Simon had first seen the sign while walking back from the Sunday farmer’s market in early November. It was printed on paper, affixed to a streetlamp, and stuck over an old gig poster. He hadn’t paid it much mind but, as he walked, he saw another copy, and then another still. He had an urge to stop and read one, but he was balancing several oversized aubergines and further investigation seemed an unreasonably cumbersome affair, so he continued home.
That evening, as he sliced and fried his vegetables following a Moroccan recipe he’d found online, he was reminded of the signs. His dark-gray suit had been carefully pressed and returned to its hanger. His eggshell shirt had been replaced with a long-sleeved tee, and he rubbed a sleeve between his thumb and forefinger as he thought.
He couldn’t remember what they had said exactly. They were titled something like, but not specifically, “The End is Nigh!” with a body of smaller text underneath. He decided that it wasn’t important, but it did occur to him, should he later be in the area, that it would do little harm to stop by and read one properly.
Three nights later, Simon lay in bed speaking to himself. The more he spoke, the greater his conviction. It concerned his job, or, he corrected himself, his career. He listed the reasons why a significant promotion would be well suited to a man of his skill set. At length, he described to his ceiling recent examples of behaviors and successes in the workplace that demonstrated a tenacity and aptitude that was nothing short of, he wasn’t afraid to say it, laudable, and how indeed he yearned for the opportunity to flex these particular endowments for the benefit of the company as a whole.
Helpfully, as his mind drifted toward sleep, the monologue grew to an entire fantasy. He was no longer in his bedroom but seated in a large corner office while the bright ambience of his workplace buzzed around him. The door opened and the regional director entered. Simon flashed a perfect smile and offered her a seat. He cleared his throat and began to speak but realized the only thing he could say, maddeningly, over and over and without any ability to change course or even cease, was that damned nonsense, “The End is Nigh!” He tried to apologize and smooth over the director’s concerned look to no avail. Finally, all he could do was ruefully usher her out of the office, all the while barking, “The End is Nigh! The End is Nigh! The End is Nigh!”
The next morning, he arose forty-five minutes earlier than usual, skipped breakfast entirely, and set off toward the market to resolve the matter once and for all. It was preposterous that such a trivial thing had disrupted his sleep, and Simon assured himself that the inevitably boring discovery of the sign’s actual purpose would quell the unnatural feeling inside of him.
While walking, he observed three conflicts.
The first involved a child of no older than three carefully aligning his steps alongside the pavement cracks much to the vexation of his mother, forced to trail with a pram. With a practiced degree of tact, she scooped him into the seat and accelerated to an acceptable speed.
The second was a Mexican standoff between an elderly man, a door, and an unnecessarily large set of identical-looking keys.
The third was a domestic argument that echoed between two unknown characters within the recesses of a shadow-laden alley. The element of anonymity added mystery to Simon, like a burlesque show or glory hole.
He arrived at the market and realized that he must have missed the signs somehow. He turned back and traced his steps toward home. After a methodical sweep of the area, he reached a frustrating conclusion: they were gone.
Every streetlamp on the block had been stripped clean. In fact, they were almost too clean. It didn’t make any sense. In all his years, Simon had never seen the poles, in their inconspicuous shade of “civic-duty” gray, so positively gleaming. It was absurd. He felt as though he were in the middle of one of those sterile Scandinavian dramas he seemed inexplicably duty-bound to watch and report back on to his colleagues. He wished he’d just read the sign when he’d first seen it. Each time he imagined it, the text grew longer and more mysterious.
After a few moments’ consideration, Simon walked to a stationary store. He purchased a white A3 poster, a black felt-tipped pen, and duct tape. He wrote the following:
Attention!
To the person(s) responsible for the signage displayed at this location recently.
For reference, it contained the phrase (or a phrase similar to)
The End is Nigh!
Please contact me to discuss.
Kind regards,
S.
Underneath this, he wrote his mobile phone number. Satisfied, he taped it to the base of a lamppost and walked home.
The rest of the week was torturous. Not only did Simon fail to receive a single helpful lead, but he found himself bombarded with gratuitous prank calls as well as the odd, presumably earnest, solicitation. On Friday evening, weary from the onslaught of nonsense and defeated by a particularly intrusive string of accusatory text messages, he finally resolved to return to the street, tear the advertisement down, and restore an element of dignity to his life.
As soon as he arrived, he discovered that his poster had been tampered with. “The End is Nigh!” had been replaced and the text now read:
For reference, it contained the phrase (or a phrase similar to)
SEXUAL REAWAKENING!
Worse still, underneath:
Please contact me FOR A GOOD TIME.
Simon couldn’t help but admire the handiwork. He first thought that the perpetrator had copied and reprinted the advert, but upon closer examination he decided that the new words had actually, somehow, been stamped on top with flawless precision.
He wrapped his arm around the streetlamp’s pole and slid down to a seated position as he meditated on this turn of events. For a moment, he felt as though his body and mind had separated from one another—as though one were leaning on the trolley in the breakfast aisle of the supermarket, reading the back of a cereal box, and the other had ambled off in search of blanched almonds. After a time, the one with the cereal might look up, notice the departure, and call out, “Hello! Where have you gone?” Then would come the reply, “I’m here! I’m with the blanched almonds!”
Simon wondered which of the two would be his body and which his mind. He wondered why he was still embracing the streetlamp. He wondered whether anyone was watching him—and with this, he leapt to his feet with renewed vigor.
