Welcome to Night Vale

Chapter 18

Now that science and civic leadership had failed to solve her problem, Jackie sat in her car in the City Hall parking lot, unsure of what to do. No one had fixed anything. No one had been able to help her.

She watched as workers rushed out of the doors to begin the long process of draping the black velvet over City Hall. It was nice to watch people struggle over a problem that did not involve or affect her at all. She didn’t have to help or act or choose. Part of her wanted to just recline the seat as close to lying down as possible and sleep the night where she was. Stay in one spot and let the world go on with its strange and terrible business without her.

But before she had even finished having that thought, she was already turning on the ignition and reversing out of the parking lot. She wouldn’t stop. She couldn’t. There was something in her that made giving up feel as impossible as the most impossible of her problems.

Driving through Night Vale in the early evening was peaceful. There weren’t many cars out on the roads, mostly just the agents from a vague yet menacing government agency starting their slow-cruising night patrol of the town. It wasn’t late enough for the hooded figures to be prowling the sidewalks, looking for lone pedestrians to take and do whatever it was they did (almost no encounters were witnessed, and, if they were, the witness was wise to cover the witnessing part of their sensory systems until the whole thing, whatever it was, was over).

The lights were on in the various places of business along Route 800. The neon of the Moonlite All-Nite stood out as the day turned to night. A slab of mint light in the warm desert darkness, as the radio had once described it. She considered eating there, hunger being one problem that was simple enough to solve, but the thought of returning and seeing that man—the blond man in the kitchen—smiling at her made her nervous. Was he the same blond man she’d seen outside the mayor’s office?

She shook her head, but the thought wouldn’t leave.

The blond man, it said.

“KING CITY,” the paper said.

A man in her mother’s backyard. Blond hair. A smile. That was where she had known him from. Her heart was beating in her wrist, which was where it rarely beat.

Dots of light studded the hazy purple of the twilight horizon: red taillights, yellow porch lights, orange streetlights, the strange greenish white pulse of light hundreds of feet above the Arby’s. In the distance a jagged line of soft blue light, like a crack in the sky. Above all of that was the clean, white brightness of the stars and the moon and the searchlights of surveillance helicopters.

Children in Night Vale grow up hearing the Dopplered whir of helicopters above, recording or monitoring or whatever it is that helicopters do. It’s a comforting sound, knowing that you’re well taken care of by unimpeachable judges of what is good and what is evil.

Jackie did not feel comforted, only inured. She was not thinking, only doing. Unaware of her car’s speed, she turned off Route 800 onto an unnamed street that led, eventually, into the Sandwastes and the shantytown that was the barista district. Before all that, though, the unnamed road went right by Jerry’s Tacos.

The light of Jerry’s Tacos was the most inviting thing she’d seen all day. It was a small stand, only recently reopened after an ugly incident a few years back involving a time traveler, but already word was around that the food was worth the years of waiting and silence that had preceded it.

She pulled into the lot, relieved to have so simple a task in front of her as ordering food and then consuming it. Reaching into her pocket, she added paper of a different sort and with a different kind of value than the paper already in her hand.

The only other car in the lot was a silver pickup. Full-size. Well worn. Tall. Long. The windows gray with dried dirt. She had seen it many times. It belonged to John Peters (you know, the farmer?).

He was at the window, already picking up an order of the house specialty, a mysteriously crunchy enchilada.

“Hey, John,” she shouted as she walked up.

He turned, crunchy enchilada in hand.

“Howdy there, Jackie. How goes it with pawning?”

She posted an elbow up on the counter and waved away the shadow on the other side of the frosted glass that was waiting for her order.

“It goes. For sure it goes. I’m just, well, taking a break I guess. People take breaks. How goes it with, you know, farming?”

“Ah, it is what it is. It’s farming, you know.”

“Sure.”

A big crunchy bite of enchilada.

“Man, that looks good.” She turned to the shadowy figure behind the glass. “I’ll take one of those and one Jerry’s Special Taco. How much do I owe you?”

A receipt popped out from under the glass. She took a look at the price.

“Really? Jesus.”

John Peters watched her force a tear out onto the receipt and push it back under the glass. The price paid, the food was delivered through a hatch moments later.

