We Are the End

by Gonzalo Garcia

  At the Golf Club, the same hippies from outside the church are now wearing suits. Alejandro looks the best, a magazine hipster, braces over his shirt, light tanned brogues and fitted tweed trousers. Angela goes straight to him and greets him with a kiss on the small mouth that’s been recorded missing in action for years due to the curls of his disgusting fucking beard. Yiyo is here too and he waves at Tomás, holding up his acoustic guitar. Through high school, Yiyo missed every single one of Tomás’s parties (which is to say, his birthday parties, where a maximum of eleven people once turned up – and that was because they thought Yiyo was coming). Tomás found that the only way to get Yiyo to come was to offer him a gig. Even then, he was always late. But he always apologised with a long hug that made it awkward to be angry about his absences.

  Yiyo straps on his guitar, sits on the edge of the make-shift stage and does a little solo. It’s the beginning of the solo for Metallica’s ‘Nothing Else Matters’.

  Tomás heads over to the stage with a wave Yiyo doesn’t see. ‘Thanks for coming, man,’ Tomás tells him.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t make it to church,’ he says, and hangs his guitar to the side so he can hug Tomás.

  ‘That’s fine. Thanks for doing this.’

  ‘That’s cool, dude. A gig’s a gig, right?’ he says with a smile.

  Tomás smiles too, and notices his sister frowning at him and shaking her head.

  ‘How’re you man?’ Tomás asks Yiyo.

  ‘Same old, same old, dude. Sold the ME-50 today at last. Seriously, it’s the worst fucking guitar pedal ever made. Though no one wants to buy the blue drum kit. Seriously, it was fucking expensive and I can barely pay rent now. It’s my life’s mission to sell that thing now. But at least I got rid of the ME-50. Got to start somewhere, right?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s the worst.’

  ‘Anyway man, like, I’m sorry for your loss. We’ll talk later in the week, I’m sure. I’ll just go say hi to your mum and sister.’

  ‘Alright.’

  Tomás has no idea what the ME-50 pedal is, but he wishes that he did. He wishes he too were gigging at other people’s funerals and had a guitar on his shoulder. When did it happen? When did he decide that he could no longer believe in guitar equipment, in music? After their first date at San Cristóbal Hill, Eva went home with Tomás. She saw his guitar and asked him to play her a song. She said she loved Bob Dylan and Tomás didn’t at all, but Bob Dylan is a great singer to cover because his voice always sounds like shit, and so it’s easy to impress people just by knowing the words. He decided to play ‘Wedding Song’, and she kissed him for it and they even fucked because of it. But then again, it was she who later suggested, in front of all their friends (during a foie gras party one of her French-loving douche girlfriends organised), that he sell his guitar and music gear because their kitchen was basic, so basic, and she just couldn’t live in a house with electric hobs forever and he said she was right. And so, whether it was her or not who was responsible for the fact that he’ll never gig at other people’s funerals (or even at normal parties) or sing about being young in Santiago, what he does know is that sometimes even dreams get tired. She said that too, but that was much later.

  There are rows of white plastic seats with people Tomás has never seen before. Besides from a few of them and the hippies, there are mainly empty seats. The coffin is in the centre and at the front, on a block of black cement. The coffin’s attached to a crane waiting to lift it and place it underground. To the side is a stand with a microphone, and next to that is the flag of the seventh hole. His dad had one request, his mother told the priest, and it’s that as the crane lays him into the hole in the ground, the national anthem needs to be playing, and people need to be singing loud enough for Argentineans to hear. But Tomás’s mother thought this was a bad idea, that songs about war have no place in cemeteries (or golf courses), and that she needed something softer. So Angela asked Yiyo to play an acoustic cover of it.

  ‘Are you ready to read the eulogy?’ Angela asks him.

  ‘I think so,’ Tomás says, his face getting hotter.

  ‘Oh, I almost forgot to tell you. Mum said there was a box for you from Dad, a box the police found on the plane. She couldn’t open it. I don’t want it. Holding on to the past is not in line with my role in the universe. I mean, there’s a cheque for each of us too. But we have to wait for the solicitor to cash it into our accounts. Just don’t forget the box,’ she says, and walks away to sit between his mother and Alejandro in the front row. Yiyo starts to play the national anthem.

