Chapter 6 - Insomniatic
Carlos thought a lot of things were real before Night Vale. Then again, he also thought a lot of things weren't.
"Say something," Carlos muttered as he switched off the seismometer. Andrea slammed the door of the equipment locker.
"What do you want me to say?" Her voice was cold and biting as she turned to face him. "That was harsh, Carlos. Ten years we've been friends, and I've never heard you so out of line."
"You think I was wrong to give them the choice?" Carlos crossed his arms defensively in preparation for the coming argument. It wasn't often that the two fought, but when they did it was almost always guaranteed to evolve into a rough shouting match.
"I think you were wrong to turn it into some twisted goddamn ultimatum, yes. It's no surprise they all just walked right out."
"All I told them was if they were going to ignore the entire basis of our research, they needed to find other employment. We came here to find answers and apparently that's no longer a priority. Which begs the question, what are we even still doing here?" He gestured around the lab with a rhetorical shrug.
"Some of us stay because hard as it is to believe, we actually like it here," Andrea snapped. "Just because you can't fit something into your little box of logic and equations doesn't mean it's not worth spending time on." She paused and took a breath. "Carlos, I know your life's been rough, and I know you like things to be even and structured and sensible, but sometimes it's okay for things to not make sense." Andrea let out a strained little laugh. "Hell, I wish the whole world made a little less sense. I mean, isn't it amazing to believe in something impossible, and realize that just because you believe in it, it can actually exist?"
"I believe in things I understand," Carlos retorted, his voice raised to combat the shrieking that drifted through the walls of the laboratory from the edge of town. It had begun a few nights ago, a horrible wailing that had unfortunately become a nightly event. Andrea covered and uncovered her face with her hands, letting out another frustrated little sound.
"You don't get it, Carlos. You just don't understand." Her head dropped momentarily before she looked back up at him. "I really wish you did." Regretfully, she slipped out of her lab coat and set it on the empty end of one of the exam tables. Carlos stared at the jacket as if it were venomous. "I'm sorry," she shouted over the disembodied screeching. As an afterthought and to avoid further shouting, she quickly stepped around the table and hugged Carlos tightly. "I know you're not sleeping, and you're hardly eating, and it feels like hell," she paused to offer a small, understanding smile, "but it's all going to make sense one of these days. And after that everything will be different, I promise."
Carlos just watched helplessly as his best friend, his last actual tie to the sanity of the outside world, walked out the door and left him entirely alone in a laboratory full of useless science. In the absence of any other clear direction, he eventually decided to at least attempt sleeping even though the sun had only just slipped below the horizon. The thin walls of his apartment were negligibly better at blocking out the shrieking, so he simply lay on the lumpy little mattress in the clothes he had been too drained to change out of and wished for sleep.
As was becoming the norm, sleep seemed to evade the scientist quite effectively for a long time. He hesitated to check his watch, knowing that although it kept perfect time everywhere else in the world, here in Night Vale it would read preposterously incongruent times. One morbidly curious glance reassured the theory as the watch claimed it was 3:28 in the afternoon. Carlos rolled onto his back with a sigh and tried to clear his mind. It wasn't that he was thinking too deeply about any one thing in particular; on the contrary his thoughts had an increasingly frequent habit of dissolving into nonsense until his head began to throb. It didn't help that the still air in the little apartment was stifling. He rolled back onto his side and stared blankly at the radio on his bedside table. It kept supposed Night Vale time, so he used it as an alarm clock. Despite his emphatic assertions to the contrary, he also had been using it lately to fall asleep. Whether or not he was willing to admit it even to himself, Carlos liked the smooth tones of Cecil's voice. Even on the nights when the radio host was ranting about people who disagreed with his conspiracy theories or prattling on about the dangers of public libraries, Carlos found it soothing to lie down and close his eyes and just listen. Some nights it helped him sleep. Other nights it at least drowned out the shrieking enough that he could focus his thoughts into steady coherence. That night as he impulsively switched on the radio, Cecil seemed to be talking about a small group of polar bears migrating through town that had been turned away from local businesses on the basis that they were in violation of the 'no shirt, no shoes, no service' policy.
Carlos closed his eyes and tried again to clear his mind. This time it worked a little better, at least well enough that he could focus his thoughts onto a single subject. Over and over his mind kept replaying Andrea's odd argument. She had made it sound like there was some great secret that if he could only discover it, the whole town would suddenly become logical and ordinary. She had said impossible things existed if you chose to believe in them. Carlos thought quite a lot of things were impossible. Unfortunately in the eleven months he had lived in Night Vale, he had also discovered quite a lot of those impossible things really existed. He had discovered that cats can float and forests can absorb carbon life forms and five-headed dragons can apparently run for public office, though he had never actually seen the supposed candidate and could never tell if people were talking about a literal five-headed dragon or just speaking in metaphors. Carlos went down the list of things he still believed were impossible. The list was alarmingly short.
In fact, at that moment he could only think of three absolutely impossible concepts - snow, ever leaving the desert, and love. The first one he knew was simply a reaction to the smothering desert heat. Somewhere in the world, even now, there was snow. Snow was not at all impossible; in fact, it was highly likely. Leaving the desert also, Carlos knew, was entirely possible. He had left once since arriving in Night Vale, right at the end of his first month, just to get to Phoenix for a few days so he could pick up the last shipment of instruments from the university and call his grandmother on her birthday. Now that he considered it, he wasn't sure why he hadn't left again since. It seemed a simple enough escape from the oppressive strangeness to just drive across the city limits and keep driving until the world made sense again. Deep down, something inside him was afraid the world outside had disappeared in the months since he had left. He was afraid if he drove past the city limit sign he would just keep driving until he would end up right back where he had started. So leaving the desert was unlikely, but not impossible. That left love. His eyes flitted involuntarily to the dark outline of the radio on the dresser. If everything else impossible seemed to exist in Night Vale, then why not love? Cecil claimed to love him after all. Carlos had started calling him sometimes, just occasionally, to ask about strange aspects of town that locals would probably have more experience with. A few times they had even met for coffee, though he had made the professional nature of their visits as clear as he possibly could. In the end, he found he actually enjoyed Cecil's company, even if the man sometimes said the most absurd things or just stared at him with that same strange flickering smile like he was struggling to contain some splendid secret.
Carlos didn't love Cecil. Love was still impossible as far as he was concerned, but it would be inaccurate to claim he was indifferent to the radio host. He was intrigued by him, sure. Fond of his mellifluous voice, of his eyes that seemed to shift colors with alarming frequency, of the strange way he was able to convince anyone that even the most inconsequential topics were somehow incredibly significant. Carlos sighed. Maybe he was just fond of Cecil in general. Even his thoughts had recently begun to wander to the radio host during the day; some nights he had been impatient for the lab to grow empty so he could turn up the radio while he cleaned up. But it wasn't love. For impossible things to be real, even in Night Vale, you had to believe in them. And Carlos did not believe in love.
At least that was what he told himself as he finally fell asleep listening to Cecil discuss polar bear tourism on the radio.
End Notes: I should probably explain a few minor headcanons that I have as they become relevant. One of my headcanons about Cecil is that his eyes change color like a mood ring. Their natural color is an iridescent violet, but they change frequently depending on his emotions.
I think this might be the halfway point in the story, so we're halfway there! Thanks to everyone who's been reading so far, you people are eternally cool. :)