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My name is Carlos David Espinoza, and I grew up on B movies. My folks weren’t rich but they weren’t poor either, they just had priorities – anything more than basic cable so Pappi could watch Letterman when it was raining wasn’t one of them. So I soaked up the B monster movies, B mutant movies, B alien movies – you name it, I was glued to it. Not because of the monsters, the mutants, or the aliens, though. No, I was watching the scientists.
Every single B movie in existence has a scientist in it. Most of them wear lab coats. All of them are so much smarter than everyone else – although in a B movie that’s not saying much – that they seem to know literally everything. And most of them can do everything, not just the science stuff but all the hero stuff too. The only time a scientist can’t do something is because it’s a plot device and he’ll either figure it out by the end of the movie or it’ll turn out that the way he gets around it was the key all along.
When I was nine, I decided I was going to be a scientist. Just like those guys in the movies.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not crazy and I do know fantasy from reality – I’m a scientist, of course I do. But I saw those guys and I figured that if they could do all of it, so could I. So I hit the library and started sucking up all the science I could find…and hit the rec center to suck up all the action stuff, too. I learned to rappel and pole-vault and rock climb, to fire guns and rifles and crossbows and even a blowgun. I swam and ran and spelunked, and I had a light-aircraft pilot’s license and first-responder certification by the time I was twenty-two. I got my first degree in general science, then jumped into graduate school with both feet and started just learning it all. I may not be a genius, but you don’t have to be a genius to be a scientist – you just have to be smart enough to figure things out. I patterned myself off of those guys I’d idolized all my life and did a pretty damn good job of it, too.
And everyone hated me for it. I wasn’t ‘normal’. I was ‘overly dramatic’. Science – and B movies – were the only interests I had, and they were all I wanted to talk about. Other scientists, ‘real’ scientists, weren’t like that. They were conformist and not very exciting, and the only ones with any athletic ability at all were what I started to call the Weekday Science Guys – they did science for work, but their real life was what they did on the weekends. And on the weekends they didn’t want to talk about science at all. They mostly wanted to get drunk and screw each other and ramble about networking and getting a cushy job in a pharmaceutical company someday once they had their PhD.
I’m not saying I never joined in on the drinking and screwing, but the cushy job with Big Pharma? Those scientists are always the bad guys in the movies, and even if they see the error of their ways by the end of the movie they usually die. Not to mention that after four failed dissertations that PhD was starting to look more impossible than crossing a shark with an orangutan and teaching it to sing. It wasn’t that my papers were bad, far from it. No, what sunk me every time was defending them. Because dissertation committees are usually made up of stick-up-the-ass types – with good reason, I won’t deny it – and I’m ‘overly dramatic’. They just didn’t like me and they wouldn’t take me seriously, which meant they wouldn’t take my research seriously either. Which was a real shame, because the more research I did, the more things I found to research in more and different areas of science.
I was working on Diss #5 when my mother got sick. I applied for a leave of absence, got it, and took the research back home with me. I spent every day being there for my father and every night doing more science, and running lots of tests. I have basic medic skills, of course I do, but I’m not a doctor and I do know the difference – I didn’t question Mama’s doctors, I questioned their labs. Every test they ran, I ran it again and compared my results to theirs. Usually we matched, once we didn’t and I got some asshole Weekday Lab Worker fired…but unfortunately, my accurate results meant worse things than his half-assed ones had, they meant that we were going to lose her and there was nothing we could do about it.
Mama told me that when it’s a person’s time to go, it’s just time to go and that’s it and you just want to make sure you don’t regret anything. “I am so proud of you, Carli,” she told me while Pappi was off taking some time to himself – we were taking turns sitting with her at that point, so she wouldn’t be alone, just in case. “When you were a little boy and you decided you would be like the men in those awful movies you love so much…well, I thought you would outgrow it.” She clasped my hand, her grip so weak but still with so much strength in it. “But instead, you grew into it – you took your impossible dream and you made it real.” She smiled. “My son is a scientist, and someday he is going to do great things – just like he always dreamed of doing. First he has to stop going to school and rejoin the real world, though.”
