The Buying of Lot 37 Read online

  Dedication

  To the cast and crew of Welcome to Night Vale

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword by Dessa

  Introduction by Jeffrey Cranor

  Episode 50: “Capital Campaign”

  Episode 51: “Rumbling”

  Episode 52: “The Retirement of Pamela Winchell”

  Episode 53: “The September Monologues”

  Episode 54: “A Carnival Comes to Town”

  Episode 55: “The University of What It Is”

  Episode 56: “Homecoming”

  Episode 57: “The List”

  Episode 58: “Monolith”

  Episode 59: “Antiques”

  Episode 60: “Water Failure”

  Episode 61: “BRINY DEPTHS”

  Episode 62: “Hatchets”

  Episode 63: “There Is No Part 1: Part 2”

  Episode 64: “WE MUST GIVE PRAISE”

  Episode 65: “Voice Mail”

  Episode 66: “Worms . . .”

  Episode 67: “[Best Of?]”

  Episode 68: “Faceless Old Women”

  Episode 69: “Fashion Week”

  Episode 70A: “Taking Off”

  Episode 70B: “Review”

  Live Show: “The Librarian”

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  About the Contributors

  Praise

  Also by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  AFTER AN EYE EXAM, MY OPHTHALMOLOGIST, DR. SWENSON, WILL TURN her monitor so that I can see the image on screen: my own retina, reflecting the beam of her pen light in a ghostly green, run through with a pattern of blood vessels as unique as my fingerprint. This is my favorite part of an eye exam because I get to see the inside of the seeing part of me.

  Listening to Welcome to Night Vale often provides a similar thrill. Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor manage to establish and defy listener expectations within the span of a single sentence—sometimes more than once. I myself am a writer (I got to write “Niecelet,” Episode 113 of Welcome to Night Vale, in fact), which means I generally know how words work, I know how pacing and sentence structure function, and I’m familiar with the mechanics of absurdism. So laughing out loud in my car while listening to a Night Vale episode is akin to working at a haunted house and still falling for the jump scare every night. It’s hard to surprise a person waiting to be surprised. And yet they do it all the time. Experiencing my brain scamper off in the wrong direction then spin around, confused and delighted by a bizarre turn of phrase, feels like I’m learning something about my usual habits of thought; I get to peer inside the thinking part of me. I know a lot of Night Vale diehards are devoted to its characters—they fall for Tamika’s moxie, Cecil’s baritone, Old Woman Josie’s angels, Carlos’s hair—but the language of Night Vale is my favorite character. I’m a sucker for the language in which all these figures are described—I think I like the window as much as the view.

  The first time I ferreted my way into the vicinity of Night Vale was backstage at the Town Hall theater in New York. I’d been asked to serve as The Weather for the evening and was excited to perform in such a grand venue—brass railings and red velvet seats and chandeliers chandeliering in that way unique to big theaters or old hotels. I listened to the show over the backstage intercom and snuck around to steal glimpses of the attendees sitting out in the darkness—hundreds and hundreds of rapt faces. Some of those faces were painted, some were hidden behind mesh panels (costumed, I’d learn, as the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home), some of them hung like moons below cotton Glow Clouds rigged with working LED lights. Until that point, I’d spent most of my musical life as a hip-hop artist, touring the club circuit, sometimes playing a big festival stage. I’d performed in lovely rooms before, but this was something entirely different. The fans reveled in every inside joke, dissected every reference, knew every grain of desert sand in Night Vale. I didn’t know the term world-building then—it’s not a phrase that’s bandied about in the halls of the rap academy, but it was plain that Joseph and Jeffrey had made a complete, functioning human culture where people could actually live—at least for the span of a ninety-minute live show. I could not wait to tell my rap crew about this.

