It was an unscheduled Street Cleaning Day that got to him in the end.

He had learned to adopt a gluten-free diet, to expect the occasional temporal anomaly on the way to the lab, and even not to be surprised if tarantula hooligans heckled him after dark. And he had done of all of this without fainting more than twice, which he considered a victory. Basically, Carlos had found that his senses of reality and rationality were under such constant and rude assault in Night Vale that he had to pick his battles if he wished to hold onto a single scrap of sanity. And of course there was something else to keep him grounded now. Someone else. Sweet, bubbly, unsettling-in-the-best-kind-of-way Cecil, the only man he'd ever loved. He kept telling himself that it wasn't wise to call it love when they'd only really known each other for a matter of months…but if not caring that your boyfriend's shadow sometimes appeared to have more appendages than its owner did wasn't love, then what was?

And it was that same affection that finally pushed Carlos's carefully controlled, constant state of confusion into absolute panic. He had just been coming out of the shower, stepping gingerly over the bottle of intensely, almost offensively blue shampoo(?) that he had no recollection of putting there and could only see with his left eye when the radio in the next room crackled to life. It was Cecil's voice, 15 minutes too early for his morning traffic report and taut with urgency.

"Listeners! The Street Cleaners are coming. They have already reached Desert Bluffs and will be upon us in a matter of minutes. We have no precedent for a Street Cleaning Day taking place on a Wednesday. I repeat, this is an unprecedented situation. The Street Cleaners are coming. Listeners, lock your doors. Updates as they come."

Carlos froze momentarily in the process of drying his hair and then ran to the window of his little apartment. The street had emptied with eerie speed—Night Vale was a ghost town (ghosts were literally the only citizens left outside; the spectral population never seemed particularly concerned by things like this). He had been lucky enough to completely miss the last Street Cleaning Day. Safely cloistered in the basement of the thick cinderblock research lab and surrounded by the constant loud clicking of the NMR machines, he hadn't known that anything had happened at all until he had emerged to see the somber post-Street Cleaning Day street cleaning taking place. This was an entirely novel experience. Carlos was about to assume the fetal position in his closet when Cecil's voice, now shaking with barely contained fear, stopped him dead in his tracks for a second time:

"Listeners!" it said in a harsh whisper, "All bets are off. I don't know what's happening anymore. The windows are covered in street cleaning fluid and I can't see anything. There was a single loud 'thud' from downstairs a few seconds ago, and I think station management has even exited their office. I dare not leave the building, but I am speaking to you now from the men's bathroom in the basement. Khoshekh is the only other being in the room as far as I can tell, but he's acting very—oh no! What was that? Listeners, I—aaaAUUGHRGROOOWWWGSSSHHttzt"

The broadcast ended right there in a burst of static and inhuman screeching, and something in Carlos's brain short-circuited. Since his arrival in Night Vale, everyone else's acceptance of the endlessly weird goings-on was part of what kept him from collapsing into a gibbering heap on the ground. If Cecil was scared, something was seriously wrong. And if something was seriously wrong, then Cecil was almost certainly in danger. Carlos lunged back into the bathroom, grabbed the furry red-spotted bathrobe that Cecil had given him for Dot Day, and flung himself out the front door.

He didn't take in much of his uncharacteristically reckless drive to the radio station. It was a haze of air raid sirens, radio static, and a heavy smell like tallow and jasmine. His mind never left Cecil and that frightening last broadcast, and every tiny variation in the awful mocking radio static made his stomach lurch sickly, as if he were suffering another bout of gastrointestinal spiders. He pulled into the small parking lot by the station building with a screech of tires and nerves and leapt from the car. The side door of the building was, of course, locked.

"CECIL," he called desperately, pounding at the grey door, "CAN YOU HEAR ME?" There was a horrible moment of silence, and then a crash as a bloodstone sphere came sailing through the small window, followed quickly by Cecil's voice.

"Carlos? Oh no, Carlos! Is that you? What are you doing here? Get inside!" There was some scuffling, a heavy dragging sound, and then Carlos heard the door unlock. He flung it open and was greeted with a sight that was indescribable in the same way that colors are to the blind. The only thing getting through his eyes and into his feeble human brain was Cecil's face, surrounded by swirling something-ness. He reached forward and grabbed the smaller man to drag him from the building, grimacing as an indignant sound like a planet with indigestion echoed through the hallway. He slammed the door shut behind him and shoved Cecil towards the car.

"Carlos!" Cecil cried, wide-eyed, "why? It was much safer in there! That was station management protecting me! They said I was important!" he added, beaming a little. Carlos's incredulous spluttering was cut short by a cloud of dust and the familiar strains of Schubert's unfinished symphony as a Street Cleaner approached from around the corner. They both leapt into the idling car and Carlos took a hard right across the street, past the Arby's drive through, and into the desert.

They drove in silence for almost a full minute, Carlos ashen-skinned and wild-eyed, Cecil just watching as the reflection of the glowing Arby's sign grew smaller and smaller in the rear-view mirror.

"Carlos," he finally said gently, "my sweet, beautiful Carlos, what are you doing?"

"I am getting us out of here," Carlos replied through gritted teeth, "and taking us somewhere that follows the law of thermodynamics and where puppies don't fly."

