “I am not a futurist, I am from the future. A time traveler sent back to warn you all.” And they’re still pointing at the metal man.
Ah, this is one of those robots that NZ is always going on about! NZ is saying that everything they told us about the robots was true, and they brought one just to prove it, well hi robot! Oh, oh the robot has something to say? Oh, wait, it’s saying “I’m hardly a bear.” Well no, [chuckles] I’d say you’re not. You’re more of  a robot. Oh no, I misheard, they’re saying “Time carved a pear.” What? NZ, I think your robot is malfunctioning. Wait, not it’s saying… it’s saying, “I’m Charlie Bear.” Charlie Bear? Well he’s the weekday shift manager at the Ralphs, this makes no sense. The robot is saying again: “I’m Charlie Bear.” And then it is saying: “Help me.” It is saying “help me” over and over in a hollow digital moan.

Listeners, uh..
Let’s check in on the weather.

[“Good Intentions, Bad Advice” by Nicky Flowers https://nickyflowers.bandcamp.com]

The robot told us everything. Once the robot was Charlie Bear, weekday shift manger at the Ralphs, and then a man named Casper Rhodes came to town. Casper offered the idea of living forever, freezing Charlie’s brain after death so that he could wake up in the future once mortality was a bad dream. Once sickness was a memory. So Charlie signed up. He took out his life savings plus a couple loans and paid the 10,000 dollars. And Charlie became the first customer of the Quality Cryogenics Corporation. And Charlie was so happy. He is so happy somewhere in town, even while this robot tells us its story. Charlie is unaware, and he is happy. Because Charlie believes he has defeated death. And Charlie will continue to believe this for another 15 years until the unfortunate whistle pig incident. And after that, his brain will be removed from his mangled corpse and will remain frozen for centuries in the grain silo outside of town. And then one day, Charlie will awaken. It will be the future, as promised, and as promised he will not be dead, but all will not be well. He will have awoken as a brain in a metal body chained to that body’s programming. It will be explained to him that he was brought to the future by the Quality Cyborg Corporation, in order to take care of any errands or busywork needed while the humans of that future relax and watch him toil.
You see, when we deny death and toss ourselves into the future, we do so with the strange delusion that the future feels it owes us life. That in the world of the future, they would want nothing more than to devote time and money into resurrecting each of us into eternal wellness. But the future does not feel any obligation to us at all. The past means only one thing to the future, the past is a resource. Every brain saved by Casper Rhodes is a resource.

It is a trick. We are being used. We must put a stop to this, we were all wrong trying to fight death this way, to put our trust in the future is though it would be anything but some other person’s present. Carlos was right, I was wrong! Who is this Casper Rhodes, and why is he doing this?

Oh, Casper’s calling to the station. He must be calling to confess or otherwise explain his crimes. Casper, is that you? What have you done? What have you done?
Casper: Hi there, Cecil. Was listening to your show and really disappointed to hear what you were saying about me, buddy. But as the Smiling God says: when your enemies try to bring you down, just smile wider and wider until your smile eclipses the sun and then all other life in the universe. Believe in a Smiling God, buddy. Believe in a Smiling God.

Today’s proverb: As Dolly Parton said: tumble out of bed, and I stumble to the kitchen. Have to fight an evil magician, yawn and stretch and fight him for my life. Wise words.

Here it comes.
Here it comes!
The Great Golden Hand!
Hurrah, rejoice! It nears, it nears!

Welcome to Night Vale.

Wonderful news, residents. City officials report that within the next few hours, we should expect the arrival of the Great Golden Hand. This will mark the first visit from the Great Golden Hand in nearly 80 years. Older residents and those who up until recently did not age will remember the last visit fondly. Those were the days, when the air felt crisper somehow, as though growing older does not cause a degradation of self, but rather a degradation of everything outside of self. We project our own decline upon the world and complain that everything was righter and better at the time that we coincidentally were at our physical and mental peak.

But I digress. Because everything was better during the Great Golden Hand, that’s just objective. We will update you on the Hand as it approaches. But in the meantime, make sure that you are stocked up on a supply of clean water, adequate canned goods for five to eight years, and copious amounts of human hair for the offering. If you do not have hair, please make sure to stop by the hair bank this morning to pick up hair generously donated by your neighbors, for those who crave human hair by the fistful.

But first, today’s forecast. Rain later, or no rain. Or sun, or snow, or none of those things. There will be some light clouds along the horizon, or it will be clear and you will stand out on a lawn gone prickly with the conservation of water. And you will see that you can see all the way across the world, even though you know that you can only see about three miles to to curvature of the Earth, but it’s metaphorical, this distance, and with the clarity of the sky, it will seem much further than that. Or there will be clouds, so none of that will happen and you will l only sit in your kitchen, eating leftovers and not thinking even a little about everything you’ve never done and you will never get to do.
Or you won’t wake up today. There will come a day where you don’t, you know, and then none of this will matter. And the sky will be a perfect blue and you won’t see it. Or it will rain. Or no rain. Or sun. Or snow. Or none of those things.
All of that later today, or tomorrow, or never.
This has been today’s forecast.

We continue to track the Great Golden Hand, as it takes over much of the western horizon. Larry Leroy out on the edge town reported that flowers have begun growing and dying in bursts all morning. Cycles of life that passes quickly as air through his lungs. “These plants are speeding up,” he said, or else we are slowing down. Maybe thousands of years have passed and the only ones that know are the flowers.” [laughs] Larry, what a joker!

City government tells us we have nothing to fear from the Great Golden Hand, although city government is in a bit of disarray, as of course we do not have a mayor, and city council has announced that they forgot it was their sister’s wedding this weekend in Tulsa, and they need to leave town immediately. So city government currently consists of Claire Scott at the hall of public records. Claire is a woman-shaped apparition that haunts the dark hallways of the building and is responsible for at least ten deaths. It’s not an ideal situation leaving her in charge, but at least someone is there, as the Great Golden Hand draws ever closer.

