The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe Read online

  DEDICATION

  To Ron Fink and to Louis Nettleship

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  FOREWORD BY MAUREEN JOHNSON

  INTRODUCTION BY JEFFREY CRANOR

  EPISODE 26: “Faceless Old Woman”

  EPISODE 27: “First Date”

  EPISODE 28: “Summer Reading Program”

  EPISODE 29: “Subway”

  EPISODE 30: “Dana”

  EPISODE 31: “A Blinking Light Up on the Mountain”

  EPISODE 32: “Yellow Helicopters”

  EPISODE 33: “Cassette”

  EPISODE 34: “A Beautiful Dream”

  EPISODE 35: “Lazy Day”

  EPISODE 36: “Missing”

  EPISODE 37: “The Auction”

  EPISODE 38: “Orange Grove”

  EPISODE 39: “The Woman from Italy”

  EPISODE 40: “The Deft Bowman”

  EPISODE 41: “Walk”

  EPISODE 42: “Numbers”

  EPISODE 43: “The Visitor”

  EPISODE 44: “Cookies”

  EPISODE 45: “A Story About Them”

  EPISODE 46: “Parade Day”

  EPISODE 47: “Company Picnic”

  EPISODE 48: “Renovations”

  EPISODE 49: “Old Oak Doors”

  DISPARITION MUSIC CORNER

  LIVE SHOW: “The Debate”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  PRAISE FOR WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE: A NOVEL

  ALSO BY JOSEPH FINK & JEFFREY CRANOR

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  FOREWORD

  WELCOME TO THE GREAT GLOWING COILS OF THE UNIVERSE: WELCOME to Night Vale Episodes, Volume 2 by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, a book experience. My name is Maureen Johnson, a book person, and I have been asked to guide you into the warm water* of this second volume of Welcome to Night Vale episodes.

  One might presume that the reader of volume two of the collected Welcome to Night Vale episodes might have read—or at least possess and perhaps refuse to consume—volume one. But I will not assume. I am here to guide, or forward!, your progress. I’m going to tell you what’s going on.

  Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast. These are the episodes of that podcast. The episodes in volume one were the first season. The episodes you are about to read (or possess and perhaps refuse to consume) came later. The podcast arrives at certain points in time, but a book—a book can come whenever. A book waits. A book is patient. A book will never crawl off the shelf while you sleep and walk toward you on the edges of its cover in that weird, hunched way that bats walk. Books just aren’t like that. So if you want to read this volume before the other—it’s up to you. Why not? Dip in. Dip out. Read at random. Read in order. YOU DECIDE. Books are the enemy of time.

  If you listen to the podcast you will notice one very particular thing: the sounds. In the podcast, Cecil and The Gang talk to you. They go on and on and on. Now listen to this book. Is it making any sounds? No?* Yes?† It’s no, isn’t it?‡ That’s because books are not podcasts. Podcasts are pretty new, so we never had to explain this before, but now it’s the first thing we tell people.

  Fear not. The silence will soon be filled by voices in your head. As you go through the book, you may start to hear the podcast again. You won’t be hear-hearing them—you’ll be read-hearing them. Which is totally different. It’s not hearing at all. Do you follow me? Take jet skis for example. They aren’t jets, and they aren’t skis, but somehow they are jet skis. Books are a lot like that. YOU ARE THE PODCAST NOW.

  What’s extra nice about this volume is that you get commentary from Jeffery Cranor and Joseph Fink, as well as from the Night Vale performers. They will explain what they were thinking when they created and performed these words. I have had the distinct pleasure and privilege of appearing in some Night Vale episodes as Intern Maureen. (I even talk about this in this book, in the introduction to “Old Oak Doors.” You don’t have to go and look for this now. I promise you, it’s there.§) I will repeat one sentiment I expressed in that commentary: the entire Night Vale crew are among the most thoughtful, talented, and lovely people you could ever hope to meet. Night Vale is the circus we dream of running off to join. The fact that Night Vale is so popular proves that something undeniably good is going on in the world.

