STEVE: This is a story about me, said the man speaking, and you are pleased because you always wanted to hear a story about me. Welcome to… well, I can’t tell you where we are.

###

I’m with Tina. She is not tall. I’m not supposed to ask anyone their names, but I drive this route with Tina every day, and [chuckles] I can’t resist being a howyadoing about it all. Plus, I’m riding shotgun, which means my tasks are:

One – make sure we get where we’re supposed to go, which was hard to do at first because we’re not allowed to use phones or maps, not that we get reception or even use charted roads half the time. I have to navigate on vibes, on gut feelings. It just comes to you, where you’re supposed to go. I imagine things like “Look for three cactuses aligned as if in conversation” or “Find the spot in the valley where the wind sounds like inhaling through a deviated septum.” And boom, I’m right!

Two – if we pick anyone up along the way, my job, the job of the man who is not short, is to deal with them. I’ve not really had to deal with many passengers along the way. But I imagine this just means I should make them feel comfortable. I always bring food in case we get a passenger. I have peanut butter stuffed pretzels, YoungBoy-branded red hot Rap Snacks, and a cooler filled with cauliflower. Oh I hope we finally get to pick someone up today. That cauliflower is fresh from the Green Market.

I also have a third task. It’s not in the job description, but it’s choosing what we listen to in the van. No one that I’ve worked with at Labyrinth has ever told me their music preference, maybe because they rarely ever speak at all. But I always offer. I’ll listen to any kind of music: folk, folk country, trance EDM folk, country folk, folk-hop, thrash folk, nu-folk, and marching bands. That is every genre of music, and I love them all. But since no one ever takes me up on my offer, I just choose something that’s upbeat but unintrusive. Right now, Tina and I are listening to some classic 80s synth-folk.

[to Tina] What’s that, Tina?

[long silence]

###

Tina’s not saying anything or even looking at me, but I fully understand. She doesn’t like 80s synth-folk and would rather hear no music at all. That’s fine. Hey Tina, what about a podcast? There’s a new episode of Tights and Fights—okay, no podcasts either.

We instead listen to the sound of the air as we drive out toward the Sandwastes, where we will find another truck that looks just like ours, parked between a rock the color of pencil shavings and a crack in the earth shaped like a portobello mushroom. In the other truck will be a man who is not tall and a man who is not short. I will move wooden crates from our truck to the other as a man in a suit silently watches. It is a different man each time. Sometimes the crates tick. Mostly they do not. When we are done, the man in the suit will hand Tina… will hand my colleague, who is not tall, and me (a man who is not short) an amount of cash, also different each time. And we will go home.

It's the best job I’ve ever had.

But Tina is slowing down. She is pulling into the Moonlite All-Nite Diner. It is radiant green, a slab of mint light in the warm darkness. We park and enter. A man rolls by us on the ground, his eyes bleary and sightless. He whispers “MudWomb” over and over, and I tip him 20 dollars.

As we approach the front door of the Moonlite All-Nite, I do not know why we are here. We are not hungry, and I do not know what time of day it is, only that the sky is dark. But as we enter the Moonlite All-Nite, I know why we are here.

We sit at the bar and order thick cold coffee we will not drink. We order pancakes we will not eat. We order Invisible Pie, which we will nibble at. And we will watch a man sitting alone at a booth in the corner. I know that his name is David Lane. We are to meet with him, but not now, not today. We are only to see him today. To understand simply what he looks like.

Laura, a Moonlite All-Nite waitress, passes me. She doesn’t look at me, not in my eyes, anyway. Laura has worked here for as long as I can remember. She knows me. She knows my wife, Abby, my daughter, Janice. She has watched Janice grow from a squishy squirmy little lump into a grown woman with a life of her own.

Humans are miracles. Childhood is proof of this.

But today Laura doesn’t say “Howdy Steve.” She doesn’t offer me any fresh fruit, which blooms on the branches growing from her body. She walks past us to serve the regulars. Right now I am not Steve Carlsberg. I am a man who is not short. I am a stranger, a familiar face, but a stranger nonetheless.

Later this weekend, Janice will come visit me and Abby, and we will go to a movie together. Maybe we’ll see the new Pixar film “Predator vs Wall-E” or “Joker 3: What Are We Even Doing Anymore” and then we’ll head to the Moonlite All-Nite for burgers and shakes, and Laura will kiss Abby on the cheek and say to Janice “lookit you all grown up” and she’ll offer us ripe peaches, cherries, and kiwifruits fresh from her limbs. I look forward to that.

Tina nudges me. I’m not paying attention. I’m daydreaming about my family. David Lane, our passenger, is getting up from his booth. He pays his bill in cash, slides the money into the sugar caddy and walks out.