Let’s take a quick look at the headlines.
Controversy has erupted over a new McDonald’s commercial, as many say that the victims offered on the altar weren’t properly consecrated. Lenny Butler, who has no official (–) [0:05:47] on religion or ceremony, but who considers himself something of a sacrifice aficionado and self-taught expert, dismissed the commercial as, quote, “more hack co-opting by corporate culture.” He shook his head in disbelief as he showed reporters a copy of the commercial.
“Look at this, he said. “Does that axe look like it has been buried for 100 days in a graveyard? I bet some underpaid PA bought that axe at an Ace Hardware the day of the shoot. And look at how the subsequent bone and blood slurry is just kind of spilling everywhere! There’s no thought at all to proper aesthetic flow to the sacrifice!” Lenny concluded.
Executives at national McDonald’s headquarters expressed horror and disbelief when asked about the commercial, saying they had nothing to do with this and why are we making them watch this traumatizing footage. “Why?” the executives repeated over and over, in smaller and smaller voices. “Why?”
Well, that’s it for the headlines.

And now traffic.
There is a crack in the wall.
There is a twinge in your heart.
There is someone coming, but don’t worry, there is also someone going.
There is a lamp in an alcove in a house on a mountain.
There is a hand that reaches out and turns on the lamp.
There is an eye that squints thru the dim light, trying to see what isn’t there.
There is a name.
Yes, there is a name, but we will never know what it is.
There is a dusty foot scooting along rough wood. There is a tree outside, and it moans through the fierce wind off the peaks. There is a small flower in a pot and it is three days from dying.
There is a lamp in an alcove in a house on a mountain and a hand that reaches out and turns it off.
There is a car on a road to the mountain.
There is a mind dreaming that this time, the reunion will go differently.
There is a hand on a steering wheel and it trembles.
There is a foot upon a gas pedal, and it wants to ease up, to turn around, to accelerate toward anything but a house on a mountain.
There is an eyelash upon an eyelid, upon an eye, upon a skull, upon a lifetime of doubt.
There is a tree across part of the road, and maybe that could be an excuse, but no. The hand upon the wheel turns, and finds the narrow way thru, and continues on, toward the house on a mountain.
There is a crack in the wall.
There is a twinge in your heart.
There is someone coming. But don’t worry, there is also someone going.
This has been traffic.

I’m being told by a multitude of disembodied mouths, that appeared in my office and began worbling in a singsongy chant, that the Great Golden Hand is only minutes away from covering the entire area. If you have not already sought shelter, now would be the time to regret screwing up so badly on such an important day. Remember to not look directly at the Great Golden Hand. The Great Golden Hand should not be mixed with alcohol or other medications without advice from your doctor. Unfortunately, the Great Golden Hand has taken all the doctors. Also all life insurance adjusters and all dog walkers. If you notice sparks, that is part of the process. If you feel a fission, that is also part of the process. If you see the color green, that is not part of the process and you should panic.
The process will protect us. The Great Golden Hand will protect us. Long live the Hand.

Meanwhile, just a brief notice before we are overtaken by the Hand. It seesm that, oh this is interesting, that the family of Frank Chen has filed a missing persons report with the sheriff’s secret police. Now, you might remember that Frank Chen’s dead body was found several years ago, covered in claw marks and burns, and we all assumed he was dead. But then he was seen around town driving his pickup truck, and now he looked like a five-headed dragon. Sure, he looks completely different, but the dragon had a New Jersey driver’s license that indicated that he indeed was Frank Chen. And so that was the day it was proven to us that the dead can come back to life looking completely different. Anyway, the Chen family says that Frank was driving out from the east coast to see his brother, and disappeared somewhere between Oklahoma and Los Angeles. It took him several years to find Night Vale, although our recent change back to a normal timeline has at least put us a little more in sync with the rest of the country. The Chen family is unsure what a sheriff’s secret police is, nor what is so secret about them if they drive around in clearly labeled cars, but they would appreciate any help at all in finding their long lost Frank.
Come to think of it, I haven’t seen rank since the day that Hiram McDaniels, the five- oh sorry, four-headed dragon, left Night Vale. Where did Frank go? If you have any information, tell a bird. Birds are real loudmouths and the info will be all over town in no time.

And now for the community calendar.
This Friday, Martin McCaffrey is presenting an art show in the grain silo out back from the old Cooper farm. The silo will be kept in absolute darkness, and each (-) [0:12:40] will be shoved into the abandoned tower all along. They will not be able to see anything except the dancing light that lives in their eyelids. But they will know that they are with art, that art is indeed there, just beyond their fingertips in the darkness watching them. Suggested donation is five dollars, as in Martin suggests you donate that or you won’t be able to get in.
Saturday morning, we’re getting towards the end of the summer softball league, and once again we have the annual grudge match between Steve Carlsberg’s Happy Hyenas, and Susan Willman’s Bad at Softball Losers. Not their real team name, but the name was kind of forgettable, and I think this one is more catchy. Ugh, Susan Willman! [mumbles] Tooling around in that Prius she bought after her Mini Cooper was filled with jellyfish and then towed. [cheerfully] See you on Saturday morning! Where we will, I assume, be cheering on my wonderful brother-in-law Steve. 

Sunday, Leopold Tuesdale has called for a community meeting. Leopold is the former CEO of the former cereal company Flaky-O’s, until both were acquired in a hostile takeover by Kellogg’s. Leopold was last seen being pulled into a van by Kellogg’s executives, but he has returned. His face is gaunt and it appears he has aged several decades, or perhaps a few very stressful years. He wears a cape and one big leather glove. The topic of the community meeting is the labyrinth that lays just beyond human sight, and the harbingers of that labyrinth, who drive vans full of wooden grates. He also want to discuss parking for the antiques fair, which he feels has gotten out of hand on Grub Street.
Monday is a fun dinosaur presentation from local dinosaur expert Joel Eisenberg. This is part of the Applebee’s visiting experts program that invites local scholars to share their knowledge, and also prices jalapeno poppers at in irresistible 3,99 for 12. Wow! With a deal like that, I can’t wait to learn more about those big spitty lizards, or whatever they were.

Tuesday – is the day you’ve been waiting for. Yes, you could have achieved your dreams earlier, but it always seemed easier to plan to do them some day. Well, Tuesday is that day, and now it’s time to finally buckle down and get those dreams going. I wouldn’t delay, because it seems that Wednesday is the day – you die. So stay positive, and get it done quickly.
And finally, next Thursday the Night Vale municipal fire authority is holding a mandatory fire drill. When you hear the siren, burn as many things as you can.

