DEB: Hello Squishy Humans. Deb at it again, as usual, talking until your mortal forms pass away. Welcome-

DANA: Once again the sun has risen. Good one, sun. We’re all very impressed by the same trick for the millionth day in a row. I’m Dana Cardinal. Welcome to

COMPUTER: Computer loves Night Vale. Night Vale provides home for computer. Welcome

DEB: Welcome

DANA: Welcome

STEVE: Hey everyone. Oh uh. Oh man, I’m supposed to prepare some sort of start to this thing, huh? Dang it. I forget every time. EVERY TIME. Come on Steve. You have a responsibility here Steve. You’re better than this, Steve. Sorry. God. Sorry [long frustrated pause] uh, Welcome to Night Vale.

CECIL: Listeners, it is a special day today. That’s right, it’s Carlos and I’s sixth anniversary! Yes, we count that first night at the Arby’s looking up at those lights as the start. And why not? Something has to be the start, and that felt like the first moment of it, the rest of our life. It’s especially emotional this anniversary, because recently we did not exist for a brief period. Then we both did exist again, but I had forgotten about our entire life together. I have since remembered, and it has been especially tender between us. Such things happen in any marriage that has gone on for enough years, and so it served as a good reminder of who we are in each other’s lives.

But it’s not just a special day for us! No, it’s also, oh wow!, the 30th birthday of legend of stage and screen Mr. Lee Marvin. Let’s take a listen to a special message from the birthday man himself.

LEE MARVIN: Hello. It is my birthday again. Ha. Well, happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to all of us. It’s all of our birthdays this year. Congratulations us. But it’s only for so much longer. I am tired of floating on time, like a lazy river gone stale. It is time for me to reach out, to seize, to alter. I am so tired. I wish I could sleep. I mean, I can. I can sleep. But also I wish that I could. Both the wish and the ability exist within me.

This will be the last day that I turn 30. I have been climbing a narrow rock chimney, but today I let go and fall into deep clear waters. Thanks for all of the birthday wishes. It really has meant a lot.

CECIL: Ok. Kind of a bummer of a birthday message, but let’s move on. And now the financial news.

MAUREEN: And now the financial news or whatever. Looks like stocks are up. Which is great for people who own stocks. Who are statistically already wealthy enough that stocks being up or down doesn’t fundamentally affect their lives. And those of us without stocks, well then the health of the stock market has little relationship to...

FOW: Tony, I see you are reading the financial news. Yes I’m looking at you right now. No, not behind your shoulder. I see you glancing back. No, not out the window either. Tony, look up. Look up, Tony. The great work beg- [“begins”]

STEVE: Now see, I’m VP of counting at the Last Bank of Night Vale. I can count very high, so I’m uniquely situated to explain these figures to you. So, uh, ok. See where the graph is going down? That means the price is uh lower. Or maybe the stock is? Or it’s all going up? Hold on, I’ve been looking at this sideways. Oh, this isn’t a graph at all. It’s a picture of Lee Marvin.

DANA: Why do bad things happen to good people? Wrong question. The question is: Why do things happen?

BASIMAH: I have seventeen dollars in my bank account, and my teenage father is living with me. So things are going great here.

CECIL: …up 8%, the highest percentage in the last three years. And this has been financial news

Meanwhile, a last minute birthday party for Lee Marvin has been arranged at Gino’s Italian Dining Experience and Grill and Bar at 5pm, where we will all celebrate the first three decades of Mr Marvin’s life by taking advantage of some great happy hour deals. Gino’s happy hours aren’t super appetizing. The most popular item is a small bowl filled with polished pebbles. But they are damn cheap, and that is appreciated in these tough times, when all of us are finding ourselves short on our bills, except the estate of the late Marcus Vanston, which now contains approximately 15% of all the money in the United States but still has no designated beneficiary.

Mr. Marvin himself is not expected to attend his own party, as he is not feeling well and also says that he has a plan to remove himself from this tired wheel of time. Well feel better, Lee! And good luck on that hobby of yours! Sounds complicated and exhausting! I’ll have a Shiraz and a bowl of pebbles in honor of you.

LEE MARVIN: Night Vale, we are a town of good intentions. Once there was a god, and her name was Huntokar, and she tried to save one little town. She acted with love. The missiles came, and she reached out to shift the timeline only a tad, only enough save us, and in that moment her little town shattered into millions of parallel towns. This place became a prism. A god’s love is a dangerous force.

Once there was a woman who was a General, and she wanted victory for a just cause. So she fought every battle over and over until time was jumbled up and overlapping and worn thin. She returned home and she died, but the wreckage she made of time remained.

And once there was a man, an actor. Once but not much longer.

Here time and space have been scratched and scrunched, worn down until they are translucent. And what if I reached out a hand? And what if I pushed that hand through the thin places? Happy 30th birthday to me. My last 30th birthday.

STEVE: Well folks, there’s the hour and it’s time to, uh, do our usual checks and such. Check in on it. On the. You know, the. Uh. What’s the word?

FOW: I’m standing on your roof, Randolph. Yes, Randolph, that’s my pacing you hear, back and forth on these cheap clay tiles that needed replacing three years ago. There will be rain, Randolph, someday. And then there will be leaks. That’s a certainty. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at…

DANA: That’s that for all that, listeners. I’m getting tired just reporting on all this life. Can’t imagine how tired all of you are from living it. So let’s all take a break, together, and go to the…

THE NUMBERS STATION: 43, 12, 9, 55, 30, 17….the weather……to the weather….Cause I am a champion and you’re gonna hear me………….roar

[weather]

LEE MARVIN:

There are many Night Vales. This isn’t news. It’s merely the fact of it.

