WTNV - Subversive Radio Host

[Episode 49B: Old Oak Doors]

The greatest pleasure Kevin can find in his job — and he is sure of it, since his earliest days as an intern — lies in the storytelling.

The grasp on a fact that is in your hands only, and the joy to gift everyone else with it; the inflection your smile gives to your voice as you disclose whatever your knowledge is, whatever string of words is going from secret to the talk of the town. 

Rare are the times in which Kevin doesn’t feel generous, loved and dear and close to his listeners. Never, no matter how horrible the news on his hands, he feels threatened in their company.

But since the break of this dawn, red with blood, Kevin is aware of it — today is the worst exception that could arise, in a long string of terrible, yet familiar, exceptions.

The threat from the desert was not stopped; nobody walked on to slow it down, to break the rows of blind employees, nor to shield their homes from the terrible light everyone’s eyes avoided. Nobody tried to understand, dared understand, that this was a menace far greater than the blue-winged blackbirds or the singing cacti at the far end of the desert.

They were used to threats. Until it was too late, nobody actually cared.

He understands the contradiction, the guilt that destroys all of Desert Bluff’s pride. It is so unlike them, this lack of efficiency, and yet it is unmistakably there — joined with the blinding light, it is the first thing to destroy their hometown in the terrifying morning. 

He stands in front of his desk, incessantly guilty, unable to forgive. He blames himself first, the universe last, out of fear of its vengeance; he counts the conspiracies and the evils that make up their town, and shivers at the thought of them all being gone.

He cannot accept; he can no longer smile. All Kevin feels is possible to him, in this lonely studio deserted by everything, is to speak.

So he sits, his grip firm on the mic, and accompanies the Desert Bluffs he knows in its downfall.

He narrates the town, his town, as it crumbles before his eyes. He talks and talks on, speaking of lost battles, doing the one thing he was ever able to — he tells a story.

But the change is gradual, his words lose in strength; and by the time he curses it all, the fire of tears raging in his eyes, he has to realize his fingers are translucent.

The window at his right side betrays the shadows of the studio, throwing in the magnificent light that only a terrible, divine threat can radiate. He draws back in fear, keeping himself close — all that he thinks is true, all that he’d rather not know, feels volatile and thin as transparent paper.

He has no room for escaping when the light reaches out, when those few, hallucinating fingers wrap around his hand. 

Then he sees the beating heart of the universe, scarily in tune with his own. He witnesses the truth uncoil in front of his eyes, black and monstrous and invincible in the core of that terrible god — and that revelation is one he accepts, and embraces, and can only embrace. 

In the moment Kevin surrenders, he smiles. Under the touch of the blinding light, his lips are unlocked — for a handful of moments, the whole essence of the world stays, still, in the same space and time as him. And his eyes go blind, basking in that truth; but he can soon see again, only differently, only with new, transformed eyes.

He stares. His smile grows wider.

And wider.

*

The sandstorm brought back memories. Mostly forbidden ones, way far off the borders of Strex regulations. In any case, it couldn’t be different than that; Kevin is aware of how dimensions work, and that day’s was most certainly some illegal portal opened by undefined entities.

Or it could be, in rare cases, the Smiling God. It happens when His infinite love spreads — and Kevin knows that now, on a desert not too far from theirs, He has found someone else, some lucky candidate to engulf in His eternal glow.

The desert that streches out there is not that different at all, in the end. He can see through its fabric, and spot each and every one of the gross knots that slow down its existence — the horrors, the conspiracies, the ancient traces of a wrong world.

And that is something Kevin can tell, over and over again to his faithful listeners; it is a scenery that returns, and he will describe in the tiniest detail. Those are the wrongs of Night Vale, the natural, so easy to erase wrongs they have long gone past.

In the end — but that is a secret thought, and the one half-forbidden idea he lets free in his mind — the patterns of Night Vale are so familiar, he could mistake them for something that once was his own. Kevin perceives that town closer than it should, a weak signal that somehow makes it through the numerous layers of his rieducation and rebirth.

Actually — and, in all sincerity, he feels a bit uneasy when he acknowledges it — it is all about Cecil.

There is an unsettling touch in his overly silly resistance. It is a shade over the brillance of the Smiling God, a shade that Kevin perceives all the same, as wrong as Night Vale obviously is. There is an underlying tone that accompanies his every word about Strex, from the blatanlty fake praise to the annoyingly cross insults — and Kevin has to smile, radiant in his love, safe in his faith, yet ever so slightly disturbed.

But Cecil will have to see, he repeats to himself; he will know too, one day, what loving a Smiling God means. He will know that it is the best choice — that it is perfect, complete, not even a choice.

Kevin is patient. He puts his confidence in what Strex is capable of, in what it had in store in the past — this overgrown child can’t turn his back, nor does he stand a chance against the power of the infinite.

As far as he is concerned, Kevin can do nothing.

And something, in the back of his mind, reminds him that he actually never could; once like today, as a matter of fact, he has no way to help Night Vale nor Cecil.

Today — in front of this man that is too much like him, and nothing like him (not anymore) — there is but one thing Kevin knows how to do.

So, in the end, all he does is smile.