This has been the community calend- oh! Oh, I see it! I see it, it is here! Aaaaaaah, it is above me! The [booming sound] the [booming sound]

[“Drones” by Epicenter
https://epicentermetal.bandcamp.com]

Part 1. In which the rabbits get their way.
Before there were buildings, there were hills. In the hills, there were rabbits. All they wanted from life was food, a bit of sunshine, and to multiply across the land. And so they did. Most stories are happy if you end them at the right time.

Part 2. In which we approach.
Aah, to see us then, when we were moving – toward the west, or else toward the east, or else south or north, but it wasn’t the direction. It was the momentum of it. We put ourselves out there, made ourselves available for new opportunities. Never mind the drawbacks, and never mind who gets hurt. That’s a problem for who comes next. We are here, so we can get there. And there’s just nothing else to worry about, but the getting.

Part 3. In which comes the kingdom.
Great towers and great halls. A crowd looking upwards and a king looking downwards. What a time to be alive! What a terrible time to be dead! How much the dead are missing out on. Death is stupid, and we must only celebrate life. Those who are gone are gone, and it’s probably their fault anyway. We are alive because of our wits, and because we are naturally inclined to be alive. “How good we are,” we murmur, “and how beautiful our king is.”

Part 4. In which all is thought lost.
But then – time came for us too. We weren’t who we used to be, but we also weren’t who we would be next either. There was this awful in-between, and we had to stay in it for so long. A king grew tired on his throne. We all grew so tired.

Part the last. In which we are each born anew.
After – there were the buildings. There were the hills. In the hills lived rabbits. And we lived there too. All we wanted was food, a bit of sunshine, and to multiply across the land, and so we did. Most stories are happy if you wait long enough. The [booming sound effect] gives, the [booming sound effect] takes.

Stay tuned next for a slow drifting toward what we’ve always wanted, interrupted by the constant distraction of what seems easiest, and from one discipline of the [booming sound] to another:
Good night,
Night Vale,
Good night.

Today’s proverb: The universe contains, among other things, black holes, vast clouds of gas and light, endless void, a diamond planet, and your tiny body.

Deb:Hey squishy humans! Deb at it again, as usual, talking until your mortal forms pass away. Welcome…

Dana:Once again, the sun has risen. Good one, sun. We’re all very impressed by the same trick on the millionth day in a row. I’m Dana Cardinal. Welcome to..

Computer:Computer
loves Night Vale. Night Vale provides home for computer. Welcome…

Deb:Welcome…

Dana:Welcome…

Steve: Heyy everyone! Oh uh, oh man, I’m supposed to prepare some sort of a start for this thing, huh? Dangit, forget every time! Every time! [chuckles] Come on, Steve! You have a responsibility here, Steve! You’re better than this, Steve. Sorry. God, sorry! Oh.
Uh,
Welcome to Night Vale! 

Cecil: Listeners, it is a very special day today. That’s right, it’s Carlos and I’s sixth anniversary! Yes, we count that first night at the Arby’s, looking out at those lights, as the start. Why not? Something has to be the start. And that felt like the first moment of it, the rest of our lives.

It’s especially emotional this anniversary, because recently we did not exist for a brief period. Then we both did exist again, but I had forgotten about our entire life together. I have since remembered and it has been especially tender between us. Such things happen in any marriage that has gone on for enough years, and so it served us as a good reminder of who we are in each other’s lives.

But it’s not just a special day for us. Oh no. It’s also, oh wow – the 30th birthday of legend of stage and screen, Mister Lee Marvin. Let’s take a listen to a special message from the birthday man himself.

Lee Marvin: Hello. It is my birthday again. Huh. Well, happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to all of us. It’s all of our birthdays this year. Congratulations, us!  But it’s only for so much longer. Uh.. I am tired of floating on time like a lazy river gone stale. It’s time for me to reach out, to cease. To alter. I’m so tired. I wish I could sleep. I mean I can, I can sleep. But also I wish that I could. Both the wish and the ability exist within me.

This will be the last day that I turn 30. I have been climbing a narrow rock chimney, but today I let go and fall into deep, clear waters. Hm. Thanks for all the birthday wishes. It really, really has meant a lot.

Cecil:OK, kind of a bummer of a birthday message, but let’s move on. And now, the financial news.
Intern Maureen: And now the financial news or whatever. Looks like stocks are up, which is great for people who own stocks, who are statistically already wealthy enough that stocks being up or down doesn’t fundamentally affect their lives. And those of us without stocks, well then the health of the stock market has little relationship to..

Faceless Old Woman: Toni I see that you are reading the financial news. Yes, I’m looking at you right now. No, not behind your shoulder. I see you glancing back. No, not out the window either. Toni, look up.  Look up, Toni. The great work begin-

Steve:Now see I’m VP of counting at the Last Bank of Night Vale. I can count very high, so I’m uniquely situated to explain these figures to you. So uh, oh OK. See where the graph is going down? That means that the price is, uh, lower. Or-or maybe the stock is? Or it’s all going up oh hold on, huh, I’ve been looking at this sideways. Oh this isn’t graph at all! [chuckles] It’s a picture of Lee Marvin.

Dana:Why do bad things happen to good people? Wrong question. The question is: why do things happen?

Basimah:I have 17 dollars on my bank account and my teenage father is living with me. So things are going great here.

Cecil: ..up 8 per cent, the highest percentage in the last three years. And this has been financial news.

Meanwhile, a last minute birthday party for Mr. Lee Marvin has been arranged at Gino’s Italian Dining Experience and Bar and Grill at 5 PM. Where we will all celebrate the first three decades of Mr. Marvin’s life by taking advantage of some great happy hour deals. Gino’s happy hours are super appetizing. The most popular item is a small bowl filled with polished pebbles, but they are damn cheap, and that is appreciated in these tough times, when all of us are finding ourselves short on our bills. Except the estate of the late Marcus Vanston, which now contains approximately 15 per cent of all money in the United States, but still has no designated beneficiary.