There’s a Night Vale where the streets are rivers, and the rain falls constantly from sunless skies. There’s a Night Vale where the mayor is a smiling man and a Night Vale where the mayor is a brave woman and of course there is a Night Vale that has no mayor and never will have one again.

There’s a Night Vale without day and there’s a Night Vale without night. There’s a Night Vale where the dogs sing and the birds bark. There’s a Night Vale with no people. Only the angels moaning and tapping their fingers. There’s a Night Vale where I never was born, and there’s a Night Vale where I never will die.

There’s a Faceless Old Woman who secretly lives in your home. She’s in every Night Vale there is.

There’s a Night Vale where time runs backwards and a Night Vale where time skips about and there’s a Night Vale where time doesn’t work at all. That’s this Night Vale. Time is weird here. Time is weird everywhere, but it’s especially weird here.

There’s a Night Vale where Dana is the voice of her town and a Night Vale where Deb the Sentient Patch of Haze is the voice of her town and a Night Vale where you are the voice of your town. An infinitude of voices of an infinitude of Night Vales. But here in this Night Vale, our voice is Cecil. A voice like distant traffic. A voice like strong coffee at midnight.

Once there was a god with good intentions and a heart full of love. She shattered us into many versions of us.

Once there was a general, full of courage and victory. She twisted our time about itself, lost us in a labyrinth of hours and years.

And once there was a man. Oh, his dreams were simple. He wanted to be an actor, that’s all. To lie a little to audiences, in a way that they like being lied to. But time got stuck on him, like gum on a shoe. It was always his 30th birthday. From the big bang to the tedious heat death of the universe. His 30th birthday forever. Time weighed on him. And so he looked out at every Night Vale that has ever been and every Night Vale that ever will be, all of them swirling and swinging through intertwining chronologies, and he concentrated very hard, and he reached out one tired, ancient, 30 year old hand and stopped them all. Just for a moment, he stopped time’s gyrations.

All is frozen. Water hangs in the air below a leaking tap. The trees are sculpted by a gust of wind and haven’t yet swung back to their natural state. The clouds form a frozen pattern, like snow drifts in the sky. A voice of Night Vale sits in front of a microphone, mouth open but no words coming out. All of the voices, in all of the Night Vales.

On the highway out of town, the cars are stopped dead, their drivers caught glancing at their phones, or scratching their ears and thinking about what would finally make them happy, or looking in the mirror and trying to gauge whether the car behind them belongs to the Sheriff’s Secret Police. Farther out, over the mountains and to the coast, the waves are stopped mid fall, foam caught rising, water caught tumbling.

An old man in Canada trips on a shoe discarded by his grandson, and there he remains, hands out, mid-air, too late for anyone to save, but not yet colliding with the earth. He will dislocate his knee.

A soldier in China squints at a bird, trying to decide which type of bird it is. Really, it is too distant to tell, but the soldier makes a game of this to pass the tedium. And so here they are, squinting at a bird that is stopped mid-flight, its wings outstretched, catching wind that is no longer moving. Observe the soldier in this moment, a thin slice of a long life.

Out in low earth orbit, a spindly silver being in a graceful silver craft is caught in the instant when its appendages that are not really fingers - but we can call them fingers even though they technically are closer in function to kidneys - when its fingers phase through the skull of the sleeping human that it has brought aboard, reaching into the human’s memories seeking out a clearer understanding of the planet that the being has been tasked to observe.

That planet and all of the other planets cease for a moment in their senseless hurtle through the vacuum. They are all suspended, the way they are in diagrams. The story we tell ourselves of stasis and clear spatial relationships is, for a moment, true. An entire universe holds its breath.

Then I shift my hand a little, and the gears of time click back into place and start again to move. Not quite as they were before. They are on track now, their tread a little truer.

The beginning of my end. The start of my death. I take in air. I let out air. And in the moment where the universe starts again, something happens that has never happened before. Not in all of history.

CECIL: Today is a special day, Night Vale. Lee Marvin, star of stage and screen, is…oh wow, turning 31 today. Happy birthday Lee! You know, it feels like our thirties just fly by. Enjoy them while they last! Lee Marvin celebrated his birthday in a notably somber way. He stepped out onto his lawn, nodding to passersby and various idiot birds. He spit through his teeth, placed his hand on his hips, watched the sun move for a while. Then he nodded in approval of everything he had seen, and stepped back inside. Well, we all express happiness in our own ways.

A few minutes ago, I got the most interesting voicemail from my most interesting husband, Carlos. It’s our sixth anniversary today, you know? Anyway, he was so excited, I’ve never heard him talk so fast in his life.

Carlos said he opened the clock that was on our mantlepiece at home. The one that was given to him by his mother the day he received his PhD. The one he brought with him to Night Vale. The one that, after having come to Night Vale, he opened to find that it was full of moss and fur and human teeth. Time doesn’t work in Night Vale, he had realized, and he mourned the transformation of both the clock and his experience of the days and years of his life. But he still believes in keeping his possessions in perfect condition and so today he opened the clock to brush its teeth only to find it was full of gears and a battery and was ticking away. He measured the movement of its minute hand against the sun and found that the sun, instead of disappearing at wildly different times, was setting on a normal schedule. He called me up, his voice cracking with excitement bordering on terror.

“Cecil,” he said to me. “Cecil. Time is normal in Night Vale.”

Well.

It is night, Night Vale. Soon the sun will rise, and we know exactly what time that will happen. Our lives have all lurched forward. Is that…good?

Stay tuned next for exactly what was scheduled to run next, at the exact time it was scheduled to do so.

And from my mouth to your ears, even after all of these years, Good Night, Night Vale. Good Night.