Love the winner, hate the win. Welcome to Night Vale

I start today with sad news. I must inform you of the passing of Intern Victor. To the friends and family of Intern Victor, we extend our condolences.

Oh, that reminds me. Our intern program has a new open spot available. Hours are flexible, as is time itself. You must be fluent in at least three languages, although one of those can be your own dream language and another can be a future language that doesn’t yet exist. This is an entry level position. All applicants must have 30 years experience in the field of community radio, and have been the managing director of at least two radio stations or equivalent unregistered stations broadcasting coded messages to our brave spies in the field. This is a non-paying position, but we do give you four credits to the institution of your choice. Please apply in person by groveling before the Station Management door and crying “Choose me! Choose me!” as their tendrils draw you slowly toward them.

I look forward to meeting whoever gets hired. Always so fun when we get a new intern.

And now for a look at the day’s news.

The Night Vale Medical Association has ordered a review of the management of Night Vale Asylum, after a number of irregularities have cropped up involving a transdimensional missing plane and a pilot who could control people’s thoughts.

“Honestly, we had a lot of cases like that back in the 60s,” said Lonny Chapman, chairman of the Medical Association. “Mental institutions used to be cruel places, where the fragile rift between dimensions was regularly breached, and telekinetic powers were exploited, and people were treated as less than people for the simple crime of having an illness that could not be found in the blood or the bile.”

Lonny settled back into the sagging comfort of his old armchair, sighed and rubbed his forehead.

“We endeavor to help, not to other,” he whispered. “It should be commonsense this kindness. Why is kindness not commonsense?” He said this last so quietly that no one heard him. Dust motes circled tirelessly in the afternoon sun through the window.

The Night Vale Medical Association is looking to shut down the outdated Asylum and replace it with a brand new state of the art treatment center, located near Grove Park. More on this story as this story has more to it.

I guess I should get into a little more detail about how Intern Victor died, since some of you might be curious. You know, I think the story starts back in my very first days as host of this radio station. After the previous host, Leonard Burton… After… uh… Once I took over as host of this radio station, Victor was one of my first interns. Eager and earnest, and always helpful. He was first in the station in the morning, last one out at night. His research was impeccable. “That’s not true,” he would say, every time I said something that wasn’t true. “That’s not true either,” he would say. He would say stuff like that a lot. He was very diligent.

It kind of felt like we were starting this great adventure in radio broadcasting together. I thought that someday after I… After…. Once I was no longer host of this radio station, perhaps Victor would be the one to take over.

“Someday Victor,” I would murmur, in the quietest hours of the night shift. “Someday maybe you will be where I am now.”

“Maybe, Cecil,” he would say back into the intercom from the producer’s booth. “But for now please stop murmuring that into the mic. We’re live right now.”

Then one day he told me he was leaving. That he appreciated all the time he had spent as an intern, that he had learned a lot, but that he felt his place in the world was not with radio after all.

“Not with radio?” I sputtered. I simply did not understand the concept. If there is not community radio, then what is there? What is there besides that? Will someone tell me what else there is?

“Thank you for our time together,” he said gently, and then he left. It would be the last time I saw him for many years.

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I didn’t finish with the story of how Intern Victor died, I guess. Let me quickly wrap that up. So a few years after he left, he came back again. He was older than me now, with salt and pepper hair, and a stiffness to his walk. When he had left, he had been several years younger than me, but time changes us all, I suppose.

“Cecil, I didn’t know if you’d still be here,” he said.

I bristled at this, hearing a perceived implication that I should have gone on to something larger, that by staying put I had allowed him to pull ahead of me in some intangible way. So I responded with manic friendliness, to compensate.

“Still here!” I shouted. “Great to see you buddy! Wow, what have you been up to!”

He told me that he had left Night Vale, gotten an apartment just outside of somewhere called “Fresno”. That it was difficult at first, and that he felt lonely much of the time. But that he had slowly made friends, so many friends, and had found a job that became a career that became part of his life. He worked with teenagers who were going through a tough time, seeing them through to better times. He was very well liked for what he did, and he was very good at it.

“But I’ve decided to retire,” he said. “I’m getting up in the years, you know? But wow, you don’t look like you’ve aged a day.”

“I haven’t,” I said. He was so much older than me then. I wondered where the years had gone, and what I might have accomplished if I had aged as well.

He had retired to Night Vale, to be with his family and friends and the people who knew and loved him best, and to relax into the soft years of his later life.

So, that…well that’s not how he died, but I have to get to this next report. I’ll finish in a second.

And now, traffic.