  In sum, this is not a podcast but a book of a podcast. The voices you hear aren’t real in the same way that jet skis are jet skis. We’ve all joined a circus. Also, I was an intern in Night Vale but I am not an intern. I am a book person and this is a forward to a book, which is yours to read or not read, as you choose. You may choose at any time, and books operate out of time so you may choose out of time as well.

  You follow?

  Excellent.

  Now please complete this short quiz to demonstrate your understanding.

  1. This is a:

  a. podcast

  b. book

  c. jet ski

  2. The voices you hear are:

  a. real

  b. not real

  c. getting louder and more insistent

  3. Night Vale is:

  a. a circus

  b. a podcast

  c. a jet ski

  4. Books are the enemy of:

  a. time

  b. Cecil

  c. the people

  5. This is volume ________ in a series of ________.

  a. two, that number you see in the mirror when the lights are off

  b. six hundred, five hundred

  c. twelvety, terrible mistakes

  Fill in the blank:

  6. You possess this book. What do you do first? Answer in the form of a statement: ________________

  7. You do not possess this book. Now what? Answer in the form of a question: ________________

  8. Cecil Baldwin is the voice of Night Vale, but we have established there are no voices in this book. Who is reading this now? Answer in a whisper.

  Finished?

  Very good. Now pass this book to the person to your left for grading. If there is no person to your left, you may keep this book and continue reading. Or you may simply continue to possess it and never explore its contents. I am not here to tell you what to do. I am just here to forward.

  Bookishly,

  —Maureen Johnson, New York, 2016*

  * Not water. The first things you should learn about books is that they’re not water. At least, NOT RIGHT NOW.

  * Good.

  † Run.

  ‡ See previous footnote if this statement is false.

  § I’m just being polite. You should go look.

  * As previously discussed, this is a book, so putting in a year is an act of folly.

  INTRODUCTION

  PEOPLE ASK: HOW DID NIGHT VALE BECOME SO POPULAR?

  The short answer is: Tumblr.

  The long answer is: I don’t know.

  I mean, I do know, but it’s in the same way I know how gravity works or what peanut butter tastes like or how blue is a different color from red (spoiler alert). It involves some logic, some intuition, some reverse engineering, and a lot of wild gesticulation.

  When we posted our first episode, we had fifty total downloads the first week, which seems like the grand total of all the friends who know me, Joseph, and Cecil. That number grew over the next couple of months into the hundreds. As we put out two episodes a month, each one had more downloads its first week than the previous. And we reached the low thousands by our half-year mark.

  There’s no way the three of us knew a thousand people total. We had strangers in our audience who
listened for a reason beyond chummy obligation—a quantitative measure of true artistic success!

  Our hope was that by our one-year anniversary (June 15, 2013) we would reach 100,000 total downloads over all twenty-five episodes. And we achieved that. We, in fact, beat it pretty good. We had 150,000 total downloads.

  When you make theater and dance for a living, you get excited when the audience outnumbers the cast on stage. (“Please let there be at least six people tonight! Please let there be—oh good, those people I barely know from work came!”) So it’s hard to process what 150,000 downloads even means, especially when you can’t even see them. They’re just abstract numbers and a small handful of nice e-mails. (At this point we still had no idea what Tumblr was.)

  But we were giddy. We were regularly in the iTunes Top 200 comedy podcasts. Sometimes we would have a bit of a surge and jump briefly ahead of some of the greats hovering in the twenty to fifty range: Stop Podcasting Yourself; How Was Your Week; Stuff You Should Know; My Brother, My Brother and Me; Comedy Bang Bang, etc. It was great. We were proud.

  We had no idea what was happening.

