15/08/2018 22:41:27 ¶ ●

## 132 - Bedtime Story

This is a bedtime story my mother used to tell me.

Welcome to Night Vale.

There once was a boy who wanted to know everything. He was smart and curious. He would draw the stars and collect insects. He would read books and write poetry. He looked at blades of grass in a magnifying glass, and he knew there was more to know. His father would tell him “I love you my son, I would give my life for you.”

Most days his father made him work in the pasture. The boy was not interested in operating plows or hammers or pry-bars. He was only interested in how they worked, and his curiosity would often lead him to injury. This made his father angry, but his father did not want to say an unkind word to a son. So when he was mad, he avoided the boy, not speaking to him for days, even to check to see if he was OK.

His mother would tell him, “I love you my son. I would give away everything I own for you.” She sometimes baked cakes for the family.

He loved cake. He loved leavening agents and the careful art of mixing flour with liquid, and the chemical reaction of eggs and fat under extreme heat. Sometimes he would help, but his mother would become frustrated when he would eat a spoonful of raw baking soda or open the oven early and pour the uncooked batter onto the floor, to examine the consistency at different times in the baking process. His mother would cast him out and tell him no cake, no dinner even, to go to his room for the rest of the night.

His sister would tell him, “I hate you, brother.” But their parents would instruct her to be nice and so she would say sarcastically, “I love you, brother. I would climb the tallest mountain for you.” But she knew she did not believe in mountains, and he would tell her that mountains were real, and she would wrestle him into the ground and pull his hair.

He knew he would never need his father to give his life for him. He just wanted his father to show concern for his health. He knew he would never need his mother to give away all of her belongings for him. He just wanted his mother to show interest in his curiosity. He knew his sister really loved him. He knew he would never need his sister to climb a mountain for him. He just wanted his sister to believe him that mountains were real.

One day, the boy decided he wanted to be a singer, so he could study how music makes people feel good. But his mother said, “You can’t support yourself as a singer.” Another day, the boy decided he wanted to be a doctor, so he could understand how medicine works. But his father said: “Being a doctor means you have to perform surgery,” and he feared for the boy’s future patience. Another day, the boy decided he wanted to be a judge, so he could make sense of the laws that govern the land. But his sister said, “You get in trouble too much to be a judge.”

The boy wanted to be an alchemist. Later, a chef. Later, an archeologist. Later, a ship’s navigator. His mind thought of everything he could imagine. His fingers touched everything they could reach. His mouth said everything he could form into sounds. But for each job he told them he wanted to do, they told him a reason he couldn’t or shouldn’t do it.

One day, the boy saw an angel in the middle of the dusty field next to his house. This was a long time ago, so angels were not to be publicly acknowledged. But no one else was around, save for a few birds who might report the boy to the sheriff. The boy was willing to take that chance. He had never seen an angel, and wanted badly to learn about them.

The angel, like all angels, was named Erika. The angel told the boy that below this field is a world of renewal, a place that will let you be something different, something amazing. Erika knew the boy wanted more from his life.
“Underground, I can be anything I want?” the boy asked.
“You cannot be anything you want, but you will be something you want,” the angel said.
“And what is that?” the boy asked. “Like a doctor or a singer or a judge?”
“What you actually want is rarely what you think you want,” the angel replied. “So probably no.”
“How will I know if I’m going to like it?” the boy asked.
“How will you know anything?” the angel said and then ascended back to heaven, where they had some scones and a tall class of orange milk waiting.
“How do I get there?” the boy called. And faintly, from the clouds, he heard: [spitting sound].
He didn’t understand what the noise meant. Was the angel angry at him for asking so many questions? His mouth was wet, even in the dry dusty desert field. He felt immediately hydrated. He spit. [spitting sound] He spit again. [spitting sound] And the dirt moistened into mud, dark and glistening like chocolate pudding. He spit and spit and spit, until the puddle was about 18 inches wide. His mouth was dry and swollen. He couldn’t spit anymore.

The boy reached his hand into the mud, and the earth gave way easily. It was a hole. He reached his entire shoulder in, then his head, his torso, and finally his legs and feet. He was standing once again, but upside down underneath this world. Everything was dark, but completely visible. And below him, the bright white of the new sky. He could see the underside of the barn, of the house, his sister had returned home, and you could see the warm tread on her boots as she stepped across the lawn. The boy saw worms and spiders and centipedes floating in the dark soil before him. He could feel them touch his cheek and teeth. And soon they began to nestle in his ear. He spent hours exploring every bug, every plant, every buried rock. He found some artefacts, like an expired shotgun shell. A lockbox full of notebooks long since rotted away. Even the skeleton of a dog in a wooden crate.

There was so much to explore, but he was getting tired. It was difficult to move around. He looked for the hole he had entered, but it had dried up in the hot sun. he could feel ants along his eyelids and the inside of his lips. He could barely walk. He tried spitting again, but soil had stuffed in his mouth. The sun had set, so he curled into a ball to go to sleep. He would figure out how to get home in the morning. He wished he could move.

It began to rain, and from the underside of the earth, the weather sounded like this.

