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Carlos – oh, Carlos! Carlos with his hair as colorlessly black as the void that awaits us after death, Carlos with his eyes as dark as long-mummified skin, Carlos with his timeless, rough-hewn good looks! Carlos with his real, visible, non-holographic body! Carlos, oh, Carlos! – Carlos is sitting on the steps of Cecil’s apartment block when Cecil returns from work, jittering his knee and chewing at the cap of a biro.
“Good evening!” calls Cecil, and Carlos jolts to his feet at once. His white shirt is plain – no attention is distracted from his face! – and unbuttoned at the top – except for the attention that goes to the solid, beautiful lie of his chest! – and his collar’s half-flipped and his expression’s anxious, and it suits him. Ah, Carlos! – what wouldn’t suit him? An Iron Maiden, perhaps, or a very long side fringe.
“The third storey of your building,” says Carlos, low and urgent and divine. “It’s not there.”
“It’s not?” says Cecil.
“I saw it as soon as I turned onto your street,” says Carlos, while Cecil frowns up at the gap between the floors, and the wide blue expanse of sky, and the distant trailing flame tail of a phoenix idly pinwheeling back and forth across the white glare of the sun. “It didn’t – appear to be present, so I went inside, up as high as I could get, but the stairs end, they just end in a, a matrix, this grid formation, this sort of – crosshatching of a million tiny squares overlaid on reality where the ceiling should be, with the sky showing through them quite clearly – and it rippled a little when I got close, but –”
Cecil pushes back the glass door to the building and holds it, courteously, while Carlos follows him in. Carlos is rumpling his hair and staring about him in a manner that’s really rather wild-eyed; wild-eyed and gorgeous, and so very, very scientific! “You can see the floor above,” says Carlos – so frantic! “If you look up, through the grid, you can see the same grid – up where the floor of the fourth floor should be, you can see everything, furniture just resting on it, in the sky – I saw what’s her name – military uniform? Spiders?”
“Miss Elkins?”
“Yes! I saw her in her kitchen, just – walking on the grid, like it didn’t bother her –”
“Well!” says Cecil. “There’s no reason it should, if she’s been keeping an eye on her lunar calendar. We’ll have to take the elevator, by the way,” he adds, and Carlos says, “You live above that gap,” and Cecil says, “Trust me, Carlos,” and Carlos must do, for the soothing tones of his sonorant voice cease and a hush lowers down around them in the lobby.
Cecil plucks an ink pen from his satchel and draws, carefully, on his left palm: an eyeless figure in a sundress, a sliced apple, a glyph he was taught when he signed his lease to reproduce accurately and not to question. He tucks the pen behind his ear; he presses his hand flat to the elevator callpad; he closes his eyes and he says: “Tomorrow is another day. But, heck, I’d rather it was another box of Dunkin Donuts instead!”
The elevator doors slide back with a whoosh of stale cool air.
“It’s a sponsorship deal,” says Cecil, as tally marks scratch themselves into the steel elevator walls and the floors tick past. “For small businesses especially, there’s a lot of money to be made partnering up with unspeakable entities borne of mortals’ dread! And, you know, I say what I’ve always said: so long as the community benefits, who are we to take issue?”
“We’ve just gone up through the third storey,” says Carlos. He rasps one hand down the lovingly close-shorn stubble on his firm, beautiful jaw. “We’ve just gone up through the storey that isn’t there.”
“It’s really more of an advertising stunt than anything,” agrees Cecil. The elevator pings. “But long live Night Vale, that’s what I say. Long live the capitalist hegemony! Would you like some dinner, while you’re here?”
“You don’t even know why I’m here,” says Carlos.
“Use of the word ‘why’ within the city limits was punishable by placement of a leech to the generative regions for a period of ten full minutes,” says Cecil, ruefully, “right up till the local kindergarten complained to the City Council about the obstacles this posed to children both learning their ABCs and questioning the seemingly arbitrary moral codes enforced on society by generation upon generation of our advantaged, frequently hypocritical ancestors. And – like luminescent, ectoplasmic waking nightmares – old habits die hard.” His station keys jangle; the slice of elegantly carved bone that opens his front door doesn’t. “Anyway, I don’t mind in the slightest. It’s lovely to see you, whatever the reason! Do come in.”
