Welcome to Night Vale

Chapter 22

Jackie was at a dead end, investigation-wise. In terms of tacos, she was doing fine. Judged on her ability to never be able to let go of a slip of paper with her left hand, it was all going great. But trying to figure out what the hell was going on was not going well at all.

She had spent the night with open eyes, trying to will her mind to be just as open. There had to be something she had missed, some connection to be made in the events and individuals moving about in the memory of her day. But if there was, she couldn’t see it. Maybe she wasn’t smart enough. Or maybe the world wasn’t. Maybe the world wasn’t smart enough to put together a story that made sense. Maybe it could only stick together random elements randomly, forming, as Shakespeare had famously written, “a show of senseless movement and circumstance that ultimately doesn’t amount to much at all.”

The next morning found her with only one lead left. She had seen that blond man at her mother’s house. And she had seen him outside of the mayor’s office. And she had seen him at the Moonlite All-Nite Diner. It was time to talk to that man and to find out how he was involved in whatever it was this whatever was.

She drove to the Moonlite All-Nite. It was the same crowd as always, which is to say that there were many of the regulars, and also to say that certain people were always in the Moonlite All-Nite, always at the same booths, always working on plates of food that never seemed to go away. It’s a sign of a good diner to have customers who are stuck in time. A well-known rule of eating is that if there are no time-loop customers, the place probably isn’t worth even ordering a plate of fries.

Jackie sat in her regular spot at the counter.

“Hiya, Jackie,” said Laura, moving with difficulty behind the counter, her thick, woody branches scraping against it. “You hungry?” She bent a fruit-laden branch toward her invitingly.

“Thanks, Laura, but just a coffee.”

Laura pushed her way toward the coffee machine, her branches knocking over tubs of ketchup and mayonnaise and stacks of empty water glasses as she went.

Jackie watched the kitchen. There was no blond man.

She turned to survey the room. Diane Crayton was getting out of her booth. It seemed like there was probably someone with her, but Jackie couldn’t remember who. She looked back at Diane’s table, and her heart began to pound, and then she looked at the kitchen again and couldn’t understand why her heart was pounding.

Diane walked by her. Jackie decided to stop her, talk a little, make it seem casual. She needed to know if Diane actually was involved somehow.

“Hey! Diane!” Jackie said with a casual half salute.

Diane jumped and gasped.

“Easy,” Jackie said, bringing her saluting hand down to pat the air with a “Whoa.” “Just saying hi.”

“Sure. I was…” Diane took a breath. “I was all caught up in my thoughts.”

She waved her hand to indicate where her thoughts were. She laughed to indicate that she was fine and unbothered. The combination of hands and laughter indicated she was startled and uncomfortable.

“Totally get it. Cool.”

“I am sorry. I have to go. I hope the tear I gave you is working out okay.”

“Yeah. The tear. It’s great. I’m sure it’ll fly off the shelf real soon. Always a demand for tears.”

“How’s your mother?”

Jackie gave her a hard look.

“What do you know about my mother?”

Diane frowned with her whole face.

“What?” she said.

The conversation went wrong from there. Jackie felt Diane hiding something from her. It felt like everyone was hiding something from Jackie, the whole world a game of hide-and-seek she had never consented to play. She gave up on the conversation and turned back to the coffee.

Diane smiled, but only with her mouth.

“I’ll be seeing you, Jackie.”

“I’m completely visible.” Jackie thought this was a pretty good joke, but Diane didn’t laugh.

Jackie’s coffee had arrived in a mug with the logo of a strangely proportioned giant of a man leering out at the world. Underneath it was a phrase that had been vandalized by some sharp object, chipping most of it away and leaving only

CALL 4 6 TO M E.

The mug had a smudge where blood had been incompletely wiped off.

She sipped and she waited. She waited and she sipped. The act of sipping was an act of waiting. Sometimes she didn’t even put the coffee in her mouth, only held her lips to the rim and then put the mug back down.

The woman with the clipboard was there as usual, and each time that Jackie took a sip the woman would write something down. She appeared to be working with a woman with an earpiece standing outside, as she would occasionally wave wildly to her, and the other woman would wave wildly back, and then they would quickly and nonchalantly look away, loudly whistling and saying, “I don’t know that person. If you asked me to define a stranger, I’d say that lady. Couldn’t know her less.”

Jackie looked back at the kitchen, and there was the man again: blond, handsome in all of the expected ways (and in this way not handsome), staring at her and flipping endless amounts of burgers into the air, a fountain of burgers with a meat-splash pattern in a five-foot radius around him.