I couldn’t help it, I blushed; the perpetual student may be a cliché, but graduate school is still full of them and I’d been surfing pretty close to that line myself the past few years. “Mama, you know I’m trying. They won’t listen!”
She laughed at me. “Because you’re not saying it in language they understand, Carlos. Passion and fire like yours…if they ever had it, it’s long gone now, and it burns them so that they draw away from you. You don’t need to quench your fire, though; you just need to put a screen up between you and them so they only see the play of light and shadows instead of being blinded by the fire that casts them.”
Plato, of course – this was Mama, after all, and she’d been teaching literature since before I was born. But the lightbulb came on, just like that. She saw it, too, and she was happy…but even though I could tell she was getting tired, she still had something else to tell me. “Alfonso’s mother came by to see me, she said he’s home for a little while.”
I chuckled. “Is he still a hippie?”
She gave me a look. “Are you still a mad scientist?”
“Point taken.” I squeezed her hand back. “I’m glad he’s in town, I’m kind of surprised he didn’t call me. I’ll go see him later.”
I ended up not having to go see him, because he came to see me – at the funeral, a week later. He had his hair pulled back neatly and he didn’t look any more hippie than anyone else did, and he gave me a hug that turned into me crying on his shoulder the way I hadn’t cried all week because I’d been trying to stay strong for Pappi. Al and I had been friends nearly all our lives, we hadn’t started losing touch until I’d gone off to the university and he’d decided to ‘find his roots’. He didn’t just wander down to South America, though; he got a degree and then got a job teaching English that actually paid him to hop from place to place, and while he was there he sort of went native. I hadn’t seen him in years, and we’d mostly kept in touch through our mothers – his had been a math teacher at the same high school mine had taught English Lit in, which was the same high school we’d both graduated from.
Al left the funeral with me and came back to the house, and after a few hours of people milling around talking about Mama he said something to my Uncle Sherman and dragged me out of the house again. “Your uncle is staying there with your dad,” he told me when I protested that I shouldn’t leave Pappi alone. “And he agreed with me that you needed out of there for a while, you’ve been running yourself ragged since you came home. So we’re going back to my hotel room…”
That surprised me. “I thought you were staying at your mom’s?”
He squeezed my arm. “I was, at first, but I needed…a little distance, and some privacy. And I knew you were going to need that too, so I got a decent one where we can just kick back for a while.”
“I was going to work on my dissertation tonight…”
“No, you were going to clean up after everyone and then stare at the little lab you have going in the spare room, and then you were going to break something – which you would then have had to clean up.” He started walking again, tugging me along after him. “This will be better for you, I promise.”
It was. The hotel had an indoor pool, and Al insisted that I swim while he read a book. I did a few laps and then started crying while I was swimming, but that was pretty good because no one could tell so I kept doing laps until I almost couldn’t climb out of the pool by myself. Then we went back up to the room and flopped down on the king-sized bed and just talked. I told him about the university and the five dissertations and what Mama said to me before she died, and I told him about re-running all the tests to check them and getting that one guy fired for being sloppy. And then I asked him about where he was in South America and how he liked it there.
He told me some about the little town he lived in, he told me about one or two of the people, and I could tell he was holding something back. “What is it?” I finally asked him, interrupting a description of part of the jungle that really had nothing to do with him at all except that he’d seen it. He was starting to worry me. “Al, whatever it is, you know you can tell me. Aren’t you happy down there?”
He shook his head. “It isn’t that, I just…I need to show you things, tell you some things. I guess I should just stop dicking around and do what I came here to do.” He started unbuttoning his shirt. “I am happy down there, very happy – it’s where I belong, once I go back I’m staying there for good. And then there’s this.” He’d finished unbuttoning, and he shrugged the shirt off and tossed it onto a chair. “These…they mean something.”
‘These’ were tattoos – an elaborate pattern that swept up across his collarbone and down both arms almost to his wrists. “That’s…” I reached out almost in spite of myself, but didn’t quite touch them. “Jesus, Al, that’s…is this why you wouldn’t swim? Why were you hiding them? They’re beautiful.”
“They’re special,” he corrected. “A tribe did them for me. It was part of a ritual.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “Are you about to tell me you’re a shaman now?”