-----
Cecil undoes the padlock on his highest cupboard, and with a soft damp dishcloth he gently wipes off the inexplicably-accumulated smears of old blood from his best china. Sealed with a fine glaze, the intricate pointillist design shows the bunkhouse of an eighteenth century leper colony, the calm swells of a warm Mediterranean sea just visible through its sternly barred windows. Next door Carlos is talking, and pacing, and radiating such splendor Cecil wouldn’t be surprised if it registered on Carlos’s own science detectors.
What Carlos is saying right now, to the restless pad pad pad of his own feet crisscrossing Cecil’s haphazardly chalk-scuffed living room carpet, is: “The antenatal group invited me to their coffee morning.”
“It must be said,” says Cecil, so he does, “those ladies are very keen on eligible young bachelors.”
“I went,” says Carlos, “I went, I thought they’d want me to talk about – y’know, pregnancy, trimesters, delivery – but they – Cecil, are you hearing this? They gave me this little pot, this little glass pot with a little green cap and said, here you go, this is zucchini and brake fluid chutney, now strip – and rub yourself down in its delicious spices –”
“Did you do it?”
“No! God, no. There was this look in their eyes, like – like –” His footsteps falter and hearing the skip in their confident beat drops Cecil’s stomach like a careless surgeon.
“There were rumors about the women of the antenatal group painted in dark treacle onto the front wall of the Sandy Groves Medical Consultation Center a few weeks ago,” he calls through, hurriedly, and selects a ladle from the rack of shining kitchen implements above the stove. “The message of those high sticky words was that all pregnant Night Vale women experience intense simultaneous cravings for human flesh, lightly seasoned. We sent an intern down to investigate, of course, but Sully – poor Sully! noble Sully! – well, he’s buried below the vending machine in the break room, now, what’s left of him – which was mainly the inconveniently gristly bits, and his hollowed, sucked-dry bones.”
“No police investigation?” says Carlos.
“What’s there to investigate?” says Cecil, briskly twisting at the pepper grinder. “We all know he was devoured.”
“Right,” says Carlos. The rich, resonant tones of his voice sound a little weaker. A little less like dark, glossy mahogany wall-paneling; a little more like an elegantly-carved desk in need of a quick lick of varnish. “Right.”
The table Cecil tends to reserve for investigative reporting research is stacked with papers, and ringbinders and printouts and stone tablets and arcane, encrypted filing systems. He pushes them tidily aside and lays down two soup bowls. The minutely-detailed renditions of eighteenth century lepers glazed around the rims stare up in frozen, eternal misery. Perhaps he should light some candles, for atmosphere – or smear his cheeks with ashes in three symmetrical, parallel stripes, for atmosphere – or ululate to the vast blank face of the moon, just quickly, for atmosphere –
No! “Toucan soup!” announces Cecil, before he can fret too much, and wipes his palms quickly down the sides of his stylish-though-affordable pants to relieve them of any excess moisture, just in case.
Carlos is standing at the open window with his hands propped down on the sill and his enviably, luxuriously coiffed head bowed. The distant blatting of Night Vale High School’s marching band practice carries in the still evening air: the rhythmic shouts of the color guard, the savage, whooping cries of the drum major, the steady beat of drumsticks on necrotic drumskin. It’s nostalgic, in its way, or Cecil feels it might be, if his memories of his own early teen years weren’t largely white noise and pulsing visions of bloodied, moldy soil.
“Toucan soup,” says Carlos.
“Fresh from my imaginary ration packets,” agrees Cecil. “I’ve had them ever since the town’s last nuclear scare, and I thought, well, I’ve been saving them for a special occasion – and here you are, and here I am, and what occasion could be more special?”
“Okay,” says Carlos. He sounds weary to the bones, to his perfect, structurally-sound bones, but he turns from the window, and he rubs his forehead, and then he smiles: and it feels like watching the colossal soundless bursts of white light illuminate the endless dim plains of the desert during the clandestine explosives testing Cecil doesn’t know about, and certainly doesn’t think about, and definitely never watches wistfully from his bedroom window. “Yeah, okay. Imaginary toucan soup. It sounds – great, it sounds really great. It does. Thanks, Cecil.”
