He shakes the mouse and the computer screen turns on. Jaime left it on YouTube. He’d been listening to Phil Collins who Tomás thinks is the opposite of anything respectable because he wears gloves to drum and can’t even sing (and with him it’s not even about the lyrics) and he’s overweight, has no hair, and his name is Phil Collins. Music for the old, the dying. And so he searches for Amusement Parks on Fire and listens to ‘Vensosa’ on repeat.
He could come up with a videogame story about Eva, about the Antarctic, about travelling and about unexplored ice holes in the middle of the frozen ocean. She could be waiting to be rescued (come on, Tomás, you know better than that). She could be waiting to see how much trouble he’s willing to go through just to be with her (Jesus, man). And he would have to survive and fish with upgradable spears and make fires and meet animals, feminist polar bears who hate him for wanting to save someone who needs less saving than him (are there polar bears in the Antarctic?). And they’d give him stuff to do in exchange for information about climate change so they too can save each other with volcano banners and then, finally, Tomás would find the hole of ice and follow it down until he finds her at the very bottom of the ocean where it’s all darkness and silence and the depths are infinite and…
It ends a mess. What’s the point of the game anyway? Why would anyone want to play someone else’s story? And isn’t it too simple? Surely he needs to come up with a way of introducing drama to the whole thing. He needs villains and complications and obstacles, not simple objectives, because videogame stories are about playing the middle, even the beginning, but never the end. That’s lesson number one.
And so he doesn’t write a thing but keeps his IDEAS book open just in case, and he lies under his desk with it on his chest. He looks up to the chewing gum constellations, which have changed to groups of triangles bound by a circle at the centre, like a star. He looks at the troll doll on the shelf and it’s wearing clothes again and facing out the window. Tomás sighs and shuts his eyes.
• • •
IDEAS BOOK P. 33:
Another game. A clone. A Pac-Man clone to sell for cheap mobile platforms. Or maybe it will be free, yes, free to download but with a crap-ton of adverts of anything from shoes to jewellery to watches and toilet paper. But before making any impulsive decisions as to the nature of the characters/story in the game, let’s see what made Pac-Man such a big hit.
The game was an H-bomb in the digital world. And yet its premise is simple and elegant. You are Pac-Man, a yellow pizza circle without a slice (that’s his mouth) and you travel through a maze (a ‘board’) eating white pellets. When you eat them all, you go to the next stage and so on. But here’s the complication, the drama of it all. There are four ghosts: Blinky (red), Inky (blue), Pinky (yup, pink) and Clyde (orange) and they all behave differently. The programmers spent around eighteen months (that was long back then) on the AI alone. Blinky would chase you, Pinky and Inky would try and ambush you to take you on from the front, and Clyde, he would behave rather randomly and chase you but then change his course once he got too close to Pac-Man. This gave a whole new dimension to the game. You were now playing against characters with their own distinct personalities, with their own strategies. The game even included short animated cut scenes (revolutionary back then) between boards, where the ghosts chased Pac-Man.
If you knew how the ghosts behaved, you could outplay them, use their programmed weaknesses against them. Have you ever used someone else’s weaknesses to your advantage? Have you ever found yourself saying or doing just the right thing to get what you want? If say, you hate vegetables and you smoke too much, but the girl you like is a vegan who has told you before that she sees smoking as part of the same exploitative economic industrial complex as the meat industry, would you change? Would you lie? And say you’ve changed, and you’re eating more beans than you ever thought possible (and you eat even more because of nicotine withdrawal) but at least you get to fuck who you wanted… Then who won? And who used whom?
Anyway, this game will be different. The character will be a vegan mouse travelling through a a man or a woman travelling through a maze. Instead of eating pellets they will get shopping items, all of them real trademarks (advert issue solved) and once their shopping spree is finished, they go to the next stage (called ‘malls’ instead of ‘boards’) and shop for increasingly more expensive items: cars, European passports, houses, no, mansions and so on.
And what about the ghosts? How would you go about translating them? Well, Blinky, the ghost that chases you is now a Government Tax Agent. Inky and Pinky, who try to take you on from the front, will be a Worker’s Union and Credit Card Debt. And finally Clyde, the terrified orange ghost, will now be a French hippy from the Elqui Valley.
But how will it end? There are, after all, a finite number of boards in Pac-Man. Billy Mitchell, the ultra-nerd, was the first to get a perfect score. Billy played the ghosts, not the pellets. And so in this version, the protagonist will go from mall to mall accumulating objects but there will be a limit too. What is there to own when you own the world? What would Billy say? Once you have every mansion, every car, every plane, every clothes line, every bottle of vintage wine, every dollar bill ever printed, every country, what then? In Pac-Man, the game ends because the hardware of the time, the memory available, was too limited to keep the game going any longer and so it just broke, bugged out, on the 256th board. You could be so good at it that you broke it! You beat not only the characters inside the game but the innards, the actual wiring of the arcade machine. A Kill Screen.
