We Are the End

by Gonzalo Garcia

  Tomás is thinking about whether he would jump or not, though he doesn’t have a flatmate or despise someone that much (and Jaime is never right about anything), or even knows how he’d go about inviting said person to share a flat with him, let alone take them to a balcony he doesn’t own.

  He thought his dad had left him a lot of money. Tomás had called the bank that morning and realised he had miscounted the zeros, had missed a zero or two, and that he in fact got much, much more. Also, the bank clerk referred to his father as Don Drillo, and Tomás just nodded along with it, and finally understood the message in the fishing tackle box. His dad had given him all of his Argentinian porno money he made when he was younger acting with La Sole. He had literally fucked his way through life. And now Tomás will be able to rent, fuck it, buy a flat in Bellavista or Barrio Italia, a flat with green and purple walls, with black pencil marks at the kitchen entrance showing how hundreds of children grew up in it, a flat with real history and insulated walls so that you can shout and have dramatic arguments like artists do in movies, throwing expensive mismatched chinaware at each other with no one able to hear… And it will have a kitchen with six gas hobs that aren’t even stuck to the wall because the oven’s one of those old-world kinds, the ones that run on wood and are used not just for cooking but to heat the whole place, like in the old days… And a bedroom that overlooks La Chascona, Neruda’s old house, so that every time Tomás gets up, he can say ‘Big fucking deal’ at it, and when it gets late it can inspire him to write the saddest lines whilst wearing a tweed suit that is now unsuitable for a funeral and then…

  Tomás decides to take the bus to work today. He’s been avoiding it because he knows Eva prefers the bus over the metro. He knows she isn’t here, that it’s irrational, that if she were here he’d like nothing more than to bump into her, but he just hasn’t been able to shake off the feeling that… They’d even had arguments about it. She’d told him that she didn’t understand why people prefer to travel underground, and he’d told her about the beauty of the sparks in the dark, the curious inclusion of full-sized windows to see absolutely nothing, and the way no one ever talks until they get off the train or even out of the station. But no, she liked the roads, the noise, the musicians, the city, the slow city, the one she could never lose, she said, her city, with all those timeless places and their timeless people. She once said that ice was interesting because it keeps matter that’s as old as water intact. ‘What is age to an ocean?’ she asked him. ‘But Santiago isn’t frozen,’ he said, and she just smiled back.

  If he were honest, he’d admit that what he’s been avoiding all this time isn’t the illusion of Eva on her way to work, and it isn’t the noise and colours of the city. What he hates is remembering how they met. It had been so casual and he had done nothing, had made no effort (and therefore spent no time), so that he had thought right then and there that he must have her, he must keep her, because if it had no cause to start then it couldn’t have a cause to end. It was, again, irrational, and he’d always heard that love must be irrational and he’d never believed it until then.

  He now looks at a couple of dudes laughing together and the way one guy leans his head on the other guy’s shoulder. Back then he’d been writing notes for a game take on Moby Dick called Ahab’s Quest; it would come with a web-page blog or forum where everyone would share the last sightings of a virtual whale. Whoever caught the whale would win a trip on a cruise ship he had no idea how he’d fund. At the time, he had so many ideas and at the time, he could sleep and at the time, he was dating Elisa (shit he had forgotten about Elisa), with whom he shared absolutely nothing apart from the fact that she never wore dresses and bras. But he’d known she was a good person. She was always talking about how family’s the most important thing, and so his mum had once said, ‘she’s a good person, I like her,’ and he’d agreed. He’d promised her a future with kids and a large house in the suburbs with gas hobs, real plates and tea mugs, and they were happy for two solid months.

  But then, just like that, Eva had tapped his shoulder and laughed when he dropped his pen – and that was the end of Elisa. It was summer and Tomás remembers wanting to stop sweating and hoping she hadn’t felt the moisture gathering on his back. He looked at her. She was wearing a black T-shirt and black shoes. It was an Elliot Smith T-shirt with the words ‘Going Nowhere’ in white on her chest, and she smiled at him. He closed his IDEAS book and she’d said…

  ‘Can I sit here? I can’t sit on the side with all the sun. I have a horrible headache.’

  • • •

  The couple on the bus now don’t say a thing but that’s OK because if everyone’s always saying one thing to mean another, then silence is OK and really…

  He’d called his mother this morning and she was silent too. His sister answered the phone and told him he was inconsiderate and self-centred because he hadn’t instantly asked about their arrival in India. He’d told her his roof had collapsed, that he couldn’t just leave it as it was, but she called it an excuse because she too had lots to do, juggling Mum and Alejandro and an important interview with some famous foreign writer he can’t remember the name of, which might get her her old job back. He’d asked about his mum. Angela had told him she had locked herself in her hotel room for the first few days of the holiday.

  The couple get off the bus, still in silence. A guy with three shopping bags sits next to Tomás and he sighs because he needs to get off the bus in a minute and will have to tell him to move.