Cecil blinked. "There are places where puppies can't fly? You mean you clip their plasma wings or something?"

Carlos began shaking his head very hard from side to side, as if he were trying to fling memories out through his ears. The car swerved noticeably, and Cecil winced and clutched at the cup holder. "Could you at least slow down a little bit?" he pleaded.

"I don't know," said Carlos grimly. "How fast are Street Cleaners?"

Cecil sighed.

And so they drove on, gliding and bouncing over the flat sunbaked desert, until Carlos noticed something.

"I can't believe how similar all these cacti are."

"What?"

"I thought they were normal golden barrel cacti, Echinocactus grusonii, but I swear that clump back there looked exactly like the last two we passed. There must have been some kind of crazy genetic bottleneck with the native flora here to kill variation like that," Carlos mused. Cecil smiled a little, noting silently that the scientist must be calming down if he was back to analyzing the desert's biota.

"I guess so."

About five minutes and four identical cactus clumps later (Carlos commented that they seemed to be appearing with more frequency, and "why do they all look like they're the exact same distance from the road?"), they experienced a sensation that could only be described as a temporal sneeze accompanied by a faint smell of burnt popcorn, and just like that they were back in the now-quiet radio station parking lot.

"Mierda." said Carlos flatly. He wobbled, tried to put his head between his knees, and banged it on the steering wheel instead.

"Huh," said Cecil, rubbing Carlos's shoulders comfortingly. "That's never happened to me before." Carlos looked at him with pleading eyes.

"You've left before! Yes? You said you'd been to Europe, right?"

"Yeah. I especially loved Svitz. Oh Carlos, it's so beautiful, we should go some time. You'd love it."

"Cecil, where the hell is Svitz?" asked Carlos in the forlorn tone of a man who already knows the answer, more or less.

"Just north of Franchia, of course!"

"No. No no no. Let's try this again." Carlos said stubbornly. "You told me that last Street Cleaning Day, most of the city council went to Miami. Miami Florida."

"Ooooh," said Cecil dreamily. "We should go there too. I've always wanted to see the blue-sand beaches."

"Blue—" Carlos managed, before barking out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob and collapsing forward over the steering wheel. "Those weren't just a bunch of unusually similar looking cacti, where they?" he managed between bouts of hysterical laughter. "The whole desert was repeating and now I'm back where I started. And that wasn't my Europe, is it? Or my Florida?"

"Carlos," interrupted Cecil with concern, "what are you talking about? There's only one world. Everyone knows that. Don't be silly." His use of the word 'silly' caused Carlos to make another of those awful honking sounds, and Cecil put an arm around him.

"You know what," said Carlos, still giggling a little, "I've talked to my family and old friends. I have. They've answered my emails. But no matter what I tell them, they seem to think that I'm in Canada and that I've only been gone for about two weeks."

Cecil frowned. "Where's Canada?" he asked, sending Carlos into another attack of hysterics. "Hey." he said, covering Carlos's hand with his. "Okay. Maybe you're from somewhere else. After all, I didn't believe in mountains until the whole blinking-light-wasteland-invading-army incident."

Carlos snorted.

"But you must have gotten here somehow, so…there must be some way of getting back. I guess. Maybe. For you. But Carlos, I don't think I can ever leave. Not my whole world, I mean. I'm the Voice of Night Vale, you know! It's my home! And more than that, I think I'm a part of it. Like…an organ." Cecil sighed shakily, as if steeling himself for something. "But…but if you every really feel like you need to leave…please come back, okay?" he said quietly.

There was a moment of shocked silence.

"Oh," said Carlos. "Oh. No! No, Cecil, querido, never without you. You know why I lost it today? Because you were scared. I'm used to being scared at this point. I mean, mostly," he added, thinking of the Street Cleaners again and shuddering a little.

"Oh, Carlos," Cecil cried, throwing his arms around him, "my sweet, perfect, brave Carlos. My knight in shining armor. You wanted to save me. You risked the Street Cleaners to save me."

"Well, yeah," said Carlos, a little sheepishly. "But now that you throw in the organ metaphor, I can see why that might not have been wise." They sat there together quietly for a few moments, watching the town tentatively come to life again around them. "Cecil?" asked Carlos.

"Yes?"

"Te amo, querido. I love you."

Cecil smiled a little more widely than he should have been able to, his improbably bright eyes brimming suddenly with tears he'd been fighting to hold in.

"Oh, Carlos. I love you too. I have for a long time. I think you're neat," he sighed happily into Carlos's neck. Carlos smiled, kissed him gently, and everything was perfect, or at least it was until Cecil broke the silence.

"I'm glad you like the bathrobe I got you," he said shyly.

"What? Oh. Yeah." Carlos grinned, stroking the horribly furry fabric. "I was in a little bit of a hurry this morning."

"I guess you were," said Cecil, smiling. "I wasn't going to say anything while you were in such a state of panic, but it seems you've forgotten to tie it. It's been hanging open the whole time."

Carlos turned an alarming shade of magenta that complimented his smooth coffee skin much better than the greyish tone he had worn earlier, and then it was Cecil's turn to laugh as the two of them sat together in the sweet, unlikely little oasis of the car.