Our moral compass has been demagnetized. Welcome to Night Vale.
Night Vale, Carlos and I went to see a new play the other night. It's been ages since we went to the theater. I think the last show we saw was Hamilton, which is a Tony- and Pulitzer-winning hip-hop musical about the figure skater Scott Hamilton who died in a duel to fellow Olympian Katerina Witt.
Hamilton was wonderful, but live theater is so expensive. It's a rare treat for us to get out of the house, what with the cost of tickets, plus dinner, parking, a babysitter, tuxedo rentals, and all that time spent watching YouTube make-up tutorials for jamming facial recognition cameras.
But my friend Charles Rainier invited us as his special guests to watch the premier of a new play at the Night Vale Asylum, where Charles is the Warden.
The play was called "The Disappearance and Cover-up of Flight 18713 as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Night Vale under the Direction of Undercover Agents from the National Safety and Transportation Bureau." Or "18713/NTSB" for short.
I'm used to seeing plays at the new Old Opera House, or in the high school auditorium. There’s also the Black Box Theater, which presents some of Night Vale's most experimental drama from young performance artists. No one has seen any of these shows, or if they have, they've never emerged from that doorless Black Box, its walls perfectly smooth and faintly warm. But this particular play was at the Asylum itself.
The Night Vale Asylum perches atop a craggy peak in the Sand Wastes. Its Brutalist concrete walls intermittently slashed with slivers of windows.
I do not personally know anyone inside this intimidating institute, other than Warden Rainier himself. And I'll admit to being a bit nervous venturing out at night to a heavily-guarded home for the criminally insane.
But Carlos put me at ease by rolling his eyes. He said it was neurotypical ableism that makes us think this way. That movies and TV shows often play up harmful tropes about psychopaths and lunatics planning daring escapes so that they can return to a life of criminal misdeeds. Carlos explained that asylums are merely places where we hide away the people who most remind us of the inexplicable fragility of the human brain.
Driving out past the scrublands under an indigo sky, the full moon low over the horizon, backlighting the Night Vale Asylum atop its jagged, rocky ridge, my nerves returned. I thought I heard coyotes howling in the distance, but it was the car stereo. Carlos had put on his favorite new Frank Ocean album called "Various Animals Screaming"
When we arrived, Warden Rainier greeted us at the gates. Two guards wearing Army-style green dress uniforms flanked him. Their right breasts were laden with medals, chevrons and stripes. They each were armed with billy clubs, tasers, and slingshots, and one of them was wearing an eye patch, but it was positioned in the middle of his forehead.
The Warden escorted Carlos and me to our seats, which were simple wood chairs. There were only 10 seats total, all in a single row along the near wall. There was no standard stage to speak of, no curtain. The actors were all in costume in the center of the room, already in character.
The other seats were already filled: Warden Rainier, Sheriff Sam, 3 of Sam's Secret Police officers, 2 of Sam's Overt Police Officers, and an angel I had never met before, but who introduced themself to me as Erika.
"With a 'K.'" they added.
"Nice to meet you Erika," I said.
"You got ten bucks?" Erika asked.
"Sure," I said. "What for?"
"Not everyone gets to know everything." they said. "You either got it or you don't, man."
So I handed them ten bucks, and minutes later, my lower back pain, which has plagued me for the past 6 months, was gone. I looked back at Erika and I saw them wink at me. Or I thought they winked. They have 10 eyes, so it could have just been an asynchronous blink. It's hard to even tell what they're ever looking at.
The play began with an introduction by Warden Rainier, who welcomed us all to this unusual night. The first ever performance of an original play by inmates in his asylum. He introduced the writers-slash-directors of the piece.
There were three of them, each dressed in an electric blue jumpsuit. One of them had a blister on his upper lip. Another, a swollen red lump along the cuticle of his right index finger. One of them had an unceasing nose bleed. I recognized them as the agents from the National Safety and Transportation Bureau in Washington, who had come to Night Vale two months ago to investigate the disappearance of Delta Flight 18713.
Sheriff Sam had placed these agents undercover in the Asylum to try to meet with an inmate named Doug Biondi, who claimed to have pertinent information about the missing aircraft.
