121 - A Story of Love and Horror, Part 1: "Barks"

Howdy, Jeffrey Kraner here.

You probably know that Welcome to Night Vale does live tours.

We've done seven of those tours, in fact.

If you never got to see these tours, or even if you did and you want to relive them, we have live recordings available to you right now over at nightvale.bandcamp.com.

You can find those seven different live show performances, including our most recent show, The Attic.

We've also got some one-off events like our Thrilling Adventure Hour crossover show, our first-ever live show, Condos, as well as The Debate.

These albums are only $5 and they're so much fun.

So while we're between tours, tide yourself over with our live albums.

That's nightvale.bandcamp.com.

Once upon a mundane morning, Barb's Day got busy without warning.

A realtor in need of an open house sign, no, 50 of them and designed before nine.

My head hurts.

Any mighty tools to help with this pipe?

Aha!

Barb made her move.

She opened Kenla and got in the groove.

Both creating Canva sheets.

Create 50 signs fit for suburban streets.

Done in a quick, all complete.

Sweet.

Now, imagine what your dreams can become when you put imagination to work at canva.com.

The password is Mudwomb.

The username is Mudwoom.

The website is Mudwomb.

Where did the rest of the internet go?

Welcome to Night Vale.

I would like to tell you a story.

It is a difficult story and I don't know what it means, but it seems important to me to tell you.

It is about two people and a terrible, impossible decision that they found themselves having to make.

It concerns Francis Donaldson and Nasr al-Mujahid.

But first,

the community calendar.

This Tuesday evening, the Nightvale Football Boosters Club will hold their meeting at the Applebee's that we're all pretty sure was a Chili's just yesterday, but now is an Applebee's.

And all records show it it has always been an Applebee's, even though we remember it as a Chili's.

The subject of this week's meeting will be the timing of football games, which all members agree are too long.

Hey, I like football as much as the next guy, said Hannah Gutierrez, but a whole 60 minutes of play, plus all the breaks and starting and stopping, we're busy people.

Football should take less time.

The Booster Club will be working on their new proposal to get games done in a tight 15 so everyone can get home in time to watch the newest episode of Stop Chef, in which a group of contestants compete to prevent a chef from cooking.

Wednesday is Love Day at Dark Owl Records.

Owner Michelle Wynn explained that after recent love-focused events, she wanted everyone to understand that love is a laughable concept.

And she wanted to highlight its absurdity by selling albums with songs that ruthlessly mock love using subtle irony like, I will always love you and ain't no mountain high enough.

My former radio intern Maureen, who was in the store too, and was holding hands with Michelle, agreed that love is stupid and funny.

and fun and ridiculous and all-encompassing and revitalizing.

Then Michelle said, what?

And Maureen said, what?

And then they both got embarrassed and asked me to leave.

Thursday is the Safety Parade, which the Sheriff's Secret Police hold each year in order to highlight safety.

Of course, no one is allowed to march in or attend the parade for their own safety.

As Secret Police mascot Barks Ennui always says, Woof woof, the biggest danger to you is you.

Woof.

Friday is a meeting at Town Hall to discuss the problem of entrances to other universes and the question of whether all of us even ended up in the right universe after that whole recent mix-up.

There will be light snacks as well as blood tests and surprise interrogations about our version of history in order to trip up intruders from parallel universes.

Attendance is mandatory.

This Saturday and Sunday, the Brownstone Spire Spire will be offering powerful gifts in exchange for great sacrifices.

The larger the sacrifice, the more powerful the gift.

For instance, if you give it a DVD you got for Christmas five years ago and have never even taken out of its shrink wrap, it'll give you a well-worn copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets that is missing its cover.

But if you give it an offering of your blood and fervent chanting, the copy of Chamber of Secrets it gives you will have an intact cover.

And finally, this Monday, Nightvale Cinemas will be hosting a showing of that classic comedy caper, The Grift of the Magi,

in which two con artists run scams in order to get one another Christmas gifts, only to find that they've accidentally each stolen the money from the other.

And now, a story of love

and horror.

Frances Donaldson runs the antiques mall in Old Town Nightvale.

Long before she took on that job, though, she developed an interest in time.

As a child, she would stand still and consider that while she had not moved at all in space, something had changed.

That she had grown just slightly older.

Her hair just slightly longer.

and this without being able to see the movement at all.

She liked to lie in bed and, through her window, watch planes pass very high in the sky.

She liked to think about where they had taken off and where they might land.

Objects fascinated her because they too moved through time on a different trajectory than her.

Her bedroom lamp had existed, looking more or less like it was now since before she was born, and could well exist after she had died.

