The television was not on. A textbook was open but not being read. A phone was lit up.
“How are you doing?” Diane sometimes said.
Sometimes she said, “What’s going on?”
Sometimes she said, “Just checking on you.”
“Josh,” Diane sometimes said, standing at his door, in the evening. Sometimes she knocked. “Josh,” she sometimes repeated following a certain amount of silence. “Josh,” she sometimes did not repeat following a second amount of silence.
“Dot dot dot,” Josh sometimes replied. Not out loud, but like in a comic book speech-bubble. He pictured other things he could say, but did not know how.
For the most part, I do not like taffeta, the house thought, and Diane shared that thought.
“Josh,” Diane said, sitting in the passenger seat of her burgundy Ford hatchback.
“What?” said the wolf spider in the driver’s seat.
“If you’re going to learn to drive, you’re going to need to be able to reach the pedals.”
The wolf spider elongated, and two of his middle legs extended to the floor of the vehicle, gently touching the pedals.
“And see the road too, Josh.”
A human head with the face and hair of a fifteen-year-old boy emerged from the body of the spider, and the abdomen filled out into something of a primate-like torso. The legs remained spindly and long. He thought he looked cool driving a car as a wolf spider. He did look cool, although it was difficult to control the car. It was important to him that he look cool while driving, although he would not have been able to articulate why.
Diane stared him down. Josh took a fully human shape, save for a few feathers on his back and shoulders. Diane saw them poking out from underneath his shirtsleeves but decided that not all battles are worth fighting.
“Human form when driving the car.”
Diane saw herself in Josh. She had been a teenager once. She understood emotions. She empathized. She didn’t know with what, but she empathized.
Josh huffed, but Diane reminded him that if he wanted to drive her car, he would play by her rules, which involved not being a three-inch-long wolf spider. Diane reminded him of his bike and how that was a perfectly reasonable form of transportation.
Diane’s task of teaching her son to drive took additional patience, not just because of Josh’s insistence on constant reassessment of his physical identity but also because the car was a manual transmission.
Imagine teaching a fifteen-year-old how to drive a car with manual transmission. First, you have to press down the clutch. Then you have to whisper a secret into one of the cup holders. In Diane’s case, this was easy, as she was not a very social or public person, and most any mundane thing in her life could be a secret. In Josh’s case this was hard, because for teenagers most every mundane thing in their lives is a secret that they do not like sharing in front of their parents.
Then, after the clutch and the secret, the driver has to grab the stick shift, which is a splintered wood stake wedged into the dashboard, and shake it until something happens—anything really—and then simultaneously type a series of code numbers into a keyboard on the steering wheel. All this while sunglasses-wearing agents from a vague yet menacing government agency sit in a heavily tinted black sedan across the street taking pictures (and occasionally waving). This is a lot of pressure on a first-time driver.
Josh often got frustrated with his mother. This was because Diane was not the best teacher. This was also because Josh was not the best student. There were other reasons as well.
“Josh, you need to listen to me,” Diane would say.
“I get it. I get it, okay,” Josh would say, not getting it at all.
Diane enjoyed arguing with Josh about driving, because it was time spent talking, having a relationship. It was not easy, being a mother to a teenager. Josh enjoyed this time too, but not consciously. On the surface, he was miserable. He just wanted to drive a car, not do all of the things it takes to be able to drive a car, like having a car and learning to drive it.
And sometimes he would say, “Why can’t my dad come teach me?” because he knew that question hurt her. Then he would feel bad about hurting her. Diane would feel bad too. They would sit in the car, feeling bad.
“You’re doing a good job,” Diane once said to Josh, in relation to nothing, only trying to fill a silence.
So every other time, I’m not doing a good job, Josh thought, because he didn’t understand the context of her statement.
“Thanks,” Josh said out loud, trying to fill the silence with graciousness.
“You still need to work on a lot of things,” Diane did not say. “I’m sorry your father isn’t here,” she also did not say. “But I am trying so, so hard. I am, Josh. I am, I am, I am,” she did not say. As far as things go, her self-control was pretty good.
I’m really good at driving, Josh often thought, even as he veered too close to highway barriers, rolled wheels up on curbs, and failed to yield to hooded figures, resulting in mandatory citywide ennui for hours. Night Vale’s traffic laws are byzantine and kept on a need-to-know basis with civilian drivers.
Their driving lessons often ended in a “Good job” and a “Thanks” and a brief pause and a divergence into separate silent rooms. Later Diane would knock and say, “Josh,” and Josh would or would not reply.
Diane hurt. She was not consciously aware that she hurt, but she hurt. “Josh,” she said, so many times a day, for so many different reasons.
Josh loved his mother but he did not know why.
Diane loved her son and she did not care why.
Another way the house is unlike other houses is it has a faceless old woman secretly living in it, although that is not important to this story.
Chapter 3
“KING CITY,” said the paper.
Jackie had never felt fear in her entire life. She had felt caution, and unease, and sadness, and joy, which are all similar to fear. But she had never felt fear itself.
She did not feel it then.
She got to the work of closing: wiping down the bathroom sink, sweeping the floor, and adjusting the thick burlap covering up items that were forbidden or secret, like the time machine that Larry Leroy had stolen from the Museum of Forbidden Technologies, and the pens and pencils (writing utensils having long been outlawed in Night Vale for reasons of public well-being, although everyone still surreptitiously used them).
The paper was still in her hand. She hadn’t realized it, had been going about everything without realizing, but there it was. Still there. Dull pencil. Smudged. Hurried handwriting. She put it down on the cracked glass of the countertop.
Now it was time to feed those items that were alive. Some of the items were alive. Some of them were dogs, and some weren’t.
There were lights now, in the desert. Low bubbles of light coming and going. She had never seen them before. She ignored them, as she ignored all things that were not part of the small circle of her days.
There were always things she had never seen before in Night Vale. There was the man she passed in the desert using a pair of scissors on the top of a cactus, as if he were cutting its hair. There was the cactus that had a full head of hair. There was the day where the small crack that’s always visible in the sky suddenly opened up, and several pterodactyls flew out. Later it was revealed they were just pteranodons, and all the panic was for nothing.
She finished her check of the inventory. The paper was in her hand.
“KING CITY,” said the paper.
How did it get there?
“How did this get here?” she asked. The dogs did not respond, nor did anything less sentient.