I start to rise, but Tina does not move, so I remain seated. We both watch David from the corners of our eyes, as he gets into his car. He does not drive away, though. Lit only by the dashboard, his hands are on the steering wheel, and his head is slumped. He is sighing in long, gulping heaves. David lifts his head, taking one last centering breath. His eyes are closed; his face tilts upward to a God he no longer believes in,

David Lane exhales. He is calm. He is settled. Then… his eyes flash open. He is looking right at me. I look back at him. I do not move. I do not blink. I am scared. I do not know why I am scared, because I am the man who is not short. He is David Lane. His eyes look more frightened than I feel. He knows something about us, something I do not yet know.

David puts the car into gear, reverses and drives off. As he turns out of the parking lot, his headlights seem to slash open the darkness, like a knife. Like a sharp thing. Like a thing that reveals what lies beneath.

I go to take a bite of Invisible Pie, but Tina ate all of it. There’s nothing left. I’m not hungry. I don’t need food. But I do need comfort, the kind only true love or a slice of Invisible Pie can bring. I don't have either here.

Tina stands. I pay for the mostly uneaten meal. No one looks at us as we walk past them on our way out of the diner.

At the rear of the truck, Tina opens the cargo flap. Inside are a series of perfectly stacked crates. She points at each. As she does, I nod my head. This is how we count, wordless. We have no paper that tells us how many crates we should have, nor what they contain, but we know. We just know. We know that one is missing. It has been missing from the Labyrinth trucks for weeks.

How do we know?

###

We drive, and my shortwave radio, which connects us to other drivers as well as the Head Office makes an unusual amount of noise. It’s static, but pulsing in the pattern of speech. I cannot understand the individual words, but I understand the complete message. I pick up the receiver, press the talk button and say, “The dentist says chewing bricks is bad for your teeth. Over.”

It doesn’t matter what I say, because the words are only static, and the rhythm is more important than the meaning. I honestly don’t know exactly what I just communicated, but whoever hears it? They will know. They always do.

I don’t ask Tina what we want to listen to on the drive. I just put on some Patsy Cline, the queen of folk metal. As Patsy croons “My Neck, My Back” I stare at the night sky. Arclights and low-flying helicopters and reflections of street lights zip across the windshield, but high among the stars, the dotted lines, the glowing arrows, the circles. They do not seem to move.

Tina doesn’t say anything, only readjusts the seatbelt on her shoulder, which is her way of conducting small talk.

I agree quietly: “Yeah look at this weather we’re having.”

###

WEATHER

###

Work isn’t done. Not until it’s done. We don’t have set hours in this job, which can be difficult on my family. Abby has been wanting me to clean the pool for months now, and I just haven’t found the time, plus there’s a mass shortage of cleaning supplies here. But it’s almost summer. It would be nice to have a clean pool. I might need to call someone to do it. I make enough money to afford a pool service, but I miss getting to do it myself. It’s a calming chore, like mowing the lawn or drying dishes or taking recycling to the people who huddle behind the Ralphs.

I need rote tasks to take my mind off a long week of work, to let me forget (if only for a moment) the dotted lines in the sky, the glowing arrows, the circles.

The upside of fluid work hours, though, is I never have to set an alarm. My body just knows when it’s time to report. I get up. I shower. I get dressed. And I go. And here I am now in the passenger seat of a black car. Tina is not driving this time. Tina is not here at all. Some man who is not tall is driving now. I wonder if we are going to pick up a passenger. I wonder if today is the day we pick up David Lane and where we will take him.

Immediately the answer comes to me. I am the only passenger today. I try to understand more of what is to be expected of us. I have never driven in one of Labyrinth’s black cars before. It feels special. It smells special, in fact, like we are the first people since the manufacturer to sit inside of it.

But there is no more to know. We only drive. I have never seen this man who is not tall before. “Steve,” I say and hold out my hand. He doesn’t respond, which is normal for my co-workers, but I know his name. (How do I know it?) His name is Thurman. You don’t meet a lot of Thurmans. I don’t know why that is.

Welp, it’s my lucky day, I guess! A good sign for what is in store for me. Nothing can go wrong today for old Steve Carlsberg. No sir.

I don’t think about the dotted lines and all that. I don’t think about the pool that needs cleaning. I don’t think about what we’re here to do. I watch the road up ahead and breathe steadily.

Thurman turns on the radio. That’s new! Oh hey, it’s my brother-in-law’s radio show.