  A box? For a moment, a very sudden and unmemorable moment (Tomás will never think about these minutes again for the rest of his life), he ponders on whether his dad flew right into… Maybe he knew the snowstorm was coming. Maybe Tomás didn’t know him at all. Maybe he was depressed, suicidal, had CANCER, or ALZHEIMER’S, or DEMENTIA or fuck it, all three of them, a holy trinity of doom, and how well do you know a person? If you think of the most embarrassing, the sickest thing you’ve ever done, would you tell your children? Would you be able to tell your friends? Would they still like you? And now think about the whole world finding out about these morbidities after you die, does it matter to you at all? Would you have spoken before it was too late to speak? And then the priest calls Tomás up onto the podium.

  Tomás adjusts the microphone. Yiyo keeps playing but turns the guitar down and is now whispering the lyrics: Puro Chile es tu cielo azulado… Tomás takes out his IDEAS book and opens it on a random page. Puras brisas te cruzan también… It’s the page which has the first notes about Bimbo the elephant, with the initial hand-drawn character sketch at the bottom.

  Must be heavy (jumping must feel ‘weighty’).

  Bimbo needs to be a hand-drawn cartoon, a bit like Babar (appeal to a younger or nostalgic demographic).

  His motivation is to save his cute little family from the evil Dr. Ratzenhower, a mouse who hates elephants because they’re fat and say that it’s genetic when because they stepped on his family. The doctor must wear a suit, must look like a politician or authority figure.

  The backgrounds in the game, the settings, will differ from a jungle plain to an icy peak, a woodland forest and then end in a factory, a cheese factory with giant pieces of moving cheese as platforms (add holes in the cheese for extra difficulty).

  Bimbo must remain gender-neutral (he must NOT have a penis).

  ‘So, where to begin?’ Tomás asks quietly into the mic as he stares at the words ‘NOT have a penis’ and Bimbo’s face right next to it. And so he begins.

  ‘Dad was, like, a big man with an even, um, larger, weightier heart. It was genetic. He sure as hell loved the younger demographic, um,’ Tomás adjusts the mic again without needing to. ‘I mean, he loved his children very much, and he was always nostalgic about the good old days (did he just say ‘good old days’?). But more importantly, more importantly, like, to everyone here and myself as, um, his only, as his son, he was a motivated man. So motivated was he in fact, that he could have easily have been a (he sees the word, shit, he can think of nothing else) mouse, right Mum?’ he looks at her with a smile and gets a long stare back. ‘Anyway, jokes aside, jokes aside, my dad was someone who was loved by everyone who had the good luck of meeting him, and he could fit right in with any kind of crowd and any setting, be it the jungle plains, um, the icy peaks of the Andes, a woodland, like a forest, and even a factory. Yes, that’s it, the Clover factory where he made cereal boxes which, as far as I recall were always gender neutral, which makes him…’ The mic screeches out feedback. It wants it all to stop. ‘Thank you,’ he ends, and steps down from the podium to sit on the last, the very last chair he can find.

  ‘OOOK,’ the priest says, breathing heavily on the mic. Alejandro is the only one clapping. He places both his hands on his head and opens them to show everyone that the speech blew his figurative mind, but unfortunately not his literal head. ‘You can lower the coffin now,’ the priest says.

  Yiy
o starts the loud part of the anthem now, making his own mark on the song by needlessly changing notes at the end of every phrase in the chorus, Duuuuulce Paaatria, reciiiibe los vo-u-otos and the man on the orange crane pulls on a lever. As the coffin judders down, Angela looks around for Tomás.

  ‘Goddam it man, the only thing you had to do right. Now Mum will have to…’

  Suddenly the crane chain rattles and there’s a collective wave of WHATs, SHITs, FUCKs and NOs as the coffin falls loose into the hole and Tomás’s dad, for the second time, crashes into solid ground. Tomás’s mother stands up and she points at the pile of dirt that will soon be on her husband. But she’s laughing, laughing so hard that it makes others laugh too. Even Angela is laughing, so much that she has to pause for breath.

