(This episode was co-written with Zack Parsons.)

Episode 79: “Lost in the Mail”

We brought something back with us. Something we cannot escape. Memories of a great vacation to deepest space! And the merciless Distant Prince. Welcome to Night Vale.

Listeners, it is a solemn day here in Night Vale. Even more solemn than last year's Solemnity Fest, during which three people were overcome and had to be revived with party hats and whoopee cushions.

Today is Remembrance Day, that special day once per year when we interrupt our routines to reflect upon those who probably sacrifice their lives for us in the endless Blood Space War. We're not sure whether they are alive or dead, because there is a thousand year difference between our time and those who fight for us on the vast intergalactic battlefields where time converges. But we assume that they are all heroes.

On this day, we put aside our political differences, even deeply bitter, divisive differences like the belief or disbelief in mountains, and we all come together to remember those who will die thousands of years from now, and to hope that the impossibility of victory is less impossible than before.

Like any deeply painful and serious subject, it is best remembered through the medium of a civic parade.

Looking out of the studio, I can see the parade route is packed with onlookers and everything is getting under way

The symbolic dead lead the procession, each of them wearing the mask of one of those who went into the distance of time and can never return. Behind them is a float depicting the enormous serpent whose mouth contains the universe. A playful reminder to us all that even the stars must someday be swallowed.

Following that apparition comes our mayor, and my friend, Dana Cardinal, in her ceremonial mayor's coffin. Behind her are the Citizens for a Blood Space War. Still over six hundred million dollars left to hit the fundraising goal for their bomb that may destroy reality as we understand it. Get those cookies in the oven for the next bake sale!

A brief departure now from the parade in progress. All this week we have been reaching out to you, the listeners, and asking for stories about how the Blood Space War has affected your lives. You heard from the Black Dauphin on how to grow a victory garden inside your body and Sara Bismuth shared the story of her Etsy store where she sells dolls that represent individual soldiers in the Blood Space War, showing the actual wounds they will someday suffer. And now, today, in her own words, I bring you the story of a girl whose father volunteered to fight. Let’s listen together.

[amateur recording quality with low ambient sound maybe crickets or night sounds]

BASIMAH:

Hello. I'm Basimah Bishara and I am a junior at Night Vale High. My father, Fakhir Bishara, left to join the Blood Space War when I was six. I remember the glowing doorway he stepped through when the tall, silver skinned recruiter came to our house. And the sound of it, like a slide whistle going up, but the most tragic slide whistle I've ever heard.

My dad was gone forever. But also he isn’t gone at all.

[Laughing, ambient sound like a lunchroom]

I think I'm a regular student. Whatever that means. I haven't grown wings like the cheerleaders, but I fit in. I'm bad at math, I mean I used to be good at it but I think I stopped paying attention. It seemed like it was pointing towards a truth I didn't want to learn. I'm really good at science and English. I used to be in marching band, now I prefer guitar. Me and my friends formed an all-girl thrash group. We're called the Mizz Fits.

[Guitar plucking mixed in with the ambient sound]

I guess how it works is that once a year for the first hundred years of dad’s journey they are going to wake him up and allow him to send a message back to earth.

I have a big family, so it's not like I don't feel loved. Sometimes I feel like it would be easier if dad couldn't get in touch with me at all. No, I don't wish that. I love him. I wish he had never left.

The messages show up on my nightstand in these gelatinous gashapon capsules. They’re warm and soft in my hands. The words are printed on a tiny roll of plastic inside. He only gets to send one, every year, and he always sends it to me right around my birthday, but not exactly on my birthday. I don’t know whether he’s getting it wrong or they are. Or maybe it’s just time being weird again. I’d like to believe it’s that.

To my dad, he left eleven days ago, but to me it's most of my lifetime. I'll be an old woman and he'll still be on his way to the war, sending letters to a me that he remembers from just a few weeks before. It's stupid. It’s not stupid, I guess. It is stupid though. It is.

CECIL: More from Basimah in a bit, but we need to update you on the parade.