Mr. Marvin himself is not expected to attend his own party, as he is not feeling well, and also says that he has a plan to move himself from this tired wheel of time. Well, feel better Lee, and good luck on that hobby of yours. Sounds complicated and exhausting. I’ll have a Shiraz and a bowl of pebbles in honor of you.

Lee Marvin: Night Vale. We are a town of good intentions. Once there was a god. Her name was Huntokar, and she tried to save one little town. She acted with love. The missiles came and she reached out to shift the timeline, only a tad, only enough to save us. And in that moment, her little town shattered into millions of parallel towns. This place became a prison. A god’s love is a dangerous force.

Once, there was a woman who was a general. She wanted victory for a just cause, so she fought every battle, over and over until time was jumbled up and overlapping and worn thin. She returned home and she died, but the wreckage she made of time remained.

And once there was a man. An actor. Once, but not much longer. Here, time and space have been scratched and scrunched, worn down until they’re translucent. And what if I reached out a hand? And what if I pushed that hand to the thin places?

Happy birthday to me. My last 30th birthday.

Steve: Well folks, there’s the hour and it’s time to, uh, do our usual checks and such. Check in on it. On the uh, you know the, what’s the word?

Faceless Old Woman: I’m standing on your roof, Randolph. Yes, Randolph, that’s my pacing you hear, back and forth on these cheap clay tiles that needed replacing three years ago. There will be rain, Randolph, some day. And then there will be leaks. That’s a certainty.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at…

Dana: That’s that for all that, listeners. I’m getting tired just reporting all this life. Can’t imagine how tired all of you are from living it. So let’s all take a break together and go to the…

Numbers station: 43. 12. 9. 55. 30. 17.
The weather. To the weather.
Cause I am the champion and you’re gonna hear me… roar.

[“Things Still Left To Say” by Mal Blum, https://www.malblum.com]

Lee Marvin: There are many Night Vales. This isn’t news, it’s merely the fact of it. There’s a Night Vale where the streets are rivers and the rain falls constantly from sunless skies. There’s a Night Vale where the mayor is a smiling man, and a Night Vale where the mayor is a brave woman. And of course there is a Night Vale that has no mayor and never will have again. There’s a Night Vale without a day. And there’s a Night Vale without night. There’s a Night Vale where the dogs sing and the birds bark. There’s a Night Vale with no people, only the angel who’s moaning and tapping their fingers. There’s a Night Vale where I was never born. And there’s a Night Vale where I’ll never die. There’s a Faceless Old Woman who secretly lives in your home. She’s in every Night Vale there is.
There’s Night Vale where time runs backwards and a Night Vale where time skips about, and there’s Night Vale where time doesn’t work at all. That’s this Night Vale. Time is weird here. Time is weird everywhere, but it’s especially weird here. There’s a Night Vale where Dana is the voice of her town, and a Night Vale where Deb, the sentient patch of haze is voice of her town. And a Night Vale where you are the voice of your town. An infinitude of voices, of an infinitude of Night Vales.

But here, in this Night Vale, our voice is Cecil. Hah, a voice like distant traffic. A voice like strong coffee at midnight.

Once there was a god with good intentions, and a heart full of love. She shattered us in two, many versions of us. Once there was a general, full of courage and victory. She twisted our time about itself, lost us in a labyrinth of hours and years.

And once there was a man. His dreams were simple. He wanted to be an actor, that’s all. To lie a little to audiences, in a way that they like being lied to. But time got stuck on him like – gum on a shoe. It was always his 30th birthday, from the Big Ban to the tedious heat death of the universe. His 30th birhday forever. Time weighed on him and so he looked out at every Night Vale that has ever been, and every Night Vale that will ever be, all of them swirling and swinging thru intertwining chronologies and he concentrated veery hard. And he reached out one tired ancient 30-year-old hand and stopped them all, just for a moment. He stopped time’s gyrations.

All is frozen. Water hangs in the air below a leaking tap. The trees are sculpted by a gust of wind and haven’t yet swung back to their natural state. The clouds form a frozen pattern, like snowdrifts in the sky. A voice of Night Vale sits in front of a microphone, mouth open but no words coming out. All of the voices in all of the Night Vales.

On the highway out of town, the cars are stopped dead. Their drivers caught glancing at their phones or scratching their ears and thinking about what would finally make them happy, or looking in the mirror and trying to gauge whether the car behind them belongs to the Sheriff’s Secret Police.
Farther out, over the mountains and to the coast, the waves are stopped mid-fall. Foam caught, rising water caught, tumbling. 

An old man in Canada trips on a shoe discarded by his grandson, and there he remains, hands out mid-air, too late for anyone to save but not yet colliding with the earth. He will dislocate his knee.

A soldier in China squints at a bird, trying to decide which type of bird it is. Really it’s too distant to tell but the soldier makes a game of this to pass the tedium, and so here they are squinting at a bird that is stopped mid-flight, its wings outstretched, catching wind that is no longer moving. Observe the solder in this moment, a thin slice of a long life.  

Out in low orbit, a spindly silver being in a graceful silver craft, is caught in an instant when its appendages that are not really fingers but we’ll call them fingers, even though technically are closed in function to kidneys. When its fingers phase thru the skull of a sleeping human that it has brought abroad, reaching into the human’s memories, seeking out a clear understanding of a planet that the being has been tasked to observe.
That planet and all the other planets cease for a moment in their senseless hurdle thru the vacuum. They are suspended. The way they are in diagrams.

The story we tell ourselves of stasis, and clear spacial relationships is, for a moment, true. An entire universe holds its breath.

Huh. Then I shift my hand a little and the gears of time click back into place and start again to move. Not quite as they were before, they-they are on track now. Their tread a little truer.

The beginning of my end. The start of my death.
I take in air, I let out air, and in the moment where the universe starts again, something happens that has never happened before. Not in all of history.

Cecil: Today is a special day, Night Vale. Lee Marvin, star of stage and screen is, oh wow! - turning 31 today. Happy birthday, Lee!
You know, it feels like our thirties just fly by. Enjoy them while they last.
Lee Marvin celebrated his birthday in a notably somber way. He stepped out onto his lawn, nodding at passers by and various idiot birds. He spit thru his teeth, placed his hands on his hips, watched the sun move for a while. Then he nodded in approval of everything he’d seen and stepped back inside.
Well, we all express happiness in our own ways.

