We Are the End
Page 2
I can’t sleep.
Subject to change Subject to change Subject to change Subject
REASONS WHY I’M OK AS A PERSON:
I have a job.
Frozen chicken, head and all, in the freezer.
I enjoy travelling once I’m there.
I make games for a living.
I never sleep.
I don’t own anything. The possibilities are endless (subject to change).
He gets up and takes a straw from the packet on his desk and puts it in the French press. But did it really matter? Could you really separate a life into favourable and unfavourable categories? He had once Googled ‘why do people break up?’ and Minxydoucheover9000 said that sometimes it’s the things that make one fall in love with someone else that were also responsible for the breakup. But if that were true, then surely good and bad things are interchangeable and they could get back together again. And Jaime did say most lasting couples go through ‘rough patches’, sometimes more than once, and this one hadn’t even been rough (she left him a goddam record player). And sure, Jaime’s been single for years, but if someone who didn’t know a thing about relationships could tell him that, then surely it means he, who knows much better, should have the evidence to support it. The record does an 80s rap song scratching noise to a beat that never starts.
He tears up the post-its and bins them. He’ll have to get in touch with Eva tomorrow. He will thank her for the birthday card and tell her that he hopes she’s well and then she’ll ask him how he is and he’ll say something French, oulala, miss all the hobs, oulala the taste of non-coffee, oulafuck did I just get us two tickets to Paris? He’ll also tell her that he’s still working on a game about her, even though he’s never started it… Which is fine because beginning things is not as important as wanting to begin things and, like shaving for himself, it will show her that he has not forgotten about his priorities.
A note appears under his door and he can hear steps outside in the corridor. It’s 5am so it can’t be the postman but he hopes it’s another gas bill under Eva’s name, if only to see her name on a piece of paper that wasn’t his, and written by someone other than himself. He walks up to it and takes it. It’s the same note that showed up under his door at the same time last night. It’s a folded A4 that says:
You are cordially invited to come to Abdul’s vintage madness on Sunday at the Plaza Italia market. We sell anything from kitchenware to voodoo dolls. Please come. The sales are mad on Sunday, mad!
Cordially, your neighbour,
Lucas.
(P.S. Please come. X)
Tomás opens the door and checks the corridor but Lucas is gone. He steps out of his flat and hears heavy metal coming from the apartment facing his and then some loud laughter. It’s Goat Eater all over again. He had shared a flat as a student with the drummer and vocalist of death metal act Goat Eater. They were both vegans and they slept most of the day and practised all night so as to not bother the parrots that gathered in the trees lining the apartment block. He notices strobes of light on the edges of the door and on the bottom, half of Lucas’s note still sticking out. Someone suddenly takes the note and Tomás turns and hears a peephole lid opening so he goes back inside, slowly closing his own door. He hopes that he’s not sharing a corridor with Goat Eater fans. Then again, if that were the case, he’d have something to add to his favourable list and it’s not like he’d be sleeping.
He goes to the kitchen to turn the heating on. He hates having showers in the cold and he should really be getting ready to take the metro to work. Tomás only teaches at university on Thursdays. That’s tomorrow. And after he can try and sleep at any time, usually under his desk, once Jaime goes home. He should really build the bed frame when he gets back though, but only if he gets back early enough not to bother anyone.
He finishes his coffee and sees the beginning of sunrise and the backyards and gardens shine with dew. When grass shines in Santiago it means winter is about to end. Eva used to say that. It makes no sense but it is indeed the end of August and winter has to end, shine or not. He looks at the picture of Eva on his desk. She’s holding a miniature Eiffel Tower key ring he got her for her birthday. He turns it so that it faces the door for when he comes back from work.
He gets into the shower once the flat is warm enough. He must remember to buy soap because he only has lavender shampoo. Although he thinks they’re actually the same thing in different bottles and there’s no such thing as too much lavender. So no, that can also…
He’ll thank Eva tomorrow, or today rather, and write a game about her, always to remember, to replay the days she left, the days she came back, the dead leaves dead leaves that are gone as soon as he imagines them and fuck Serge, fuck him to silence, he really does hope she’s keeping well .
2
Underwater Physics
IDEAS BOOK P. 18:
It can’t just be about rescuing a damsel in distress because it’s an indie game and indie hipsters will give us hell and for good… Anyway, the hero has to have shitty powers… Something limited, the ability to only fight in water, but he can’t be as restricted as Aquaman because he still has a speck of self-respect. It’s a PLATFORMER and he’s collecting family heirlooms: a pearl, goldfish statues, purple coral shards and meteorite crystals shaped like people. At the end of the first stage, after killing an eel with a posh accent, you learn that the King of Tides (a crab with an eye patch) needs all these trophies too, in order to use their magical powers to send off waves across the world and let water take over forever so he can teach people a lesson about the power of nature (remember to make the game box fully recyclable to really hit it off with that demographic). But you, the hero, you steal it all anyway with the help of a telepathic guide, Mona, who reveals to you that she’s been trapped for thousands of years in an underwater volcano (which you will find at the end of a level). But then, suddenly, when you finish collecting everything, the world just dries up, and now freed from the crushing ocean, Mona can save herself. Once she sees the state of the world above, she turns against you because it’s your fault, it’s your fault and you did this. Why did you not say anything? Did you not see the signs? She would have preferred another thousand… But then you realise that you could only understand her telepathically, and you’ve no fucking clue what she’s actually saying now that she’s free. The King of Tides just shrugs when she speaks, a crabby shrug, and it doesn’t help you that she only speaks French, and she then beats the shit out of you to bring back oceanic life as we know it.