  Then July 2013 came around. I was in Astoria, Oregon, vacationing with my extended family: aunts, cousins, nieces, nephews—people I rarely get to see. My cousin Ryan said, “I saw you guys passed Marc Maron on the charts.” “Oh, we haven’t done that yet,” I was quick to explain. My other cousin, Ashley, said, “I’m pretty sure you did.” We each raced to our phones. And there Night Vale was: #2, just behind This American Life, and just ahead of WTF with Marc Maron.

  Then my server crashed, because we were still hosting this supposedly tiny project on my cheap, personal website.

  Okay, so remember that in our first twelve months, we had 150,000 downloads. In our thirteenth month alone, we had 2.5 million downloads. Then in August 2013 alone, we had 8.5 million downloads. And we were ahead of This American Life at #1 for four straight months. And people would say “you’re famous,” and there would be fan art and backlash and tons of e-mails, but I still worked as a database manager for Film Forum. I really liked it there. It’s a great institution, a really good job.

  I was, in a way, trying to keep Night Vale a secret, because I wanted my life to stay as it was. My whole life in theater was “please come to my show” and “here’s a postcard” and “I can comp you in, please please someone see this.” And now, here was success being handed to me. No, not handed, thrust upon me. No, not upon, into. Stabbed. I was being repeatedly stabbed with success. It was 50 percent elation, 25 percent confusion, 25 percent certain I was dead.

  I Googled “Night Vale” to find some explanation for where these millions of downloads were coming from. Surely some major television network had told everyone to listen to our show. Nope. We searched Twitter for mentions. We found nothing that would indicate such a surge in popularity. We had comic book–style interrobangs above our heads that whole summer.

  Then a friend of Cecil’s said, “Hey, Cecil. You should search your name on Tumblr.” Boom. Night Vale was everywhere on Tumblr. Fan art. Fan fiction. Slash fiction. Arguments over canon. Lovefests over how cute Cecil and Carlos were. Heck Yeah Tamika Flynn. And so on. We were no longer giddy. We were . . . um . . . errr . . . [wild gesticulation].

  “How did you do it? How did you make such a successful thing?” We’re not marketers or demographics experts. We’re just writers who’ve never had more than a couple hundred people ever watch or read or listen to anything we’ve ever created. Honestly, we made a successful thing in the exact same way we made every other nonsuccessful thing we’d done prior.

  Here are a few things I think contributed to the show’s popularity, though.

  One: I think we wrote a good story. That’s not bragging. At this point in my life, I feel like I’m a good writer. I’m not saying I can guarantee bestsellers or that other people will like my work, but that I know mostly what I’m doing. Joseph and I have been writing and creating (and Cecil has been acting) long enough to know what is good art. Good art is, of course, no guarantee of popular or critical success, but it is almost certainly a prerequisite for those things.

  You can always argue subjective quality of art, but there are quite a few objective measurements of art as well. We put out a show twice a month, on time. It is of consistent length and format. We consider limitations of the medium, universe continuity, social issues, and we have a thorough editing schedule and process.

  Two: Episode 25, “First Date,” was posted on June 15, 2013. In this episode, we see the culmination of the relationship between host Cecil Palmer and Carlos the scientist. Many fans have told us that this relationship means so much to them.

  Quite a bit of popular fiction (whether book or movie or television) features teased-out will-they-won’t-they same-sex relationships.* These couples are drawn close but never allowed to get together as a loving couple. Joseph, Cecil, and I were more interested in a couple that falls in love without getting hung up on outdated hetero-assumptive conditions.

  Combine this with the fan fiction community on Tumblr, where many fans had been writing Cecil/Carlos slash fiction, creatively narrating these two men together before they were canonically together. And then, bam, they’re not heterosexual, and they’re in love. It’s canon. Tumblr explodes into flower-crowns and Arby’s logos.

  Three: No one else was doing what we were doing at the time. The Thrilling Adventure Hour is the one exception I can think of, but their show was primarily a live show that was recorded and then distributed in segments via podcasting platforms. (Note: The TAH folks were crazy helpful when we first started touring live shows. We did a couple of crossover shows with those guys, which were great fun.) But as far as podcasts go, there weren’t any long-form fiction serials in early 2012, and certainly none that were like Night Vale.