It wasn't even aware, was unable to move, and yet it joined her in this mad hurdle through time.

She found this terrifying, and she found this fascinating, and she found this delightful, and she wanted it to stop, and she hoped it never stopped.

And she felt all of these feelings equally and at once, and without contradiction.

What use was there in worrying if all of what she felt about time did not exactly add up.

She was too busy feeling it to consider what it meant.

And so, of course, she became fascinated with antiques, these objects washed up from the crooked tides of time.

Nasr al-Mujahid coaches the Nightvale High School football team, Go Scorpions.

And this was almost the entirety of his world.

He thought about football when he woke up.

He thought about it on the drive to work.

Of course, he thought about it when he ran practices and had meetings with the assistant coaches.

And he thought about it at night, when he ate take-out dinners on his couch while watching football.

This made him happy.

And what makes a person happy, if it doesn't harm another person and doesn't harm themselves, is okay,

even if it's not how anyone else would want to live.

But while it made him happy, Nazar was also aware that there is more than one kind of happiness.

And that perhaps this happiness he found in a life endlessly thinking about football was less than the happiness he could find in a life with more things in it.

This wasn't about fixing a problem, this was an attempt to improve on a good situation.

This was his play for some sort of grace.

Other people, he knew, could provide an outside perspective and perhaps allow him to be less focused on his work work and on the game he coached.

And so he decided he would try dating

without expectations, without a plan, just as a way to see what the world might have for him.

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We barely understand how an engine works.

We have one guy who knows, and he builds them all.

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Now that's smart thinking.

Ford, drive weird bones.

There was no great epiphany for Frances that led to her dating life.

She had been on the dating app Void since it had become available in Nightvale, and had gone on a few casual Void dates.

It was not an important part of her life because it didn't seem likely to ever lead to anything more.

but the occasional company was nice.

A night with someone, and then back to her life as it was, which was a life she liked.

In this way, her dating was related to her obsession with time.

Her bed was always the same bed, and sometimes there was another person in it, and mostly only her.

She floated upon that bed as it moved through time, passengers on and off, and she alone voyaging onward.

And then, Nazur messaged her on Void, and they started chatting.

For his part, he was was unsure of how to date, it having been some time since he had done so, and certainly before dating happened as a series of written communications, rather than awkward hand gestures.

So he had messaged a number of women in town who had seemed to him like someone he might want to spend more time with.

He did this without expectation.

He had few expectations that did not involve football.

He just performed the actions that might lead to new outcomes for him.

And three of the women had messaged back.

He was, after all, not a bad-looking man, handsome even, although it had been a long time since anyone had told him that.

And so it would not have occurred to him that he was handsome.

And this, in many ways, made him even more handsome.

Frances and he agreed to meet for lunch near the high school.

This was close enough to her antique store that she could walk, and so the whole thing didn't feel to either of them like much of a commitment of time.

So, he said, once they had sat down with their food.

So, she agreed.

And for an awful moment it seemed it would hang there in uncomfortable silence and a bad date best forgotten.

But then he asked about antiques, because he himself had an interest in old football trophies, and he agreed that might seem a bit weird, but the thing was that their designs were often fascinating, never having been meant to stand up under scrutiny.

Crudely carved players, hands like dinner rolls, feet disappearing into the base of the trophy.

And this turned into a discussion of all the many old items that would never be valuable from the viewpoint of capitalism, but were more interesting than the ones that were valuable.

From this, the conversation spread out into her fascination with time, and then time itself, and their childhoods, and how it was hard sometimes to remember that they themselves were adults, and in Nazur's case, older than his parents ever lived to be.

On returning to work, Nazur started the afternoon football practice as usual, and as usual threw himself into the rhythm of drills, spells, and counterspells that make up any football skirmish.

But he found, for the first time in his life, that he couldn't make himself fully focus.

There was a part of him still still thinking about the lunch, about the way her hands had looked tapping on the table, about the way she talked about time as though it were not an implacable force, but an old and fallible friend.

He had to continually draw himself back into practice, and the players wondered if he perhaps was sick.

Frances stood at the window of her antique shop, watching the planes fly overhead.

When a person entered the shop, she would acknowledge them vaguely with a nod, and then acknowledge them vaguely with a nod again when they left.

But otherwise, she kept her eyes on the window.

Something in her chest felt tight, but also less heavy.

She was both scared and happy, and she wasn't sure why she was either of those.

When later they both messaged and decided to go on a second date, an evening date at a nice restaurant, something with a bit more commitment behind it, neither of them connected it directly to the way they felt after their lunch together.

But both of them could not contain their impatience and had messaged that very evening, both at exactly 10:52 p.m.

