We Are the End

by Gonzalo Garcia

  ‘What are you looking at?’ he asks the doll but even if it did answer, Tomás likes that their agreement is a silent one.

  What yesterday was a perfect circle of seven pieces of gum is now a square. He turns to the troll doll on the shelf that looks both old and young at the same time, which is pretty much what an internet troll is too, and he notices its big toothless smile and bulging eyes. He checks his watch and it’s time for him to go to class but he could fall asleep under the desk right now. The rug is comfortable enough and he already used his bag as a pillow once. He must remember to build the bed frame when he gets home but only if…

  He puts his jacket back on, gets his IDEAS book from the window and takes four random books from the shelf (Chaos Theory 1, Ludonarrative Dissonance, Physics Engines, and Unreal 4) to make his students believe that he’s well-prepped for class. He walks up to the dead bird wrapped in paper, shakes the tobacco dust off of it, and grabs it to put it in a bin outside.

  Towards the main door he sees Anna the secretary putting her phone down and standing up and grabbing her belly. Tomás keeps walking and shows her the dead bird.

  ‘Tomás, please, those grades, when will—’

  ‘I can’t right now, something died in my office.’

  3

  Chewing Gum Constellations

  There are still forty minutes left of class and Tomás has nothing else to tell them. Maybe if the classroom didn’t look like something dreamt up at Google he would make an effort. The walls are red, the desks are bright yellow, the carpet is red and the blipping LED in the projector is red too. The whole thing would be like being stuck in Doom’s KILL SCREEN if it weren’t for the green-shaded window that opens into the bins. The bins are red too, and so are the bin bags.

  He checks his phone without taking it out of his pocket (as if they wouldn’t notice, but the important thing is to look like you believe it), and he favourites a NASA post to an article he will never read. It’s about a super Earth that just got discovered, exoplanet HD7924d. Planets get discovered and he has nothing to say about it. It sounds like the classroom codes in Tomás’s timetable. He’s on PH203r but it’s no exoplanet because the slight tilting on the floor, the bend on the window that shrinks and splits the bins with its tiny cracks, and the way time just doesn’t pass… It means that if anything, it’d be a black hole.

  The students stare at him and he stares back at them. It’s dark. He had forgotten to turn the lights on when he came in and he can’t just walk over to the light switches now without saying anything. All the noise and all the reds are being sucked out by the remains of the dead class star, now just shadows in front of other shadows, tearing through the classroom, their words and thoughts travelling through whole universes but always seeming still, going nowhere, and that is what it is to be young like them, to not notice that what you’ve said has been said and will be said a million times over, to think yourself safe from PH203r, to appear to go nowhere. He looks back at his phone and in the Twitter responses to the NASA article @RealNicolasCage says to not get our hopes up about the super Earth because it’s fifty-four light-years away. It’s still closer than the end of class.

