No Time for Nostalgia

The door gives up with a moan; light spills on the floor like oil from a drum. How strange to be in such a familiar place that feels so alien. How many times had I walked through this door in three years? Hundreds? Thousands? Impossible to know for sure. How unimportant it seemed at the time.

It wasn’t a great job—working at the local movie theater. Whenever I’d complain, my dad would say the same thing: “Work a shitty job now, appreciate the better job later.” Maybe he was right, but I never got to experience the better job. And I never will.

The entire back of the movie theater held equipment and storage for the concession stand. Many moons ago there would have been huge stacks of fifty-pound popcorn seed bags, massive columns of Coca-Cola concentrate bladders in cardboard boxes, ready to be ripped open and attached to the CO2 machine. But today, not even the stands and shelves they sat upon remain. I cautiously walk down the long corridor to the double doors that open into the actual concession stand. The popcorn kettles are gone, but otherwise everything is as it once was. This was the physical and economic hub of the movie theater where large pops and extra-large popcorns were sold at costs that rivaled life-saving prescription medication. Movie theaters rarely made money on tickets, sometimes none. Any profit would have originated here.

The theater was about twenty years old when I started, built sometime in the early 2000s. Bright colors that didn’t belong together were haphazardly thrown in irregular shpaes upon the walls, the carpet, and floor tiles, a light purple lilac acting as the foundational hue. Like something from the Andy Warhol Museum. But in the dim light, everything is faded, like when I would apply a black and white filter to an Instergram photo. Or, was it Instragram? It’s been so long, I can’t remember.

I close my eyes and the gaudy color scheme is migraine-inducing once more. The sounds and smells of popping popcorn wafts up from the kettles; a trailer for the newest Tom Cruise movie blares its explosions and sub-bass booms that resonate deep in my chest; children race each other from Theater #1 to Theater #14; an arcade game replays the same fifteen seconds of Offenbach’s ‘Can-Can,’ an insufferable melody that pecked away at my sanity during the course of a twelve-hour double shift. With eyes closed, everything is back to normal. Like it was before.

Like the war never happened.

I’m not sure what year it is. Time is one of many things we all took for granted in the before-times. Yes, my digital watch tells me it’s 2029, but in the beginning, I paid no attention to weeks and months and years. At some point I lost track. Others did, too. Some think they know—ask five different people, get five different answers. The apparatus required to ensure the correct answer no longer exists.

One of the nukes fell on my city, wasting nearly everything. But not the movie theater which had been constructed—albeit unintentionally—to withstand the blast of a nuclear weapon. Winds took the fallout to the northeast, pushing most of us who survived south. And that’s where we’ve been for…well…a while.

Governments are gone because the people who ran them were cowards. Our way of life had become so gluttonous and massive that when the bombs fell, society imploded like a dying star. I hear rumors, but I don’t know much about life in other places. The Settlement, centered on an old warehouse south of the blast zone, runs well. I laugh every time I think about my high school economics teacher lecturing us about the evils of communists, because at the Settlement, that’s exactly what we are. Everybody chips in, everybody works. And if someone isn’t pulling their weight, we have an intervention. Like that old TV show about drug addicts and alcoholics, except this is for lazy asses. Most of the time it works—if not, they are asked to leave.

I didn’t leave because I was lazy. I chose to leave. Not because I didn’t like where I was living. My mom and my two little sisters are there. A lot of people I care about are there.

I don’t know how old I am now, but I know I was twenty the day the bombs fell, in between my second and third years at one of the local universities. Before college, life seemed to race by with no break or rest. Elementary school, middle school, high school, they all started and ended in a blink. I played soccer and I was in the marching band and I was vice-president of my senior class and I was in the Honors Society and—there was always an activity to race off to, and I always felt like I was moving in the direction of something. It was all a prelude to something else. Something important.

And ever since the Settlement was established and I knew my family was safe, I’ve felt like I was moving, but not towards anything, Five steps forward, five steps back. Maybe a circle, or one of those figure-eight infinity signs. And once I noticed the stagnation, I couldn’t un-notice it. The further my life moved into the future without progressing, the more it gnawed at me.

It took a while to convince my family that my future was out here, beyond the Settlement. That I had done by part down south and needed to hit the road, as we used to say, and fulfill a promise I made to someone in another world. I packed supplies and was gifted a paper map—never used one of those before—and started walking north.

