Last Call at the Cosmos Diner

Just before midnight on a Tuesday in late October, six strangers converge on the Cosmos Diner, a twenty four hour roadside stop in the Nevada desert five miles from a restricted government zone. Wanda Frizz, who has run the place for twenty two years and reads the future in pie, is used to the diner’s jukebox changing songs on its own. Tonight it seems to have opinions about everyone who walks through the door. Colonel Bud Hapscomb has spent eleven years convinced the jukebox is broadcasting a coded signal, and he has the cipher to prove it. Priya Namboodiri, a NASA systems engineer with cracked glasses and nowhere else to go, is hiding from an incident involving a satellite signal at 438.7 Hz. Dolores Funch is driving to a national quilting championship with a pattern passed down through her family that turns out to map the same frequency. Pastor Reynaldo Peck built a prayer app that malfunctioned and sent twelve million people a personalized message at 3 AM with this diner’s coordinates attached, and he is facing a lawsuit because of it. And Ziggy, who may be thirty years old or three hundred, walks in off the highway carrying a paper bag and speaking almost entirely in song lyrics that land with uncanny precision. Behind the pass through, Kevin the cook has worked nights since he was sixteen and has quietly known more than anyone about what the jukebox is doing. As the strangers’ separate mysteries turn out to be pieces of the same fifty year old signal, the diner becomes the site of a strange, gentle first encounter, one that asks less what is out there than who is willing to stay and listen for it. By the time the jukebox delivers its message at midnight, felt by everyone in the diner and by twelve million strangers with the app on their phones, the flickering OPEN sign outside finally holds steady.