“My pleasure,” says Cecil, and his heart swells warmly, uncontrollably up inside him like a healthy fetus in the womb, or a benign tumor – a compassionate tumor – a loving tumor! The soup is delicious, and the company is exquisite, and the tan line that is revealed to run confidently across the bridge of Carlos’s handsome nose when he slips off his glasses and lays them down beside his bowl, on a little stack of research documents encrypted in Triple Dutch – the tan line is perfect! Cecil tells him so.
Carlos is talking about the elementary school but he stops anyway and looks up, startled.
“Please, continue,” Cecil says, hastily. “I just – it just sort of slipped out. You know how it is.”
“Well,” says Carlos – and those eyes! So dark, so liquid, so inviting, like molten milk chocolate – and that’s a vat Cecil would dive right into headfirst. Oh, he’d scald, and he’d suffocate, and he’d drown as he boiled alive, but he’d savor every moment of it, in the sweet candy inferno of Carlos’s eyes! – “Thank you,” says Carlos, oh Carlos, “that’s – I appreciate it.”
Cecil thinks this is probably almost definitely a date.
“I was counting the doors,” continues Carlos, and Cecil props his chin in his hand and listens, “because they’ve got more doors than rooms, in the elementary school, but also more rooms than doors – the doors change, if you don’t keep an eye on them, and if you do keep an eye on them then they change anyway, but with this, sort of, this unearthly drawn-out scraping sound – that’s why I was there, anyway, and I saw there were balloons in the gym hall all knotted together in clusters, so I asked the vice principal if there was a party, or – or a celebration, festivities, end of term, perhaps –”
Carlos waves his spoon for agitated emphasis, and sometimes he whaps it on the edge of the table to really underline a point, and Cecil really makes an effort to interject only when it’s absolutely necessary: which is not often, because Carlos’s monologues are as perfect as the rest of him, and he is content to sip soup and listen.
“– and she said they were running a competition for the kids to fill in speech balloons, so I said, you know – all that’s for the winner, is it? And she said no, those were the speech balloons. And then she took me into the gym and popped one of the balloons and there was this screaming – this nightmare of a sound, like a kid, like a child – and then I started popping more, and they all had voices, every single balloon, the gym hall filled with screaming and sobbing and children just talking – their voices recorded in the balloons, saying the most horrific things –”
“And the children themselves, when you met them – they were silent? Fear-stricken?”
“Yes!” says Carlos, and then he looks a little embarrassed by the admirable intensity of his own passion, and he lays down his soup spoon. “Silent, all of them, and just – just the balloons screaming. With the voices of the children.”
Cecil laughs a fond little chuckle of affectionate reminiscence. “Well, it wouldn’t be Sports Day without the stolen voices of newly mute children shrieking raw, incomprehensible elegies of loss from the brightly-colored trackside decorations, would it?”
“It wouldn’t?” says Carlos.
“Oh, Carlos!” says Cecil. “Of course it wouldn’t! You might know all about science, and beauty, and certain portions of the musical history of the twentieth century declared undesirable, unmentionable, and nonexistent within our little town – but you didn’t win Night Vale community radio’s Most All-Round Alluringly Enigmatic, Beautiful-Outside-And-In Outsider Contest by being a Night Vale local, did you?”
“I wasn’t aware I’d taken part in such a contest,” says Carlos, after a moment.
“You did,” says Cecil, “and you won by an absolute landslide. I don’t like to toot my own horn, but working tirelessly at the heart of our community – as I do! – means people tend to listen when I crouch behind them whispering your name into their ears on one low, sibilant note.”
“Well – thank you. Thanks. I’m very flattered,” says Carlos, after another moment that stretches out and out and out. The barrier runes across the open windows are starting to glow, dim mauve pentagrams flickering neon in the gathering twilight, permanently inscribed into the very air itself. “Say – I called round for a reason, you know.”
“Hm?” says Cecil, who’s wondering what shade of ribbon Carlos’s winner’s medal should be strung on to look best against his skin – his shining, democratically-merited medal! – his coarse-haired, entirely opaque skin! – and letting Carlos’s words wash smoothly by him, like flash flooding from the year of the blood rains: warm and soothing, and only slightly metallic.
Carlos coughs a delightfully gruff little cough and says, “I intended to ask if you’d like to discuss seismology over dinner some time. And then half your building vanished, and then you – well, you beat me to it, so – perhaps we could do it again? Go somewhere? Talk about – science?”