It was obvious! How hadn’t he seen it? In between the time he had taped the poster to the streetlamp and now, a third party had seen it and reacted professionally. No casual observer or prank-artist would go to such lengths to interfere with an irrelevant, harmless sign, he insisted to himself, and therefore he had an avenue to pursue.
A plan hatched in Simon’s mind. He walked back to the stationary store for more supplies. He wrote the following on a new sheet of paper:
The End is Nigh and They Don’t Want You to Know!
He taped the new poster onto the old, walked across the street and sat at the outside table of a bar. It was 8:39 p.m.
He nursed a soda water, and then a tonic with a slice of lemon, and then a tonic with a slice of lemon and a dash of gin, and then a soda water, and then another, and then (during a rambunctious “2-4-1 cocktail 60 min” between 10:30 and 11:30) two Manhattans. He had between two and five more drinks and was politely asked to leave. Undeterred, he sat on the street itself, his hood occasionally bobbing down as his eyes drifted toward the pavement.
Simon observed the performances of the street. Characters wandered past and occasionally interacted with one another. Cars slid past like props and Simon couldn’t convince himself that they weren’t. Boots thumped in a rhythm. He could see them all in chorus; the pedestrians, the motorists, the barflies, the homeless, the absent. There was an anticipation in the air, as though they were all waiting for the main event.
And finally, the dancers arrived. There were two of them and they were in beautiful dress, perhaps flamenco, tango, or even ranchera. She wore a corseted top in deep red, skin-tight as it wrapped around her shoulders with a low cut that fell into cascades of shimmering ruffles. He wore a shirt with loose, creamy-white sleeves packed into a gold-trimmed black vest. His boots clacked as he walked and his trousers hung over them audaciously and gave him a swagger as confident as a gaucho. They walked hand-in-hand.
They stopped at the lamppost and read the sign. Simon felt a pressure and the urge to hide, but his body would not respond. She pulled the poster away and held it flat on the palm of her hand as though offering it to her partner, but when he leaned forward as if to take it, she fell back suddenly and was saved by his embrace, inches from the ground. Deftly, he gathered her back to her feet and she twirled from him, the sign clamped, now, between her teeth. With an arm outstretched, he stepped toward her, but she tiptoed backward, always just out of reach. In this catlike pursuit, the pair crept back up the alley from which they appeared.
Simon followed them. He saw them turn left and so he turned left. They crossed a road and so he crossed a road. For a moment, they were obscured by a passing van. They twisted sharply to the right and he only caught, in the corner of his eye, the tip of her dress as it slipped out of sight. They passed an all-hour laundromat, and Simon looked down. His sleeves were sticky with spilled alcohol. His shoes were scuffed. He felt as though he had been walking for hours, as though he might never stop.
As he turned the corner, he recognized the area. There was no road sign, but Simon knew where he was. They had arrived at Chapel Street. He hadn’t come here in years. The dancers were well ahead now, almost gone. He saw them turn left toward the river. He turned right and heard the clacks of their footsteps fade to nothing.
—
The road was named after an old church. The building had been deconsecrated and converted to a theater, and then again to a boutique cinema. For the last forty years, it had been open all hours, playing eclectic selections of films either forgotten, panned, or divisively experimental. Simon walked inside.
There was one attendant in the lobby manning both ticket booth and confectionary stand. He was an older man. Simon wondered if he was the owner. He tried to read the film listings on the overhanging board, but the letters hadn’t been manually set and were splayed randomly across its breadth.
“What do you want to see?” the attendant asked. He waited. “We only got one playing, I’m making a joke.”
“I’ll just have a ticket. I just want to see what’s playing.”
“Used to be different.”
“Boy,” said Simon, “I didn’t know this place was still, you know . . .”
“These days, even the projectors are digital. It’s not how it was is what I’m saying.”
As Simon stared at the board, he could have sworn the muddled-up words were spelling something out.
The attendant continued. “Ah, but don’t get me started, once I get going. It’s a miracle we can keep the doors open. We run events here, you ever come to those?”
Simon wondered if the attendant had to get up on a ladder to set the films and times for the upcoming day. It seemed dangerous.
“Just the other week we did one for Día de Muertos.” The attendant stressed the syllables diligently. “You know what that is?”
“When the dead come back,” said Simon.
“Yeah, you got it. The dead. Isn’t that something?”
“I don’t know. It sounds interesting.”
“You bet it does. Made it all spooky, apocalyptic-like, it was a whole thing. Anyway, nobody came. Lot of good it did me, all the advertisements I put up around the place. Sign of the times, I guess.”
“That’s too bad,” said Simon.
“I don’t know, maybe it’s all getting past me.”
Simon took his ticket and walked further down the lobby. The film had already started. There was melted butter in the air. He followed the muffled rumblings and booms down the corridor. Nobody was there to take his ticket and the entrance was blocked off by a stanchion. He stepped over it, opened the door, and felt it close behind him. His eyes were slow to adjust. For a moment, he saw nothing.
Dante Pragier grew up in Auckland, New Zealand. Having worked his way north via Melbourne, Australia and Spain’s Costa del Sol, he currently lives in the United Kingdom. He has completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. He has been published in Ad Alta: The Birmingham Journal of Literature and is a contributing writer for Australian Cinematographer Magazine. With a particular interest in philosophy of language and Cratylism—the natural relationship between words and things—he intends to further his studies in these fields.