OPEN Sign

I miss the clouds. I don’t know where they’ve gone but I wish they’d come back. They used to provide brief moments of shade or break up the monotony of the blue desert sky, add a darkened reprieve to the tan/beige monopoly of the ground. From the beginning of time to the end of it and now to here the land has always remained the same. The heat remains brutal, life teams beneath the hot sands, and the mountains fill the distance with imposing monoliths. But now the sky is a little more empty, and I wish the sun's friends would return.

Because I can't stand the heat. I wait all day for the night just to be a little cooler. Occasionally I'll stumble upon a derelict town and hide away in the remains. Or I'll see a little river and hop in to relax. But really I wait for the night to blanket the world and save us, what's left of us, from another beating of the sun. Every morning, just like this morning, that light breaks the horizon and acts as the harbinger of pain to come.

Tonight, however, as the sun slipped beneath the horizon, another glow shone across the sands and brush; a much smaller beacon of orange and blue in the distance. As I approached I made it out.

A neon “OPEN” sign.

I looked at the ground and didn’t see a  power cord. I checked behind it and couldn’t find a spot for batteries. The sign just sat in the middle of the desert, bright, nothing around it for hundreds of miles but me.

Before the End these were common, a dime a dozen; You'd never notice them. The only one I can even think of was outside the Flying Dog, my usual Friday night haunt back then. That place was my refuge, just like any little bar you can think of, but I knew that place like the back of my hand. You could probably go back to where it stood and you'd still see this scene: Mr. and Mrs. Jones sitting in a corner booth (I think the "Save the Aral Sea" poster is still above them), Joe Crawly and his friend Jack playing another miserable round of trivia at their table, and later in the night you'd catch Ella Ferguson and Casey Fitzpatrick stumble in for last call. Last call was special there because the bartender, Jamie, would call it at 2 A.M., but she argued it never specified which 2 A.M. 

And then there was me, usually coming in with my hair on fire from delivering mail all day. Jamie was pretty good about noticing my subtle entrances and would have my Blue Moon and water waiting for me at the bar. And that was my Friday night escape from the desert, my weekly oasis retreat.

One week was a bit different, though, because there was a new woman I'd never seen before. She was sitting at the bar, talking to Jamie just as Jamie walked to get my drinks. The woman looked over at me and I saw her face: I just remember blue eyes framed by light brown hair with a heart shaped locket around her neck. I got to the bar the same time my drinks did and she kept her gaze fixed.

She watched me gulp down my water in one go.

“Save some for the fish.”

“You see a fish out here you can retire on it,” I scoffed under my breath. She played with her ice.

“Stranger things have happened out here where no one is.” I turned and looked at her.

“What? like aliens?”

“Maybe, who’s to say?” she said with a shit eating grin, like she knew something I didn’t, adding, “Everything out here was supposed to be here; Then we came along, saw some land devoid of all things we need to survive, and decided to set-up shop. If anything, with a little perspective to the critters of the sand, we are the aliens.”

I gave her a dry laugh and pointed to Jamie.

“That is almost as deep as that shotglass she’s filling,” then picked up my own drink, “but I see your point.”

“Oh, really?”

I took a sip then set the glass down.

“Yes, really. After you deliver enough packages in 108  heat to buildings designed to withstand a whole host of disasters, you wonder why we’re here and not next to a beach.”

She grabbed her drink and moved next to me.

“Maybe it was a mistake,” she said, “Maybe we weren’t supposed to be here at all?”

“I mean, you’re probably right. I don’t quite think the pioneers came looking for Eden and decided a place devoid of green was the way to go. Probably some wagon wheel broke down and, as is the case for all-times, one of the leaders called it God’s Will and ‘strongest battles to his strongest soldiers’-ed the people to stay.”

“You think so?”

“I do, yeah. Wish they’d gone a little further so I could do a 2-day delivery for Mr. Jones over there with a breeze in my face, though.”

She followed my finger to Mr. Jones then looked back at me. It was kind of cute, I don’t know why.

“So you’re a postman then?” she probed.

“No,” I said with a grin, “haven’t earned that promotion just yet. I’m just your average jungle driver at the moment.”

“And do you have a name?”

“I do, it’s Jim.”

“Jim the Jungle Driver, that’s a catchy name.”

