We Are the End
Page 3
‘That was different.’
‘It’s always different.’
‘She just loved vanilla so much, I thought—’
‘So what is it this time?’
‘You know where she lives now, right?’
‘No.’
‘You said you did.’
‘I do, but not for you. You looked pretty fucked up after you gave her the candles.’
‘It’s a bill, man, a gas bill.’ Tomás hands him the letter and Yiyo turns it to look at the writing on the front of the envelope.
‘A bill?’
‘Yeah. Could you give it to her? It’s important. She’s expecting it.’
‘Alright, sure dude, but tonight I got band shit to do.’
Tomás sighs and looks at the shop windows. There’s an old blue CJ drum kit with a bent splash cymbal and black electrical tape holding the bass drum skin in place. Christmas lights are tangled around the cymbal stands.
‘So you still haven’t sold the drum kit, huh?’
‘Nope. It is a piece of shit after all.’
‘A real shame.’
‘I thought the lights would work, but I guess it’s August,’ Yiyo says, walking back to the door. ‘Sorry man, I’ve got to finish opening up. You want to come in or are you staying out?’
‘Nah, thanks. I’ve got to get to work. I just came to give you the bill.’
‘So how’s that going?’ Yiyo asks.
‘How’s what going?’
‘Work.’
‘Well, the next one will be big.’
‘Good. Christmas lights might work for you,’ Yiyo says, stretching with a smile. ‘Good, good,’ he says while shaking hands with his first customer who just waits there nodding at nothing.
‘Yeah.’
‘Bye dude.’ Yiyo turns a cardboard sign by the door that now says OPEN and Tomás waves back even though the door’s now closed.
He lights a cigarette, stands and turns to cross towards the park that runs along the Mapocho River. In Santiago, anything with more than two trees is called a park, but this one’s really great because there’s a giant water fountain that sprays red and yellow and pink water and even music, although they mute it in the summer because people use it for pool parties and forget to wear clothes. He sees a young couple flying a kite together, and a stray dog that follows him (stray dogs always follow him) until it finds pieces of bread by a bin. He’s always found it funny that the whole of Santiago revolves around the Mapocho, the river of shit that crosses the city and divides it into those who have to live with it, and those who hope to some day sail on it. Plaza Italia cuts Santiago in two, into whites and browns, into rich and poor, into German and misspelt Spanish surnames, and if water could be sliced in half and made to flow in opposite directions, the river would do just that and its whirlpool would be right here, right where he now steps on his dead cigarette.
Then again, the Mapocho isn’t too bad because anything can look beautiful next to it, like having an ugly friend with you on a night out in town (which he knows is a shitty thing to think). There’s a plastic windmill salesman pulling a cart full of spinning reds and oranges. People sell everything on foot in this city. You’d think it’d be easier to just wait in some corner, let people come to you. That’s what he’d do, build a customer base, maybe even promote it online and make business cards with at least two telephone numbers and pay to appear in the Yellow Pages and… There it is again, the pigeons, the Sky, the not-doing-coke-on-a-monkey’s-head, the river splitting, and him just sitting in the middle, where no one knows if trash is sinking or getting pushed aside by the current, by the spinning colours and the broken Sandro tunes from the tiny speakers that could now spell out forgotten memes about him: all-your-base-are-belong-to-us, I Regret Nothing… But they really don’t.
The truth is that if it were your job to sell counterfeit Snicker bars and ChocoPanda ice-lollies, you’d also probably develop an instinct to escape, to run, to walk away. In Santiago you never really enter anything but you leave a lot. Tomás stands and the salesman asks him if he wants a windmill and Tomás promises that he’ll buy one later on the way home. The salesman tells him that he’ll be there all day and then asks another guy the same thing, but the other guy just says no.
