Is this the first time you’ve heard me say this? Are you sure? Welcome to Night Vale

Ok, I’m starting again.

As many of you certainly noticed, we are having a problem of timeline divergence here in Night Vale. Events are happening over and over, and each instance is different than the last. Earl Harlan, sous chef at Tourniquet was preparing a Fresh Salad with Wood Glue Vinagrette and decided to do a spinach base, but then he was preparing a Fresh Salad with Wood Glue Vinagrette and decided on a romaine base. The same event twice, with drastically different outcomes.

Also there was that tragic story from the Night Vale Daily Journal about the plane that crashed at Night Vale International Airport. But then when we looked at the paper again, and it was a really boring story about a plane that landed safely with no unusual incidents. It was a stunning tragedy and a totally mundane event, simultaneously, and it is unclear which of those really happened.

My husband Carlos, whose long, perfect hair was looking unusually perfect, does not know what is causing these fracturing timelines. He has been busy in his lab, saying that he is working on an incredibly important project related to this, and he needs to see it through. Meanwhile, a mysterious figure in a black satin mask stood on top of the former Flakey O’s factory, watching this chaos unfold. Who is this figure? And what do they want?

More soon. Or maybe just this again, but with a slightly different wording. We’ll see.

And now traffic:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And so I decided to take both
Be one traveler, I split myself good
By a process I barely understood
A third me slithered ‘neath the undergrowth;

Through the trees I could see myself walk
Merely me but I started to hate him
For if I am real then he is the mock
We turned as one, as one began to talk
Each quoting the other verbatim

I shall be asking and asking why
To iterations of myself hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
Took them both and many others beside
It turned out there never was a difference.

This has been traffic.

This splitting of timelines in town has only gotten worse. And it seems that it is connected to the mysterious figure in a black satin mask. Wherever they go, things happen and also happen differently, and also happen even differently than that.

When the masked figure visited the library and asked for a copy of The Artist’s Husband - that hit novel about an artist and a time traveler who get married - the Librarians began keening and banging on their cages, but also they got very quiet. Several Librarians escaped but also they didn’t escape, and several bystanders were mauled by the loose Librarians but also they were fine and went back to their homes saying things like “wow, uneventful day today” and “Nothing exciting has ever happened to me and I’ve never been injured.”

When the masked figure stopped at the Ralphs, weekday shift manager Charlie Bair accidentally spilled a box of cereal in aisle three, Kellogg’s cereal of course, since no other cereal is allowed in town anymore. But at the same time Charlie spilled Kellogg’s cereal all over aisle five, which is the cleaning supplies aisle (he wasn’t sure how that even happened but it did). And at the exact same moment the Ralphs wasn’t a Ralphs but was instead a Vons.

This is truly getting baffling. How do I report on a story that is many different stories at once, all contradicting each other? And just who is this mysterious figure in the black satin mask?

Further updates when more is known and, possibly, simultaneously not known.

And now the community calendar.

Monday is Pizza Night at the Last Bank of Night Vale. Come by for this fun community event, that features free pizza, a DJ, and paperwork that looks like a softball sign up sheet but actually commits you to a predatory loan.

Meanwhile, Monday is karaoke night at the Last Bank of Night Vale. Come and join our employees in song. Unfortunately we planned this slightly last minute, and so the only CD we could find was a collection of nature sounds. So do your best to sing along to such hot numbers as “Rustling Leaves #5” “Miscellaneous Beach Noise” and “Two Hours of Burbling Brook”

Then, Monday is Art Gallery Night at the Last Bank of Night Vale. Do you make art? Why? Just what are you trying to prove? Do you think you’re better than us? Come try to justify yourself, this Monday night at the Last Bank of Night Vale.

Finally, Monday is the Annual Kids Fundraising dinner at the Last Bank of Night Vale, catered by Night Vale’s own Earl Harlan. Join this fun and delicious celebration, as we raise money for kids, which we will then give to the kids, no strings attached. I wonder what they’ll spend it on.