A few minutes ago, I got the most interesting voicemail from my most interesting husband, Carlos. It’s our sixth anniversary today, you know. Anyway, he was so excited, I’ve never heard him talk so fast in his life. Carlos said he opened the clock that was on our mantelpiece at home, the one that was given to him by his mother the day he received his PhD. The one he brought with him to Night Vale, the one that after having come to Night Vale, he opened to find that it was full of moss and fur and human teeth. Yeah, time doesn’t work in Night Vale, he had realized and he mourned the transformation of both the clock and his experience of the days and years of his life, but he still believes in keeping possession in perfect condition, and so today he opened the clock to brush its teeth, only to find it was full of gears and a battery and was ticking away. He measured the movement of its minute hand against the sun, and found that the sun, instead of disappearing at wildly different times, was setting on a normal schedule. He called me up, his voice cracking with excitement, bordering on terror.

“Cecil, Cecil!” he said to me. “Cecil! Time is normal in Night Vale.
Well. It is night, Night Vale. Soon the sun will rise and we know exactly what time that will happen. Our lives have all lurched forward. Is that – good?
Stay tuned next for exactly what was scheduled to run next, at the exact time it was scheduled to do so. And from my mouth to your ears, even after all these years,
Good night,
Night Vale,
Good night.

Today’s proverb: Technically, the first human being and the first human being in space were the same person.

Leonard Burton: The opposite of war is not peace. It is tedium.
Greetings from Night Vale.

[distorted version of the theme song]

Hello, listeners. it’s your regular host Leonard Burton welcoming you to yet another beautiful day in Night Vale. There is the sun, of course. I don’t need to tell you there is a sun, you know this. You’re so confident that he sun is there. Past performance is not a predictor of future results, folks, yet sure as I say it, there is the sun. And near the sun are clouds, but they’re not near, are they? Millions of miles separate those clouds from that sun. And yet our eyes measure mere inches of the space between. What deception, this human sight.

The air is crisp and cool. A slight morning breeze touches us. We feel it like cold fingers playfully caressing our shoulders, our hair, our skin. I see no breeze, but I feel it. That which I feel, that is my only truth, listeners. Wind is a verity.

I hope you will join me in closing your eyes and walking naked through the invisible yet irrefutable air. Hold aloft your arms, widen your jaw and feel the impact of atom upon atom upon atom against your body.

This day is beautiful. This day is crisp. This day is true.

This morning I nearly died. I’m always nearly dying, proximity is subjective. This morning I nearly died in the same way I nearly die every day. After waking, I showered. After showering, I drank coffee. After coffee, I ate a grapefruit and oatmeal. After eating, I walked. After walking, I walked some more. I do not own a car and I live two miles from my work. I purchased a quart of whole milk, and then I climbed a tree. Atop a tree branch, I saw a grackle’s nest and I drank my milk. I counted four eggs, each of them blue. Each of them lifeless, abandoned for countless years. I did not finish my milk, because I cannot digest milk. I poured the remainder into the nest. Then I climbed down from the tree and walked again. I do this every day. It is, as the French say, vie sans signification.

As I approached the radio station, a cargo truck driven by a man who was not tall, barrelled down Mesa Boulevard. I stretched one foot outward from my body like so, and here I demonstrate my leg extending outward. A tentative (-) [0:05:00] as the French dancers phrase it. My head was turned away from the oncoming traffic, because I saw a municipal garbage can on fire. Gathered around the flaming bin were angels touching together their unusually long fingers and moaning. The cargo truck honked loudly, but it was not as loud as the moans from the fire-lit celestial beings, so I did not alter my attention. I stepped into the roadway like this. And then again like this, and then again like this. Then again several more times, til I had crossed the road safely. Immediately following my final step, the cargo truck roared past me. I had not died, but I had a vision of my death. No, not a vision. What do you call a vision without visuals? My vision was every other sense. I had a dreadful snap, I felt my legs (accordion) [0:05:56] beneath my neck, I tasted blood and asphalt, I smelled the pungent rubber tire against my nose. My vision halted me for what seemed like hours but was less than a second.

I should have died, Night Vale. For it was in my vision. Yet I did not. The truck honked again, and the man in the passenger seat who was not short waved his fit and cursed at me. On the back of the truck were several wooden crates emblazoned with a white labyrinth above a black square. The crates glowed from within. I do not glow from within. I am darkness from within.
I crossed the street, the angels moaned, and I wet myself.

It is a beautiful day in Night Vale. How was your morning?

And now the news. There is peace in our time, Night Vale. We hold a parade today to celebrate the end of the Blood Space War. The Blood Space War ended many years in the future, and we celebrate armistice today. Time, you see, is not a line but a (-) [0:07:10], which is kind of like a donut. And we are living within the donut. If we were to look out across a hall in the middle of the donut, we would see other times that have happened both before and after us. This presumes we can see time, which we cannot. We can only describe visually the shape of things that have no shape. Here is an incomplete visual description of things that have no shape.
One: death is a bottomless pool of clear water.
Two: wind is a question mark.
Three: morality is a thermos.
Four: love is an overfull shopping bag with a broken handle.
Five: fear is a cinderblock tower with a single door and no windows.
I hope that makes sense to you, dearest listeners. Because it does not to me. I’m neither a scientist nor a poet. I’m a radio host. I merely repeat to you that which I have learned. And what I have learned is that time is shaped like a donut. Beyond that, I have no comprehension.

When you woke up this morning, Night Vale, did you remember a life you never had? Did you experience the faint memory of a conversation, of a smell, of a feeling that never happened? Jamais vu, I believe the French say. The French say so much. And what do they know of peace? Today, I celebrate peace, however I do it alone. I broadcast my feelings to no one. Night Vale is empty, and I am its only citizen. Yet I have a vision of a town full of people. One of those people is a man, a radio intern named Cecil Palmer, but he is not here. No one is here. No one has ever been here. Has he died? I do not know. He simply is no longer here. You do not remember his years of fine reporting on this very radio station, because you never heard those reports. I did.