In this alternate version, once the player owns everything and there are no longer any participating sponsors to supply us with new objects to own, the game will not break (there are no hardware limitations for a game this size) but will instead automatically push you back to the first mall, back when your character was poor and terrified of the Tax Agent and the Worker’s Union and Credit Card Debt and the French Hippie, back when you felt truly motivated to win at all costs, to beat them all and, well, to see the Kill Screen (massive bragging rights, just ask Billy). Only now you’ll have to turn it off yourself to stop: Suicide Screen, l’écran du suicide, and you won’t be able to tell anyone about it.
Presumably most players will turn it off when they’re bored of collecting crap, but there will be a handful of people, there always is, the hard-core gamers, who will no matter how, want to risk losing all their progress to look for glitches in the code to keep the game going into infinity. Because of them, we won’t be adding a PAUSE button, or we’ll blast them with an annoying and short musical loop provided by a sponsor, or fuck it, invert the controls after every single stage. With all those difficulties in mind, would people still play? Would reaching the end now be a badge of shame, of wasted time? We’ll have to see what happens on the forums post-launch.
Moi, je viens de finir, one of them will say, posting a GIF animation of the game restarting itself. Imbécile, another one will answer, le jeu ne finit pas de recommencer, and there will be no more related posts on that subject.
• • •
Can’t he just leave? And hell, if he’s not leaving anything he cares about, then can it really still be called ‘leaving’? Surely him moving out of here and joining Eva would all be about arrivals, about coming back, an old first kiss and familiar laughter, the morning coffee out of cups he now has out of cafetières. Would it be possible? Can he really return anywhere but to Santiago?
And so he sits under the desk against the wall, opens his IDEAS book on a new page and writes…
Trip to the Antarctic 2013: Looking for Eva
Items list for a trip I won’t regret.
– A coat.
– Metallic water bottle.
– French press and straws.
– Cigarettes.
– One hob (gas).
– Rope.
– Knife and snow axe (like in that movie Vertical Limit).
– GPS.
– Flare gun.
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– Oil lamp.
– Snow glasses (or snorkelling mask, they’re the same thing).
– Spiked boots (would football boots work in the snow? Google).
– Compass.
– Condoms (Eva might not be taking the pill).
– Find out if condoms freeze in backpacks and if they do, would they still work when defrosted in a pan on the gas hob? (Google).
– A pan.
– Single tent and single sleeping bag (I have to be careful not to appear to assume Eva will sleep with me. This is best left implied by the condoms).
– The frozen feathered chicken?
He gets up, moves the mouse and goes on Google. He types in ‘Do condoms freeze and how to defrost them with a pan’ but Jaime comes in before he can press the Enter key.
‘Hey man,’ Tomás says, turning off the computer monitor.
Jaime laughs. ‘It’s OK, I watch porn in here sometimes too but if I were you, I’d use my own laptop. They check your browsing history all the time here, and what with Fran sending the Head of School that letter about you, you have to be extra careful.’
‘It wasn’t porn. Just work. I don’t want you to see it until it’s done. Fran? What letter?’
‘You’re really working? Finally, man. No wonder Anna looks so happy today. Haven’t seen her that happy for a while. Hey, remember I need something to work on by next week.’
‘Sure. But what letter? What are you talking about?’
‘I thought you knew.’
‘No.’
‘Well, you should probably talk to the Head.’
‘You can’t just tell me?’
‘I have a class, man,’ he says, picking up a folder by the keyboard, ‘and then I’m off to meet my new girlfriend.’
‘You have a girlfriend now?’
‘Yeah, didn’t I tell you?’
‘No.’
‘Oh. Well, OK, I will some other time. She’s a writer too. Met her at a workshop I go to. It’s a good place to hook up. You should… But it’s not her writing that worries me. It’s you, you have to keep writing, man.’
‘OK.’
‘Next week, man, deal?’ Jaime points at Tomás.
‘Deal.’
Jaime walks out and Tomás lies under the desk again. Why would she send the Head of School a letter? Is she totally fucking crazy? She knows that he locked her in the kitchen because he had to take that phone call. And not that he knew it at the time, but it was the last time he talked to his father too, and surely he can no longer apologise for that and everyone would understand. Had they not had a good time together as well? Had he not given her a plastic coloured windmill and coffee from the French press, his French press, and had he not even waited five minutes for it to brew before he’d done so? He still hasn’t built the bed frame but he gets home so late and he has so much work to do and his ceiling fell and he understands that it probably wasn’t the best first date but none of it is really his fault. She cuts herself for herself and now she’s accusing him because really, there’s no such thing as a cut, a mark, that is not meant for others to see.
But he will deal with this later. He looks at the troll doll smiling out the window and then at the chewing gum constellations one last time, and then he stands to turn the computer off. He looks out the window too and there’s still no one outside asking for the world to cool down, for things to change for the better. And despite whatever that may involve, Tomás just misses the noise and the banners.
‘Don’t ever change. Though I like the circles better,’ he whispers at the troll doll.
Then, he puts his IDEAS book in his bag and his hood on. He has to go home. He has to go and plan his way back to Eva and he has to finish writing up a story that others can play and he has to avoid the Head of School and Anna because what they want is his time (always an effort) and he needs it if he’s to prepare for the Antarctic. He puts his bag on his shoulders and laughs, not because he just had a short conversation with a troll doll (and he hopes there are no cameras in his office), but because he knows this is all fucking crazy, but he’ll do it, he’ll do it, he’ll do it, even if frozen places, in all their tranquillity, still demand so much movement, so much time, to be reached.