“Prices here have gone up a bit,” said John.

“Tell me about it.”

They both dug into their food. When nothing else works, eating sure does.

“What do you know about a man in a tan jacket, holding a deerskin suitcase?” Jackie asked, not wanting to break the easy quiet of eating, but also not wanting to hang on to the question.

John stopped chewing.

“Have you seen a man in a tan jacket, holding a deerskin suitcase?” he asked.

“Yeah. Except I don’t remember much about him.”

“No,” said John. “Wouldn’t suppose you would. He has that effect on people.”

Jackie looked out from the pool of light they were standing in to the dark desert beyond. There was movement there. She swore that she could see the tan-jacketed man in question sprinting just at the edge of the light. More blur than person, but still with the desperate run that was away from something rather than toward.

“Is that—?” she asked what could only be herself, given that John wasn’t looking.

She dropped her food on the counter and started away from the stand, but John stopped her with a hand on the shoulder.

“Don’t bother. Wouldn’t catch him, probably. And wouldn’t remember if you did. He’s dangerous.”

“Dangerous?”

“If I were you I’d stay away from his town.” He pointed at her hand. She held up the paper.

“King City?” Jackie asked.

“KING CITY,” the paper confirmed.

“He’s here because of Diane, I think,” he said.

“Diane Crayton?”

“Don’t know if he’s helping or hunting her, but he certainly always seems to be lurking around wherever she is.”

“Diane Crayton,” Jackie repeated, in answer to her own question. She considered this information.

“Wouldn’t go anywhere near that town of his if it were me,” he said. “Who knows what you’d find, or what you’d find out and then wish you hadn’t.”

He picked up a Styrofoam cup full of horchata and took a long slurp from it, his eyes on where the man may or may not have been running.

“Mostly we don’t get destroyed,” John said. “Mostly we destroy ourselves.”

Another car pulled into the lot. It was a well-preserved Chrysler from at least a couple if not a few decades past. Out of it came a woman about which much the same could be said.

“Mom?” Jackie said, as the woman entered Jerry’s Tacos.

Jackie’s mom smiled. She was wearing the exact same clothes as she had been that morning.

“Hello, John. How goes the farming?”

“Till we get some of that federal water here, mostly I grow imaginary corn. Grows just as well as anything else. Sells pretty well too. Plus doesn’t take much work.”

“I would not imagine it would, no.”

Her mother said hello to the shadow (Jerry?) behind the glass, glanced over the regular menu, and, not finding anything to her liking, said the code phrase to receive the secret menu.

“I am comfortable with secrets,” she said, then did a quick scan of the proffered yellow page. “Well, I have to say, it all sounds so good. I’ll take the number four, and I’ll never tell a soul.”

“Mom, did you always have that car?”

Her mother looked up from the menu.

“Yes, of course, dear. I’ve only ever had that car. Who ever would have more than one car in their life?”

“Right. Yeah, no. I know.” But why did Jackie not remember it at all?

“Have to get back to farming I suppose,” said John, standing in the open doorway.

“It’s dark out,” Jackie’s mother said.

“Indeed it is,” he said, shading his eyes and looking up at the night sky. “It’s completely dark out. Well, better get back to it.”

He winked, tossed the wrappers and cup into a trash can, and tossed himself back into his truck.

“Mom, you were saying earlier about me as a kid.”

“Yes, dear, suppose I was.” Her mother pulled some napkins from the dispenser and sat down. She didn’t look at Jackie.

“What was that about?”

Her mother laughed. She kept laughing.

“Mom, what is going on? Why won’t you tell me?”

Her mother didn’t stop laughing. Also, she was crying. Jackie wasn’t sure what to do. Her mother’s food showed up and her mother was still laughing and also crying. Pausing several times along the way, Jackie moved toward where her mother was hunched at the counter, extending an arm and placing it across her mother’s back. Jackie looked out the windows toward her own car. She wished she could laugh and weep, too. She felt as though everything had been taken away from her, even though only most things had.

Jackie stared past her car at the dust of John’s departure swirling in the edge of light and darkness, where she could still see movement that looked like a running man.

“Diane Crayton,” she said to herself. She couldn’t hear her mother anymore.