“Almost as catchy as yours?” I asked. She shook her head and smiled.

“Maybe, we will see.’

I turned my body to face her more.

“Oh I see, so you’re the mysterious woman who’s come to this watering hole to steal the townfolk’s hearts then leave?”

“Oh obviously. I come in, briefly wax poetic about the world and what we know (and especially about what we don’t know), then leave you recovering from that bombshell.” She sipped the last of her drink, and I took a sip from mine.“But,” she said, “This time I got to hold a bit more back because Jim the Pithy Postman came in and stole the show.”

I laughed.

“Yeah, just what I thought. All us small townsfolk just live in ignorance ‘til you come around and show us the way.”

She smiled and tucked her hair behind her ear.

“I don’t think you all live in ignorance, at least all the time. That you live in ignorance all the time. Because, I mean on some level we all do, even I the ethereal stranger come to change your world.”

I turned around and looked at the usual suspects of the bar, tilting my head to tell her take-a-look. And she did, and she looked back at me.

“Some of us live there more than others,” I said to her.

“So they’re all just oblivious? Locked into modernity,” she replied, then in a hushed mocking tone, “never to be heard from again.”

“Well maybe! I couldn’t tell you exactly,” I said smiling, “but I can tell you they aren’t liable to change too much. Hell they won't notice change too much.”

About this time John or Jack came up to the bar and grabbed another beer from Jamie. As he walked away I pointed him out to this woman.

“He drinks Guinness in that corner booth over there, just like his dad drank Guinness in that corner booth before him. Look too fast and you’d think it was the same guy who hasn’t moved in decades; and yet he’s changed. Or at least I think he has.”

I turned back to the bar, and she came with me.

“I could’ve sworn he and I said we wouldn’t be like our parents. I could’ve sworn we’d be different if we tried. Like we were little boys with big dreams of changing the world, heads in the clouds. Yet here we are; same bar, same drinks, same faces. Couldn’t be less interesting and different if we tried.”

“Did ya? Try I mean, try to be different.”

I recoiled with a grimace, then replied to her. 

“I don’t know; I don’t think so. It’s hard to be different or become different if you’ve never seen it. And as you get older you just get scared of trying, I think. So then you’ve not trying to be different and thrive, you're just trying to survive the day, then you just fall back to what you know around you.”

I sipped my same beer.

“Like doing each day’s tasks and worrying about tomorrow’s when you’re there, so then all the days just kinda blend together.”

“Yeah,” I grunted, “exactly.”

“I felt the same way; I kept losing the macro in the micro, and then something just-” She put her hands toward her head and just tapped her face. I looked at her locket. She continued.

“-clicked. I realized one day that someday I’ll end and I’d rather remember a flurry of days rather than one long one.”

Her words hung in the air for a second.

“And that’s how you ended up here?” I said, “out where all the little boys that change the world come from?”

She smiled.

“More like to the place where they grow old, fat men set in their ways. Where they will never change the world if they never leave.”

I smiled back at her.

“You’re quite interesting, you know that?”

“I like to think so.”

She pushed her empty glass as Jamie cupped her hands around her own mouth.

“LAST CALL!” she roared a few hours late.

I raised my hand for another then looked at the woman.

“On me if you’re having.”

“I just might, yeah.”

I raised my hand for her as well and Jamie nodded.

“So what are you doing here,” I said, “if we all aren’t meant to be out here?”

She set her arm on the bar and her head on her hand and looked at me.

“I think,” she began, “I came to see the end of the world. To see the people surviving at the end of the world, knowing that if we could make it here then we could make it anywhere.”

“And if we don’t?”

“Well then we’ll make cute fossils for the real aliens to find.”

She said this as Janie handed us our drinks and napkins, and the woman took her napkin and a pen and wrote something on it. Then she slid me her drink and the napkin. 

“Call me sometime, Jim the Postman. You’re more interesting than you think.”

She stood up and walked out the door, and my eyes followed her then retreated back to the drink and the napkin. I picked up the drink and sipped it. It hit hard, like a bomb going off. I picked up and read the name on the napkin.

Enola.

The “OPEN” sign burned out, and I stood in the dark again, in the natural state of it all. Then slowly, creeping up over the ridges and filling the valley, the sun rose into the sky. And the desert looked exactly as it had the day before.

But it had totally changed.