“The staff at the Sunset Bistro are small and iridescent with heads shaped roughly like teardrops,” Cecil says, without stopping even to think about how foolish the recommendation he’s making is, “and all the food is made of elaborately sculpted tinfoil.”
“Well – then somewhere else,” says Carlos. He props the finely-turned joints of his elbows on the table and leans in, toward Cecil, whose heart is pounding. He feels as though he has as little control over what is coming out his mouth as he did last Thanksgiving, when every last townsperson spent the day laboriously pulling intricately, impossibly knotted shoelaces up from the deep damp depths of their throats. “You said it, I’m the outsider here. Where d’you recommend?”
“I’ve heard things about Vander’s Kebabs and Grill,” Cecil says at once – and why? Why say that? Vander’s Kebabs and Grill is terrible! He lays down his spoon and then he picks it right back up and the pentagrams chalked onto the carpet beside the table are glowing a little too, now, vibrating with an eerie white light that’s usually comforting, when he’s not almost trembling anxiously enough to match them. “Things about the venom sack in the left claw of every male platypus. I heard they have one, male platypuses. I heard that from the manager as I walked past. He opened the door and yelled it out at me as his eyeballs turned the deep, rich purple of fine ancient Chinese silk and his hair began to evaporate from his scalp. That’s what I’ve heard.”
“Somewhere else, then. Even here – there’s got to be somewhere in Night Vale that’ll let a couple of guys in and serve them edible food and not put flies in it, or be aliens, or – or glow, or dissolve into the fryer, or write up the menus only in Ancient Sanskrit, or –”
“There’s an Applebees on Desert Grove Lane,” says Cecil, and Carlos beams, as though to show his appreciation for Cecil’s incomparably ready and all-encompassing local knowledge, “but it doesn’t exist in any dimension our puny human minds can comprehend.”
They fall quiet. The increasingly rapid vibrations of the chalky pentagrams beside them do not. “Arby’s –?” suggests Carlos, after a moment, and: “Arby’s,” Cecil agrees at once, gratefully. “The menus are in Sanskrit, but they provide optional translations into English, Spanish, Greater Armenian, or smoke signals – they put the customer first, at Arby’s, especially if the customer is capable of independently generating great volumes of mud.”
“It sounds perfect,” says Carlos.
“You should know,” says Cecil.
An attempt at washing up is made, but it is interrupted by a wraith with an unhinged jaw and ethereal arms lathered to the elbows in dish soap: it chivvies Cecil out from the kitchen and back into the living room, where Carlos hurriedly removes Cecil’s Night Vale Municipal Dump souvenir clock from his ear and sets it back down, in its place on the shelf above the television.
“My clocks are your clocks,” Cecil informs him. “Listen away!”
“I’ll be sure to,” says Carlos. “Thank you.” He smells like fresh snap peas and his smile is a handsome crooked curve that speaks wordlessly, but eloquently – and beautifully – of perfection, and warm-heartedness, and hard-working commitment to science and all related scientific pursuits. “I’m not sure this isn’t a pointless question, but are you going to be – broadcasting this, tomorrow? Our evening?”
“Sure!” says Cecil, and carefully sidesteps the pentagrams as he crosses to him. “Unflinching, hard-hitting journalism with no compromises is what my listeners have come to expect from me. Here – you’ll like this.” He pushes the window open wider and – his imagination? no! – for a series of oh-so-articulate lines of concentration crease Carlos’s expression in a frown and they stand, shoulder to shoulder at the narrow window, and they listen, to the distant but now-audible hum of unfathomable technologies and unidentified hovering objects rotating slowly through the vast dark skies, their taillights flickering, red and white and ultraviolet. It’s science, probably, Cecil thinks; but it’s also officially invisible to anyone who hasn’t yet donated their mandatory monthly cubic foot of body hair, and Cecil hasn’t, yet, and going by the dark, divine waves sweeping back from Carlos’s temples nor has he – so the whole thing is quite miraculous, really!
“Professionally speaking,” says Carlos, “I can’t endorse miracles.” But then he pushes his shoulder against Cecil’s own, and laughs: and concedes that Cecil might just have a good deal to teach him about the – unique brand of professionalism, called for by Night Vale.
“Demanded by Night Vale,” says Cecil, “violently and annually.”
“I’m already learning,” says Carlos. “Thanks, Cecil.”