[rattling chains and distant fluting]

Here comes the emissary, listeners! It wouldn't be Remembrance Day without a visit from the only entity to ever return from the war. It has been hauled up from the pit and, yes, here it comes.

[high pitched merry flute whistling, think the bird from Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf"]

No one knows what the emissary is or why the emissary inhabits a cosmonaut's suit. Oh, it's lifting the visor and giving us a glimpse at the void within the helmet. It's saying something. I'll try to interpret. "All these things... are meaningless. End... the... war."

Of course, that's the whole point, isn't it listeners? If we end the war it will go on eternally. We must continue the war to bring it to an end. It's why all those brave people enlisted and keep enlisting and will enlist forever.

[fluting moves away]

And there goes the emissary, a solemn reminder of why our volunteers continue to fight in the Blood Space War. What a brave being. Soon we will trap it back in its pit.

Speaking of those volunteers, the Night Vale Veterans of a Blood Space War Association is holding a fish fry this Saturday to raise money for a statue of the unknown soldier to be built 1,000 years in the future, by which time we may know who the soldier is. Bring friends, family, fish and whatever else you would like fried over to the VFW hive located in the space between the walls at the abandoned cannery.

[distant, comical car honking sounds]

Oh, no. While I avert my gaze from the Shriners homunculi, let’s have a word from our sponsors.

Do you have dry eyes? Red eyes? Goat eyes? Aphid eyes? Any other eyes you're not currently using? We want your eyes at Richter's Eye Glass Hut. We give you money for your unwanted eyes and turn them into glass for affordable window panes. How? Don’t ask questions. Come on down to Richter's Eye Glass Hut, located conveniently off the highway helix in the shadow of the immense precarious rock. [faster disclaimer] No longer accepting potato eyes or the eye of a storm. Not responsible for our windows watching you while you sleep.

And now, let’s return to Basimah’s story.

[Ambient sound of her bedroom]

[Basimah is doing an impression of her father's voice]

BASIMAH: "The ship is so big. It makes me think of big things, Bazzy." That's what he calls me. It was my nickname when I was six. I’m not six.

It all comes out of him in a jumble. "They say what we are going to fight is an idea, like a color or pride, but it can kill us. If the idea gets inside you then it's over. Bazzy, do you remember the song I used to sing to you to put you to sleep? Paula Abdul. Rush, Rush."

And then he wrote the whole song out, but he got a bunch of the lyrics wrong. I guess he was doing it from memory.

I just got a capsule two months ago telling me he wants me to be a doctor so I can cure one of the big diseases like cancer. Like cancer? There's nothing like cancer, there's just cancer. Sure, I'll cure that, Space Dad. No pressure, right?

Most of the messages my father sends me are lists of ways I need to live my life. Things I should do and shouldn't do, you know? He told me to pray every day and obey my mother. When I was nine he warned me not to kiss a boy until I'm sixteen. Which, well, I guess good news for him there.

[new ambient sound. She’s outside, maybe in the lunchroom, maybe somewhere else]

The divergence started with little things. He said I should get a puppy for my eighth birthday, but I got a snail. When I was fifteen he wanted to make sure I had started wearing my hijab. Mom said I should make my own choices, so sometimes I wear it and sometimes I don’t. Like, always at mosque, but not that often at school. That sort of thing.

My father is talking to a person who isn’t me, to a person that doesn’t exist. He has imagined my entire childhood and young adulthood. He brings up obvious milestones, like starting high school or that first kiss. But he didn't know about the car accident I spent most of my fourteenth year recovering from. I can't tell him about the poems I write or the fact that I have a girlfriend, not a boyfriend.

He’s a ghost to me now or, maybe, since he's going to be around long after I’m gone, I’m the one who is a ghost to him.

I take some comfort knowing my dad got paid a lot of money for joining the Blood Space War, enough to take care of me and mom for a long time, and, really, having a space dad is just another way to have a family. Everyone has their own thing, you know? Like all of the Mizz Fits. Clara is in a nuclear family straight from the 1950s, but, like, literally from the 1950s even as she lives her life in 2015. Nisha has a council of fathers. Jacquelyn's mom is a spider.