I remember things that never happened, yet I have no evidence of any of it. Let me describe to you the shape of Cecil Palmer. He’s a line of leafless mesquite trees, he is a glass factory, he is a golf ball sized (hell) [0:09:37], he has a voice like distant highway traffic. He loves coffee and handshakes, he wears tight clothing, and has never once worked with modelling clay. He covers mirrors with cloth and has an irrational fear of glowing lights beneath locked doors and dark hallways. You cannot know any of this, because Cecil is my vision, not yours. He is real all the same. He is to be my replacement when I retire. But he does not exist, so I can never retire. I am your permanent host.
I can still see his face. I’ve said it before and I will say it once more. What deception is human sight!

The parade for the end of the Blood Space war has begun! There is no one attending, because no one lives in Night Vale. Perhaps we’ll reach a day when no one has ever lived. An emissary has arrived in town to lead the parade. The emissary’s an astronaut, bloated white arms and a mirror for a face. The emissary walks slowly through our empty city streets. I do not know why I broadcast this to you, dear listener. For you are not even here. No one is here, except for me and the emissary, who walks like a marionette under the wobbly control of a novice puppeteer. And the angels, whose moans are songs and whose fingertips are (-) [0:11:11] rods. Also there’s the two men in the cargo truck who are driving far beyond our town. And somewhere there are the French, who are inventing phrases to describe, I don’t know what.

The parade of absent floats along empty streets (-) by a mirror faced marshmallow of a grand marshall approaches our radio station. I will enjoy getting to see the festivities up close and describing shapes out of the shapeless.

And now the Children’s Fun Fact Science Corner. Kids, did you know that everyone experiences time differently? Physicist Albert Einstein once said: “There’s no business like show business. Like no business I know.” He said this while starring in “Annie Get Your Gun” in London’s West End. The performed the title role ten years before Irving Berlin even wrote the musical. This is because Albert Einstein experienced time differently, but only when it came to songwriting. He had the complete discography of both Leonard Cohen and Kendrick Lamar before either were born.

And perhaps, like you and I only hear music after it is written, we experience time differently in other was. Like say our births. Think about your birth. You don’t remember it, do you? This could be because you’ve forgotten it, but how do you forget something that so powerfully impacted you? I would argue that your birth was the important moment in your life, and you have forgotten it? I cannot believe you’re so cavalier as to allow the memory of your entry into this world to dissipate like steam from a screaming kettle! No, you do not remember your birth, because it has not happened yet. I am sure this is scientifically true. It can be the only explanation. You experience time differently. One day you will be born, and you will experience awe and pain and confusion. You will begrudge the lack of input you were given in this decision. You did not ask to be born, and yet pow, bam, squish, there you are, or were, or will be.

Earth is an (–) [0:13:32] during a flood. Memory is the chipped bark of the cedar tree. Time is a donut. This has been the Children’s Fun Fact Science Corner.

The parade has ended. The street moments ago crowded with no one are once again still empty. The celebration of peace has ended, and another beautiful day comes to a close. The sun, like a shopkeeper with no customers, leaves work early. And the radio softly reminds us the shapes of the shapeless.

Oh! Oh dear, you startled me.
Listeners, the emissary has appeared in my studio without warning, without even opening a door. And they’re sitting in the chair next to me and slowly rotating. Their visor is open, and I’m being forced to stare at the ineffable darkness within the emissary’s helmet.
This seems like a good time
For the weather.

[Subspace” by RAQIA
https://raqia.bandcamp.comandhttps://www.instagram.com/raqiaband/]

Have you ever forgotten where you put your keys? You were certain they were on the mantle, but they were not. Have you ever missed an appointment because you were sure it was on Wednesday at noon and not Tuesday at ten? Have you ever remembered a life you did not lead? Has a carefully collated series of words ever made you uncertain, unconfident or un, just un? Un as an adjective onto itself.

The emissary arrived from the future, from space. The emissary told me changes were made, and those changes became mistakes and those mistakes became truths, and all of it would need to be undone.
“Night Vale is a vibrant and full city with tens of thousands of people,” the emissary said. “Yet here you are, Leonard, the only person in Night Vale.”
I nodded into the dark onyx of the emissary’s face screen.
“How old are you, Leonard?” the emissary asked.
I did not know. I still do not know.
The emissary revealed to me a newspaper clipping. From the Night Vale Daily Journal obituary section dated November 1983. There was a photo of me and a story about my life: my childhood, my radio career, my wife, my children – my death. It was all true and yet I remembered none of it, except for the last part. I looked at my obituary photo. I read how I died. Under cargo truck wheels on Mesa Boulevard. In print, everything looks true.
“What deception is human sight,” I said.
The emissary lifted their trick gloved hands to their neck, unlatched the snaps and removed their helmet. I saw the face of an old woman, with sunken tearful eyes.
“I am the general,” the emissary said, placing her enormous soft paw upon my hand. “I have tried to save myself, my soldiers, my town, my planet, through time travel. Every time we lose a battle, I return to before it even happened and fight it again. I fight each battle over and over, until we have won.”
“You’re an excellent general,” I told her.
“Of course I am,” she snapped. “In battle. But each time I interfere in the timeline, I create a widening ripple of historical changes. And now Night Vale is empty, on the verge of never having existed at all. This must be undone. Do you understand me, Leonard?”
I nodded yes, to hide the fact that I did not understand.
The emissary pointed to the moon. An enormous piece of the moon was missing. I did not remember that the moon was broken, but also I rarely look at the moon out of disdain.
“Like the moon, time has broken,” she said. “Night Vale should be full of people, and you should have died long ago, Leonard,” she added. “Do you understand?”
I shook my head no, to hide the fact that I did understand.
“I’m sorry, Leonard,” she said. If Night Vale is repaired, you will return to the grave.”
“But you have achieved peace,” I argued.
“I have achieved peace,” she said. “And in doing so, I have made it so that no one in this city, or this world, or this universe, ever lived. I have achieved an infinitude of emptiness. Leonard, look.”
She touched my shoulder with one hand, and with the other, she indicated once more the moon. When I looked, the moon was again whole. I looked back at the general and she was gone.

I hear now a voice, not my own, like distant highway traffic. I do not think I should be alive, but I do not know what else to be. Am I a ghost? Am I a god? Am I at all?
Whatever it is I am, I reject my end. I embrace my existence, even in a world with no one to acknowledge it. I never wish to die, Night Vale, and still I refuse to do so. I am a broadcaster. I do not stop broadcasting simply because I do not live!