  After Eva had sat next to him, she pushed her sunglasses up to her forehead. He re-opened his IDEAS book because he wanted her to know that he lived his work, that he could write and concentrate anywhere, and that maybe, just then, he was writing about her in secret. And after she’d sat down with him, she asked him what he was doing and he said he was a writer because no one wants to know that you make mediocre videogames. He asked her what she did and she said her name, shook his hand, and told him she was a maritime biologist and that she was studying melting ice in the South Pacific. She gave him her card. It had a phone number. As she stood to leave the bus, she told him, ‘Give me a call some time… If melting ice is your thing,’ and he laughed and she left.

  And now a guy comes into the bus and starts playing Victor Jara’s ‘The Tree of Forgetting’, so I didn’t have to think about you under the tree. After waking from that dream, I thought about you again because I forgot to forget you, and then I quickly went to bed. And the song ends and everyone on the bus claps.

  He presses the button to stop the bus. He comes out in Plaza Italia, near the cathedral he’s never been to, and near a Fuente de Soda restaurant he’s heard on TV belongs to the local mafia.

  Then he just sits on the same bench he always does and looks for today’s written message. It says LUCKY SOD I HATE YOU, and Tomás smudges it (the messages are always written in ink so that he can smudge them), and he writes his name. He adds I HATE YOU TOO, which then reads TOMAS I HATE YOU TOO but he can’t be bothered to change it.

  The old people who take over the mornings in Santiago don’t even look at him. Tomás finds himself getting annoyed that Angela and his mum went off to India so quickly and that they won’t be able to see his new flat, his new car, his new job (OK that’s pushing it), see him succeed. Their plane might as well have crashed, they might as well never see him again if they’re to miss him winning at something, getting what he wants. They might as well all move to Antarctica… And then he shakes his head, closes his eyes, and agrees with the words on the bench – TOMAS I HATE YOU TOO – before making his way to class.

  When he gets there, a few minutes late, he manages to hear his name spoken before the students spot him and shut up. He puts his bag on the only lonely chair (the room is a large square with tables that also make up a square along its walls, making the middle a bit like the sand pit at The Nail Brothers circus and…) and he breathes in deep and asks…

  ‘So what do you all think about the Damsel in Distress
trope in games today?’ Everyone types and writes that (or some other doodle) down instead of thinking about an answer. They better fucking speak up though, because Tomás didn’t prepare anything, not the reading, not the PowerPoint, nada, and he’s counting on someone to please, please form a debate.

  Debate

  Academic noun.

  A form of discussion that never gets even remotely interesting before lunch is up.

  A form of discussion which helps the teacher know that his/her students are wrong because the teacher has worked for years in that subject, and they have never even worked at all, and they never even do their reading but they just won’t fucking stop talking back.

  A form of discussion where a student that talks a lot also talks a lot of nonsense. But no one will stop them because they’ve gone on for too long to even care.

  Academic lingo for ‘I did not prepare the class but you are paying me to be here, sit here moving my neck from time to time like a fucking owl while I listen to your bullshit until the day, the holy day, that I retire or die young from a brain tumour that will most likely look a bit like the university’s shield or logo’.

  Synonym: ‘Bullshit’ vulgar academic noun.

  Eva used to say that his students must love him. She said he was ‘charming’, that he made videogames (which she hated) sound like the most interesting things in the world, like they were always the newest and most exciting invention, and also that he wasn’t handsome enough to make others lose focus when he spoke. She said that he just wasn’t the type of guy to turn heads at the entrance of a bar. But she said she liked that, his ‘invisibility’, as she called it (attempting to make a games-related joke), though that was much, much later on in the relationship and she said it with far, far less appreciation.

  ‘Anyone?’ he adds. He finds that when he says ‘anyone’, the students with the biggest egos will always raise their hands because to them, being called ‘anyone’ is the worst insult ever and they just can’t resist it. He might as well be insulting them for real, directly, swearing at them, and Tomás almost begins to mouth out F-U-C…

  And the student with a T-shirt that says IT’S NOT ME, IT’S YOU raises his hand.

  ‘Yes?’ Tomás points at him with a smile.

  ‘I think Damsels in Distress, the wording of it, is part of a liberal agenda to wipe out all of us men.’

  Tomás wishes this were true, if only to wipe this fucker off the face of…

  Another raises a hand.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she asks the douche, her hands making fists on the table. ‘The fact of the matter is that most games have guys saving women. Not all, but most do in some form or shape. And so you play and play and play and suddenly you feel it’s OK that women are always the victims, and even worse, that they are victims whose only choice is often death or being with a man. When Bowser in Super Mario kidnaps Princess Peach, she will either spend her life in Bowser’s fiery world, an actual hell, or live with Mario, who’s only a fucking plumber! And Zelda has the option of either living her life as a prisoner to Ganon, some pig, literally a pig that travels through time, or getting saved by a dude who dresses up as Peter Pan, plays the flute, and looks like a cross-breeding experiment between a garden gnome and a Christmas elf. Like, a princess, a rich and beautiful woman, because of course they can’t be fat or hairy either, I mean, who would want to save them? But they are rich and beautiful and powerful women, and they have to have their lives sorted out by a plumber and a garden gnome. It doesn’t make any fucking sense! I mean just analyse the fucking words. Damsel. Why can’t it be Punk? Or Writer? Or Doctor? Or just bloody Woman? Woman! Damsel is just a posh term for a mentally challenged, order-following woman-child sex object, and then… Distress. That one really gets to me. Why would distress be such a bad thing for this Damsel? Is it that she couldn’t possibly deal with the complexity of human feelings, unless, they are, of course, to do with their desire for the plumber and the garden gnome? Is it that she has no possible way of overcoming stress unless there’s some dude who wants to do it for her? I guess what I’m trying to say is that if we keep making games based on these old tropes, if we keep using the same language, the same codes, then there will be more Damsels, and there will be more Distress, even when both combined have never, and will never, be true.’