I had to prepare for two dangers. First, the lawlessness of the land. There are no more cops or SWAT teams or FBI to protect us from evildoers. The Settlement was protected by volunteers on rotating shifts, but what went on beyond the borders of our home? There were no shortage of rumors. Cannibalism, rapes, human sacrifices. I took several weapons, including a revolver and a rifle. I hoped the need to use them would never arise.

The other danger was the radiation, which was tricky. It’s not like we had the Internet to learn the necessary information, nor did we have the Geiger counters popular in old spy movies. There was no way of knowing the yield of the bomb that destroyed our city, if it was an airburst explosion or ground level, whether the weapon produced fission via a uranium or plutonium core—all necessary information in understanding the dangers. The fallout should have blown to the northeast, carving a discernible line of rotted foliage into the woods. If I found myself surrounded by withered tree trunks and grassless dirt, or the air smelled strongly of metal, I was to turn around immediately and find a different way.

I wore protective clothing to prevent radioactive particles from getting on my skin, entering my lungs, digestive tract, or eyes. Heavy duty boots, long pants, long-sleeved shirt, jacket. A face mask left over from COVID and two bandanas. A thick ski cap. And, my favorite part of the ensemble, an authentic pair of Ray Ban sunglasses that, in the before-times, went for $500, the same kind worn by Timothée Chalamet in a gossip magazine ad I’d once come across.

It’s hotter than holy hell, and after walking twelve hours or more every day my sweat-soaked clothes weigh me down to the point that I have to strip and rinse my clothes in the creek, all while hoping I’m not breathing in anything that will eat away at my lungs or esophagus. It sucks. But I’m moving in a direction now. And before my true journey begins, I must stop by the old movie theater one more time.

I take the steps to the mezzanine level. The entire northern wall of the second floor is glass—or, I should say, was glass. A gentle breeze blows against me as I can’t help but take a moment to gaze out on what was the parking lot. Remaining are the light poles spaced apart evenly across the expanse, but the lines of the weathered pavement have faded to nothing. I continue moving to my right towards a door in a dark corner: the male employees’ locker room.

When I pull the door open, I know it’s just my imagination—I’m wearing three layers of cloth across my face, and it’s been years since this closet-sized room was used for anything, let alone its original purpose. But I swear I can smell the specific combination of sweat, deodorant, and Axe body spray, a potpourri of odors that greeted me every time I opened this door. It’s impossible not to be consumed by the past, and I wish I had a moment to sentimentalize, but I don’t. Despite the mathematics of probability, each second feels significantly impactful.

I steady myself and enter the miniscule change room, finding my locker: 1138.

Now that I have what I need, it’s time to go. I swiftly move back into the mezzanine towards the stairs. Despite my face coverings, I detect an aggressively pungent odor in the big open room that I know isn’t my imagination: body odor. Yes, I probably smell a bit ripe after days and days of traveling, but I must be nose-deaf to myself by now. This is the stink of someone else.

“Stay right there,” someone says from behind me, just as I reach the staircase. “Don’t move, and don’t reach for anything.

The voice is colored by desperation. A boy—a young teen, probably—artificially deepening his adolescent voce to sound like a man. A child, faking brevity.

I turn slowly. From the diluted outside light, I confirm my suspicions. He’s my height but rail thin; curly blonde hair, freckles, acne, downy fuzz on his upper lip and chin. A rifle in his hands, the end of the barrel no more than three inches from my chest. His outfit is nowhere near as protective as my own, a simple pair of torn trousers and a dirty tank top. My conspicuous clothing probably contributes to the intimidation he undoubtedly feels. He swallows nervously, his pronounced Adam’s apple retreating into the muscles of his throat before bobbing back to the surface.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, voice cracking on the word ‘you.’ If there are other people here, how is he the one in this position? How is he the protector?

“I said, what are you doing here?” he repeats. I study the length of his rifle, his hands in the right places.

“Turn your safety off,” I say calmly, quietly.

“Wha—What?”

“Your safety. It’s on. Turn it off.”

Ignoring the absurdity, he flips the safety off with an audible click.

“Good,” I say. “Now, take about four steps back.”

“Why?”

“Because at this distance, I could snatch that rifle out of your hands if I really wanted to. Always put some space between you and your target.”

He hesitates a moment, then another, then takes four steps back.

“There you go. Now I can’t move without you pulling that trigger. Got it?”

“What do you want?” he asks nervously, still aiming the gun at me. “We don’t got no food.”