He crosses the avenue again and turns on a small side street where his office is. Well, at least it used to be his. When the university announced that they would be cutting down their spending budget and many people lost their jobs, it seemed like the wrong thing to do to complain about having to share an office with Jaime. But there’s only one desk, so Tomás has to work on a small flat surface by the windowsill until Jaime leaves. Jaime is always there when Tomás arrives but at least he leaves early too, because creative minds, he says, are attuned to the power of sunrise (though you can’t really see the sun at all because of all the skyscrapers blocking it). Jaime once said it was OK that Tomás had to write by the windowsill because good writers can write anywhere. But when Tomás asked if he could work from home, Jaime said that no one really works at home. Either way, Tomás can’t complain. After all, Jaime let Tomás stay at his flat for nearly three months after the breakup without paying for as much as a beer. Sometimes though, he wishes the rent had been expensive as hell.
There’s a crowd gathering by the main door of the office building. They’re all wearing hiking boots, green jungle hats with nets on the back of the neck, and oversized military jackets filled with pins and badges and creases and holes. Some have banners that say ‘Blue Peace’ and ‘Unite against #GlobalWarming or suffer THIS’ with a photograph of a volcano erupting into an atomic mushroom cloud of reds and orange sparks in the background. The university shares the office building with Blue Peace, so every week Tomás and Jaime have to watch crowds start their marches towards the La Moneda Square along the river. Last week, the protesters were pissed off by the lack of media attention after their #WeAreJustAnimals naked protest campaign against animal-made clothing failed to get into the evening news. Fighting warmth in winter gets no support whatsoever.
He pushes through the crowd and a woman with a megaphone gives him a volcano banner. He takes it by the mushroom cloud and thanks her because they like being thanked, and she smiles at him as he walks inside. The elevator is still under maintenance, which is really just a Chilean way of saying BROKEN FOREVER since he’s never seen anyone come to maintain it. He takes the stairs instead and by the time he’s on the ninth floor he can hardly breathe. He should really stop smoking and go jogging and eat organic vegetables. He should ask the Blue Peace people for advice. His father, now sixty, told him once that he already has friends who’ve died of lung cancer. But, like his father, Tomás will stop smoking when he has his first kid (and then, also like his dad, never actually do it). At least that was the deal he’d had with Eva.
He opens the 934-A door to the offices lobby. He walks past the secretaries because he still hasn’t graded the students’ Game Ludonarrative Dissonance assignments from the beginning of the semester. He’s also not up to date with the attendance sheets for his seminars. They wouldn’t take long to do, but that’s also the reason why he never does them. He looks at the secretaries as he passes by and Anna sees him and stands to talk to him. He keeps on walking. Ever since she got pregnant, Tomás has found it easier to outwalk her.
‘Tomás, the tests, please!’ she shouts to him, holding her belly.
‘Sorry, I’m joining the protest today. This one’s with clothes.’ He shows her the volcano banner and he walks past office doors where there are people he’s still never even met. At the end of the long corridor is their boss, Pedro Milcock. Tomás hopes that Pedro doesn’t know about the assignments, and he probably doesn’t because even when Bimbo: The Elephant failed to sell, he told Jaime they were doing work that showed promise. Still, he’s only ever complimented Jaime for anything they both do, and Tomás is sure that Pedro knows that he doesn’t deserve to work there, that he’s just another pigeon living on someone else
’s scraps. Jaime says this is all in Tomás’s head, but just to be safe Tomás always avoids Pedro. For example, once, on his way to his office, Tomás saw him starting to come out of a door at the other end of the corridor. Tomás went into the toilets that were next to him and locked himself in the handicapped cubicle. When he was about to come out, someone came in. Tomás looked under the door to see if he could recognise the shoes. He didn’t (who could ever do that?) and so he sat and heard that someone piss. FOR. AGES. When he came out, Pedro was looking at himself in the mirror, still pissing, and then frowned at him. Tomás walked straight out but he should have washed his hands first.
He opens his office door, door 405, right next to Pedro’s. Jaime turns on his chair and smiles at him.
‘Great, so now you’re a climate change activist. Cool, man,’ he says with a fist in the air. ‘You know those hippies are all wrong right? I only wish it were warmer. But hey, some of those girls must look good naked, despite all the hair,’ he laughs and Tomás nods and puts the volcano by the bin.