Huh, something was off about this community calendar, but I can’t put my finger on what. Looking back, it seems normal. Kind of a light week, only one event. Monday night at the Last Bank of Night Vale is a garage sale. They have all sorts of weird stuff people have put in safety deposit boxes, and it feels like a waste leaving them sitting there. Come and make an offer.

So that’s normal. Not sure what it was.

Carlos has reached out to me with a concern. He said he is busy at work on this problem, but, given that events have been turning out with wildly different outcomes, how will we know which outcome is true?

“This day will end, however it ends,” he said. “But how will we know the ending we experience is real? What if resolving this crisis is merely another splitting possibility, and at the same time there’s an us still dealing with the crisis?”

And that is a very real concern. I guess I can only say that it’s a gut thing. I feel like when this is resolved, we’ll know the real series of events. We’ll just know them, you know? Because they’ll be the ones that actually happened. Carlos tells me that gut feelings aren’t scientific but I said, “Well what are guts made out of? Science, right?” And he had to concede that point.

Then I told him his short, cropped hair looked more perfect than usual, and he blushed.

Still, I’ll keep Carlos’s concern in mind as this day wraps up. I’ll need to pay attention, and make sure that what is happening is the only version of that event, and there aren’t other stray versions, sprawling out their own timelines somewhere else.

And now for a word from our sponsors.

Today’s sponsor is…huh. Ok. They just sent a videotape with the labels torn off of it. I guess I’ll watch it and describe what I’m seeing. It’s a black and white shot of a kitchen. A man is making a sandwich. It’s a falafel sandwich with cucumbers and tomatoes. He eats the sandwich, smiles at the camera and leaves the room. Now there is big red text saying “There must be another way.” Now we’re back at the kitchen and the man is making a sandwich. He seems confused, as though he remembers having just done this. In his confusion, as he’s cutting the tomatoes, the knife slips and oh god. Oh god. He’s screaming. But now that same text. “There must be another way.” And the man is back making the sandwich. He’s still screaming. But he realizes his hand is intact. He goes to the phone to make a call and slips, banging his head on the counter. He falls out of frame. The text again: “There must be another way.” The man is back. He is pale and shaking, and feeling his head. He can’t believe it’s not broken open. He runs for the door and out into the yard. The camera follows him. It’s not clear who is filming. There is an earthquake and a crevasse opens up in his lawn and he disappears into it. Again: “There must be another way.” And he is back in the kitchen. He is weeping.

How long is…ok, it looks like this tape is at least three hours long. I’ll watch the rest of it later and kind of summarize. Maybe at the end we’ll find out who is even sponsoring this thing.

The diverging timelines disaster is only worsening, and Night Vale of course has no mayor to deal with the issue. Except that sometimes we do have a mayor, and sometimes it’s Dana Cardinal and sometimes it’s Pamela Winchell, and sometimes it’s a tall obsidian statue with wings and a thousand faces. It’s not clear which of these timelines are real.

The Sheriff tried to restore order, saying “Listen, no matter what timeline you find yourself in, just maintain a calm disposition, lie face down wherever you are, and wait for a secret police officer to collect you.” But the problem is that anyone following these directions finds that they have simultaneously not followed those directions, and so the problem doesn’t seem possible to resolve.

Meanwhile, the worst of the effects are following the figure in the black satin mask, although nothing more has been learned as to who they are or what their role in all this might be.

And so…oh.

Listeners….the masked figure. They have walked into the station. They are standing on the other side of the control room glass. They are reaching up now, and pulling off the mask.

Oh my god…it’s….

Hold on, I need to deal with this. Let’s go to the weather.

[Weather from Caged Animals' new album Escape Artist]

Ending 1

Listeners, I can’t believe it. The masked figure all this time was…Telly the barber. Yes, Telly, who soon after my Carlos came to town with his beautiful and perfect hair, gave Carlos just a hideous haircut. It was an affront to all that is good in this world. And in his rightful shame, Telly fled into the desert, howling his regret to the night sky and giving wild haircuts to the cacti. No one in town has spoken his name in years. And now here he is, apparently destroying our timelines. Is there no end to the crimes that Telly can commit?