He smiled but didn’t laugh. “No, no bullshit like that. I’m still me. I can just…see things now. I see things for people.”
Science said no he didn’t, but this was Al and he’d never been an illogical person, so I would hear him out – another lesson from the movies, refusing to listen almost always ends in disaster. “See things how?”
“I see…things that are or were or could be,” was his answer. “Not the future, not really, but little parts of things that have happened or are happening or could happen. They tell me I’ll get better at it, be able to see more things more clearly, after I’ve had them longer.” The room was getting hot, and I wondered if the air conditioner had stopped working. Al was looking me in the eye, almost like he was demanding something from me although I didn’t know what it was. I felt…funny. And hot. “I saw that you were going to need me, that I needed to do something, so I came. I won’t be coming back again, though. This is the last time you’ll ever see me.”
I flattened my hands against his chest on a sudden impulse; the inked lines of the tattoos were hot to the touch. The scientific part of my mind wanted to find out more about that, but it was overridden by a suddenly much more demanding part and I leaned in and kissed him. There was a pressure inside me, building, almost hurting, but the more I kissed and touched him the more it eased. He seemed to be okay with that, he was definitely responding even though I was the one taking the active role, and although he never said a word through the entire thing I felt like he was, somehow, insisting that I keep going. It was almost like he was shouting demands at me without using words and I had no choice but to do as he wanted, even though that didn’t make any sense.
When I woke up, he was gone. As in all the way gone, packed up and left to go back to South America gone, didn’t even leave a note by the bed gone. Because of what we’d…all right, I’d done? On the afternoon of my mother’s funeral, with the best friend who was like a brother to me and who had never…I got into the shower and washed the evidence of what had happened off until my skin was raw, I got dressed, and I left the room feeling shamed by the messy sheets I had to leave behind. I asked the front desk and they said Al had left late the previous afternoon to catch his flight but had told them that I’d be using the room until morning and had left a note for the morning front desk staff asking them to please be very gentle with me because I’d just buried my mother and he had broken me.
I definitely felt broken, but I didn’t realize that he’d meant something else entirely for several months. First, because after what had happened just the thought of sex made me want to die, and second because I ran back to the university – not like I could stay home and face Pappi knowing what I’d done, even though he didn’t know and never would – and applied to re-present all four of my rejected dissertations as well as submitted the fifth one. Because I’d failed my mother once, horribly; I couldn’t do it again by not following the last piece of advice she’d given me. I also submitted a complaint to the university ombudsman’s office against the head of my dissertation committee, who had been very unprofessionally vocal about how much he didn’t like me and how he ‘would never be responsible’ for giving someone like me a PhD. I didn’t request that he be removed, I just asked that he not be in charge of making the decision on my papers, due to his bias, and that I be allowed the right to re-present them to the committee for the same reason.
The ombudsman investigated, decided in my favor, and not only had someone from their office present at all of my diss defenses, they made sure someone from the Dean’s office was present for all of them as well. The biased professor didn’t much like it and was as nasty and difficult as he could get away with being, but I stayed polite and ignored him until Defense #3, when he made a crack about my parents speaking English that had the dean choking on his coffee. This time I looked at the committee chair, who had turned bright red, and said, “My mother had a Masters in European Literature, and she taught English Lit at the local high school and a few auxiliary courses at the local college up until the year before she died. My father was an architect who worked in city planning, and he was the only one in the family who could speak any Spanish at all – they made him take a language class for work, for their diversity development initiative. And now I would like for you to clarify exactly what me being a fourth-generation Mexican American has to do with my grasp of the scientific principles my research is based upon, please.”
He withdrew the question, and I didn’t have to look behind me to know the dean was giving him a death glare. I kept the screen up, finished my defense, and thanked the committee when I was done. Three down, two to go.
My fourth defense passed, of course, and I was getting ready for the fifth when I got the phone call telling me Pappi was dead. I was ready to drop everything and go home, but Uncle Sherman told me not to. “Carlos, he’s been driving everyone nuts bragging about his boy having five doctorates,” he told me. “He’d come back from the dead and kill us all if you made a liar out of him now because of him being stupid enough to die before you were done. Finish up that last one and then come home, we have everything under control – you know he wanted to be cremated and that’s already done, so it’s not like we’re on a schedule.”
