“So I should go to King City?”
“Sure.”
“You think so?” Jackie was glad for an authority that would finally tell her what she should do.
“Probably not. I’m not even sure if it’s a real place. It could just be an idea on paper.”
“But I spoke with—”
“I don’t know what a King City is,” the mayor continued, yawning. “I don’t know a lot of things. I do know there will always be problems for Night Vale. There are so many. Usually they pass. Often they kill many people, but what are people but deaths that haven’t happened yet?”
“Births that already happened?” Jackie said without thinking.
The mayor laughed. She looked different when she laughed, and then she stopped laughing and she did not look different anymore.
“Thank you, Jackie. I needed that. As for you. Well. I know you came here hoping that I would have an answer or a piece of advice that would fix things.”
“So—”
The mayor stood, a wordless pre-good-bye. Jackie stood too, a wordless capitulation.
“You say your life is unraveling. Your life cannot unravel. Your life is your life. You haven’t lost it. It’s just different now.”
“Do you feel the same thing about your brother? That his life cannot unravel? That it is just different now?”
Dana blinked. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose I do.”
“Fair enough, man, but I want my old life back, whatever my old life was.”
Dana shook her head.
“You know, Jackie, before I was mayor, I was an intern at the community radio station. One of the only interns to survive that program. Being an intern at the radio station is dangerous and terrible work. But there are days, sitting in this office, with responsibility past my years, working in a system I barely understand, that I miss my time as an intern. At least I was allowed to be young. At least I was allowed to be Dana, not Mayor Cardinal.”
“I hope your brother will be okay,” Jackie said.
“He’ll be what he’ll be. And we’ll all learn to be okay with whatever that is.”
Jackie said good-bye with her eyes.
“Good-bye, Jackie,” the mayor said with her mouth.
Jackie pulled on the door. It did not move. She pushed on the door. It did not move.
“Oh, right. Jesus. There really should be a sign,” she said, bleeding.
Back out in the wood-paneled waiting room there was a blond man with a big smile sitting at the desk.
“Hey?” she said.
“Yes?” he said, his voice all customer-service politeness.
It was not the same man as when she arrived. She did not know where she had seen him before, but the sight of him made her uneasy.
“Wasn’t there someone else here before? This old guy who didn’t talk?”
“Oh, oh no,” he said. His smile did not waver. “It’s always just been me here. You have a good day, okay?”
“Sure. Okay,” she said.
As she walked down the stairs, he pulled out some forms, picked up a pen, and silently smiled at the forms, writing nothing. Jackie did not even flinch passing the City Council doors this time. Nothing, not even the terrible council, was more frightening than the fact that no one seemed able to help her, least of all herself.
Chapter 17
“You didn’t come home last night.”
Josh said this from the couch, book open across his legs. He had red claws and antennae. He was wearing baggy jeans and a Mountain Goats T-shirt, which Josh had once been kicked out of school for wearing, because of its strong political message siding with those who believe in mountains.
Diane stopped short of the kitchen. She hadn’t expected Josh to be up already. She was running on three hours’ sleep and had hoped to be up and out before him.
“I’m here now. I hate it when you wear that shirt.”
“Mountains are real, Mom.”
“I believe in mountains, Josh. It just reminds me of how I had to come pick you up from school and wait in the front office while the vice principal gave me a lecture about how inappropriate it is to raise a child to believe such nonsense. It was embarrassing.”
“Well, I’m not embarrassed by my beliefs.”
“I’m embarrassed to be told I’m a bad parent.”
“You aren’t home a lot these days.” It was a swerve, not a response. He wasn’t looking at her or his book. It was difficult to tell where he was looking because of the solid black eyes drooping from the ends of long, curved stalks atop his head.
Diane walked past him into the kitchen and started the process of making coffee. She always ground her own beans. She did not feel that her coffee tasted better because of this, she simply liked the process of grinding beans: the cool crumple of the bag from the freezer, the gentle rattle of beans across the countertop, the therapeutic release of pounding them into grounds with a hammer for several minutes.
As she removed her safety goggles and washed her hands, she called to the living room, “How’s school?”
“You didn’t come home last night.”
She dried her hands. “I came home late last night.”
“From what?”
“Work.”
“You never work late.”
“I did last night?”
She hated the question in her own voice but had never been good at lying.
“Doing what? What were you doing that you didn’t get home until early morning and that you didn’t answer my texts and that you didn’t reply to my e-mails?”
“My phone was off.”
“Okay. Why?”
She came back into the living room, and Josh stood to face her. He was tall, his jeans draping in baggy folds over his hooves.
Diane wished she knew what Josh looked like. She wished there was a single thing she could assume about her son. She wished Josh had a second parent to be ballast. Josh wished all of those things, too.
“I was on a date.”
Josh didn’t respond, so Diane nervously filled the pause.
“My phone died, and I was. Um.”
“You just said you were at work.”
Josh tried to fold his arms, but the claws snagged on each other, and so he awkwardly clasped them in front of him.
“Yes, I’ve been seeing someone. I know we don’t talk about dating much. Mom and son, you know. It’s… awkward. Right?”
“No, Mom, no. That’s really cool. What’s their name?”
A good lie requires two things: (1) assertiveness in delivery, and (2) narrative logic that cannot be unhinged by actual truth.
“Dawn,” Diane said assertively, achieving one of those two things.
“Don?”
“Yes, Dawn.”
Josh sat back down.
“How long have you been seeing Don?”
“A few weeks. Mostly seeing movies and having some dinner, getting to know each other.”
Diane began to panic about Josh running into Dawn and trying to talk to her about their relationship. She mentally scheduled an ugly breakup with Dawn in the coming days. Or would that make Josh even more likely to talk to her? It would certainly remove Dawn from the list of possible future friends.
“And so you spent the night at Don’s house last night?”
Right. She was still dating Dawn in the here and now, and had to focus.
“You’re not allowed to ask me questions like that, Joshua.”
“You’re right. Gross.”
She examined Josh’s opaque, bobbing eyes, and his flagellum-lined mandibles. It was difficult to tell by his expression if he was being playful or aggressive, but she could hear a grin in his voice.