Chapter 4 - Sleepy Desert Town
They always say the first month is the hardest.
From the outside, Night Vale seemed like just another small town in the deserts of Arizona. The streets were swept with sand, the mom-and-pop businesses dated, the community close-tied. Beneath the surface however, things were very far from normal, and it didn't take long for Carlos to come to three very basic realizations about the sleepy desert town he had naively relocated to.
The first realization was that he had severely underestimated the town's scientific incongruity. He had been so proud of himself for his dissertation theory on gravitational and temporal shifts from his one night stand with the lights in the sky. Within twenty-four hours of arriving in town, it had become painfully apparent that he had only glimpsed a fraction of the anomalies in Night Vale. There were massive earthquakes that nobody could feel, houses that didn't really exist, portals through time itself, and a cloud that glowed and shifted against the wind leaving animal carcasses in its wake. At first Carlos had been slightly disturbed by the town's seemingly senseless abandonment of the laws of physics. Uncertainty quickly gave way to curiosity however, and one by one the machines they had set up in the laboratory hummed to life with experiments and carefully planned tests. Night Vale was home to a seemingly endless armada of mysteries, but Carlos was determined that with careful observation and experimentation science would prevail as science always did. He was sure he could force even the strange little town in the desert into his organized lists of numbers and equations and diagrams. It just might take an extension or two on the grant.
As the months wore on, the nights grew longer and the conclusions less and less logical. The first day of October was the day simple arithmetic ceased to properly function. It was also the first day that Carlos genuinely doubted his work. Science had always been the constant in his life. It had been the one part of his world that never changed, never shifted, never collapsed. Science was the one thing he was confident that he could understand. The first day of October was the first day that Carlos was afraid of Night Vale.
The second truth he realized was that the feeling he was being watched wasn't necessarily simply a feeling. When the first note was slipped under the door informing him his behavior was being observed, he didn't take it seriously. Cecil had mentioned in their first brief encounter that the locals were distrustful of change, so Carlos thought nothing of what he assumed was an anonymous prank and tossed the note and the next few that followed into the bin beside his desk. Concern didn't set in until the letters began to slide under the door regularly, one-by-one every night. Some of them were fairly harmless, simply informing him that his socks didn't match or requesting that he turn up the music when he was in the shower. Progressively they grew more threatening.
The first time Carlos was arrested by the Sheriff's Secret Police was for a misdemeanor. It was nearly midnight on a Saturday night when he was forcibly removed from his apartment and taken into custody for failing to fulfill his mandatory weekly pizza requirement at Big Rico's next door. It took some coaxing to assure the Secret Police that it was an honest mistake. Since it was only his third week in town, they were willing to let him off with a warning and a literal slap on the wrist instead of the standard punishment of three months' incarceration at the abandoned mine shaft. The second time Carlos was arrested was on the more serious charge of possession, for which the retribution was the loss of one extremity. He had tried his best to be careful, but when the police unexpectedly invaded the laboratory during work hours for a raid and found the writing utensils he hadn't known were illegal, they took him into custody yet again. This time he had no excuses to avoid the punishment, though they had assured him he would be able to choose the extremity. As they drove into the desert towards an unknown location in an unmarked white van, a terrifying distancing calm had settled over Carlos who sat staring at his hands from different angles to determine which one he liked less. That was before the van halted abruptly, the door opened, and he was released from his brief confinement. The officer apologized profusely, stating that an anonymous benefactor had vouched for the scientist's innocence and paid the levies to clear the arrest from his record. Which is what brought Carlos to the third realization.
Cecil was watching him almost as closely as the Secret Police were. As he had with Night Vale itself, Carlos had severely underestimated the radio host. What he assumed would simply be just another fleeting fancy had escalated to a slight stalker-like fascination that now bore all the signs of full-on infatuation. Whatever his personal opinions on Cecil's feelings, Carlos had to admit that it was comforting to know that even in the bizarre, unfamiliar desert, someone was looking out for him. However it still left him with an entirely new set of problems.
Namely, Carlos was vastly unprepared to deal with Cecil's adoration. He never knew how to react when Cecil would approach him guardedly in public asking ridiculously basic science questions, or when he would babble on the radio show and tell the whole town about Carlos's haircuts. He especially didn't know how to react when he woke up one morning to little red dots covering all of his outdoor belongings: one on the new car he had bought when his pickup had mysteriously combusted, one on the streetlight that glowed maroon through the night, one on the recycle bin that frequently made gulping sounds, a little organized row of dots along the corrugated metal panels of the siding, and one last dot on the front door attached to a note. It had a phone number, Cecil's name, and the words 'call anytime' followed by what was either a very large period or a very small heart - all, curiously, written carefully in blue ink. Carlos did what he could to keep the situation at bay. He always kept their conversations to an absolute minimum of words, and was sure to never be the one to initiate contact. He never acknowledged the fact that he heard the things Cecil said about him when he listened to the radio show late at night in the empty lab. And he never called.
End Notes: This chapter was more to sum up and set up, so it's short and a little general. Also I really wanted to mention Dot Day because I firmly believe that Cecil used almost all his red dots on poor, unsuspecting Carlos and his entire sheet of blue dots on Steve Carlsberg.