Stay through next for grackles hatching from long dormant eggs, and anything else I wish to describe, real or not. For you do not hear me anyway.
And until tomorrow,
See ya Night Vale,
See ya.

Today’s proverb: Ask your doctor about dogs. Have a long conversation about how good dogs are. Show each other pictures of dogs.

Hot singles in your area are staring into the forest and grinning absently. 

Welcome to Night Vale.

Astronomers are frantically trying to determine why a chunk of the moon is missing. Ragged and greedy like a slice removed from a pie by hungry hands rather than a civilized serving utensil, the gap in the moon has been baffling professional sky gazers for weeks. Fun fact: did you know a group of astronomers is called a commotion?

Astronomers believe the moon could be eroding, because people have stopped believing in it, like ancient Roman polytheism. Others have theorized that the moon was damaged by enemy ships in the ongoing Blood Space War. But people on the internet have countered that this is part of the mandala effect, and that that piece of the moon has always been missing and we’re collectively misremembering. Like how those beloved picture book bears that we all remember as the Berenstein Bears, have by all physical evidence always actually been spelled “The Dog Pound Boyzzzz”. Boyz with a Z. Because of the 2016 city ordinance that proclaimed that anything can be true if you say it loud enough, astronomers are forced to consider all sides.

I don’t know any astronomers, but I do know a scientist! My husband Carlos has been the leading scientific mind in Night Vale since we started dating, almost six years ago. Carlos says that he has been studying and interesting meteorite he found out in the sand wastes and scrublands beyond Night Vale. He believes this particular rock is a piece of the moon. Standing before a giant wall of blinking lights, flickering screens and intermittent beeps, Carlos determined that this piece of the moon broke off only one month ago. But this is impossible, because no one can remember seeing the moon breaking apart in the sky. Well, maybe we were all asleep when it happened, I told Carlos as I dabbed away a small crumb from a cheese Danish that had gotten stuck in his beard. Oh, fun fact: Carlos grew a beard! And I have never liked beards on men, but now – I do. It’s got two thin silver racing stripes down the chin, and the hair is so soft. We’ve been married over two years and every day, I fall more in love.

Oh right, the moon, OK good God, always with the moon. [mutters] Yeah, yeah…
Carlos has been studying an unusual number of empty homes and businesses about town. He noticed that the houses on either side of us are completely empty, but he didn’t remember them being empty before. He remembers us having neighbors, but he couldn’t name a single thing about them. He believes this might be related to the damaged moon. Whatever happened a month ago to the moon immediately caused us all to forget it, because something in our timeline changed.
Carlos said: “Perhaps we are not forgetting people and events, perhaps they never existed at all.” His eyes were cloudy with pensive thought, and I touched his furry cheek and said: “You’ll save us, hon. I know you will.”
He smiled and asked if I’d be willing to reach out to archeology professor Harrison Kip again. Carlos, uh, had been communicating with Kip about this very issue, but now emails to Harrison keep bouncing back, and his phone number is no longer in the phone company’s database of working numbers. I laughed and said: “Carlos, I don’t know who Harrison Kip is!”
Carlos looked worried, and said he wasn’t sure he did either. But he felt like he should.

Protestors have organized a sit in in front of city hall, demanding an end to the Blood Space War. The city council, seeing the crowd of about 150 people gathered around the front entrance of their building, took immediate action. They announced they would be taking a long planned family vacation to the Badlands National Park in South Dakota, until this whole protest thing runs its course.
“We don’t believe South Dakota actually exists,” the single-bodied, multi-voiced council said. “When you look at a map, it seems like it exists, like it’s just right there when you look at it and it’s between two other identical states, so it would make more sense for it to be there than not. Anyway, this feels like a great time to take the kids to see Mount Rushmore.”
As the city council said this, several small childlike heads emerged from the city council’s singular body and screamed in happy unison. Or terrified unison. Mm, it’s hard to get an emotional reading on screams.

The organizer of the protest is 20-year-old Night Vale community college student, Basimah Bishara, whose father Lieutenant Fakir Bishara returned home from the Blood Space War three years ago. Basimah greeted her father’s return with joy, but that joy has since been replaced by confusion and pain. Let’s hear Basimah’s story in her own words.

Basimah: Time no longer works correctly for my father. I understand time does not work correctly for many people in Night Vale, but it had always worked correctly for him before the war. In December 2015, he returned home after 11 years of serving our city, our country, our planet in a war that still makes no sense to me. I was six when he volunteered for service, he was 30. 11 years later when he returned home, I was 17. My father was 19. He did not remember joining in the war nor having a daughter nor meeting his wife. He is a teenager, like I was. I no longer am a teenager, but my father still is. He has stayed 19 years old. Time no longer works correctly for him.

My mother Tahira raised me. She expressed reticence about the band I started, the music we played. She grounded me when my grades slipped and shouted at me when I told her I had a girlfriend. But she came to love Marina and more, my mother came to understand as both as people, as women. Not as rivers to be damned or levied.

My father’s return has been especially hard on her, because she is 45 and her husband is a 19-year-old stranger. You probably know what it’s like to have a father, to have a man much older than you who changed your diapers or watched your diapers being changed. Who taught you to speak or ride a bike, who helped you develop as a human from an animal from a larva from the simplest, squirming wad of meat into an adult. That father will always be a father, not a friend, not an equal, a father. You probably do not know what it’s like to see a father at your age, to talk with your father when he is also barely an adult. To have your father lonely and inquisitive think of you as his only friend in the world, while you look to him for guidance and love. But he is incapable of both, at least not in the way you need to be guided and loved.

It took two years for Fakir to open up about the war and it still makes no sense to him nor me. The Blood Space War requires constant shifts through time, through worm holes to change lost battles into won battles, to undo what has already been undone thousands, millions of times over. The future does not look like a blank page, it looks like a tattered sheet of paper, grayed and frayed from countless transcriptions and erasures of history. Battles are won and then undone through time travel. We lose our lives and then regain them by traveling backwards and fighting again. We are winning the war by perpetuating the war. Last month, the Polonians attacked our earth, I am sure of it. The only evidence is our broken moon. I believe the general undid this attack with time travel and this has changed our reality, changed who was born, who ever lived in the first place. People are disappearing because they will have never existed.