I didn’t sleep well that night, but I did sleep; I knew better than to try to attempt a defense without any. I didn’t tell anyone what was going on, I just went in there and gave it my all, and if my passionate fire was burning a little low I made up for it with focus and precision. The committee seemed a little startled by that, and once we were done the co-chair complemented me on my presentation. “I think this was the best defense so far for you, Dr. Espinoza.”
I couldn’t help it, I winced. “Thank you, ma’am.” I took a deep breath. “I would like to request that I be told whether my defense of my dissertation has been accepted or not by this afternoon, if it pleases the committee.”
“Why?” one of them asked suspiciously. “If this is about a job interview…”
“My father died yesterday, my flight leaves at six,” I interrupted him. “I’d like to know before I leave, if that’s possible. I don’t…” I bit my lip, got control of myself. “I’d really like to have one less thing to be worried about before I leave for home.”
The co-chair’s hand was over her mouth; she looked horrified. The chair raised an eyebrow at the ombudsman – who I knew was probably horrified too, since I hadn’t told him either – then exchanged glances with the rest of the committee and nodded slowly. “That is a valid request, Dr. Espinoza, and we will grant it. Come back in two hours and we’ll finish this up.”
“Thank you, sir,” I told him, then left the room and the building and took care of business around campus for an hour and a half before making my way back. I waited patiently until the committee called for me, I answered the questions they had regarding various points, and the only lapse I had was when one of them – the same suspicious one from before – asked if I had refrained from telling anyone what had happened until that particular time in hopes of swaying the committee’s decision. I looked him right in the eye. “Would you have?” I retorted bluntly. “The only reason I showed up today at all was because my uncle said Pappi…” I swallowed hard, “…said my father would come back from the dead to kick my ass if I abandoned this because of him being stupid enough to die before I finished it.” I swallowed again. “Sir.”
He just nodded, and I returned my attention to the chair. Who was nodding himself. “That was the last point anyone wanted clarification on,” he told me, and banged the little gavel he’d been toying with. “Your research and your dissertation have been accepted, Dr. Espinoza. We will file the decision with the university immediately. Congratulations…and on behalf of the committee and myself personally, our condolences for your loss. Have a safe flight.”
“Thank you,” I said. I could feel myself losing it. “Thank you, I…thank you.”
Thankfully, I made it out of the room and into the nearest bathroom before I threw up. When I came out, the ombudsman was waiting with someone from Student Services, and they helped me finish getting things together so I wouldn’t miss my flight. They also made sure that my apartment would be fine until I came back, and let me know that the dean’s office had approved my walking for all five PhDs at graduation in two months, but had granted me the option of having the presentation made in absentia due to the circumstances. I thanked everybody, even sent a written thank you back to the dean, and then I was on the way to the airport and, once there, I sat in my car in long-term parking and cried for half an hour because yes, most of those movie scientists are orphans…but I hadn’t wanted to be like them in that way, not ever.
After the funeral, the doctor from the hospital approached me. He told me about how Pappi had talked about me constantly…and then he offered me a job at the hospital, running the in-house lab. Turns out all my re-testing and the one good/bad catch – and the way I’d handled said catch – had gotten some attention, and the hospital had decided that they needed someone like me. So they were making an offer, because they knew thanks to Pappi that I was done with school now and that I’d have to be home for a while to straighten everything out. He left the offer with me.
I accepted it the next day. The lab supervisor job paid well enough and would keep me busy, but it left me time to take my time settling up my parents’ estate. Which it did, but once all the cleanup and packing and selling was finished I was stuck somewhere between bored and just plain dead in the water. The work I was doing at the hospital was plentiful and important but not challenging, and I racked up a lot of overtime doing it anyway because there just wasn’t anything else I wanted to do. I went back to the university and walked for my graduation, Uncle Sherman sitting in the audience in Pappi’s place, and I ducked questions afterwards about what I was going to do now because I honestly didn’t know. My fire had burned down to coals, barely glowing, and I just didn’t have it in me to network – not to mention, the one particular idiot on my dissertation committee had shot off his mouth to some of the recruiters he knew, so offers weren’t exactly pouring in.