  He can’t come up with anything. He should carry small-talk studio cards, like on those old panel shows where people won washing machines and orthopaedic mattresses. Even then they’d probably give him short official answers: Yes, No, Why of course, I understand. He’d have to lead into new questions, personal questions, even hurtful ones, just to get a reaction like journalists do on news channels. Still, no one would watch it because eighteen-year-olds are not meant to know what they’re doing, and the proof is that they’re all here. They could just Google their whole fucking degrees, just like he Googles his teaching material. Should he tell them that, how no one great every cared about school, how the best game studios don’t give a shit if you have a degree? But teaching is just a job. He doesn’t always have to be teacher. He needs it. It’s OK. Even light-years end and at least he’s getting paid to get older. He knows they’re texting each other about the silence, about their lunch plans, about how red everything can be and how his shoes remind them of their parents. Thirty-eight minutes. He presses Follow on @RealNicolasCage.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asks, looking at his shoes for a brief moment so that he can put his phone away. Still, no one says a thing. He would be quiet too if he were them because he knows, and they know, that the most important parts of a game are the gameplay mechanics and not the story. They’ve been talking about Final Fantasy VII and the way it manages to critique late capitalism and debate over the existence of God and destiny using a simple love story plot. But all they want to talk about is why Aeries, the girl the hero loves, dies at the end. He can’t blame them though. It’s fucking ridiculous. There should be a man in every classroom, an old man in a renaissance costume or something that looks official, sitting at a far corner, and his job would be to shout BULLSHIT in a posh accent every time these kinds of subjects come up. And what do they think? Well, they don’t and they can’t. They are eighteen-year-olds who’ve never had a lasting relationship and they smoke e-cigarettes because they’re safer and one student, a short guy with a T-shirt of Che Guevara wearing an identical Che Guevara T-shirt, even said that if the game was a critique of late capitalism, then there’d be no place for a love story. ‘Politics have nothing to do with love,’ he said, and his friends agreed and Tomás just nodded. He knows that the convictions of the young can only ever be changed by their own inevitable disappointments and not by some old douchebag who tells them he knows better. Still, he’s meant to teach BULLSHIT and there’s no man in the corner, just more nodding all in red and at the rhythm of a trash disposal truck dropping small tins and bits of glass that its claw fails to keep and…

  ‘So, any thoughts?’ They look at each other and pretend to write. He can see one of them drawing a cock smiley with glasses and a moustache that covers the entire page. Another student’s phone vibrates. The boy silences it but then starts texting anyway. There’s only one girl who likes to work, but she never says anything, although she keeps sighing and rolling her eyes whenever the others speak. She’s a Videogames Design post-grad, but she enrolled to sit in Tomás’s undergrad class to write the script for her upcoming game. He checked for her in the registry and her name’s Franziska, Fran. She’s twenty-four and a German exchange student, which means she must already know it’s all BULLSHIT. Tomás looks at her and she smiles back and unzips her hoody. Tomás looks back at the clock. He really could use a smoke.

  ‘OK, that’s enough for everyone I think,’ he says, but they don’t even move. ‘So, for next class,’ he starts, ‘think about Zelda and Super Mario and the use of the “Damsel In Distress” tropes in gaming.’

  ‘Will we ever look at indie games in the course?’ Che Guevara asks, looking around him while they all nod in silence.

  ‘Like which?’

  ‘I don’t know, like The Loop, or at least Kink Turbo. I mean, I just don’t see the point in learning about these huge games with corporate budgets. We don’t really care about the things we’ll probably never do. Not that I want to work for those corporate assholes, but I’d much rather be realistic about it. We’ll all be making indie games, small budget titles, and it’d be great to get some tips. We should be looking at The Loop. Now there’s an awesome story.’

  Tomás has no idea what Che is talking about. Other students nod and start whispering and laughing about it, so he shuffles the books he brought in his bag, picks up his IDEAS book, opens it and waits until they all go silent again.

  • • •

  IDEAS BOOK P. 22:

  The protagonist is a larva. There are only microbes in the world. Earth is microscopic and everyone in it is a microbe. There’s only one human, the protagonist, you, and you live alone in another planet filled with purple rings and a pink ozone layer. It’s light years away and it rains black paint splatters all the time. In your world, everyone else left to find sunn
ier planets, but you stayed because you had just built up a shed that you now use as a studio for your paintings. All of your paintings come to life as monsters. They keep You can give them any ability, but you can’t give them life for more than a day because, as you learnt from very young, all paint spoils in this black-rain planet, even inside the shed (there’s a lot of wind) and you haven’t invented glass or proper windows because you like the sound and the smell of rain when you sleep.

  One day you paint a man with long arms, wings and five feet but no head. When you finish the monster and it comes out of the canvas, you give it your only working light bulb and your flying shoes so that it can achieve the speed of light. Then, you make it fly into the micro-planet nearby in search of friends.