There was a song once sung by sailors
of an island in the west
Where the sun would shine forever
And not a minute less

They say that on that island
A sailor could find their rest
Finally let slip shut their eyelids
On that island in the west

But I’ve been searching and been searching
All my life, as though some cruel test
And have never found my way
To that island in the west

There was a song once sung by sailors
And I believed it, I confess
A foul lie I still believe in
My sweet island in the west

This has been traffic

Intern Victor lived in Night Vale for many years more. He was active in charities and volunteer groups, continuing to offer counseling to students at the local high school. He lived in the Hefty Sycamore trailer park, watering a garden of flowers that he kept in pots around his trailer.

It seemed that Victor was even more busy in retirement than he had been in his long career. Returning to his community seemed to invigorate him.

He helped Carlos with experiments at the labs, donning goggles and labcoats and writing down numbers with hearts around them. All of that science stuff. Carlos said he was surprisingly good at it for someone without training.

He worked with Dana at City Hall, creating the No More Pit initiative, which strove to keep one teen a year from entering that pit on Clemens Street and disappearing forever. Now, the initiative was unsuccessful, and the pit continues to devour, but hey, it was the attempt that matters.

He acted as a volunteer lifeguard at the Waterfront Recreation Area, at which he saved a record five people in one day from drowning, a truly astounding record when you consider that there is no water at the Waterfront Recreation Area, Night Vale having an entirely arid climate.

Yes, Intern Victor was accomplished and well liked. He would have made a fine host of this radio station some day, but he never showed much interest. Which is a pity. Because after I…after…well who will take up that mantle? Not Victor. Not anymore.

Oh, I guess I still haven’t told the story of how he died. Let me do that. Just after the weather.

WEATHER: “A List for Spring” by Joseph Fink

Victor was in bed. The curtain over the window shifted slightly in the breeze, so the sun flickered in the room, shadow and bright, like a message from the world outside that he would never live to understand. His breath felt like a finite quantity, slowly drawn out of his chest. He knew that the last of it was coming soon. He wanted to use the dregs of his breath for words that would sum up his life, but he couldn’t think of any. He could only think of, “I am tired.” He could only think of, “thank you for being here.” He could only think of, “I wish I had more time,” although he didn’t know what he would have done with that time if he had any.

Around his bed were the people who had known him through his life. There was his sister, Carly, and his brother Herman, and his Aunt Ronnie, ancient and brittle but apparently destined to outlive him. There was his friend from college, Norm, whose hands shook as he looked into Victor’s eyes. There was former mayor Dana and her brother, leaning into each other in sorrow, keeping each other upright as a family creature of grief. There was Carlos, in an understated lab coat, frowning. There was nothing more scientific than death, and yet Carlos hated the fact of it, and he wrestled with the contradiction within himself. Some natural processes feel unnatural, no matter how many times they occur to us. They are a surprise that our whole life spends telegraphing.

In the corner was Rosario, one of the teenagers Victor had worked with back in Fresno, who had eventually moved to Night Vale after getting lost in the shelves of a strange antique shop and waking up in the vacant lot out back of the Ralph’s. She was middle aged now. Her face glistened with tears. “Everything I am is because of you,” she said.

Victor snorted. “Don’t blame me,” he said, with one of those last precious breaths, and she grinned despite herself.

“You were the first person that cared about who I was,” she said. “I’ll never forget you.”

“Already I’m in past tense,” he said, but he grabbed her hand and clasped it in a fervent silent thank you. Because she was testament that he had been useful. And there is nothing more important in a human life than to be useful to other people.

I was there too, and I stepped forward.

“You were the best intern I ever had,” I said.

“I know,” he said, and he winked.

It can be strange, when we first meet someone when they are young, and just starting out, and are in entry positions in the career they want, to realize that they have the potential for an entire life. Victor ended up a great man. A man with deep roots in the community. A man who went from ten years younger than me to several decades older than me. I still think of him as an intern, and I suppose I always will, but his potential was realized upon the lives of everyone in that room, and many other lives still.

A strong breeze came through the window, and the flickering of light increased, as though that incoherent messenger was getting more frantic to be understood. Victor knew that his finite breaths had reached their last few. And he did not use them to say anything at all. He smiled, and met each of our eyes, and then…. And then after…

To the family and friends of Intern Victor.

To the family. To our families. Blood or chosen. They are the net on which we can fall again and again.

To the friends. To our friends. The people who make life worth living. Who help us when we need help. Who we help when we need to help.

Intern Victor was a good intern. He was a good person. He is gone. We are here. Let’s make ourselves useful.

To all families. To all friends.

Stay tuned next for a tall glass of water, greedily drunk by a person who did not realize they were thirsty until the liquid hit their lips.

Good night, Night Vale. Good night.