“I’m not looking for food.”

“Everybody’s looking food.”

“I’m not everybody. I don’t need anything from you. I’m happy to be on my way now. If that’s what you want.”

“You swear?”

I nod. “I swear.”

His face holds tension for a few more seconds, then relaxes. He lowers the weapon, right hand still in place, finger resting on the trigger.

“Are there even any rounds in that thing?” I ask.

He appears hurt, like I’ve insulted his intelligence. “No. Ran out a few months ago.”

“Is that a .30-06?”

He nods.

I unzip my bag and toss him a box of ammunition.

“Wow. Thanks. Um, I lied earlier. About the food. We got some if you’re hungry.”

I reach up and pull down the bandanas and mask and smell the air: nothing but mold, mildew, and B.O. I pull off my head gear, exposing my heavily bearded face.

“If you have enough to share, I’ll gladly take you up on that.”

“We got plenty,” he says. “It’s just me and my sister.”

“I know you didn’t ask my advice, but I’m going to give you some anyway,” I say as we walk down the steps together to the main floor. “This is not a good place to stay. You’re very close to Ground Zero. And marauders coming through here who don’t know about radiation will take it from you in a heartbeat. Might kill you for it.”

“I know,” he says, setting his rifle down as I set my bag on the counter that once was the ticket booth. “But we can’t leave.”

“Why not?”

“It’s my sister. She’s hurt. Or sick. Or both…I’m not really sure. We tried to leave once, but we barely made it half a mile before we had to turn back.”

I reach in my bag again and pull out an old peanut butter jar packed to the brim with white capsules.

“Put out your hands,” I say, pouring half the bottle into his cupped palms. “That’s pain medicine. Never let her take more than two at a time, okay?” I pull out my map, laying it flat on the counter, folding it in half and tearing along the crease. “Go out the back door and walk straight into the woods. When you reach the creek, follow it for about a day or so until you reach the old highway. Then go due south to here.” I point to a spot on the map. “That’s the Settlement. Where I’m from. I can’t promise anything, but there are people there who might be able to help your sister. Think you can do this?”

He nodes. “What about you?”

“I’m heading the other direction.”

“How’s come?”

I study him curiously. Think about this place, this movie theater. It would make sense, wouldn’t it?

“Do travelers come through here a lot?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Not really. One a week. Maybe less.”

From my jacket pocket I pull out the picture, set it on the counter, point to the guy on the left.

“Recognize him?”

He scrutinizes the image, squinting in the dim light. After several seconds, he straightens up and says, “No. Sorry.”

“Thanks,” I say, shoving the picture into my bag.

“Most people who come through say there are supplies in an abandoned hospital northwest of here.”

I nod. “I know the place you’re talking about. I’ll head there next. I appreciate the info. Do you mind if I camp here for the night?”

He shakes his head. “Yeah. I mean, no. That’s fine. Who is he? The guy in the picture?”

I pause a moment, hesitating. How do I explain the unexplainable? How can I succinctly answer such a complicated question?

“A friend,” I say.

“And you’re looking for him,” he says as though to confirm a thought in his head. “I just assume anybody I know is dead. How do you know he’s out there?”

“I don’t.”

“What if you never find him?”

I give the kid a half-smile.

“It doesn’t matter.”

Sweat, deodorant, and Axe body spray. Locker 1138.

Someone has already broken the cheap combination lock, leaving my old locker ajar. What did I keep here? Anything useful in an apocalypse? I reach for the square door and pull, the hinges crying out from disuse.

Stuck to the inside of the door is a photograph, held there with two pieces of tacky puddy, in the exact same place I left it before the world collapsed. I’m on the right, my best friend on the left, our arms around each other, both of us wearing our light-blue movie theater uniforms and cheesy bright red clip-on ties. Calling him my best friend seems like an oversimplification, because we were so much more. Are so much more, I mean. To others, we were one of many things: friends, teammates, co-workers, classmates. Some used to say we were long-lost brothers. But to us, we were something else, the kind of indefinable relationship that is only possible when you’re young and naïve and you assume the world will go on forever.

And I haven’t stopped thinking of him since the day the bombs fell.

I dream of him every night.

I fantasize about bringing him back to the Settlement.

And if there is even a sliver of a chance that he is out there somewhere, thinking of me as intensely as I am thinking of him, I can’t think of a more worthy direction to follow.