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CARLOS
There are many benefits to being a marine biologist. There are also many benefits to being a biochemical epidemiologist. And to being a theoretical super-quantum physicist. Most forms of science have benefits that are not readily apparent to laypersons.
For example, many laypersons don’t understand why a marine biologist would be studying life in a desert. Like my father. He is—or was—an archaeologist, someone who digs up places that were once lived in and now are not in order to learn the history of the people who used to live there. And sometimes to take things that were made or left behind by those people and sell them for lots of money. My father was not very good at that part of archeology. But he was very good at the digging up part, and he surrounded himself with people who were very good at the learning part, and so he was reckoned to be a good archaeologist. He wanted me to be an archaeologist too, and so when I was very small he used to take me with him to digs and show me all of the things that people were digging up. He tried to get me interested in the pots, and the jewelry, and the tools. But I remember staring at the bones, the ones that he cast aside because they weren’t worth anything, and wondering what stories they had to tell.
Many scientists also don’t understand why a marine biologist would be studying life in a desert. Like my mother. She is—or was—a paleontologist, someone who studies the bones of ancient beings that are now long gone and tries to learn what they were like. And sometimes to take those bones and sell them to very rich people who want to hide them. My mother was much better at that part of paleontology than my father was at that part of archeology, but it is much harder to find dinosaur bones than to find ancient pots, and so she most often spent her time writing the joint grants for their work and examining the bones before my father discarded them. She wanted me to be a paleontologist, too, and so when I was very small she used to take me around the digs after my father was done and try to teach me which bones are good and which bones are bad. But I remember asking questions about the bad bones, and why they were bad, and after a while she gave up trying to teach me anything at all.
I realized that some of the very old bones they found were similar to whales, or to other aquatic creatures, and I wanted to know how they got so far from the ocean. At first I wrote proposals about sky whales and secret underground tunnels and even diabolical villains, but although all of these were possible, it was Jonny who asked the question that put me on the right track. We had come to visit for Abuela’s funeral and I was telling him about the bones, and the whales, and showing him on the globe how far the mountains and deserts were from the water where they should live. And I will never forget—he looked up at me, and he asked, “Carlos, why did the deserts forget how to be oceans?”
I couldn’t stop thinking about that. Was that really what had happened? Did that explain the bones? And can a desert forget how to be anything else?
So I studied. I read all the books I could, and asked questions in school, and when I went to college, I applied to study marine biology. I found out that I was not alone in my thoughts, or at least not some of them, that it was generally agreed that deserts had—mostly—once been full of water and aquatic life, but that it had all gone and only the fossils remained. There were many people who studied why, talking about climate change and continental drift and great droughts, but I focused my studies on the animals that had once lived there, and what the animals who lived there now could tell us about them. For my master’s thesis, I did an especial study on rock squirrels. I discovered that different families would communicate with one another about danger, but I was more concerned with the ones that didn’t—like the family that drowned in their burrows during the monsoon. After a while, however, I realized the truth. The rock squirrels had been warned, but they chose to remain. But why?
My theory—and one that was hard to prove, because the average rock squirrel does not speak English or Spanish—was that that family had never lived near water. My theory was that rock squirrels held an ancestral memory of when the desert was ocean, and that only those who had lived near a river or stream or some calm body of water and been able to test it understood that they were no longer marine animals. The family that drowned simply refused to heed the warning to escape because they believed themselves to still be able to swim and breathe underwater. Of course, most marine mammals cannot breathe underwater anyway, not really. They just hold their breath for very long periods of time, and surface to breathe only when they need to. But squirrels don’t remember that part.
The more I studied, and the more I researched, the more I came to believe that Jonny was right. Climate change and continental drift and great droughts were why the deserts had stopped being oceans. The reason they continued to not be oceans was that they had forgotten how to be.
I had stopped talking to my parents at this point. There were many things we did not understand about each other. I had thought, when I was younger, that we could forgive these differences of opinions and continue to be family even if we could never be colleagues, but since they couldn’t understand why I liked boys and not girls, and I couldn’t understand why they considered the way I had always been to not be normal, it was safer for me not to see them. But I still followed their research, intermittent as it was. And because I had known them both my whole life, I could read in between the lines of their publications and see the things they weren’t mentioning. And I started noticing something odd about it. There seemed to be a pattern to the bones and the remains of the oceans. They all seemed to be pointing in the same direction.
At the same time, because I was reading so much about deserts and researching them, especially in the United States, I began to find stories. Mostly buried, mostly being dismissed by experts as crackpots or hallucinations brought on by lack of water or even extremely vivid mirages, but there all the same. Tales of a community in the middle of the desert, of a place where experiments went wrong or the thrust of them changed, where someone who thought they were researching average rainfall in various parts of the desert suddenly found they were taking notes on how many times the letter “A” was formed in the sand when the wind blew, or that papers that had previously been titled “Lines in the Stone: The Striation of Strata in Southwestern Sandstone Versus Sunstone” were suddenly called things like “Rocks: Weird, Right?” But it wasn’t just that science was going odd, it was that there were things that couldn’t be explained, couldn’t be understood, not only by the rules of science but by the rules of logic and reason, which is a kind of science but also sort of like its cousin. None of them named the place, not really, or at least not often. But I came to believe—to theorize—that they were all talking about the same place. That somewhere in the desert was, quite simply, the most scientifically interesting community in North America.