  Ultimately, though, the answer to why a thing gets popular is “who knows?” I mean, once it is popular, it’s easy to come up with all kinds of reasons. Really though, we were successful from the moment we began because we were making a thing we liked and respected with people we liked and respected. We are still doing this. It just involves live show tours, novels, scripts books, starting a podcast network, etc., now.

  But even if, four years later, it were the same fifty or so people listening from episode one, we’d still be doing this. We’d have different day jobs than we have now, but we’d be pleased to be making art we loved with people we loved. That’s really the only kind of success you have control over.

  —Jeffrey Cranor, cowriter of Welcome to Night Vale

  * This was true when I wrote this introduction. I hope it is not still true in whatever future time you live in.

  EPISODE 26:

  “FACELESS OLD WOMAN”

  JULY 1, 2013

  GUEST VOICE: MARA WILSON

  I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO BE SCARY.

  There’s no question that I was an intense little kid, but there was never anything scary about me. My earliest memories are of being surrounded by grown-ups and cool big kids. I wanted to be one of them, powerful and intimidating. I knew I wasn’t. I couldn’t do all the things by which I judged people to be grown up: I was afraid to watch scary movies, to go on roller coasters, to cross the street by myself. They weren’t. They were free, they were brave, and worst of all, they got to know everything.

  I had to find my own way. I listened in on every conversation within earshot. I went through my brother’s backpacks and my mother’s purses. I’d often get in trouble, but I couldn’t help myself. Other people’s business was just more interesting than my own.

  When I got a little older, having successfully leveraged my middle-child syndrome into a somewhat successful child acting career, people would ask me if I was anything like the characters I played. The answer was usually yes. Superficially, they were all like me. I was a little girl, my characters were all little girls. Most of them like to read and use big words. Some of them were mischievous, and had a bit of my desire to learn everything
, to get in on whatever it was the grown-ups and other kids were talking about. It was never the driving need in them that it was in me.

  There’s only been one character who has that same drive. She’s nothing like me. She doesn’t care about scary movies or roller coasters, and she doesn’t need to cross the street. But she’s everywhere, and she knows how I feel, and she understands. She knows and she understands more than anyone.

  And there’s no way I would have ever had this chance if Joseph, Jeffrey, Meg, Cecil, and the whole Night Vale crew hadn’t let me tag along. The cool big kids have given me what I always wanted.

  —Mara Wilson, Voice of the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home

  Trumpets playing soft jazz from out of the dark desert distance. They come tomorrow. It is too late for us.

  WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE.

  Did you know there’s a faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home? It’s true. She’s there now. She’s always there, just out of your sight. Always just out of your sight.

  Because you cannot see her, you were probably completely unaware that this woman likes to sift through photos of you and your loved ones. She softly touches each face as if wishing it were her own, or perhaps claiming it as her own, or perhaps simply cursing that person. It’s hard to say. You’ve never seen her doing this.

  The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home does lots of things. Ever wonder why your Web browser’s history is filled with Bing searches for (quote) pictures of dead wolves or (quote) the melting point of birds? Or why sometimes your shower drain gets clogged with organ meats or why sometimes you hear crying from behind the walls? Or scratching at the front door? Or you awaken to find long silver hairs on the pillow next to you?

  Or maybe you’ve never noticed any of those things. You’ve lived your life to this point completely oblivious to this old woman who has no face. And truth be told, I think she’s probably harmless. But maybe you shouldn’t sleep in your home anymore. Just in case.

  Ladies and gentlemen, Dana has continued to send me texts from beyond the tall, black fences of the Dog Park. Even though the Dog Park is forbidden to citizens and their dogs, Dana managed to get in and is now trapped there for who knows how long.