Let's have a look at that weather.

We live high

of gorgeous.

On the alcohol, we feed it.

And it goes all fat and friendly.

We have service if we need it.

We hold on as far as we can.

The mug goes away.

We We write letters to each other,

in that secrets to confess to.

I learn foreign and exotic terms of endearment by which to address to.

We feed fresh

fruit to one another.

We stay up all night.

I am healthy, I am whole,

but I have poor impulse control.

And I wanna go home,

but I am whole.

We are strong, we are faithful,

we are guardians of everything.

We pay close, careful attention

to the news the morning air brings.

We show great

loyalty

to the hard times we've been through.

We are filled with riches and wonders.

Our love keeps the things it finds.

And we dance like drunken sailors,

lost at sea, Out of our minds, you find shelter somewhere in me.

I find great comfort in you.

I keep you safe from harm.

You hold me in your arms, and I wanna go home

when I am home.

You chose to hit play on this podcast today.

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There was a second date, and that night she went with him back to his house.

Then a third date where they went to her house.

Then a few more dates where they sometimes went to one of their houses and sometimes just kissed, wild with the feeling of it, out in the parking lot of whatever restaurant or bar they had met at, before saying goodnight because they had to work in the morning.

And they were adults who sometimes had control of themselves.

This was not one of those nights, though.

This was a night that she was in his bed and he was asleep.

This was a little over a month after their first date.

As she lay sleepy and happy, she watched the TV which was tinting the darkness, a soft flickering blue.

It was an old episode of Friends, in which Joey rolls limply and slowly over the course of 22 minutes across the apartment while out of focus in the background, Phoebe searches desperately through every cabinet and screams.

Frances had seen the episode too many times to laugh out loud at, but still, it felt comforting to watch, like sitting in a room that she loved.

The episode had become a place she could go rather than a story to follow.

There was a commercial break, and a PSA from the secret police came on, featuring the adorable cartoon spokesdog, Barks Ennui.

He capered about, pointing out all the different ways one could break the law in Nightvale and get sentenced to a forever term in the abandoned mineshaft outside of town.

She found herself grinning at his bad puns in the section about reporting on your neighbors.

Traitorous activities can be rough.

Go fetch us their deepest secrets.

And then Barks said her name.

His cartoon canine face turned directly to the screen, and he said, Frances.

She didn't know how to respond.

A commercial had never spoken to her, and certainly it had never done what Barks did next, which was to step out of the TV screen in a clumsy flopping movement and then sit up, a two-dimensional, flickering cartoon dog standing in the bedroom.

Frances,

Barks said, You aren't supposed to be here.

This doesn't belong to you.

He cocked his animated head, the wall of Nazar's apartment faintly visible through him, as though through heavy fog.

As his head turned, it sagged in the direction of the ground, stretching and distorting his cartoon puppy face until it was a series of drooping ovals.

When he spoke again, his voice sounded stretched too.

You will have to make this right, Francis.

He garbled.

You will have to make this right.

She screamed.

Nothing happened.

She screamed.

Stay tuned next.

Just

stay tuned.

Next.

Good night, Nightvale.

Good night.

Welcome to Night Vale is a production of Night Vale Presents.

It is written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Kraner and produced by Joseph Fink.

The voice of Night Vale is Cecil Baldwin.

Original music by Disparition.

All of it can be found at disparition.info or at disparition.bandcamp.com.

This episode's weather was Riches and Wonders by Eliza Rickman and Jarek Bischoff, covering a song by the Mountain Goats.

This song is just one track from the new non-fiction podcast from the creator of Welcome to Night Vale, I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats.

For more information on this show and this track, go to IonlyListen to the Mountain Goats.com.

Comments, questions, email us at info at welcometonightvale.com or follow us on Twitter at nightvale radio or go into a cave and never come back out of the cave.

Check out Welcometonightvale.com for more information on this show and our current tour of Australia and our upcoming tour of the US and Canada.

Today's proverb: Welcome to 2018.

The year we finally do it.

The year we eat the sun.

Hi, we're Meg Bashmaner and Joseph Fink of Welcome to Night Vale.

And on our new show, The Best Worst, we explore the golden age of television.

To do that, we're watching the IMDb viewer-rated best and worst episodes of classic TV shows.

The episode of Star Trek, where Beverly Crusher has sex with a ghost.

The episode of the X-Files, where Scully gets attacked by a vicious house cat.

And also, the really good episodes, too.

What can we learn from the best and worst of great television?

Like, for example, is it really a bad episode, or do people just hate women?

The best, worst, available wherever you get your podcasts.