[PRODUCTION NOTE: Jon, can you put the Cecil audio below faintly underneath Steve’s monologue. Maybe let the first 2 sentences play quietly but clearly, and then Steve can talk over the rest. Also please start Cecil’s monologue mid-word]

CECIL: Where to now? You don’t know but you go there anyway. You drive past the Moonlight All-Nite Diner and the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex. You pass City Hall, which as always, is completely shrouded after dark in black velvet. Moving farther out, following the pull of the distant, uncertain moon, you pass by the car lot, where the salesmen have been put away for the night, and the house where Old Woman Josie once lived, now inhabited by her daughter Alondra and several Angels. A bright halo of heavenly light surrounds the home. Then the town is behind you, and you are out in the Scrublands and the Sandwastes. By the road you see a man holding a cactus in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. He shakes both at you and howls as you pass.

And then you are alone. Just you and the desert. You stop the car, and get out. Pebbles crunch in the sand in response to your movement. The radio murmurs behind the closed door of the car. The headlights illuminate only a few stray plants and the wide dumb eyes of some nocturnal animal. Looking back, you see the bulge of light that is your Night Vale.

STEVE: Cecil’s talking to someone very specific, and I understand. There’s a car in front of us. Inside that car is David Lane. Cecil is telling David a story about him, and only him. But this, what I am telling you, is a story about me.

The man who is not tall keeps an inconspicuous distance from David’s car, and we follow him past the Moonlight All-Nite, past Teddy Williams’s Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex. We pass City Hall moments after David. We see the used car lot, Alondra’s house, a few angels who are asking passing cars for ten bucks, but no one can hear them at this speed.

And soon we are out in the Scrublands and the Sandwastes. The man who is not tall turns off the headlights of our black car, because we know this land well. We follow the remnant light of David’s vehicle dodging slowly and nervously past jagged stones and acacia shrubs, until he finally stops in a barren expanse.

The man who is not tall stops our car about 20 feet from David’s. [at this point, we can kill the Cecil audio wherever it is in the speech]

We get out of our vehicle. David is standing next to his.

“How did you find me,” David asks

“Everything you do is being broadcast on the radio,” I say.

“I see that now,” David says, and laughs.

“You have the item?” the man who is not tall asks. David doesn’t respond. I walk around to the back of David’s car, look in the trunk. I see a glowing crate inside. I nod to the man who is not tall.

“You guys aren’t with Labyrinth, right? Because I---” David starts, a slight waver in his voice.

The man who is not tall nods back to me, and I immediately know what to do. I draw a knife from my suit pocket and hold it to David’s throat. I didn’t know I had a knife until this moment. I didn’t know I was supposed to kill someone until this moment, but I understand that David cannot expect to steal from the Labyrinth and live. There are rules. There are rules to follow. There are rules we all must follow, and they might not be written down, but they are known. And David Lane has broken the rules.

The man who is not tall is examining the stolen crate. “Undamaged,” he says to himself.

David Lane is not crying, but smiling. He is looking up into the night sky. Where I see dotted lines, glowing arrows and circles, he must see a dark planet of awesome size, perched in its sunless void. An invisible titan, all thick black forests and jagged mountains and deep, turbulent oceans. A monster spinning soundless, forgotten. It’s so close now. David sees it just above him. Maybe, even, if he tried very hard, he could touch it.

He does not reach up. I tense the knife against his jugular vein, but then I let go. I say, “Thurman.” Thurman looks at me, startled. “Thurman,” I say. “What are we doing? What is it for? Why do we follow the instructions in our minds?”

Thurman frantically nods at David, as if to say, “Stab him, dummy. He’s running away.”

“Let him,” I say aloud, as David flees wildly, arms flailing, into the seemingly endless Sandwastes.

“Thurman, look at the sky. Do you see the dotted lines? Do you see the glowing arrows? Do you see the circles? Do you see this chart that explains the entire world?”

Thurman looks to the sky. He sees something, but he can’t comprehend it yet. It’s all so new to him.

“I’ll radio the fleet,” I say. “We can’t go on like this.”

Thurman doesn’t look away from the sky. I wish I could see what he was seeing for the first time again.

I pick up the receiver and say: “Everybody should read Chaucer to improve their everyday vocabulary.”

The static roars with shocked responses. I listen to the unidentifiable words as they slowly come into aural focus. They’re beginning to make sense. They are all intrigued by the impassioned speech I just delivered about ethics and transparency. It is agreed, then, that until we know who we serve and to what end, we are all walking off of the job.

“Roger that. Over and out,” I say, and the shortwave radio is quiet. So is the car ride home with Thurman. We hug good night, and possibly goodbye. How do we know what is to happen next?

This has been my story. And you were pleased, because you always wanted to hear a story about Steve Carlsberg.

Good night, Night Vale. Over. And out.

###

PROVERB: Traffic looks good out there. Gorgeous actually. Look at those cars. Absolute hotties.