Welcome to Night Vale

Chapter 43

Inside City Hall there were stacks of files and papers around a groaning titan of a copier, the machine constantly churning out paper, collating it, and then pushing it aside onto the floor as more came. A woman in a dress with a dizzying pattern of blue roses repeating against a white background sat at a desk next to the copier. As Diane pushed open the door, the gust from outside caused the sign-in sheet in front of the woman to flutter into her face. She did not seem to notice.

Behind the woman’s desk was an enormous oil painting of a man in a tan jacket. His face was clear. It was more or less symmetrical. He was not quite smiling, but not quite frowning either. Was that not quite a smile? She could remember everything about the painting when she looked away from it. She looked back and then looked away again. Her memory retained all of it.

“Can I help you?” said the woman, without looking up. She was typing away at her computer, which did not appear to be on. She was crying, silently and profusely.

“I don’t think so,” said Diane, feeling herself here and elsewhere. Without Jackie the feeling of becoming more people and less of a person was worse. Without Jackie she had no one to lean against, to touch, to reinforce with physical contact that she, the Diane in King City, the Diane looking for Josh, was the only Diane that mattered.

Another version of herself was eating shredded wheat at the counter of an unfamiliar kitchen, trying to decide what to do about some information she had just received by phone. Another version of herself was driving and had to swerve. She had only seconds to swerve. Her heart pounded and she wondered if she would swerve in time, and if she would be able to regain control after she had. The version of herself that was dead was still dead and had been for a long time, a blank spot sitting in the way of her other thoughts.

“All right,” said the City Hall receptionist. Tears poured down her face. Her body shook.

“Are you okay?” Diane asked.

The woman looked up. Her eyes were red and hollowed out by the sheer quantity of salt water passing through them.

“No. I don’t think I am.”

She looked back down and continued to type on her switched-off computer.

“What’s wrong?” Diane wanted to help, but the woman did not respond.

A man who looked identical to the large oil painting above her stuck his head from around the corner down the hall.

“What did I say about trying to interact with anyone else?” He sounded tired and annoyed. “Get down here.”

His head disappeared, and Diane couldn’t remember what he had looked like. She could remember the painting, though, and grafted the painting’s features on that blank in her mind.

“I have to go,” Diane said to the woman at the desk.

The woman didn’t seem to hear or see Diane anymore. She typed away on her useless keyboard.

Diane went down the hall. The building was bigger on the inside. There were many doors, some marked with abstruse letter and number combinations. Most were unmarked. She could hear no one else in the building besides the weeping woman and the man down the hall. Nothing except the roar of the copier, an avalanche of paper tumbling from its maw. Had it been the copier they had been hearing since coming to King City? That distant, ceaseless roar? She dismissed the thought.

The hallway continued in seemingly unending bends. Left turn after left turn. Strangely labeled door after unlabeled door. Then a door marked MAYOR.

“Come in, come in,” he said from his desk. His office was piled high with more paper. There were several corkboards with papers thumbtacked to them, and a whiteboard covered in frantic, illegible writing. Some of the writing was circled with arrows pointing to other parts of the writing. A window was open onto a back alley, and there was a garbage can just outside. The room smelled rich and earthy, like decay just turning to loam.

His deerskin suitcase was open on the desk beside him, between the piles of papers. Hundreds of large black flies were inside it, crawling over each other in heaving, buzzing piles. Flies were leaving the suitcase and flying out the window to the garbage can, and other flies were returning through the window. Diane felt dizzy, frightened that her fear would overtake her body, even more frightened that the flies would. Somewhere another version of herself was sitting at her bedroom window in the morning, looking out at a tree she liked, and this kept her together.

“Sit down,” said the man, continuing to tell her what she should do next like it was the most natural thing to him.

“No, I’ll stand I think,” she said. The man rolled his eyes. The flies buzzed louder.

“Suit yourself.” He swept a pile of papers off his desk and replaced it with another pile of papers from the floor.

“Where’s Josh?”

“We have much to talk about.”

“No we don’t. Where’s Josh? I’m taking Josh and I’m going home.”

“I’m sorry, Diane, but you’re not going to do that.”

He folded his hands in front of him. A fly landed on his shoulder and also folded its appendages in front of it.

“Anyway, I don’t know where Josh is precisely,” he said. “Around, I suppose. The important thing is that he’s in King City. And he’ll stay in King City. For now, at least. Until everything is right again he’ll have to stay here. I’ve worked for a long time to get him here.”

Some other version of Diane was running, although this Diane wasn’t sure whether it was for exercise or to flee. She didn’t have access to the other Diane’s emotions, only her speed. She had trouble focusing with so many versions of herself in her head.

“Where is Josh?” she said, and moved at the man with her hand up. She wanted to destroy him. She had never wanted to destroy anything before. He sprang out of his chair, face red. The flies formed a furious, pulsing black cloud between her and him.

“Attacking me won’t help,” he shouted, and the flies echoed his words with their buzzing. “Now sit down, Diane Crayton.”

She did not sit down, but she didn’t move forward either. This wasn’t because of what he said but because the large black cloud of flies made her anxious. The other Diane in her head had stopped running, although she didn’t know whether this was because the exercise was over or because she had been caught.

“Josh is completely safe,” he said, sitting back down. The cloud of flies lowered with him, still staying between him and Diane. “But this town needs him.”

“You’re the mayor of this town, if you can call it a town. Why can’t you work out the problems on your own? Why would you need a fifteen-year-old boy from some other place to do your work for you?”

“This town doesn’t know that I’m mayor. Ever since the problems started, no one can remember me.” He reset himself to a milder tone, a gentler posture. “I was mayor when that man came to town, and ever since then the people of King City will regularly decide they need to elect a mayor because they don’t have one. They will go through all the motions of that: setting up the polling places, arranging candidates, talking to each other about who would be right for the job or mostly not paying attention and not talking about it. And then on the day of the election, someone involved will look at the paperwork and realize they already have a mayor. Confused and frustrated, they’ll take everything down, cancel the whole election, and go home unsatisfied. Then, a few months later, they’ll start again, having forgotten completely that I exist.”

He gestured to the cloud of flies in front of him, and they settled back down as a squirming ball in the open suitcase.

“It’s been so long since anyone could remember me at all. To be remembered is, I think, a basic human right. Not one that occurs to a person when it is there, but like a parched throat in a desert when it is gone.”

Diane didn’t care about the man’s problems. But there was one part of what he had said that interested her.

“Who do you mean by ‘that man’?”