  But, of course, if you’re a frequent visitor to Night Vale, you know how hard it can be to tell someone about the show in a single, quick description: It’s like the surrealism of Joe Frank with the whimsy of Lisa Frank. No, it’s like Voltaire meets David Lynch. No, it’s like Carl Sagan meeting his younger self and playing a rousing game of solitaire. Sometimes it balances right on the edge of sense and it runs on puréed imagination, and the tone is often sarcastic but sometimes brutally earnest, and it’s fun to feel your mind careening around on one ice skate, trying to keep up. Here, I’ve made a pie chart.

  I have one comment about the writing of Welcome to Night Vale that neither Jeffrey nor Joseph are likely to appreciate. So if you, dear reader, are Mr. Fink or Mr. Cranor, I will now kindly ask that you skip this section—just skim until you hit the series of wingdings and then merge right back in.

  Okay, what I’d like to talk about is the inclusivity of the characters of Night Vale. The people (and sometimes nonpeople) who populate Night Vale come in every permutation of size, sex, shape, ethnicity—almost all the kinds of bodies you can imagine and many you cannot. I brought this up with Joseph once, on stage at one of his tour stops, and the compliment I’d intended, about having constructed such an inclusive universe, was very swiftly shot out of the sky. He said something like, “The actual population is actually varied. You don’t get extra points for writing characters that represent the real world—it would take a conscious decision not to write characters that way.” His comment sounded smart then and it looks smart typed out now. But here’s the thing: I write fiction myself and, looking at my past work, I don’t remember making a conscious decision to write straight characters with mostly European-sounding names. But that’s exactly what I’d done. It was a decision that somehow simply slipped past the sentries of my conscious mind. I have since returned to old stories to correct that mistake and I owe Jeffrey and Joseph a debt of gratitude for both the example and the standard they set in that arena. (Also, let’s just pause to acknowledge and lament the complete insufficiency of the word inclusive, which is academic and sort of flaccid and not at all reflective of the indelicate, electric business of being alive in a sea of other living things.)

  (Welcome back, gentlemen.)

  The data analyst who helped me create the stunning pie chart in this foreword has just leaned into my office to remind me to make good on the promise to explain the term audacity as it appears in that graphic. (Thanks, Marela.) In this instance, it does not refer to a “willingness to take bold risks,” but rather to the open-sourced audio program Audacity. Until very recently, each episode of Night Vale was recorded (by Cecil) through a USB microphone and then edited in Audacity. This fact blew my mind. Audio software is like word-processing software; a few programs completely dominate the market. No matter which ones might perform best, most of the documents you create, read, or receive are probably in Word. To find out that Welcome to [expletive deleted] Night Vale was created in Audacity was like peeking into the kitchen of a Michelin-starred restaurant to discover that the chefs were not flambéing their fare in Le Creuset cookware, but were gathered around a microwave—no, a hotplate—no, a Bic lighter held beneath a pane of foil. It was genuinely amazing to imagine that a culturally important thing was produced by such simple and universally accessible means.

  Which brin
gs me to one of the most exciting ideas in Night Vale’s constellation of conspiracy theories. Could it be possible that this time—this one time—the good guys who work hard and give thanks and consult their consciences before corporate sponsors—could it be that they win? For me it’s easy to root for the Night Vale team and to celebrate their assorted successes because they try so damn hard and they bring their friends with them and they take real, artistic risks. And to makers of anything, in any discipline or trade, that model is a welcome one—even if you’ve got to defy space-time and march through an endless desert to see it up close.

  —Dessa,

  written on October 2, 2018,

  in room 405 of a very fine Milwaukee hotel

  Introduction

  “THE LIBRARIAN” WAS OUR FIRST TOURING LIVE SHOW FOR WELCOME to Night Vale and also the first moment I knew I had to make a dramatic change in my life.

  We began our second year of the podcast with millions of downloads each month, but downloads don’t pay the bills. In August of 2013, we printed five hundred Welcome to Night Vale T-shirts and put them up for sale on our website. Within two days, they were completely sold out plus about one hundred more oversold. We had to take the store offline.