  LEVEL SELECT:

  † † † † † † A----W----K----W----A----R----D † † † † † † S---------I-----------L------------E---------N------C--------E

  Tomás nods and he loves her, he loves her so much, and he almost mouths that, I, I, I lo…

  But the asshole’s hand is up again. Why won’t he just die? Why do people like him even exist? Have his parents not heard of condoms? Abortion? Cyanide?

  ‘That is what I meant. Did you not see just how angry she was just now? What about women like Tifa in Final Fantasy VII? She’s like a really good fighter and a total badass!’

  ‘Have you not seen how big her tits are?’ she answers back and then everyone starts to argue, on and on and loud and so Tomás leaves, he uses his ‘invisibility’, his real-life cheat code, because he needs to smoke, and he hopes that none of them notice because they’re paying him to be there and listen to their bullshit and so on and he knows it couldn’t possibly be true, but the bird that just flew by the window next to him looked a bit like an owl.

  ‘Hey teacher, where are you going?’ one of them asks (Tomás doesn’t know any of their names).

  ‘There’s still an hour left of class!’ another one says.

  He gives them a thumbs up, gets his coat and heads out of the office building and the secretaries go all quiet for once when he passes by (they’ve been quieter since his father’s death), and then there’s the Blue Peace people and one of them gives Tomás a banner with an erupting volcano all red with lava. He starts running to get away from the crowd and suddenly someone takes his hand. He turns and it’s Fran with a green plastic windmill on a stick and she gives it to him.

  ‘Let walk, um, outs the ways,’ she says and he nods.

  ‘I’m teaching,’ he says, out of breath.

  ‘Let walk, um, yes?’ she asks, and he nods.

  They walk past the Providencia Avenue and into Balmaceda Park. Neither of them says a thing and she does what couples who have nothing to say to each other do, she takes his hand, and he does what an old man would do too, and presses his hard against hers.

  ‘I so sorry. I hear what happen. It is in the news. I so sorry. I thought you no call back because you, um, you hated all of me, then but I see death parent and I feel so bad, yes?’

  Tomás did see the news coverage of the crash the day after the funeral (only the first crash was newsworthy). Correction. He searched online to see if there was any coverage of the accident. He found only two articles and they both came with the same video. Someone out there (how is there always someone out there?), for some reason, was filming the scenery from their car window and down went his father, wobbling to one side of an otherwise perfect postcard view, and then to the other side, as if it had been the plane that had had a stroke (Tomás only supposes this happened because he did not see the video) and BOOM both articles sought the causes of the accident but neither of them had any evidence of anything, so they both concluded that flying alone was indeed very dangerous and they both had a ‘Travel Danger Level’ chart and all, like a chart Tomás would make to explain videogame difficulty levels to his students, and it showed spikes this month. His dad was on the hardest level. They’re on the rise, they said, and then hoped that his dad didn’t suffer. But their titles were very different: 1) Father of 2 DIES in TRAGIC PLANE CRASH and 2) Be Careful What You Wish For: Man DIES on his FIRST DAY in RETIREMENT. Tomás is glad his mother is all the way out in India and hopes that she and Angela are in some remote village, a stereotypically removed village that is far, far from the internet.

  ‘I want talk to you.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I want tell you, if even I
angry at you, I really, forgive you.’

  ‘Forgive me?’

  ‘You lock me up, had terrible memories. My mum did used to do this when I was child. I hate be closed in small spaces.’

  ‘Right.’

  They stop at Balmaceda’s statue in front of a tall concrete pillar. Balmaceda’s wearing a toga and high boots, like a jedi. Eva once told him the story of Balmaceda. It was strange, she said, how comfortable Tomás felt with his own ignorance about the statues, the only people that populate the city and will never move an inch, will never leave. ‘How can you go about your day ignoring them all? Does the fact that they’ll always be there make it easier for you to ignore them? Or is it that you can always say, tomorrow, maybe tomorrow I’ll read the plaque?’ Tomás didn’t answer and Eva smiled. She loved it when she asked things he couldn’t answer. Don’t we all? Even Balmaceda seemed to ask ‘Who am I then?’ and smile a little. And then she told him, which she loved even more. ‘José Manuel Balmaceda was an aristocratic president at the end of the nineteenth century. Everyone disagreed with him and he started a civil war in 1891. When it ended, he shot himself. So now you know, don’t start shit you don’t know how to finish.’