Telly was weeping. He shouted through the glass window of my booth: “I’m trying to make it right.” He was fogging up the window, and that was annoying, and I could hardly hear him, so I told him to come inside.

“I’m trying to make it right,” he said, at a more reasonable volume. “I’ve been trying to change the past so that I never gave that haircut. But it has all been going wrong. Instead of changing the moment of my vile haircut, I have been splitting every possible point of divergence in all of the timelines of Night Vale. This isn’t what I wanted.”

That Telly. What a mess.

That was when Carlos arrived. I could tell he had come in a hurry, because he was wearing his casual house lab coat, which he doesn’t like to be seen in. He mostly wears it to bed or when he’s doing the dishes. But that was the least of it. His hair was going through a truly bizarre transformation. As I watched, it kept radically changing lengths and styles, from a mohawk to a shaved head to gorgeous hair stretching halfway to the floor. His hair could not stay the same for longer than a few seconds.

And then Carlos said…well, hear for yourself

CARLOS: Oh Telly. I had thought it was me. I had thought it was my fault. In the lab, I had managed to track the source of the timeline divergence to soon after I came to town, and that made me afraid that somehow my presence was causing this. I was too ashamed to say so, even to my husband, because what would it mean if this town was rejecting me somehow? But now I understand. I got that haircut from you right around when I arrived. That’s where the source of this is. And Telly. Can I just let you know? I really liked that haircut.”

CECIL: But Telly wouldn’t listen. He shouted “That haircut ruined my life. I regret it every day. I must fix it.” And he started fiddling with the device he had invented to change the past. And that is when things truly took a turn. Night Vale vanished, and the three of us were standing on an empty desert plain. And then Night Vale was back, but it was different. A neon studded city at night, all futuristic flying cars and citizens with downturned eyes hurrying back to their dingy apartments. And then we were in space, somewhere in the farflung battlefields of the Blood Space Wars and around us were explosions and thousands dying. And then we were back in the radio booth again and Telly was weeping and weeping. Carlos put his hand on Telly. “Stop,” Carlos said. “Stop.” And Telly stopped.

Then Carlos said:

CARLOS: Listen, Telly. That haircut was great. I loved it. So maybe Cecil didn’t like it. Maybe no one else in the entire universe liked it. I don’t know. I don’t care. Because I loved it. And I got it for me. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You never did. Come back to us. Come back to us and restart your life. You were one of us all this time.

CECIL: So Telly did. He moved back in from the desert and has reopened his barber shop. He has resumed friendships with people he had only thought hated him, but instead had been giving him his space. There had been a misapprehension on both sides, and that had led to years of disconnect. Years that were finally healing.

I still think that haircut was a crime. But my husband tells me my opinion on that doesn’t matter, so.

The timelines in Night Vale have settled down. Everything is only happening once, and only in one way. It seems the day has been saved by Carlos’s superhuman forgiveness and perfect hair.

Or was it? Because as Carlos said earlier, how can we know that this isn’t just one timeline, and somewhere else there’s a Night Vale where this all happened differently? And what if that’s the real Night Vale?

There’s only one way to find out, listeners. I’m going to start this broadcast again, and see if it turns out the same way.

Is this the first time you’ve heard me say this? Are you sure? Welcome to Night Vale

Ending 2

Listeners, I can’t believe it. The masked figure all this time was...my old friend Earl Harlan.

Earl stood there, black satin mask in hand, with an even-more-solemn-than-usual expression.

“I didn't mean for this to happen,” he said, his eyes filling up with an inky blackness. “That's the most important thing to remember. Okay, Cecil?”

“Okay,” I said, “But what exactly is happening?”

He pressed his phone to the glass and showed me a text conversation he'd been having with his son Roger. It was a string of emojis, mainly the waving-arms octopus plus the minotaur with sunglasses plus the movie theater on fire with a marquee that has a picture of another movie theater on fire. “Do you know what this means?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “No,” I said. “I'm not really sure,” I said.

“Roger wants to go out with his friends tonight,” Earl explained. “They want to walk blindfolded into the desert with their backpacks filled with rocks.”