‘How are you?’ Tomás asks Jaime, but Jaime turns to look at his computer screen again.
‘You have to see this. Been trying out a new engine, Unreal 4. Check this out.’
Tomás sighs. ‘We don’t use Unreal 4.’
‘Not yet. Look, check it.’
Onscreen: a dark back alley with an old bar that has a light flickering and no people inside. When the lights turn on in the bar, Tomás can see the rain bouncing on the floor like pebbles, freezing in light before disappearing, as if lightning had struck.
‘Pretty cool, huh? Finally got the rain to come down.’
‘Looks great.’
‘It looks real. Look how big those drops are. Look at how they splash and make puddles. Sure, I don’t know how to stop the puddles from gathering water yet, but hey, I’m not sure what I can do with it yet anyway. I was thinking maybe a detective game would go down well with the whole rainy dark alley bar thing. Any ideas?’
‘Well, there’s already a game like that.’
‘Every damn time… Took me all weekend. Shit, so what’s this one called?’ Jaime sighs.
‘Heavy Rain.’
‘Fuck me…’ He closes down the dark alley. ‘I guess we still have Bimbo.’ He opens up a screen with the elephant, the sad fucking elephant condemned to fly without reason other than coins which can’t even buy anything in the game because they didn’t have time to come up with any items.
‘Hey man,’ Jaime starts, ‘do you think it would maybe look better if I applied underwater presets on the physics engine instead of flying ones? I mean, without a liquid backdrop, of course.’
‘Why would you do that? The game sucks no matter where it’s set.’
‘I know, but maybe it’ll change underwater. Part of the problem is that Bimbo sticks to the jumping animation, but underwater there’d be no jumping, it’d just be swimming.’
‘There’s still a floor in the ocean,’ he says. But what if the puddle gathered so much water, so many pebbles that it covered the whole of Santiago? What if out of a puddle, a mistake in physics, they could make a whole ocean where lightning is just dust particles that freeze nothing, and Bimbo can finally be the mistake he was destined to be and just float on forever? Playable mistakes are the hardest thing to program though, and Jaime could never pull them off on demand.
‘I guess. It’s too early for a Bimbo sequel anyway,’ he says, turning the elephant model that even underwater flies confused, contorted in choppy animation and low-res greys and blacks that stick out of its head and body in sharp polygons. The more you look at it, the more it kind of starts to look like a pigeon or…
‘Well, that’s enough for me today,’ Jaime says. He opens up the web browser on a dating site called GeeksWithoutKids.com. He scrolls down the PC Master-Race section (which just means old people) to a page full of photographs of women wearing thick black-framed glasses, pokéball earrings and Zelda Triforce tattoos over their Xbox Gamerscore points and PC Steam Achievement lists.
Tomás goes to the window and opens his IDEAS book on the small white surface next to it. He starts to open the window but Jaime turns and…
‘Could you wait a bit until I’m gone? I can’t stand those damn hippies. I feel that if you open the window we might get their BO from here. I’m about to leave anyway.’
‘Really? Where are you going?’
‘Date.’ He points at the screen.
‘It’s not even lunchtime.’
‘Well, they’re meant to be geeks after all.’
Tomás nods because he likes to stay alone in the office and use the real desk.
‘How do I look?’ Jaime asks him, standing up and putting his coat on. He’s balding on the sides and you can tell by the dark cracks on his cheeks that he had real bad acne, and why is it that people ask you how they look before doing something important? Can they change it? Would washing your face, rubbing a tissue on it, changing shoes or wearing a nice watch change anything at all if you’re an ugly fucker? Repairing Jaime’s cheeks would be like building a smooth parking lot inside the ridges of the Grand Canyon. It just can’t be done with today’s technology. He’s also wearing this fucking ridiculous red bowtie because he’s the kind of guy who thinks self-hatred is confidence, and those damn braces he isn’t ashamed of make him seem honest about it.