Upon remembering this, I flipped quickly through my Playbill to find the ensemble members' names. And there on the title page was the name Doug Biondi, who was cast as "Airplane Pilot"
As the Warden returned to his seat, and before the houselights dimmed, I leaned over to Sheriff Sam and asked "How is the undercover operation going, Sheriff?"
Sam glared at me and said "I've no idea what you mean."
"You know, with the NTSB officers? Here in the asylum? Trying to interview Doug Biondi?" I asked, perhaps a little loudly for a theater.
"The NTSB officers are criminally insane, Cecil." the Sheriff said, unironically and with more than a touch of scold in their tone. "That is why they are here. They are a danger to themselves and others."
I had many more questions, but before I could say anything, the lights faded to black, and I heard the first voice of the play.
"Find us," called the voice in the dark. "Find us," it echoed again.
A faint glow coated like frost the wild-eyed faces of the inmates on stage, their frantic visages made all the more manic by deep eyeliner, rouge and lipstick. Most were dressed in common street clothes: slacks, jeans, button down shirts, mid-length patterned skirts. Two were dressed as flight attendants, and one as the pilot.
I can only presume a small budget, as the uniforms worn by the latter groups were largely suggested by navy-blue hats and little plastic wings on their lapels.
The pilot wore anachronistic aviation goggles, and so it was difficult for me to see and remember the face of this actor, this inmate Doug Biondi, but I could see his mouth, which was unusually wide, the corners of his lips extending well past the width of his eyes. He had an unusual number of teeth in his harsh smile, a smile which never abated even in his most somber of scenes.
"We survive," said Biondi's pilot character, "We live. We cannot die. Not here. Not in No Where."
He said it not like the vague concept of "in no place" but No Where, two words, capitalized, like the name of a specific place.
Each actor was seated in short, tight rows of 4, a narrow aisle in between, mimicking the floorplan of a common fuselage. At the front of the troupe sat Doug Biondi as Airline Pilot.
"How did we get here. In No Where," said one of the passengers.
"And how shall we return" said another.
"Only," they said in unison. "When you find us."
This last line they said with a quick twist of their necks toward the audience.
Then the scene shifted, the chairs cleared and all of the actors stood in the profile of a Greek Chorus.
They explained the flight from Detroit, the view of Lake Erie. They told stories of different passengers. One who had a job interview. One who was looking for an apartment. Another who went to Palm Springs on vacation. They told the story of a bright light and a loud pop.
And suddenly the engines were silent. The plane felt still, unmoving. And then the chorus all pantomimed the leaning concerned gaze out airplane windows. Instead of tops of clouds or distant shapes of Great Lakes, though, they looked out and saw... children. In a gymnasium. They heard the squeak of sneakers and the joyful cries of playful exercise.
It felt like minutes, maybe a whole hour. They could not understand what they were seeing. They could not comprehend an elementary school gym six miles above Southern Canada. But they were not six miles above Southern Canada, they were only a few feet above the American Southwest, inside an airplane, inside an elementary school gymnasium, in a town called Night Vale.
And as quickly as they had appeared there, they disappeared. Off the radar, gone from the skies, out of known existence.
Throughout this chorus, the speakers filled our ears with the joyful shouts of children, the hollow metallic thumps of red rubber balls, and the collective panicked inhale of 143 passengers and crew of a displaced plane. And then it was silent. And then it was dark.
A single green light appeared on the far wall, a dot, a blip, a radar blinking on, then off. And the voice of Doug Biondi said "We are not passengers on a plane. We are actors. We are inmates of the Asylum of Night Vale. But we do not belong here. We are people who know Truths. People who know more than is allowed. And for that we are kept in cages. We are fed poisoned pills and circular logic."
And at this point in the play, I felt movement in our small audience. The Warden had stood up, and was shouting "This is not in the script, Doug."
But Doug spoke louder, faster: "I am not insane I say. Only the insane would say such a thing they say. Then I am insane I say. Yes you are they say. I am trapped. I am framed. I spit out your poisoned pills. I reject your propagandist blather. I know what I know I say. Hold him down they say."