Time passed. I found out – the hard way, although it was more like the can’t-get-hard way – what Al’s note had actually meant. I went to the doctor, I tried the little blue pills and the little green pills – nothing. And the fact that the pills wouldn’t work at all meant it wasn’t a psychological problem keeping me from…getting happy that way. But it wasn’t a physical problem either, as far as the doctor could tell everything was completely normal. I just didn’t work: I was broken. I dug out the note, which I had kept, and read it over and over again, trying to make sense out of the fact that Al had somehow done this to me and had made sure I would know he had – because he’d left a goddamn note that said so and told the hotel staff to be sure they gave it to me. It was illogical. It was unscientific. It was possible he’d done it to punish me for what had happened that afternoon, because what had happened had just been so completely wrong. But which didn’t explain why he hadn’t asked me to stop, why he’d actually been encouraging me to keep going…but explanations were something I wasn’t going to get, because Al’s mother had died too by that point and she’d been the only person who’d known where he was or how to contact him. And he’d known that. So he’d meant for the punishment to be permanent.
Something else, though, which turned out to be the part that really drove me crazy. He’d gotten a hotel room. He’d insisted I swim, wearing myself out, wearing out all the tears, while he sat in a chair by the pool and read a magazine, refusing to even take off his shirt. He’d taken me back up to the room in my swim trunks and told me not to bother getting dressed again yet, just to be comfortable. And then he’d taken off his shirt and showed me his tattoos and he was all I needed to do something and this is the last time you’ll ever see me. Had he seen it all happening? He’d said he could do that – and apparently that hadn’t been all he could do. But why would he do that, let it happen, let me do it, and then punish me for it…forever? I just couldn’t make sense of it, at all.
I eventually stopped trying, and I resigned myself to being alone. Because I was broken, I couldn’t be intimate with another person and there was no way I could explain to someone, to anyone, why I couldn’t. It was just easier, and it hurt less, if I didn’t think about it and just did science instead with what weak little embers I still had left. It never really stopped hurting, though, because sometimes after a really hard day I would dream about my mother…and she would never look at me, she couldn’t look at me, she would just stand there and cry.
After about four years, though, my fire finally starting to burn enough again that I was getting restless working at the hospital and the research I was doing on my own again wasn’t enough for me either, I got the letter. It was an offer from a small lab in a small town, they were missing a head scientist and they wanted me to take his place. I didn’t think much about why they might be missing their head scientist, because it could have been anything from a better job being offered elsewhere to just not liking small-town life. That, and they included a partial list of the projects they currently had open – I almost choked on my coffee reading it, and felt the old passion rekindle in a rush. If they were telling the truth, Night Vale had to be the most interesting place on the planet.
If they were telling the truth. So I checked, and they were – the checking itself didn’t get me any real information, but the vaguely threatening dark-suited guy with the sunglasses who came around because I’d been checking was more than happy to answer all my questions once he saw the letter. “It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity for someone like you,” he told me. “Probably just what you’ve always been looking for – I mean, the rest of the world is never going to use all those skills you have, but in Night Vale you should have plenty of opportunities. I’d jump on it.”
It probably should have worried me more that he wouldn’t show me his ID or give me a name other than ‘Smith’, or that he left via a black helicopter. I was too excited to care, and too busy composing my return letter to the lab in Night Vale telling them that of course I’d be interested in taking the position of head scientist, how soon did they want me out there?
I have to admit, I ran around like I was drunk on science for weeks after arriving in Night Vale. All of their projects had been stagnating, I stirred them back up. My team of four took direction well, took correction well, pretty much took everything well – and they all loved science! Not to mention, being overly dramatic in Night Vale didn’t appear to be anything unusual, so I wasn’t the weird one anymore.
That was the guy they called the Apache Tracker. I mean, if this guy had ever set foot on our university campus, the Ethnic Studies people would have lynched him just for the headdress.