Though sometimes the plot isn’t the problem. The issue here will be getting Jaime to correctly calibrate all the underwater physics and their complicated particle effects.
• • •
At the metro he takes the line 1 from Manuel Montt to Baquedano. It’s only two stops away but he didn’t sleep and so he’s too tired to walk. He’s always found it surprising how tired he is and how little weight he puts on even when he sleeps well. And he never even exercises and eats all that trash. It might be genetic and all, but it’s probably his body working overtime to save him the embarrassment of asking for metro space on his way to work. Can positive things also be psychosomatic? Anyway, he likes rush hours in the metro. He’s standing by the metal pole in front of the door which he can’t even see because of all the people.
He’s touching shoulders with this real fat guy who’s sweating and reading the La Cuarta newspaper, some article about an American model called Jerry-Springs and why her liberal parents called her that, all in a tiny black bikini and smileys on the nipples and CAPITAL LETTERS EVERYWHERE and hashtags EVERYWHERE on the page because it’s so #important and the guy keeps sweeping the gelled-up black remains of what his hair used to be to one side with the other hand as if it made a #fuckingdifference. To Tomás’s left is a woman with big headphones on and she’s carrying a cardboard tube in her backpack. She must be an architecture student because she smells of glue, doesn’t look like a tramp (has shoes) and has s
mall cuts on her fingers that end in yellow and red polka dot nails. She bites them and the colours have all cracked. He wonders what would happen if he tapped some random woman’s shoulder like hers and asked her a deep question about herself, like, ‘don’t you think you’ve dealt with enough?’ or something more specific to her, ‘do you love symmetry?’ or some vague bullshit that only hippies with BAs would answer. He likes to think about this sort of thing because he feels capable of anything, of making people take their headphones off out of awe because he’d have broken the unspoken rule about never speaking to someone you don’t know in the metro and… Although really, he just likes it because he knows he would never do it and he’d like someone else to do it to him. But what would they ask him?
He could have studied something useful too, and by that he means essential, unlike videogames design, unlike narrative, unlike coffee, unlike pizza, unlike hobs and bed frames and ceramic plates and cups of any kind. He often asks himself what he could have done instead, but he always just ends up making characters, other people in a Tomás disguise that they don’t even want, didn’t even choose. Sometimes it’s a doctor in a warzone curing people of terrible diseases in a cliché of poverty, stray dogs and limbless kids everywhere, a country called Republic of Developing. But then he comes from that Third World too, which makes the whole thing confusing. Other times he’s a banker who’s depressed because his working-class friends deleted him from Facebook when he bought pet passports and a yacht he ironically called The Winner. Whoever it is, it’s never just Tomás. Eva used to say people were always hoping their lives would change, which she thought was pretty fucking stupid because change, she said, is just a nicer word for loss.
Today, like most days, he’s just Tomás, and he’s taking the same metro he’s taken since he was eighteen and he doesn’t recognise any faces, no one, not even his own on the glass doors that shake and pound to echoes in tunnels where no one’s been and so he can’t lose a thing. He reads the edge of the student’s cardboard tube as she leaves and he’s sure it says ‘Flat: cream-coloured’.
More people get on. The doors close and everyone stops talking and it’s just a long buzz, the metal scratching, sometimes even giving out sparks that briefly light the wiring on the walls of the tunnel. A guy in a suit presses against him and Tomás sees him from the reflection in the window. The guy takes out small scissors from his jacket’s inside pocket and starts trimming his moustache on the sides and above the lips. Some of the hairs land on the back of an old lady’s neck and on Tomás’s shoes and they just stay there. He’s surprised that inside a tunnel with all this noise and the trembling of the metro there can be no wind at all. No one talks but everyone’s touching someone, staring at someone, and Tomás swears this is as close as anyone gets to anybody else in Santiago and why would anyone prefer to walk? The metro lines are all so small and the wait between stations is never more than a minute or two. Eva once said that in Paris the metro was like a spider web and that rush hours over there are hell on Earth, but he finds that hard to believe because she also said instant coffee and hot dogs were hell on Earth. Still, he could have just agreed with her.
Baquedano station. It’s a short walk to Bellavista from here but even if he knew where she lived (she said it was better for him not to know), he wouldn’t know what to tell her. He could pretend to be one of those American Jehovah’s witnesses that plague Santiago and knock on every door until he finds her, but he doubts she’d be impressed by what she’d witness. She’d probably let out a small laugh and say that she knew it, that she knew that what he had was in some way a crisis of faith, but that yet again, he went about it the wrong way, and she would then add that there are deities much more powerful than Jesus… And what do people say to their exes? He has a full page of it. His IDEAS book, written upside down from the last page (page 100), says:
God, he hates that word: EX. It makes people sound like an exam mistake or an illegal trespassing signpost. Whoever invented it must have lived in Santiago too.