If my parents taught me nothing else, it was how to get research funding for something that anyone who thought about it for more than two minutes would realize was, scientifically speaking, batshit crazy. Certainly a marine biologist wanting to look into a desert community where science looked so different, so far away from any science but especially the science he was supposed to study, was something nobody would really want to fund. But I had a theory that combined both what I had learned about this community and what I had studied about the bones. I theorized that part of the reason this desert community, wherever it was, was so odd was because it was over the one spot in the whole desert that did remember it used to be an ocean. My theory was that it was trying to figure out how to get back to being an ocean, but that it was getting it wrong, and whatever it was doing was messing with the rest of the laws of science. The advantage to this theory is that it had two kinds of people who would approve a grant proposal to study it—people who believed it might be true in a sense but was just phrased oddly, and people who believed it because it sounded so crazy that obviously nobody would seriously advance it as a theory unless they already had some sort of evidence and just wanted to get it confirmed. And, of course, both of these things are true, and both of these things are false.
Anyway, I got the grant. I did the research, and I pinpointed the most likely location for it. There were several constants in the stories, but the biggest was the presence of a road that appeared on no map, Route 800. Combined with several other details, I found a spot on the map that was almost certainly where it was, and I packed my things, my research and my equipment and my picture of me holding Jonny when he was two days old, and I set off. I drove west for several hours, or so it seemed to me. I knew I was in the right place when I saw the sun starting to rise on the horizon. It was significant because I had not seen the sun set first, and that was scientifically impossible, and yet it was happening. And then I saw the familiar black and white shape of a route sign with the number 800 on it, and then a little further on I saw the sign. It looked like an ordinary welcome sign for any other town, with the correct font, the words welcoming us to the town, and the population, except for two things. One, the sign was not green for an ordinary highway sign or brown for a site of historical interest or blue for general information or even red for warning, but purple. And two, in place of the number where the town’s population should be was a strange, unknowable sigil that wasn’t exactly an infinity sign and wasn’t exactly a warning glyph and wasn’t exactly neither.
Even if the sign had not said WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE, I would have known I had found the place I was looking for. I just didn’t realize how very true that was yet.
Another thing I learned from my parents was how to establish a foothold in a town before beginning a scientific study. Even though most digs take place in uninhabited deserts—or forests, depending on what kind of archeology is being done—they always had a base in a nearby town, somewhere they could get mail and report in when they needed to meet with someone and have a physical address for me to be in school. So my first stop was City Hall, to ask about rental properties for my temporary lab and also somewhere to live. Science is neat, but if it’s your only roommate, it can be very tiring, and I wanted to have a space where I could get away from it if I needed to.
I got my first shock when I stepped out of the car. Someone walking past stopped when they saw me, pointed directly at me, and yelled, “INTERLOPER!” I jumped, sure I was about to be arrested, or worse. If the town was this hostile to strangers, perhaps my research was wrong. Or perhaps they knew that I was there to study the town and wanted to stop me. Or perhaps it was me, personally, they objected to. Perhaps they were all like my parents.
But, of course, it was none of those things, and none of the things I was afraid of. Instead, the person calmly lowered their hand and kept walking, as though they had said nothing unusual.
I had two or three more people yell “interloper” at me as I walked into City Hall, and eventually I realized that was simply a greeting, like this town’s version of a polite “hello”. I began, cautiously, to relax. Then, when I got to the front of the line, I got my second shock. I asked the clerk about rental properties, and she handed me two contracts—one for a lab space in the strip mall next to Big Rico’s Pizza, and one for an apartment. Both of them already had my name filled out in all of the blanks. DR. CARLOS ROBLES, PH.D. I had to do a double take. But both forms were exactly what I needed, and the rent was reasonable, or at the very least within my budget for that part of my grant. So I signed both, and I got the keys, and I went to set up.
And that was when I got my third shock. I had turned the radio on in my car, and managed to find a station that was not nothing but static, and now the afternoon show came on. The man on the radio began to talk about the news, and talked about a new visitor in town. A scientist. I realized to my astonishment that he was talking about me. Scientifically speaking, many of the things he was saying were not what could be considered news, but he shared them nevertheless.
I had begun to make my notes, because of course this must be part of the odd scientific nature of this town—at the time I had not considered that it might be anything else—but then the man on the radio said six words that, although I did not know it at the time, and in fact was too shocked to think about, would change my life forever, and for the better.
“And I fell instantly in love.”
In many places, that would not be considered news. And in many places, that would not be considered scientifically interesting. But in that moment, in a moment of clear understanding, I knew that here, in Night Vale, it was both. It was news that Cecil Gershwin Palmer, the beloved host of Night Vale Community Radio, a lifelong bachelor, was in love. And it was scientifically interesting that he was in love also. And it was true that I was the subject of that.
And then I dropped my pen and had to sit down, because for the first time, I realized something that I did not have an answer for, and that I may not ever have an answer for. Nobody had said the name of the man on the radio to me—not in person, not on the radio itself. He had not introduced himself, for the simple reason that if you are a resident of Night Vale, you know who Cecil Gershwin Palmer is, so why should he need to announce himself? But I was a newcomer to Night Vale. I was, as several people had pointed out, an interloper. And yet…I knew that was his name. I also knew he was the man I had made brief eye contact with coming out of Big Rico’s Pizza as I was unlocking the door to my lab for the first time, and that he had known something about me that even I did not, because he was the only person I had seen who had not called me an interloper.
I wonder if even he knew that at the time, or if it was just a coincidence. My theory is that his instant love, to him, made me no longer an interloper, but a part of his town, a part of his community. Someday, a part of his family.
That was the start. And nothing, as I suspected before I even left the University of What It Is, was ever the same again.
[DEEP, SLOW, SATISFIED BREATH]
ARCHIVIST
Thank you, Carlos.
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