I first saw Cecil in a crowd in the street. I had gone out to get something and was coming back when I saw the crowd and went to see what it was for – something relating to science was always a possibility. It turned out to be about local politics rather than anything I would be interested in, but while I was skirting the crowd to try to get around it a fierce scowl on someone’s face got my attention. It was a man about my age, wearing pinstriped dress slacks and a white button-down shirt with a high-class vest and a bright purple tie. His glasses, the frames at least, were purple too, and his hair was short and dark except for a thick lock of pure white that was falling down over one side of his forehead. He was the kind of pale that people get who work all day indoors, and the microphone in his hand and portable recorder slung over his shoulder marked him as some kind of reporter. He noticed me looking then and – inexplicably – blushed and started fussing with the recorder. But when I started to move away, I saw him glance back up at me.
I made it away from the crowd and got back to the lab, and I asked one of my team if they knew what was going on downtown. They didn’t, but they suggested that I should listen to the evening news broadcast with them to find out. Cecil, they said, would definitely know – if it had been really important, he might have even been there himself instead of sending an intern. The joke that followed about how dangerous it was to be one of Cecil’s interns went right over my head, but I had a suspicion that the man I’d seen might have been him.
So I listened to the radio that evening, and by the time the news was halfway over I knew the man I’d seen had been Cecil – because Cecil apparently mentioned me from time to time in his broadcasts, usually in embarrassingly glowing terms, so the blush suddenly made all too much sense. The ‘Voice of Night Vale’, as my team called him, had a crush on me. I wasn’t sure how he’d known what I looked like, since so far as I knew he’d never seen me before and I would have remembered seeing him, but whenever and however it had been it seemed like he’d liked what he’d seen.
Through force of habit I had managed to put that mostly out of my mind until one of our projects turned up some odd radiation readings around town and we all went out to trace them – and I ended up at the radio station. The receptionist at the front let me and my Geiger counter in, and I traced the radiation signature all the way up to the sound booth where Cecil was sitting, in an almost identical outfit to the one I’d last seen him in except that this time the tie and glasses were red. According to the meter, the place was swimming in radiation and he should have been dead just from sitting there. He wasn’t, though. He’d been getting ready to do the news and he’d been surprised to see me – pleased, but surprised and somewhat perplexed. I could tell he was blowing off what I was trying to tell him about the radiation and the need to evacuate the building, though, so I gave up and got out of there, and met up with my team, who’d had mostly the same experiences I’d just had. And then we all listened to the news and damned if Cecil didn’t make a joke out of the evacuation warning. Apparently there was someone in town who thought I was ‘overly dramatic’ after all.
Although, after listening to a few more broadcasts – turned out Cecil was the only radio announcer they had, so if he wasn’t on the air no one was – I realized that Cecil was usually so deadpan about even the most horrific news stories he was relating that my – all right, dramatic – entrance into his private sanctum with my noisy meter probably had been amusing as hell to him. And I wondered if that was what would crush his crush.
Nope, not a bit. I started seeing him more and more often, because he liked to report on what the two labs in town were doing if it was something he thought was interesting – although with our rival lab, the private-run one, he usually ended up making fun of them more than anything else. Eventually I started calling things in to him at the radio station if I thought they were important enough to be broadcast, and he always dutifully reported whatever I’d told him, usually verbatim but always with additional commentary. Oh, and he released a lot of surprisingly vitriolic comments about the local barber for cutting my hair, which I have to admit I sort of agreed with because I’d asked the guy for ‘just a trim’ and he’d cut it all off instead.
I also admit to being just a little worried when the barber disappeared and then showed back up a few days later out in the desert, wandering and completely out of his mind. I didn’t think Cecil had done it…but someone had, and I wasn’t sure whether I’d have felt better if it was someone doing Cecil a favor or someone who had a crush of their own on Cecil trying to do him one to get his attention.
I couldn’t deny that Cecil was attractive, or that his crush on me was kind of flattering aside from the overly-appreciative news mentions I kept getting. He wasn’t deadpan at all about those, once he really got to going he gushed like a valley girl. But in the five years since my encounter with Al I had devoted myself completely to science, because there wasn’t anything else I could do. Science had been my friend before, my buddy…but thanks to Al it had become my lover, too. And there was no way in hell I was going to try to explain that to someone who just might make a joke about it on the radio the next day.