People think we’re crazy for protesting. I’m 20 and my father is still 19. I’m not crazy. My mother Tahira is not crazy. We are angry.

Our next protest is scheduled this afternoon at the corner of Earl and Somerset by the Dog Park near the Ralphs.

Cecil: Not sure what Basimah was referring to. That’s an empty lot by the Ralphs. There was word for a dog park to be built there many years ago, but it never materialized.

[clears throat] Let’s have a look now at local news. Earth sciences professor Simone Rigideau announced today that she is scrapping all text books and lesson plans at the community college in favor of organized prayer to a god named Huntokar. Several students and parents argued against such an extreme divergence from core curriculum in favor of French religious practices, but college president Sarah Sultan supported her staff member by saying: “Cut Simone some slack. She doesn’t even teach classes. She’s a transient who lived in a storage closet inside the earth sciences building for 20 years. The only reason she has the title of professor is because of antiquated squatter’s rights laws.”
Rigideau donned rabbit furs and an old bicycle frame wraught into the shape of antlers, and began spray paintin the Fibonacci sequence on the cars in the college parking lot, all the while singing a ballad about clocks.

The intergalactic military headquarters released their first quarter earnings statmenet this week. Investors were displeased to see that each of the board members of the privately own space defense contractor had purchased a 125-foot yachts and NFL franchises. But those fears were quickly allayed by the announcement of layoffs of more than 5,000 employees. Stock prices for the intergalactic military soared to an all time high this afternoon, at 490 dollars a share. Senior strategic advisor Jameson Archibald said the intergalactic military has no actual earned income. 100 per cent of their gross is from venture capital. Archibald said: “Some investors keep asking how we plan to monetize our military, which is a stupid question, man! I mean, look at this Patek Philippe watch I bought. It’s encrusted with 10 pounds of diamonds, and the watch face was made using an actual piece of the Sistine Chapel. We are doing fine.” Archibald added that the intergalactic military is developing an app and a subscription service that allows people to engage in celestial war fare any time they want for only 12,99 a month.

Alright, listeners, I heard back from Basimah, and she said I was right. There is no dog park. Of course I was right. If I knew there was a dog park being built in this town, I would have reported it immediately. Carlos and I have a dog. His name is Aubergine because he’s purple and European, and Auby is adorable and we love him dearly. I mean, I wasn’t into the idea of having to care for a dog, but Carlos strongly urged this case one morning over breakfast when he said, “I think we should get a dog”, and 20 minutes later, we were leaving the SPCA with our adopted pet. [clears throat]

Basimah said she was positive there was a dog park next to the Ralphs, but when she arrived at the corner of Earl and Somerset, it was all empty lots. To be honest, I don’t remember her mentioning a Ralphs before, because I would have corrected her. There’s never been a Ralphs affiliate in Night Vale. This is what Basimah had to say. Um, hang on, let me just insert the tape I used to record her. And there we go.

Basimah: If a person never exists, did they disappear? If you never knew them, can you miss them? My father spends most of his days playing basketball with friends he made at the rec center. He is 19 years old and trying to escape a decade of inescapable drama from warfare. Asked him who my mother was. I grew up with only my uncle Omar and did not know my parents until my father returned from war. Fakir did not remember my mother. He did not remember his marriage or my birth, because it has not happened yet in his timeline. Asked what if mother didn’t exist at all. What if the general’s time traveling has altered our lives so much that my mother was never born and you can never meet her. My father, the teenager said: “If I never met a woman, I do not know I will not miss her. But I’ll meet another woman.”
I asked: “What if I was never born?”
My dad said: “Basi?” He hid his tears and then he hugged me, but it was not the hug of a father and daughter. It was the hug of a son and mother. He buried his head into my shoulder and sobbed, repeating: “Basi! Basi!” And I comforted his heaving head with my palm.
I said: “Father, Fakir. I think I shall no longer exist soon. [voice fades] I think I-

Oh OK, sorry for the dead air, listeners, I was playing a recording of an interview I did. Wait, nope. I just checked, there’s no tape in the player at all. I thought I had been talking with… Ugh. Aah! Who have I been talking to? Maybe it was my husband Carlos reporting on his findings about the damage done to our moon or, mh, or maybe it was nothing at all. [clears throat] Well, let us forget that we forgot, and go now
To the weather.

[Shake” by Wednesday’s Wolves https://www.wednesdayswolves.com]

We have an update on the Blood Space War, Night Vale. John Peters says his brother has returned home again. When he left a month ago, James Peters was 22 years old. But he is now in his seventies, which is the age he should be. John held his brother tightly, crying in gratitude and relief that his own family could return to some kind of normalcy. James at first was heartened to see John again, to see his home again, and to learn that he and the general had thwarted the Polonian attack on our planet. But his tearful smile drifted slowly downward, an evening shadow overtaken by night. Upon James’ face now was the sudden knowledge that he had made a grave error. James looked around Night Vale seeing empty lots and homes, abandoned buildings and sparse streets. According to James, thousands of people have gone missing from Night Vale, because they never existed or never moved here in the first place. The general had leapt in time to successfully stop the Polonians from ever reaching Earth, but the change in the timeline caused Night Vale to change too.

Listeners, this may seem strange, but perhaps there are people you once knew, family you once lived with, places you were in, all of which are gone, and without your knowing. I have tried hard to think of any memory of any experience or person I have lost in the last month, but I can think of none. I told James Peters that perhaps the change in timeline did not matter if no one knew what they had lost, if no one noticed any change.
James said: “Cecil, I just don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe if we had a scientific perspective on this, we could better understand how this is affecting us as a community.”
And I said I didn’t know any scientists, not personally anyway. There’s the strange woman who lives in the storage closet at the community college, I suppose we could ask her.

The important thing is that we are safe, and that another veteran has returned home, and it is another beautiful day in Night Vale.

Stay tuned next for “Conspiring to Love”, our new relationship advice show, which as a lifelong bachelor sounds like something I should check out.

Good night,
Night Vale,
Good night.

Today’s proverb: “Nothing lasts forever” is a phrase with two meanings, and they’re both true.