“That sounds kind of dangerous?” I said, not sure what this had to do with the timeline problem.

“I know right?” said Earl. “But if I say no, Roger will be mad at me and his friends will think he's uncool! I really don't want Roger to be mad at me. And friendships are so important at that age. They’re just so intense. I was nineteen for a really long time. I know what I'm talking about.”

“Right, right,” I said, “But the timelines?”

“Also,” continued Earl, “My assistant keeps asking if we're doing croquettes or funnel cakes for the Kids Fundraising Dinner but I just don't know! Whatever we choose could change the course of the night, and our lives, forever. I finally had to block her number. And then I’m supposed to pick the colors for the new Boy Scout uniforms. Dried-blood red and khaki brown or fresh-blood red and khaki green. I've gotten to the point of wearing a black satin mask so no one can recognize me and ask me to make any more big decisions today. I've just never been good at things like this.”

Earl’s eyes were as shiny and dark as oil slicks. “Like earlier at Vons?” he said. “My shopping list had one thing on it. I was there for six hours. I walked out of Ralphs with nothing. You'd be surprised, Cecil, how often I leave that store with nothing at all, feeling dazed and starved and exhausted, my empty reusable canvas bag flapping against my side in the hot wind.”

I tried to reassure him that we all do that, but he didn’t seem to hear me.

“Some days all I do is think about the things I could have done,” Earl said. “Like I keep having these visions of this one moment that I can't even really remember. It was in a car. Or it was on a porch with the light burnt out. Or it was in a brightly lit hallway with a party going on in the next room. There was something I didn’t do. Something I was afraid to do and told myself I could do it later when it felt less scary. But some opportunities only happen once before they become unattainable forever. Do you know what I mean?”

After a moment, I said: “Yeah.”

Earl’s head tilted back. Darkness beamed from his eyes until the daylight outside was stained to night. “Car, porch, hallway. Khaki, blood, croquettes. Octopus, minotaur, movie theater,” he chanted until the words became just rhythmic guttural sounds.

Finally, Earl's phone vibrated. His head un-tilted and his eyes stopped beaming as he fished around in his pocket. It was a text from an old friend. A very old, very good friend. They hadn't spoken in some time, not really spoken, not like they used to.

It said, “Hey. I know it's been a while. But I just wanted you to know, I think it's kind of cool that you can't make choices. Like, maybe that makes you more of a part of the universe and less of an actor upon it. Maybe we could all be a little more like that, you know?”

Earl felt suddenly relieved, as if many years of heaviness had lifted. The blackness in his eyes receded and the sky grew light again. “Yes,” he said, “why do I have to make choices at all? Why do any of us?”

Now, the friend may not have meant that exactly, but at this point, there was nothing he could do to take it back. “No more choices,” Earl said, shutting his eyes tightly. Then he walked down the hallway, out the door into the too-bright sunlight of dawn. And then he walked down the hallway, out the door. And then, he walked down the hallway, out the door.

Since this moment, citizens agree that one reality remains in Night Vale and that it's the correct one. Hot take: I’m not 100% sure. I thought I’d have a gut feeling, but I just feel...I don't know. Unsettled. I feel like I have to look at everything that happened today and just keep looking at it till it makes sense. You know?

Speaking of gut feelings, I'm getting updates that the Ralphs no longer stocks Kellogg's cereal and in fact only stocks one product in every aisle: Castellano brand colossal squids stuffed with their own viscera, which I understand is an imported Spanish tapas. Great appetizers for your dinner parties, or just for complete meals, snacks, and all sustenance from now on. Ralphs: For all your shopping needs involving Castellano brand colossal squids stuffed with their own viscera.

I need to make sure this was how it actually turned out. I need to begin again.

Is this the first time you’ve heard me say this? Are you sure? Welcome to Night Vale

Ending 3

Listeners, I can’t believe it. The masked figure all this time was... Daily Journal editor Leann Hart. Leann shattered the control booth glass, leaped forward, and thrust a well-polished hatchet to my face, pressing the sharpened blade against my cheek.