So my relationship with Cecil proceeded in fits and starts, because I hadn’t wanted to start a relationship with him, I really hadn’t wanted to do it. I was starting to like him a lot more than I knew I should, and every time he looked at me with all that desire and yes, love, in his eyes it was like he was stabbing me in the heart. I wanted to love him back, I did, but I knew I couldn’t give him what he wanted and it just wouldn’t be fair to either of us. Mostly to him.
I started pursuing science harder than ever because of that…and it started failing me. The rules of the universe only applied in Night Vale when they felt like it, and they were starting to not feel like it more often than not. I kept trying. A five-headed dragon showed up in town and decided to run for mayor. The Apache Tracker left town for a few months and came back as an actual Apache who could only speak Russian. Weird shit kept happening in and around the dog park. And the City Council outlawed wheat. I was actually able to study some of the affected wheat, and sadly had to concur with the City Council that it all had to go – it was infected with a horribly pernicious fruiting-bodied fungus, we couldn’t keep it in town and letting anyone eat it was out of the question since cooking wouldn’t kill the spores.
And then one evening I was studying some pictures one of my people had taken of the ‘invading’ civilization that could be seen from the back of the Lane 5 pin retrieval in the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Park, and I realized that what I was seeing wasn’t what kept getting described on the radio. So I ran right over there because Teddy Williams, the bowling alley owner, had a militia going because he thought the civilization was getting ready to march in and attack us.
What he didn’t know was that if they’d tried it, we could have just stepped on them. He tried to stop me going in through the pin retrieval, I fought him off and told him what I thought about him – and yes, he was acting pretty deranged about the whole thing and had been for a while at that point – and then I ran down there and just stood in the middle of the city, which wasn’t even knee-high to me. I could see the tiny, tiny people coming out to look at me while I stood there telling the staring people in the bowling alley what they were actually seeing, and how long I theorized it had taken the tiny people to get up there where we could see them, and how they weren’t a threat to us.
And of course, that was when they shot me. I was so shocked I turned around to look, saw what looked like a tiny missile launcher and got nailed again, and then tried to get out of there and tripped on the rocks. I thought I heard Cecil’s voice saying something about ‘so much blood’, but before I could figure out what he was talking about everything went black.
The first thing I heard when I started to come to was a confusing murmur of voices, one of which was speaking what sounded like Russian. Apache Tracker, right. Another, closer voice seemed to be connected to the hands that were touching me, and that voice suddenly got very loud. “Goddamit, would you all shut up and make yourselves useful? He’s gonna be fine! So someone call the fucking radio station and tell them to tell Cecil he’s not dead!” Then the voice dropped again, muttering. “Hopefully he didn’t leave the booth and do something fucking stupid, like go running out to the goddamned woods to become a tree or something. Fucking idiots, standing around complaining – like he’s ever gone off the air before, for anything.”
The words crawled around in my head like caterpillars, gnawing on random thoughts until finally they started gnawing on each other and then it all connected. Cecil. Had gone off the air. Because he thought I was dead. But I wasn’t dead – obviously – and no one was telling Cecil that and if Cecil wasn’t on the air he might have left the booth and done something stupid.
Jesus fucking Christ. I opened his eyes and saw a blurry version of Teddy frowning down at me. “So I’m deranged, huh?” Teddy observed, raising what was probably one eyebrow but looked to me like two.
I sighed, which turned into a cough. “I…miscalculated,” I apologized. “I didn’t think their weapons would be that effective against us – they’re really, really tiny.”
Teddy snorted. “I’m just giving you shit – I wouldn’t have thought they were a threat either if I’d known how tiny they were, and I know from threats. Now man up while I finish fixing this head injury that scared the hell out of everyone – just a flesh wound, but it’s bleeding like crazy. I already did the others.”
It probably only took Teddy a minute or two to fix the head injury, but it felt to me like he was stabbing me in the eyes with a pair of screwdrivers and then rotating them for about half a hour. Which probably explained why I’d woken up feeling like someone had hit me in the stomach with an axe, too. Finally, though, it was done and he helped me sit up. A few things were the wrong colors but at least they weren’t blurry anymore, and although my lab coat had blood and holes and burns all over it I wasn’t bleeding anywhere anymore either. I decided not to ask him how he’d fixed it all; at this point I wasn’t feeling very curious, just relieved and sort of numb. “Thanks.”