  ‘Look everyone!’ his mother says. ‘It’s Grandpa Diego’s teeth!’ and everyone sees the set of teeth on the earth pile and they even cry from laughter. ‘He loved those teeth more than anything! It’s the only thing he had left!’ she adds.

  Tomás walks over to the pickup truck to check the box Angela left for him. He finds it under the driver’s seat. It’s an old green metallic fishing tackle box (did his dad ever even go fishing?) and he opens the latch.

  The first thing he finds is a sticky tape, but below is something far stranger than Tomás could have ever thought of: DVD cover sleeves featuring a famous Argentinian vedette, La Sole: ‘La Sole in Christmas Stuffing and Other Recipes’, ‘La Sole in Police Assodomy: Cavity Search’, ‘La Sole in Beethoven: The Genius of The Organ’, ‘La Sole in Assablanca: Director’s Cut’ and ‘La Sole in Pulp Friction’. On the back of the DVD sleeves Sole appears on all fours, wearing black lace lingerie, a sexy Santa costume, in full leather, with a cock in her pussy, Jesus Christ, his dad, young, no older than twenty, no older than Tomás, wearing the Argentina football team shirt, number 10, Maradona, and at the bottom of the pile there’s a letter, and it starts Dearest Sole, my love, I think this…

  Angela knocks on the window and Tomás quickly hides the box under his blazer.

  ‘What are you doing? I need to talk to you.’

  Tomás rolls down the window. ‘Yes?’

  ‘So what did he have on the plane? Mum said he never left without that box, but that it was a secret, and that no one was allowed to open it,’ she says.

  ‘A collection of sorts,’ he says.

  ‘Look, I just wanted to say goodbye properly. You should say bye to Mum too. We’ll be off early next week to India.’

  ‘Alright. Well, have a great trip, I guess.’

  ‘Namaste douchebag,’ she says, tapping on the door before turning to leave.

  Tomás breathes in deep.

  ‘Wait,’ Angela says, ‘how come Eva wasn’t here?’

  ‘She’s busy.’

  ‘Sure she is…’ she rolls her eyes. ‘It’s OK, I won’t tell Mum. She liked Eva a lot.’

  Tomás sees Angela and Alejandro and his mother hugging it out. Eva would have been hugging it out too. His dad loved her, though right now Tomás is now finding it really hard to judge the nature of that love.

  He sits in the van, rifling through the DVDs again, and he reads the end of the letter, because the middle is crossed out with thick black felt tip:

  …everything that ends, ends badly. Your career has taken off, and I can’t stand seeing you with that asshole McBone. I think I’m going to go to college. I suppose I should thank you because I can now afford it. I’ll miss being onstage with you. I’m retiring.

  Yours always,

  Don Drillo

  And after going through the whole rubble of Argentinian porn once again, just as he tidies away the sleeve with La Sole tied up and getting spanked on the ass with a rather elegant silver candlestick, Tomás finds himself thinking – and yes, he feels guilty about it – about his inheritance money.

  If all of a sudden you got more money than you could ever dream of having, how would you spend it? Would you go on a shopping spree to look just like you always thought you should look? Or would you quit your day job and pursue a dream (yes, dreams need money) of enlightenment or some other artistic bullshit that requires you to feel that it is truly better to be alone and at peace at all times? Whatever it is you would do, Tomás knows that there is only one thing he wants, only one, and that he now has the means to do it.

  Tomás walks out of the truck and sits in the last row of seats.

  ‘We’re going,’ his sister says.

  ‘We’re going to India,’ his mother says.

  ‘Where will you go now?’ Angela asks.

  But she leaves before he can answer, and if there was someone left in the Golf Club that could hear, they’d probably be too puzzled to advise him against it as he says this to himself…

  ‘Not to India,’ he says, ‘not to India,’ and he then shoves all the porno pictures out into the air, some of them getting dragged by the wind and landing on the coffin. He looks up at the sky because the sunlight is bright and just the right warmth at last, and when he closes his eyes he sees spots of colour that he can follow but never quite catch because they disappear at the edges.