She hopped up from the stool. The woman with the clipboard started writing frantically on the clipboard, and Laura said, “Hey, Jackie, where you going?” but couldn’t get up because her branches were caught in the ice cream freezer door.

Jackie ran to the back, where the steel swinging doors of the kitchen were. She slammed through them into a kitchen with no one in it. All the burgers were still there, evidence of the man’s recent existence.

She walked slowly past the prep table, stopping to look under it, where the pans and plates were stored. No one.

There was no back door that she could see. He had to be in here.

A soft clank. Some hanging spatulas moving. She crept toward them, looking around at the large dishwashing sink and the cold storage room.

The cold storage room. A heavy magnetized door. Was it slightly ajar?

She reached out her hand, slowly, so slowly. Fingers around the handle. The kitchen was empty and silent. No one out in the diner seemed to be watching. Even the woman with the clipboard had returned to her usual business of marking off new entrances. She was alone and no one would help her if anything went wrong.

“Story of my life,” she said, and flung open the magnetized door. Shelves of meat and produce, nothing else. There was nowhere she could see to hide.

A crash from behind her. The blond man pushed away the pile of plates he had been hiding behind in a shout of broken ceramics. She tore after him, and they both slammed through the steel swinging doors. She was just behind him as they weaved through tables and surprised customers.

The clipboard woman was adding something up on her clipboard, mouthing the equations as she went, apparently uninterested in the chase.

Jackie sprinted through the diner as quickly as a person can sprint after a stranger through a diner, which was not quickly at all. The blond man burst out the front door and Jackie was moments behind him. She was younger and she was faster and she would catch him. Her feet slapped hard on the asphalt, so hot in the midday sun that she could feel the heat through the soles of her shoes.

“I’ve got you,” she shouted, before she had him.

“Troy!” Diane shouted, running from her car. “Troy, I need to talk to you.”

The blond man broke right, toward the road and the abandoned gas station across the street.

Diane and Jackie both turned to follow, and collided with each other. Subsequently they both collided with the ground.

“Goddammit!” Jackie shouted into the blacktop, a long red scratch on her face. Diane had the makings of a bruise on her thigh but didn’t know it yet. They both looked toward the gas station, but the man was gone.

“Goddammit!” Jackie repeated with her mouth. “Goddammit!” she repeated over and over with her palm onto the asphalt.

Diane glared at her, rubbing her leg.

“Why were you chasing Troy?” she asked.

Jackie glared at her. Diane Crayton, John had said. Diane was involved, and didn’t this prove it?

“Why was I chasing him? Why do you have that paper?”

Diane didn’t understand what that question had to do with anything that had just happened. Jackie looked back at the gas station.

“I almost had him, Diane. That weird dude.”

“You almost had him? What did ‘that weird dude’ do to you, Jackie?”

Jackie tried to come up with an explanation as to why her actions made sense. Her head hurt. “He just stares and smiles. What’s his deal? I mean…”

“Maybe you’re too young to understand this, but you don’t just run after people because you want to know what their deal is.”

Diane had slipped into didactic mom voice without meaning to, and they both heard it.

“Ah, so the mature approach is to body-tackle people in parking lots. Awesome. I’m sure when I’m as old as you I’ll remember that.”

Diane sighed and stood up, seeing if her body could still do that. She looked the teenager up and down.

“If you want to be treated as an adult, Jackie, you have to act like it.”

In her head, Jackie heard the voice of her ex-friend Noelle Connolly, brimming with parental condescension: Oh, Jackie, did you ever think of just turning twenty?

“Screw you,” she said.

“Oh, good. That’s good.”

Diane turned and walked back to her car. Jackie walked after her.

“Hey, where do you think you’re going? How do you know that guy? How did you know his name was Troy? Like, seriously, what’s his deal?”

Diane collected herself and spoke with only a mild tremble.

“This is none of your business. Troy is someone from my past, and I’m trying to talk to him so that things will be right with my son. My son, who is the only child I am interested in raising right now. You’ll have to find someone else to do that for you.”

She slammed herself into her car. Jackie made a gesture through the window that succinctly responded to many of the points made. Diane shrugged and reversed the car out of the spot.

“I’m finding out who that guy is and what you have to do with him,” Jackie shouted after her. “I’m getting to the goddamn bottom of this. You just stay out of my way while I do.”

Diane responded with acceleration. Jackie threw the paper after her.

“Screw you,” Jackie said.

“KING CITY,” the paper said, back in her hand.

“She has no idea what she’s talking about,” Diane and Jackie said simultaneously and separately, but about this they both had their doubts.