  When the monster lands on Earth, it finds nothing but microbes moving about with no other purpose than to decompose dead things on shallow water. The monster picks up one of the microbes with its long arms, chosen at random, and it starts to stretch it in all directions.

  The point of the game will be to make a microbe evolve into a person under a day, so that it can be taken to the rainy planet before the monster disappears. And you’ll have to go through all the stages of evolution before you can stretch them further. The microbe becomes a bigger microbe, then a deep-water larva, then a fish, then some kind of crocodile, and then a bird a monkey (the game can’t be that long). Up to that stage there is no time, there is no way of dying, there are no items and the monster helps the evolving creature by eating any predators that come near it.

  But then the creature becomes a person and the timer starts. He now needs items like fire, a hammer and a wooden pillow. The monster keeps trying to stretch him because he’s still not large enough but it just won’t happen, because he now only responds to one name in the entire universe, Dan, and the monster doesn’t even have a mouth so he has to learn sign language too. Even when Dan just stands there in front of the monster he can’t stretch, not without believing it can happen, and so he needs to get the power-up of Belief and Optimism. He builds an altar, and the entrance to it is so small the monster can’t come in to stretch him, and its legs are starting to fade with time, and its feet are no longer even there. He keeps growing and that evening Dan finds he’s too large for this planet, and his head even lights up from space like a volcano every time he breathes. He begs the monster to take him somewhere new, somewhere large, where he can choose to be by the sea, on earth, or in the sky, but not have to deal with them all at once. Now that he can draw, he draws the monster a face, and asks to fly him out in exchange of a voice. But with its new face, the monster can now see the world and it doesn’t want to go back.

  That’s when Dan fights him, the BOSS BATTLE. And when he wins, the monster takes him to your home, to your shed, and you’re waiting there, and you cry, and the monster cries too and his tears rub him out entirely. The guy is confused. He has never seen black rain. He tries to talk to you, but you can only speak French. And now he misses the old monster because you’ve just painted another one to take him back to the microbes, now all evolved into crocodiles, and he loses all of his power-ups, like sleeping and cooking on more than two electric hobs. The only thing he can do now is paint faces he has never seen on cave walls, but they all just look like microbes. And the timer never ends.

  • • •

  ‘I didn’t like The Loop,’ Tomás says, starting to tidy his things. ‘No particular reason, I just couldn’t get into it.’

  No one says anything but they start closing down their computers. Fran puts her pens back in her pencil-case. Tomás isn’t sure when he’s last seen a pencil-case, but it must have been years ago.

  They leave the classroom but Fran stays. Tomás closes down his PowerPoint presentation and turns off the projector. The hum disappears and Fran’s still sitting. Although he has his back to her, he knows that she’s looking at him.

  ‘Anything I can do for you?’ he asks her whilst tidying his laptop wires into a ball in the small pocket of his bag.

  ‘Me have one question. Sorry, um, Spanish not so good.’

  He turns to her and closes his bag.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You know The Loop, right, The Loop no exist, you know, um, you know it don’t exist?’ she smiles, standing up and taking out a small black makeup mirror from her purse.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They make up, they invent up to… um, to mess you.’

  ‘Oh. I thought I saw something called Loop, Lupa, Lupus, something like that…’ he says but she just smiles. ‘I don’t mind it so much. The classes are for you, not me.’

  ‘They think you very weird, you know, like.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Don’t know. Like, very creepy maybe? You know? Yeah, it might be dead bird, maybe, yes?’

  ‘Oh.’ He looks at the bird all wrapped up in paper on the reading stand, right under the lamplight. It looks red too. He just couldn’t get himself to put it in the bin, not with the way they treat the bottles. He will take it out and bury it somewhere. He will give it to the museum with the paintings of dead people and the taxidermists there will love it because they haven’t seen a bird so recently alive in years.

  ‘I’ve got to get going. Nice to meet you.’

  ‘Fran.’