  For the first time, Welcome to Night Vale made a little bit of money, and it was the first sign that we might be able to make writing a podcast our full-time job. But I wasn’t confident we could sustain five hundred shirt sales every week.

  Joseph quit his job selling green energy on the streets of New York almost immediately. I had a full-time job as database manager for the non-profit cinema Film Forum. Arts administration was a fulfilling career I’d had for sixteen years, and this one in particular was a great job. I liked the people there, it paid well with benefits, and it was a true nine-to-five gig, leaving my nights and weekends free to make art, which historically had been a hobby, not a job. Jillian and I were in our tenth year of marriage and had just bought our first home the year before. I was not ready to depart stable employment for an artistic endeavor that had grossed about one thousand dollars over its first fifteen months.

  We did a few live shows in the autumn of 2013, two in San Francisco at the Booksmith (“Condos,” as featured in Volume 1), and two in Brooklyn at Roulette, which all sold out in under two minutes, and it occurred to me that we should actually organize a live show tour.

  I had to miss the San Francisco shows because I didn’t have vacation days left, and I had no idea how I would fit a touring show around my job, but it was clear that there was a demand for people to see Cecil in-person telling these stories.

  We had no booking agent, so I just used my party planning knowledge to book our first tour.

  Rent an appropriate venue.

  Send out invites (in this case, put tickets on sale).

  Figure out what you’ll do at said event.

  Show up and do the thing.

  We found theaters in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Phoenix for performances over a two-week span in late January 2014. We took the money we had from T-shirts, our other four live shows, and our bank accounts and paid out about twenty-five thousand dollars to these venues and put tickets up for sale. We sold out twelve of the fifteen shows (mostly within an hour of putting them on sale).

  We said “Hurrah!” But then we panicked and said, “What the hell are we going to perform once we get there?” And “How are we going to get around?” And “How do you tour even?”

  Joseph and I started by writing a script based on the first thing that came to our mind: “What if the Librarians in Night Vale escaped?” Boom. Done.*

  I put together a pretty basic touring budget. We booked mostly Airbnbs, and save for the flight from Portland to San Francisco, every other leg of the tour was drivable. So we did what any fancy touring artists do: we rented a Chrysler Town & Country minivan from Budget.

  By early December 2013, we had our West Coast tour locked and loaded, and we were already planning another month-long tour of the East Coast and Midwest for March, and I knew I had to quit my job.

  Surely you’re thinking, “Which you did quite quickly, because getting to do national tours for a show you wrote is a dream come true!”

  Oh, heck no.

  I spent a week trying to figure out if I could manage Night Vale as a business while still keeping the security of my day job, and I learned that the number of hours in a day is inflexible. Jillian was trepidatious but supportive. We had just bought an apartment in Brooklyn two years earlier, and she had gone to part-time work the previous year in order to focus more on her choreography. My salary enabled us to do both of these things. Now it was I who wanted to leave full-time employment for uncertain artistic pursuits.

  Truth be told, I actually didn’t. I didn’t want to at all. It was Jillian who told me to write out expected earnings for the next two tours, and we realized we could live off that for at least a year. If Night Vale fell apart in that time, we would rethink our future, but perhaps it is worth the risk for an opportunity like this.

  So I quit my job at the end of 2013 and met the crew in Seattle to start the tour in mid-January, serving as de facto tour manager, something I had no idea how to do. I had several nervous fits trying to figure out how to order and ship merchandise, as well as learning that (apparently) people like to eat food around dinnertime. I ordered us a pizza in Portland, and the delivery guy showed up side stage mid-show and announced to a performing Cecil Baldwin (and our audience), “Pizza’s here!”