[“Bad Friend” by Cheese On Bread
http://cheeseonbread.com/]

After the rain, his arms felt longer, as well as his toes, but he still could not move. Days passed and he few longer and longer. There was sometimes more rain, but mostly sun. One morning, after several months, he could actually feel the wind again on his face and on his back. When the rain came, it sounded like it always had, not that odd underground sound he had grown used to. And he realized he had finally begun to emerge back above ground. He wanted to run home, but his legs and toes had grown so long that they were entangled in each other, in rocks and in other plants deep within the ground.

He wasn’t climbing out of the ground, but growing out of it. His skin was greenish brown and wooden. He had little bulbs tufted along the tips of his fingers and the top of his head. Stuck in the earth, he had only to think about everything around him. It was what he always wanted from his life. He learned about photosynthesis and cellular division. He learned about mating habits of squirrels and birds. He studied the geometry of spider webs and the physics of stars. He spent a lot of time in those next several months watching his family, their grief at his loss. His parents’ happiness at his sister’s education. Aging, and the rapid breakdown of his parents’ bodies over the next many years.

Time slowed for him, and his knowledge grew so vast and so expansive, human triumphs and pains became only a small sliver of his interest. There were much larger systems to comprehend than humanity. In a decade, he had grown to over 20 feet tall. His sister, now an adult, approached. She touched the leaves growing from his chest and hips. The boy felt something he hadn’t felt in a while, but he couldn’t quite explain what it was. He tried to speak, but nothing came out. He had forgotten what he used to be.

The boy was no longer a boy, but a tree. He did not know why a tree would want to speak. His sister smelled the tips of her fingers that had run along his leaves. She touched his bark, and she left. Over the years, she would return and plant flowers near the tree. She would remove beetles that were burrowing into his body. She would sit beneath him and read a book, and he would try to read over her shoulder, but it was written in human language. These days, he could only read clouds and stars and moonlight. His sister would pluck fruits from him, great green bulbs, like pears but larger and filled with a bright pink flesh and teardrop-shaped grey seeds. She would cut them open and eat them while reading, the juice trailing down her chin and onto her cotton shirt and denim trousers.

She sometimes collected his fruits in basket and sold them or made pies. Eventually there was a man with her, later a child. One sunny spring morning she and the man and the child came to the boy, the tree, all wearing black. Their eyes were swollen. The tree grew sad, knowing they had lost a family member, but he wasn’t sure which one, or what a family member even was, or that it was one of his parents. The crying woman below him was his sister, but he could not remember this. His humanity was eroding, his botany flourishing.

Later that spring, the woman and the man and the child brought a picnic and some games, and the tree was happy, but could not comprehend why. Nor did the tree intend to. The tree was simply happy, and this was a feeling that existed. Years later, the family wore black again and cried. And the tree felt sad, but it did not connect this feeling to any kind of narrative. It was simply sad, and this was a feeling that existed.

As the woman and man entered their old age, the tree did not understand their actions or their words or their behaviors. The tree barely noticed them at all. But as they arrived, it felt good. When they left, it also felt good, or sometimes bad. The only things it understood were sunlight and rain and soil. The tree knew it might live centuries without being able to speak or move or bake or work in the field. Trees could never be doctors, singers, or judges either, and this tree didn’t know why those particular human careers came to mind. But it loved examining the changing world with no ability to do anything about it. There was not to do, but feel. It had learned to cope with the itchiness of bugs, the searing pain of lightning strikes, and the embarrassment of birds. And it could stand all day and night, never tiring of gaining more knowledge about weather and gravity and biochemistry.

One day, more than a hundred years later in the once dusty field, now populated with grass, flowers and several more houses, an angel approached the tree and said, “Hello boy, I’m Erika.” The tree did not hear the angel. The tree did not see the angel. The tree felt the angel, but had no understanding of the angel’s presence. The tree understood so much of what there was to know about the earth. It certainly never learned to sing or test medicine or interpret laws, but these were minor details compared to memorizing the patterns of weather, the terrain of the moon, the motions of stars within an ever expanding universe. So the presence of an angel was not that big of a deal. The tree felt it had learned everything important there was to learn.

The angel said, “You’ve yet learned so little.”
And from behind their back, Erika revealed an axe. They swung wide and drove the blade into the tree’s base. It hurt, and the tree remembered mortality.
“I am sorry this hurts, boy,” Erika said and drove the axe into the tree again. For most of an afternoon, the angel chopped and chopped, and eventually the tree fell.

Over a few days, the tree and the fruits and the separated stump died. But the tree retained everything. As its body was planted into boards, as its twigs were ground into mulch, the tree felt the knowledge of each seed it had planted across the valley, each creature it had nourished with its fruits, and each piece of lumber built into a home for generations of humans to come.

The tree felt its branches burned in a fireplace, and it rose up as smoke and dissipated into carbon across the sky, coming down in trillions of molecules to build more soil, more trees, more creatures. The boy could truly learn everything now, cell by cell.

It’s been centuries, and the boy is still learning. He’s inside you and me this very moment, learning about each of us. Maybe one day, one of his memories will find its way into your own. Maybe it will make you a singer, or a doctor, or a judge, or a baker, or even – another tree. And you will think of the boy who wanted to know everything and did.

And then my mother would pat my head and say, “Good night, Cecil, good night” or so I imagine. By then I was long asleep. I hope you are too.

Stay tuned next for temporary oblivion, followed by a forgetful waking consciousness and
Good night,
Night Vale,
Good night.

Today’s proverb: Live every moment as if it was just one of the two and a half billion moments you have in your life.