  ‘Fran. See you next week.’

  ‘Wait, give five minutes.’ She steps up to him and she looks inside her purse. She takes out a notepad and writes down a telephone number, tears off the page and gives it to him.

  ‘I’m very alone too,’ she says. ‘Class people, they so very young, make me feel like mother. I hate children, you know? I hate mother too. I mean, have you seen they clothes? Chile bad, bad clothes.’

  He doesn’t know what to say but her eyes are grey and blue and her lips so red and she comes closer and he can feel her breath on his right cheek and she kisses it, and then the left, and his face is warm and all he can look at is the bird under the lamp.

  ‘See you soon, yes? No complicated, yes?’ she asks.

  ‘Why?’ he answers but she just leaves and so he says, real loud, ‘Make sure you think about damsels in distress!’ but she doesn’t say anything and he swears he hears her laughing.

  It must be some kind of dare and he shouldn’t have let her kiss him. Jaime told him that Claudio, a C++ programming teacher, once nearly got fired because a group of girls had kissed him, and at the same time taken a selfie that then went on Twitter and became a viral meme.

  Then, when he gave them bad grades at the end of the year the two girls accused him of sleeping with his students. He didn’t get fired only, but only because no one else understands C++ like Claudio does. Plus, the meme was so popular people were asking him for autographs and signing into his courses just to see him. ‘No matter what we do, we’re all programmed to fuck, that’s our only certain feature,’ Claudio had said at a late staff meeting, where he had got wasted and explained he had actually been sleeping with one of the students for a whole year and no one gave a shit. He wrote this on the blackboard:

  Tomás must not let any of that happen. If Eva ever found out! He must be stronger than Claudio, stronger than C++, than the will to be memed, than his certain features. He checks his phone but Yiyo still hasn’t messaged him to confirm that he’s delivered the letter. Did Tomás tell him to confirm? He will have to tell him to confirm. Yiyo’s phone contact picture is still the dusty monkey. Tomás has to tell him. He makes a paper ball with Fran’s number and puts it in his jacket pocket; he will bin it outside. He takes the bird and walks out of the classroom, avoiding the purple circles in the red carpet.

  Inside the elevator he looks at himself in the wide mirror. He looks tired. His eyes are swollen and although the elevator lights are bright white, he’s sure he looks paler today. Why, months after the breakup, does he still look like this? And why would Fran want to kiss that? He should make sure he sleeps before meeting up with Eva. Minxydoucheover90
00 from Yahoo! Answers also said that after a period of non-contact, you have to look like the best version of yourself. He lifts the dead bird up near his face and sees it in the mirror.

  When he turns to face the elevator doors, he sees the red lip marks on both his cheeks. Two students come in and press 1 and they look at Tomás and his dead bird and he smiles at them.

  ‘Angry Birds lecture,’ he tells them, but they look away and then at each other. He just hopes they didn’t see his cheeks.

  The doors open and he heads straight out of the building and onto the street. He rubs his cheeks as he walks across the global warming activists and their volcano pamphlets now soaked in rain as they shout slogans about the world coming to an end and blow piercing whistles. A woman wearing a neon green road-worker windbreaker gives Tomás another volcano banner. The guy selling plastic windmills is in front of the office-building door, and he gives Tomás an orange windmill so Tomás has to give him five hundred pesos for it before going in. The old man doesn’t even say thank you.

  Back in his office, he drops the banner next to the other banner and the bird back on the windowsill. He lies down under his desk and sees the chewing gum constellations. The square is a circle again, so he looks at the troll doll smiling at him.

  His phone rings and he takes it out from his pocket as fast as he can because it should be Yiyo telling him what will happen to his future, his entire life, but it isn’t. It’s his mother and he sighs before picking it up. Her contact photo is a beige couch.

  ‘Hi Mum.’

  ‘Hi monito! My little monkey, how are you?’

  ‘Ugh.’