  8

  The Jump

  When was the last time you thought about the brightness of the moon? No, not only its brightness, but the size, the scope of a floating rock right next to everything you’ve ever cared about. It has a mass of seventy-four million million million tonnes, tonnes of dust which shine only because the sun wants it to. The moon is only a receiver. It itself is dead. And yet it talks to us, from behind mountain ranges, from the end of the ocean, halved, quartered, full of messages of light and darkness, which you think are for you and you alone. But you can never translate them, never speak back, never change or reword them. ‘Look at the moon,’ you might say, and there’s nothing anyone can add to that.

  Tomás is looking at the moon right now. Eva is watering a row of daisies in the front porch of their rented beach house. He’s sitting on his Zelda Triforce beach towel and is trying to write a game about her using the scenery: the waves, the lighthouse, the faraway ship and its low whistle which sends seagulls and pelicans flying this way and that way and then the moon, a full moon which makes a glassy highway into the farthest end of the water.

  Tomás feels, no, sees the moon getting larger and larger. The water soars, the tide changes, it’s almost touching him now, almost touching their beach house too.

  So Tomás picks up his things and runs into the house. Eva’s in the kitchen with a glass of white wine and a wooden cooking spoon, stirring what could be her last soup à l’oignon in a large red Le Creuset pot, and he stops her from stirring.

  ‘We have to go to bed,’ he says, running out of breath.

  ‘Tomás, later. Right now I’m making us some dinner,’ she says with a smile, and then dips the spoon in the soup. She cups her hand under it to make Tomás try it and it’s the best soup he’s ever had, but from the window behind her the waves are taking over, they surround the beach house, their island, and the moon’s only getting larger and larger, its mass gaining zeros, though its weight is still less than an apple’s and then…

  ‘We have to go now,’ he says.

  ‘Alright, alright. I’ll set it to a slow cook. It’s probably for the best anyway. It will taste even better in the end.’

  Eva is in bed and she falls asleep almost instantly. The sea is in the house. It picks up the bed and drops Tomás to his knees, and the house creaks, the ground quakes, the roof flies off, weightless, a grain of sand to the immensity of the moon that is now right on top of them, so near he can almost touch it. And he looks at Eva who is now awake and trying to talk to him.

  ‘I can’t hear you!’ he says. ‘I can’t hear you!’ but neither can she.

  She gestures for him to come closer to her, but as soon as he presses his face against hers, as soon as their cheeks touch, the moon drops into the ground with all the violence, seventy-four million million million tonnes of violence, that it had kept throughout its y
ears of silence and solitude.

  • • •

  So say you wanted to kill yourself. No, wait, that wouldn’t work. Say you wanted others to know that you were capable of killing… No, that wouldn’t work either. One last try. Say you wanted someone to know that you were THINKING about your capacity to kill yourself. Now choose (only in your head, don’t do anything stupid) how you would go about doing it. You arrange them by levels of pain. Jumping into a live volcano at the very top, and then you work your way down to walking into a room full of bullet ants while wearing nothing but a jacket of honey, then slit wrists, then hanging, med overdose and finally jumping off the balcony. You decide to go for the least physically painful way of showing psychological pain. Now imagine someone you despise, someone whose guts you can’t stand for even a second, and just because throughout your life they’ve only ever proved you wrong, time and time again. When you thought your favourite band, the one you loved the most, did it all for the art, man, they said it was for money and BANG, they get a fucking Vevo YouTube channel a month later, and a cover appearance in Vogue soon after. When you said you preferred your shitty third-hand car with its plastic interior hardware, they said they could smell your envy as the red MINI Cooper convertible drove past you. And they were right, and you hated their smirk as you shook your head and thought how much you also needed, no, you DESERVED a red MINI Cooper convertible. Now imagine yourself living on the tenth floor, in a flat that you share with them because deep down you love it that they’re always right, you envy that too, and they’re perfect housemates. One night you tell them that you will jump. They tell you that you won’t, and that you never will because you’re a coward and you in fact love life, but you live it only to feel the approval of others, their approval, and so you’ll never ever be able to kill yourself because you love the images of crowds gathering around your body, the news coverage it might cause, your crying mother and sister, all that noise, and you love it too much to not want to live it, to feel it. You will never jump. In fact, they’ll say, I dare you to jump. So do you do it? Do you jump?