Welcome to Night Vale

Chapter 20

“It’s not a good idea, Josh.”

“Why?” His shouts were muffled behind his locked bedroom door.

“Because—”

In the space after the word because, Diane thought through what the next words could be.

Because he is a dangerous person? Maybe. Troy doesn’t seem to be a danger. But anyone could be a dangerous person.

Because he will only let you down? Probably. He had disappeared before, he could disappear again. He could also just be a terrible father.

Because it is complicated. More complicated than you can process with your young brain, she wanted to say.

Because she didn’t have a reason exactly but felt a storm on its way, a confluence of Troy’s reappearance and Josh’s interest and the disappearance of Evan, and she wanted to wrap herself around Josh and keep him from all of whatever was going to happen next.

“Because I said so,” Diane said.

There was no audible response.

“I have to go,” she said.

“Where are you going? It’s seven o’clock.”

“Out.”

“With who? With Don?”

They both took the expected tone and said their lines as if from a script, but the scene had gotten mixed up and reversed somehow. They both wanted to put it back the way it was supposed to be, but neither of them knew how to do that.

She was going out to try to find Troy again, perhaps make another visit to the movies. She needed to confront Troy now, before Josh did. Josh would inevitably find him, so it would be better if she could facilitate that on her own terms, rather than her son’s or, worse, Troy’s.

Also, given that she had hit a dead end in her search for Evan at work and with Dawn, the only place she could get any more information was at the hall of records, but citizens were not allowed to know where public records were kept. She figured they were somewhere in City Hall basement, but unless you had high-level clearance to get into the records offices, you would become stuck in the elaborate, tricky mazes designed to trap news reporters and nosy genealogists.

The other option was to go to the public library. Few people came back from a visit to the library.

There was one girl a few years ago that survived the Summer Reading Program at the Night Vale Public Library. The girl, Tamika Flynn, defeated the librarian that had imprisoned her and her classmates, using the switchblade hidden in every hardback edition of Eudora Welty’s touching homecoming novel The Optimist’s Daughter.

But few who have seen a librarian up close have survived or been in a physical condition to communicate.

Perhaps Diane could use Troy. Police officers have access to all kinds of databases. If Diane could just have a few minutes searching Troy’s office computers, she could probably find something about Evan. Just something to point her in a new direction: real estate records, a birth or wedding announcement, any number of the mandatory dream journals that he would have had to file with the city if he were a legal resident and, if he didn’t, some kind of prison record.

To do that she needed to be away from Josh more than she had been in his entire life, and in order to do that, she needed to keep up the imaginary thing with Dawn.

“Yes, with Dawn.”

“Why don’t you have Don over for dinner?”

Diane did not reply. Josh opened his door, his wings flapping in an effortless blur.

“Mom, there was no Ty. DeVon helped me figure out that my dad’s real name is Troy Walsh. We couldn’t find a photo, but DeVon’s seeing if his friend can get one. I want to meet my dad. So now I’ve told you the truth. I’ve opened up like you keep asking me to do. Now you. Now your turn. You’ve been going out on dates. Sometimes these dates go all night, and, okay, so that’s a thing, I guess, and I don’t need those specifics. But I’ve never had a dad, and you won’t let me meet him, and now you’re dating someone seriously and you won’t let me meet him either.”

“Dawn’s a she,” Diane corrected automatically, based on a reality that was irrelevant to her lie, and regretted it immediately.

“So you just really don’t want me to have a dad, do you?” he said, also automatically, based on a hurt that was not irrelevant to his life, and then immediately: “No, I’m sorry. No, that’s fine. I didn’t mean… That’s fine.”

He was flustered, back on the defensive and unsure of how he had gotten there.

Diane did nothing. She breathed, unintentionally. The faceless old woman who secretly lives in their home crawled by on the ceiling, but neither of them noticed.

Josh matched Diane’s stare for a second, then slithered backwards and shut the door.

There are a lot of things we don’t understand about orange juice, the house thought.

Diane walked to the kitchen and swung open the fridge. She did not want anything from inside it, and so stood in front of the open fridge for several moments, unsure of what she was doing next.

Her phone buzzed. A text. “Hello.”

She texted back to the unknown number, “Hello?”

Diane stared at the carton of orange juice in the fridge, at the bright round fruit logo, its straw hat shading unseen eyes on the pocked face, a tight grin with perfect human teeth, separated slightly, and a pink, leaf-shaped tongue. She didn’t know why she was fixating on the orange juice, but she didn’t know why she was doing anything.

Troy was everywhere. There were so many of him, and Josh wanted to meet just one of him. It was a meeting she didn’t think she was going to be able to prevent, so she needed more time to understand who Troy was now, and what he wanted. And then there was Evan. Why was she looking so hard for Evan?

It seemed to her that her life had slipped loose somehow, its progression all off track. Josh and Troy, that was one thing. But she felt a larger shift, and that shift had all started when Evan disappeared and became forgotten by all but her. There was something wrong, in her life, in Night Vale, maybe in the world. The magnitude of the thing was unclear, but wherever it was, she was inside it.

Her phone buzzed.

“it’s been a while”

She didn’t know what that meant, and didn’t want to reply. She should go to the movie theater. She was going to go to the movie theater.

She walked back to Josh’s closed door.

“Josh, I’m sorry. I know this all doesn’t make sense to you. It doesn’t all make sense to me either.”

Nothing.

“I love you.”

A long nothing.

“I’m not perfect. I’m not. I’m sorry.”

There came a faint “Love you, too.”

She exhaled. Her phone buzzed again.

“do you remember me?”

She stared at the phone. The area code of the texts was a postage-stamp-size photo of a burnt-out forest alive with luminescent snails in an array of vivid colors. She didn’t recognize that area code, but it wasn’t local.

Buzz.

“you remember me diane”

“Who is this?” she typed.

Nothing.

Nothing.

She was tired of waiting for things to happen to her; she would make something happen. She would just call the number. She put the phone to her ear.

It buzzed warm in her ear, and she yelped at the proximity. Another text.

“evan”

There was a photo attached.

It was a man. She was sure she had never seen his face before. He was wearing a tan jacket and holding a small brown suitcase. It looked to be leather. He had dark gray slacks and a light blue shirt, open at the collar.

She looked at his face. She stared for a long time, trying to recall his eyes, his mouth, the curve of his nose, his hairline. It wasn’t that he was unfamiliar to her, it was that she couldn’t keep her eyes focused on him. Every time she would look at his cheeks or his ears or his chin, she found herself instead looking at his tan jacket or his leather suitcase.

And when her eyes did land on his face, it was like the first time she had ever seen him. There was no recognition.

Buzz.

“remember?”

“evan. i remember, but no one else does.”

“no one ever does diane”

“i’ve been looking for you. where are you.” Diane was reaching for a pen to write down this number. She needed physical, not just digital, evidence of his existence.

“i’ll come to you”

She began to type “actually I was just heading out. let’s meet up in town” while grabbing her purse and walking to the front door.

Halfway into writing that: Buzz.

“Here!” said the text.

There was a loud knock on the front door directly in front of her. Diane suddenly remembered that she had left the fridge open.