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Cecil was a professional, interested in the truth above anything else. Any professional reporter would hold the same values. Could there be anything better than to spend day after day reporting the town news, reporting the truth to the good people of Night Vale? Surely not. And where does truth come from? Authority. So, if the mayor tells Cecil that feral dogs are plastic bags, the feral dogs were plastic bags! The waterfront was a hallucination, angels aren’t real, and there certainly never was a taxpayer funded campaign to put strange new viruses in half the school lunches, just to see what would happen. Those things could not possibly be real. Reporting the truth on these matters causes a lot of corrections to be made to his show, and it may go against his own eye witness accounts, but whose eyes show them the truth, really? Aren’t they all looking at the house that isn’t really there? Aren’t they all checking watches filled with nothing? Cecil slept soundly, knowing he was reporting the town’s truth.
And on the nights he didn’t, on the nights he slept fitfully, waking up with screams on his lips and sweat on his palms from unknowable nightmares, he was sure everything was working just fine. Probably just a few government tests, nothing to worry about. And the days when he looked in the mirror, and wasn’t really sure who looked back at him, he knew that, too, was perfectly normal. After all, who truly knows who they are? We are all just blood and sinew, hurtling through an endless void, really.
It was the days when he went into the station and questioned his news reports that Cecil feared. The days when he looked over the typed reports in his booth and couldn’t keep from saying, “Why, I did see that screeching tear in the sky last night! Just above the Ralph’s, it was right there, wasn’t it, Dana?” that he was afraid. And when Dana just answered with a strange, sympathetic smile and a finger to her lips, Cecil was lost.
He had the report right in front of them, so he told them of Mayor Winchell hissing “You. Saw. Nothing,” into her microphone, pointing an accusatory finger at the press in their folding chairs. His question marks hung in the air, though, and made him afraid. One should not question the mayor. One should not report one’s questions. One should know that the truth is a gift, handed from government to individuals, to make the world so much less confusing. But here Cecil was, questioning, reporting and forgetting. Breaking each rule, one by one.
The howling started up from station management almost immediately. Cecil, ever the professional, smoothly transitioned into the weather before removing his headphones and slumping over his desk, waiting for the note to slide under his door, to direct him to his re-education segment that evening. Dana set a new cup of coffee next to him, more cream and sugar than anything else - her way of fixing his coffee that made her so endearing to him - and placed a gentle hand on his shoulder.
“But I did see it.” He reached for the coffee, staring into it vaguely. “It was right above the Ralph’s, and the shrieking was so terrible, Dana, it was so terrible.” The coffee gave him no answers, just rippled so slightly in his trembling hand.
“I don’t know what we saw, Cecil, but it didn’t shriek, and it wasn’t really there. And you need to tell the people that.” She punctuated the “we” with a comforting squeeze of his shoulder, then let her hand fall away as she crossed the booth to pick up the note they’d both been waiting for. She set it on the desk next to him and sighed, and he couldn’t tell if she was exasperated or defeated. “I’m sorry.”
Cecil waited in silence for a moment before picking up his headset and motioning for Dana to leave the booth. “Weather’s nearly done,” he said, and lifted the coffee to his mouth. Dana to returned to her booth. She gave him the three, two, one - back on the air. He told the people the truth this time. The station management was displeased, and he was headed for re-education. The government was, of course, correct about the rift in the sky that had never been there, that Cecil had never seen. And he for one was grateful, truly grateful, that they had a government strong enough to answer their questions about the sky, to tell them when they were wrong. He reminded Night Vale to also be grateful, to listen to the mayor’s answers and be glad, because isn’t life just too short to be worrying about rifts in the sky you can never hope to understand?
While he headed to City Hall, Suite 300, as the re-education orders demanded, he felt memories stirring within him. The familiar building, the agonizing walk through halls that should not exist, if you take physics literally: It all reminded him that he had been here before, but he could not have said how many times. He thought of fitful nights, time stolen from him, and hours spent unable to tell himself whether or not he was the same man he’d been the day before. He stopped at the door to Suite 300 and realized that it didn’t matter if he had told Night Vale the truth. He told Night Vale what he needed to say, what they needed to know to keep re-education orders from sliding under their own doors. He gripped the door handle, thinking that he loved Night Vale, that he loved his government, that he loved the truth, and all that was going to happen tonight was a simple course to remind him of all of that.
And he should be grateful for it.