‘You look great.’ Tomás answers. ‘I mean, if you put a gun to my head,’ he says using his hand as a gun aimed at his left ear, ‘I’d lose the—’
There’s a bang on the window and they both jump and turn to it. A bird is dying on the other side of the sill after crashing against the glass.
‘Dude,’ Jaime says.
‘Fuck.’
‘Should have opened the window after all,’ Jaime laughs as he picks up his umbrella.
‘I’ll clean it up, don’t worry.’
‘Well, you kind of have to, I have to go, like, now.’
Jaime leaves and Tomás bends down in front of the window to see the bird. It’s shaking, black eyes still open, its wings wrapping the body to stillness. It’s the second time a bird has died on their window and he really should, once he’s done with the new game, print out bird silhouettes and stick them everywhere. He knows it works because he’s seen them stuck in other buildings around the city and he wonders why birds are so afraid of their own shadows that they refuse to touch them.
He opens the window and pokes the bird with his pencil. It doesn’t move so he takes out an A4 from the printer tray and uses it to grab and wrap it and then leaves it in front of himself on the keyboard. Would it still have crashed under Jaime’s ocean preset? Nothing can look painful underwater, even drowning. He takes out a cigarette and rubs the tip to let specs of tobacco fall on the bird. He looks for a pen inside the pen mug, finds a Bic, and takes its insides out to keep the plastic tube. He looks at himself on the black computer screen with the tube up his nose and then looks at the bird with the tobacco.
The climate change hippies are still downstairs shouting motivational slogans amongst themselves. Free our futures, free our futures, free… The bird opens its beak and shuts its eyes, and the pen falls off Tomás’s nose, and he stands and leaves the bird by the window and lights a cigarette. At least it’s not a pigeon.
He looks at his IDEAS book and writes FREE OUR FUTURES and draws a bird under it, but he knows he could never turn something so abstract into a game. He finishes his cigarette and looks at the time. He still has twenty minutes to kill before class and he wonders if Yiyo’s delivered the letter. Would Yiyo free his future? Would Eva write back or just appear at his office? Would they ‘talk it over’? He hates that douchebaggery, talk it over, which is really just C++LIFE code for
h fun as they once did when tiring others with the same fucking jokes routine they shared for two whole years about this hipster in the metro they pretended to have conversations with and hey, man, yo, man, what’s up bro, check my beanie out, man, but there was no one there even wearing a hat… And then there’s the way they’ve both changed just because they’re older, which they’ll try to make sound like something positive with big words like EXPERIENCED and MATURE, but you’re OLD, you douchebag, you’re getting older, you’re just OLD, #oldandying. And that’s what happens when you talk it over. You agree to a wall of noise, and then you agree to silence.
He locks the office door from inside and turns the lights off. He kneels on the floor and crawls under Jaime’s desk and lies on his back looking up at the table. It’s in moments like these that he recognises himself as a teenager and it really gets to him, because if people can only see themselves as they want in secret, then the whole city is just filled with half-people, ghosts traversing through walls and convinced they can still dream when they’re just remembering, and then they disappear and it freaks everyone out, and like in the movies, they just don’t know yet that part of them is already dead.
Under the desk it’s an astrological display of chewing gum. Someone else has done before what Tomás is doing now. Someone has lain under the desk, just like him, and stuck about sixteen pieces of chewing gum underneath. He or she even took the time to connect some of them and Tomás is glad he’s sharing a stranger’s secret. They remind him of the times he and Eva would walk up the San Cristóbal Hill on summer weekend mornings and stay there until the stars came out and they would see the whole of Santiago light up for them, just for them, and somehow, in the sudden emptiness of city nights, he would know, he knew, that he could spend all of his life watching the streets and the sky flickering like a dying candle in the dark.
The pieces of gum move overnight. He’s sure of it. No one apart from Jaime and himself can get into the office and so who could be coming in (or why) to move them is beyond him but it happens. Could it be Lolita, the remover of bench names? Or was it Jaime’s troll droll on the shelf that comes to life at night to do it? It’s always turned to face the desk.