“Welcome.” But Teddy sighed again, shaking his head. “The Apache Tracker was the one who pulled you out, rest of us were just frozen.”
I looked around, saw the plastic headdress on the ground, saw the blood. “He’s…”
“Dead – bled to death before anyone could get to him.” He shook his head. “I’m not sad about it, though – he went out doing a good thing. He went out at the top of his game, and it’s pretty much the only time there was a top to his game so that’s no bad thing.”
I was horrified. “He died saving me?”
“Yep.” Teddy looked me in the eye. “I think he knew, before it happened – he’s been spooky like that ever since he went away and came back changed. So don’t feel bad about it, Carlos. He did it on purpose, he meant to do it. And again, he went out on top – most of the townsfolk hated him, they don’t now.” He stood up, pulling me up with him, and then steadied me until I had my balance. “Go get a clean shirt out of the office, get out of those bloody clothes, and then go get something to eat, okay? You need protein to replace the blood you lost. And then…” He made a face. “Carlos, he went off the air; Cecil doesn’t do that, he’s never done that. Don’t…you can’t keep playing games with him, you just can’t.”
I nodded, feeling sick to my stomach – and not because I’d just almost been killed by a miniature civilization living under a bowling alley. “I wasn’t trying to – play games with him, that is,” I told him. “I care about him, a lot. I just…I’ll fix it. Tonight.”
I switched out my bloody clothes for one of Teddy’s flannel shirts, rolling up the sleeves and feeling better for the warm softness against my skin. Protein ended up being Arby’s, because it was right there and I was relatively certain they weren’t going to feed me something weird or poisonous, and I texted Cecil and told him I wanted to see him. I’d been listening to him on the radio while I ate in my car, listening to him beat himself up for hating the Apache Tracker when the man had saved ‘that which was most precious’ to him.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever been ‘that which was most precious’ to anybody before, ever, unless it was my parents. And they’d been gone for years.
I got out of the car and sat on the trunk, facing the road, waiting. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, to say, but hopefully it would come to me once I saw Cecil.
It did. Cecil still looked like he’d been crying, and something in his eyes was still haunted and hollow. And then he tried to be professional, to play the game I’d been playing with him for months to keep him at arms’ length…and I just broke. “After everything that happened…I just wanted to see you,” I said, the honesty of saying it doing something to me, breaking the hard, lonely part of me that I’d been trying to pretend didn’t hurt all this time. “I just wanted to see you.”
We spent the next hour sitting on the trunk of the car, just looking up at the stars twinkling away in the devouring void, not needing to speak because there was nothing that needed to be said. The relieved weight of his head on my shoulder said it all for me, and I felt like the hand I had resting on his knee had never been more exactly where it should be, ever.
I’d been worried before, and not just about the awful, shameful secret I still wasn’t ready to share with him. Half the population of Night Vale was crazy, and half of those people were beyond crazy and all the way to being lunatics. I’d fought to keep hold of the science my whole life had been devoted to…and then I’d found out about the clocks not being real, and I’d realized that I would probably never leave this crazy valley because the world I’d left to come to Night Vale probably wasn’t someplace I could get back to anymore. Cecil’s reminiscence about his youthful road trip to ‘Europe’ had confirmed that at the very least. Night Vale might be an island of insanity, but it was afloat in an ocean of horror and horror was probably all I was going to find if I ever did manage to leave.
Staying, though…I wrapped my arm around Cecil’s back and watched the void with him, watched the stars that whirled through it in patterns that defied over a thousand years of astrological science. Staying had its perks, and they were good ones. Or at least they would be, until the time came when I finally had to tell him the truth. And after that…well, after that, jumping out into the ocean of horror might not sound like such a bad idea, because I wouldn’t need to worry about getting back.
I never would have thought, in that moment, that loving Cecil wasn’t the end of everything for me. And I never would have dared to imagine that he could be the beginning.