As long as you are loved, it doesn't matter. So my dad's a space ghost? I can deal. I just wish dad loved me and not who I was eleven years ago.

Or maybe I’m not ok with it. Maybe I wish he would come back.

I wish he would be a dad to me, not to the ghost of me that haunts him.

CECIL: More with Basimah coming up, but first, the weather.

[WEATHER: "Sharon" by Good San Juan]

The parade has ended, most of the onlookers have ceased to look on, and the wind is gathering up the paper Remembrance Day masks and depositing them in a random scattering across our sidewalks and streets. A lone dog I recognize from a recurring dream is staring at me from a block away. A dark van rumbles past. Everything is calm and quiet once again and--

[Close, loud fluting]

Oh, my! You startled me. Listeners, the emissary has appeared in the studio without warning, without even opening a door. It is sitting in the chair next to me and slowly rotating. Its visor is open and I am being forced to stare at the ineffable darkness within the emissary's helmet.

[fluting]

I believe it is asking if I understand the nature of unreality. Emissary, I understand dreams and fantasies and this gooey, sometimes-incredible, sometimes-painful world that surrounds us, but I can only experience it with my seven senses.

[fluting]

Listeners, the emissary is saying that the nature of unreality... is... that experience and reality are linked but separate. What is experienced may not be real. What is real may never be experienced. So far this is just basic geometry like we all learn in 3rd grade. Where is the emissary going with this?

[fluting]

The emissary is saying... "in a thousand years, we will turn the vastness of space red for no reason. There was never a purpose to this war we made."

But if Remembrance Day has taught me anything, under strict order of the Sheriff's Secret Police, it is that war is a purpose unto itself.

[fluting]

The emissary is asking me to end the conflict, but I'm sorry, emissary, I do not have the power to end the Blood Space War. After all the blood that has been spilled in space, or will be spilled, or may be spilled at some theoretical point in the future. I am a humble radio host and you are a sentient nothingness inhabiting the suit of a dead cosmonaut. How could the two of us hope to stop a war?

I don’t know. I just don’t know.

The emissary is gone, as though it was never here. Maybe it wasn’t. After all, this moment was only something I experienced, not something I know is real.

Let’s hear the rest of Basimah’s tape.

[Basimah, quiet ambient room, guitar playing of Rush Rush]]

BASIMAH: People always say to me, "You must be proud of your father going off to fight in the Blood Space War."

I used to say yes to them. Not anymore. I don't care if it makes me selfish or ungrateful. My dad made the wrong choice and I want him back.

He wrote down the lyrics all wrong.

[singing to the tune of Rush Rush]

You're gonna seeI'm gonna run,I'm gonna fly,I'm gonna bring this love back to ya

[fluting on the recording,]

Ah! How did you get in my room? What are you? What are you?

[the fluting shifts, distinctly playing the tune to Rush Rush]

Daddy? Is that you, daddy?! [laughing] Daddy! [crying. laughing.] Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. [crying]

CECIL: Listeners, I don’t know how the emissary ended up in this taped recording, dropped off at the studio three days ago, given that the emissary was only released from its pit this morning. But then: I don’t know how my favorite type of pie is made, but when I order it, there it is, steaming and delicious. I don’t know how the mail gets delivered, but every day, like clockwork, it doesn’t. I don’t know how lost pets end up on the moon, but they do, and they have built an extensive city up there.

The clock claims it is now 12:01. Remembrance Day is over. We can all return to our lives and to forgetting that the Blood Space War is going on, or will go on, maybe, a thousand years from now.

And maybe, in one thousand years, plus a day or two, those brave volunteers we sent to fight in a war none of us understand will allow the most dangerous idea of all into their heads. They will turn back, and return home to us, against all laws of time and space.

Paraphrasing the half-remembered words of an ancient prophet, perhaps they will bring this love back to us. Or maybe they already have.

Stay tuned next for events that will or will not happen, in the order that they may or may not occur.

And from the present as I am currently experiencing it, good night, Night Vale. Good night.