Warden Rainier had gone to the tech board and turned on all the lights. He shouted "Code Blue" into a radio receiver, and we saw half a dozen security officers in their green, medal-laden uniforms lurch from the corners of the room, penning the ensemble of inmates into a tight circle in the center.
"Return them to their rooms," the Warden called.
But as the guards encroached. the three men from the NTSB stepped to the perimeter of the mass of inmates. They were holding little plastic wings, just like those on the costumes of the actors playing flight attendants.
One of the NTSB agents - the one with an unceasing nose bleed - opened the back of the wings, revealing a long sharp pin and thrust it into the neck of a guard. Simultaneously the other NTSB agents and several actors did the same. And the guards fell to the ground.
One of the NTSB agents - the one with a blister on his upper lip - grabbed the keys and weapons from an unconscious officer.
"Dearest audience," he said in verse, "We mean them no harm. 'Tis but a sleep, a little pharm- aceutical rest for a uniformed guard Who kept us confined, made life hard For us low level agents doing our jobs, Trapped ‘neath the lies of a Warden who robs Our freedom, and murders our spirit. At last we can go, approach the wall and clear it But heed my warning, as we this coop fly: Every man for himself, better run... or die."
And upon this last line, the alarm bells of the asylum rattled my ears and my nerves, shaking Carlos and me from our seats. The inmates scattered in every direction, as Sheriff Sam and their officers gave chase. Carlos was nearly stepped on by one of the escapees, and as I bent to help him up, I was knocked over by two officers in full sprint.
When the commotion died down, I looked up and saw Erika, still sitting calmly in their chair, and I asked "Erika, what is happening?"
Erika looked down at their Playbill and then back at me and said "I think it's intermission."
And now, the weather.
[“One One Thousand” by Raina Rose]
After 15 minutes, Carlos and I returned to our seats, hoping, but not truly believing it really was an intermission. We've seen immersive theater before. Like Sleep No More, an interactive show in New York City where audience members are placed inside a huge warehouse of actors dancing out the plot to Macbeth, and at the end, everyone is granted the ability to live out the rest of their lives without sleep. It's expensive, and not for everyone, but totally worth it if immersive theater is your thing.
But this show was not that. No, "18713/NTSB" had gone wrong. Or perhaps it had gone right? Under the strict critique of plot structure, character development, and production value, the play failed terribly, but as a piece of political, or agitprop, theater is was a rousing success.
The Sheriff's Secret Police have placed roadblocks around the entire city, hoping to keep these supposedly dangerous inmates from leaving the area. It is bad optics, to say the least, for the entire population of the town's asylum to escape custody.
But as Carlos and I left the theater space, we walked down the long corridors, cells and rooms open, no security detail in sight. In one of the cells, below a cot, was a journal. It was the journal of Doug Biondi. Page after page was filled with monologues, narratives and conversations from various people. People who were on a plane. People in transit between checkpoints of life, between relationships, between homes, between jobs, between vacation and work. These stories were written as verbatim dialogue, as if Doug Biondi had transcribed them himself. As if he could hear the voices of those very people.
Like former air traffic controller Amelia Anna Alfaro. I wonder if Doug heard the same voices. The same passengers of the missing plane. I had my intern Seamus (SHAY-muss) go down to the library and look up public records on Doug Biondi hoping to find some connection between Doug and Amelia. But Seamus still has yet to return with that information.
I even double-checked my Playbill looking for Amelia's name in the cast or crew, but she was not listed there. She was likely never in the asylum.
One thing I did find, though, was a note in the back of Doug's Journal. This note seemed to be in Doug's own voice: "They tell us we are kept here for our safety. But they keep us here for their safety. They fear what will happen when the people on that plane are found, but I think they have already been found. They should be afraid of what happens when the people on the plane find us."
Night Vale is on lock down, so stay home, and stay safe, listeners. I do not believe any of us to be in danger from those who escaped the asylum, but I do believe us to be in danger of most everything else.
Stay tuned next for a series of audio clicks, which is definitely not federal agents tapping your radio. Don’t worry about it.
Good night, Night Vale. Good night.
Today’s proverb: What if -- and hear me out -- what if someone made a printer that worked every time you needed it to work?
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