He gets out of the crowd in the metro station and walks to the Fuente de Soda nearest to him to get a takeaway coffee and a fried sopaipilla. It comes wrapped in a blue paper napkin that’s definitely toilet paper and it’s covered in grease stains and mini eruptions of oil now brown from all the use. He sits on the bench facing Yiyo’s shop and writes his name on it where it now says ‘Lolita Diaz’. He smiles and stretches his legs until well after the yawn has passed. He takes one bite off the sopaipilla and he feels full, and all the pigeons in the world start to crowd at his feet because they know it. Eva used to say pigeons were dirtier than rats and should be killed. He told her: if they exist, they must be important. But when you see them crowding around you with all their fucked up feet and necks breaking this way and that with that throaty blipblipblupping and skipping to get your crumbs that they confuse with cigarette buds, convinced of their invisibility and entitled to everything you own at restaurant terraces… You have to wonder if anyone would miss them if they ever returned to their own planets. He should have just agreed with her, the useless pigeons, their useless flights from roof to wire to roof, the useless noise and useless conversations. ‘Pigeons are the wisdom teeth of the Earth, useful only to a world without people.’ It didn’t make any sense but that’s what she had said once when they passed out drunk next to the canary cages in Yiyo’s garden, where he’d also taken in orphan pigeons. He throws the rest of the sopaipilla at the birds that pick on it before disappearing to the street corner where they sell paintings of poets no one recognises.
Yiyo’s music shop hasn’t opened yet. It’s called AudioPop. The shutters are only halfway up. Tomás takes out his IDEAS book and writes,
Dear Eva,
Thank you for your letter. I loved the colourful spots. We are getting older. Isn’t that funny? And since we aren’t being spared the time, I think we should meet up and talk it all over. Again, thank you for the card. The colour choice was fantastic.
Love,
Tomás x
PS. I have foie gras at home. I now get what you meant about subtlety.
He tears out the page and puts it in a used gas bill envelope because he has to make sure she reads it. He takes out a roll of sellotape from his bag and seals it.
He looks up at the shop and waits for Yiyo to open. He wishes he were selling drum kits and guitars too. Yiyo used to offer him work here when they were younger but Tomás just laughed it off. He always said he was working on the new thing and that this time it’d be huge. And the truth is that before the breakup, before his last game came out, he really did believe it’d be huge, he’d be HUGE. He used to take notes of the smallest details so he could then include them in his games: when the smog gets bad, everyone in Santiago has dust halos in the sun; the neighbour’s dog barks in perfect jazz straight eighths; Eva’s fake painting-poster on their wall is called Sky but the downward strokes, the blue waves and their unfinished circles that cross over buildings and people, suggests it just didn’t know it was an ocean. By the time they split up, Eva didn’t want to hear a word about his stories. She even declared herself ANTI-NARRATIVE one night, as if by his doing she’d lost all hope of ever loving any story, any story at all. ‘It’s the sky,’ she said, ‘that’s what it is and that’s what it’s called, even if now that you said otherwise we can never see it again. And the yellow silhouettes nose-diving into the edge of the frame, those are all birds.’
He sees Yiyo inside the shop coming to open and waves at him. He doesn’t see Tomás at first but when he gets to the door he waves back. Tomás stands but Yiyo signals him to wait for him to roll up the shutter. He comes out wearing a Sonic Youth T-shirt under a red and black flannel shirt and black jeans, like a cheap barista.
‘Hey dude, how’s it going?’ Tomás says.
‘It’s too early to say. Same as always I guess, man, you?’
‘Same really.’
‘Actually dude, I’m pretty excited,’ Yiyo says rubbing his face with one hand
. ‘We’re recording the guitars for Fármacos tonight. I’m really nervous.’ He waves to some guy opening a hat shop behind Tomás.
Fármacos is the band Tomás would be in if he hadn’t been so persistent in getting a real job, which is just C++LIFE code for
And it was that same day that the monkey head-dust photo appeared, following five hundred likes and a fucking meme made for it on 4chan. com, that Tomás decided to send off his university Games Design application. He sometimes wishes he’d taken a gap year too, although he knows that even under different circumstances, even with a meme of his own face doing drugs off of an alpaca’s groin, he’d somehow find a way to live through the same decisions all over again, and he’d be sitting right where he is now, five years older, twice the pigeons, half the money, zero memes.
‘Hey man, listen, I have a favour to ask you,’ Tomás says.
‘Sure man, shoot,’ Yiyo says, making a gun with both hands.
‘It’s about Eva.’
‘Come on, it’s been long enough.’
‘It’s just this one last thing.’
‘You said that last time when you wanted me to give her that bag full of candles. She didn’t even remember having them.’