  While waiting in the airport to fly to San Francisco, I was in a mental fog caused by imposter syndrome and fear of flying. I had spent the morning crying and didn’t feel like talking or looking at anyone. At the airport bar, Cecil noted that I looked not so good. I said I was getting a cold, which I wasn’t, but I would rather lie than burden people with my anxieties. Cecil said, “Oh, me too. I just bought some Emergen-C to try to stave it off. You want one?” I said yes. He handed it to me, and without thinking, I put it directly into my mouth, like it were a lozenge.

  The table went silent, and I looked up to see Meg, Joseph, and Cecil staring straight at me, eyes wide, not knowing what to say. I was trying to play it off like, “Oh, I know you’re supposed to dissolve these in water first, but it’s totally fine to just suck on them.” But what happened was a bunch of pink foam dribbled out of my lips and Meg started laughing. Then I started laughing, and Joseph and Cecil. It was an embarrassing catharsis and I felt great for the first time on the road.

  By the end of the tour, we had met two people who would change our touring course forever for the better: Lauren O’Niell of Booksmith, who became our tour manager for the next tour and laid the groundwork for future touring; and Andrew Morgan, our booking agent.

  As Night Vale entered its third year, we were touring The Librarian to Europe and Canada and even making inroads toward an Australia/New Zealand tour.

  As of January 2019, Meg is now our full-time tour director and live show emcee and is the best at both jobs. Our touring has become the lifeblood of Welcome to Night Vale as a business and as an artistic endeavor. We have performed more than three hundred shows in seventeen countries, in some of the most amazing venues on earth (London’s Palladium Theatre, New York’s Town Hall, and on the main stage of the Sydney Opera House).

  We learned so much from “The Librarian.” That first tour was the most stressful two weeks of my life to that point, knowing I’d left a comfortable job I did well for a career I’d never trained for. But seeing Night Vale fans en masse, in person, across the country is a pleasure that never stales. And that first tour was also the most exciting two weeks of my life to that point. Driving the West Coast of the U.S. with three dear friends (and essentially work spouses) doing what we loved and learning so much about each other.*

  —Jeffrey Cranor

  Episode 50:

  “Capital Campaign”

  JULY 15, 2014

  COWRITTEN WITH ASHLEY LIERMAN
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br />   WHEN JEFFREY AND JOSEPH INVITED ME BACK TO WRITE ANOTHER EPISODE after “Summer Reading Program,” I was both excited and a little intimidated to come back to the world of Night Vale, after its huge and well-deserved boom in popularity. I also knew, though, that if I had another story I wanted to tell in this setting, it would involve Night Vale Community College. Being a librarian led me to write “Summer Reading Program,” but I’ve always been a college or university librarian, not a public one, and I feel most at home with the humor and horror of higher education. In fact, back in the early days of the podcast when the creators sought fan contributions for a potential book (which unfortunately never became a reality), I submitted a piece called “Minutes of the Night Vale Community College Faculty Meeting,” which was what led to my being invited to write an episode in the first place—and later became an episode in its own right, during a hiatus of the regular podcast.

  So I was eager to return to the community college, and play around with some more of its possibilities. I did struggle for a while, though, to think of what foible of campus life could be worthy of reporting on in the community news and would at the same time have the potential to build up into an appropriately dramatic crisis. Finally, I found myself delighted by the idea of a fundraising campaign that resulted in the donation of a lot of unwanted, disruptive animals instead of cash, and ended up pursuing it. In a throwaway aside in “Minutes,” I had introduced Mrs. Sylvia Wickersham, an eccentric alumna with a penchant for gifting the college useless, animal-centric facilities, and I decided that bringing her back as the culprit of my unfortunate capital campaign would be a perfect fit.

  Unfortunately, this plan had one small drawback—that I’ve never worked with college development at all so I have no idea how a capital campaign is actually run. Would it be announced like this? Would it be opened up to the general public? Do community colleges even hold capital campaigns? No idea! Let’s just say that idiosyncratic college fundraising practices are the absolute least of what’s weird about Night Vale, and chalk any mistakes up to that, okay?