Hatchets are tools common among print news professionals for threatening internet-based publications, so I couldn't understand why I was her target.

I said: "Leann, I'm a radio host, not a news blogger. I'm not your enemy."

"Oh I know you're not, Cecil," Leann said. "I'm not threatening you. I'm just showing you the new hatchet I bought. It's palladium. Cost me a fortune. Feel that. So nice. The metal stays cool and soft, but it cuts through bone like a copy editor through adverbs."

And then we both laughed. “Haha,” I said, “This was an extremely funny joke that only us true journalists could understand.”

"The word 'extremely' was unnecessary there, Cecil," Leann growled, pressing the blade tighter to my face.

"Uh, that IS a nice hatchet, Leann," I said. "But how did you afford it? There's no money in media these days, unless you have a true crime podcast."

Leann smiled.

"Wait. Did you start a true crime podcast?" I asked. "Because that would be a great idea, to murder a bunch of people and then do a podcast about it."

"I have something even better, Cecil," she said. "I have time."

Leann said she time traveled over and over throughout each day, and then selling newspapers across hundreds of concurrent timelines. She increased the number of days she could sell papers but not the amount of time or labor involved. She made millions.

She tried to stay out of the stories, not wanting to change the arc of our future, but no matter how objective she remained, the repeated day was always different. So she gave up trying to stay disinterested and began to actually influence each event.

There was a car chase on Route 800 last Tuesday. In one version, the Sheriff's Secret Police stopped the suspect without violence and then took him to jail with lots of violence. In another version, the suspect got away by fleeing on foot out into the scrublands.

And in another version, Leann Hart thwarted the suspect from ever stealing the car in the first place, thus saving police from endangering themselves and others, and protecting the car's owner from an awful day followed by months of arguing with an insurance company.

But Leann found that this third version didn't sell papers, because there was no story. What proved most lucrative was an ongoing fear amongst the readers needing to know how this horrible crime would be resolved.

Weeks of a fugitive on the loose lead to weeks of great sales, as the city filled with angst, fought for more police protection, and formed theories about who the criminal mastermind was.

"Oh yeah, I remember this story now." I told Leann. "We never caught the guy, did we?"

"We did," Leann said. "I finagled a timeline where he was captured, but only because the story stopped selling papers. I needed something more exciting, so then I convinced this psychopath who had been murdering stray animals to instead poison the town water supply, and we all died. That was a bad one. No one bought a single paper."

"Leann, you can't do this. You can't keep traveling through time and manipulating our fates to sell papers," I said. "It's unethical, immoral even, to make money by ruining lives."

Then she said I must hate capitalism and called me a socialist, and I didn't have a comeback.

"I'm giving up the time travel thing anyway," she said. "Also, I promise to stop creating dangerous news stories to sell papers."

I told her it must have been a tough, but fulfilling journey through her own soul to elevate compassion for others above personal gain. I told Leann I was proud of her decision.

She said negative news stories didn't really sell anyway. In all of her time traveling, she had cultivated a large sample size of sales data showing sustained emotional arguments based around raw fear were the best approach. The Daily Journal from this point forward would be exclusively Op-Ed.

With a gleam in her eye, Leann showed me tomorrow's front page headline: "PUBLIC SCHOOLS SHOULD NOT GIVE PORNOGRAPHY TO OUR KIDS"

"They're handing out pornography in school?" I gasped.

"I don't know," she said. "The point is that they should NOT be doing that, whether they are or not. We're going to sell a bunch of papers. This will be a story for weeks."

And I agreed it was a good idea to sell papers with only half-formed opinions about nonexistent issues. It will save on staff time spent researching and reporting, and more importantly no water will poisoned, no cars will be stolen. Irrational headlines will initiate helpful discussions and friendly debate, with absolutely no harm done.

Leann left the office and told me I could report her story but only on embargo until the Daily Journal scooped it. So that's why it's taken me a week to tall you this. At least I think it's been a week.

You know, I want to make sure this was how it actually turned out. I need to begin again.

Is this the first time you’ve heard me say this? Are you sure? Welcome to Night Vale.