He’ll start buying the stuff on his list when he gets home and he’ll go to Abdul’s shop to check for anything useful tomorrow. Now, he gets out of the office and runs along the corridor. Anna sees him and starts running after him.
‘Hey, the grades, where are they?’
‘Sorry, big plans tonight and I’m late,’ he says, and runs down the steps and he doesn’t feel like smoking, not between people and cars and buildings because he’s too happy to smoke, and for once they will all have to miss him, and is there a better way of showing love? No, not missing, but being missed, being missed and knowing it, and tonight Tomás knows it. For the first time in a while he’s looking forward to moving out and not having to be young in Santiago. And he might even buy a coffee cup and consider buying gas hobs although he knows that, like a good game plot, change should never appear forced. Rather, it should be a simple consequence of the gameplay and so the cups can wait, the hobs can wait, and the cars and people can all stay… Until, well, until he disappears. But for now, all he cares about is the list, the plan, the story, and running, just running and being missed by everyone and everything in Santiago.
11
Single Drops
He’s smoking out the window in the dark.
Last night he was too excited to sleep and ordered a tent and a sleeping bag and some DVDs about the Antarctic, and he binned all his cigarettes (after splitting them in two at the filters) as well as all the lighters he could find around the house. But then Amazon sent him an email about the purchases not going through and Tomás remembered his dad’s cheque still hasn’t come through, and he was glad he hadn’t gone to the mall instead and had his card rejected in public. Having said that, he still felt embarrassed by the email and so he went to the kitchen, opened the bin lid and dug out four cigarettes he found between the trash Fran had emptied on the floor.
Smoking without filters is so unpleasant to him and he knew he’d feel so rough later, so he thought he might as well smoke a couple instead of just the one.
So why is he smoking in the dark? Well, when Tomás got home after all the running, he was laughing real loud and he felt so young he punched the air boxing-style when he opened his apartment door, and then he flicked the lights on and there was a tiny explosion and then all of the lights in the apartment started to flicker. So he turned them off. He used his phone to get to his room and noticed the ceiling was leaking. The leak must have screwed with the circuits or something but it was so late, or at least too late to fix, and so Tomás used his phone light to look for the cigarettes in the bin. He couldn’t make new coffee, so he drank what was left in the French press. In the dark. By himself.
Now somehow it’s 7am and Tomás doesn’t shower, doesn’t shave, and he gets dressed to go to work. But before work, he’ll go see Yiyo and tell him about the trip he’s planning. He wants him to know that despite him not being in a band, he still has dreams that take time, that take work and commitment and he wants Yiyo to wish him luck, just so he can then answer that it’s not about luck but about time, work and… But does it matter? Does it make a difference to him if someone’s watching? He doesn’t know or care about the answer to this, but what he does know is that the more people he tells, the more he’ll feel he has to do it, like when people tell their colleagues at work that they’ll bungee jump or parachute out of a plane or do something extreme like that. As he once said in class, once the ending of a story is a possibility, then the beginning and middle become certainties. And so, as he buckles his belt, he also decides that he’ll go to Abdul’s shop and e-mail his dad’s solicitor about that inheritance money on the way so he can start buying the things on his list.
He has a last cigarette by the window and it starts to rain. Since his flat is dark,
the reds and yellows of the morning traffic and skyscrapers slide on the walls of his bedroom as if it were a metro wagon in its tunnel at full speed. And nothing is cream-coloured, nothing is still and nothing is boring and he, despite his collapsed ceiling, his wet carpet, his unbuilt bed frame, his lack of coffee cups and his two electric hobs, well, despite all that he’s still part of Santiago and all its moving lights and shadows.
This makes him want to take the metro, but when he gets there he sighs because it’s full of students dressed up as zombies carrying anti-government and free education banners. This one fat zombie sharing a metal pole with him isn’t wearing a shirt and he painted his belly white and patched with black scars. He doesn’t need the paint to scare anyone with that belly, but then a female zombie (much skinnier than him) is holding hands with him. Tomás lets out a quiet laugh, because he knows that militant people fall in love with other militant people just so they never have to think about how different they actually are. They stare at the sign with all the station names that they already know, and in the lapse of one hug they miss the sparks outside the metro windows, the silent hum of the doors sliding open, and the echoes of the steps of a leaving crowd.
But what really bothers him about the fat zombie is that he reminds Tomás about an argument he’d once had with Eva when the student protests began last year. He was getting ready to go to work and she asked him to go to a march with her and he had said that it was raining. She told him that for someone working at a university, she found it surprising how much of a shit he didn’t give about education and he answered that either way, free or paid, his job would be the same. There was no French breakfast that day and she left to protest before work, without him. Now don’t get him wrong – Tomás agrees with free education and all that stuff, but it had been raining that whole week, there had been endless crowds of douchebags shouting about a different world, and the only thing achieved was a full metro, a fight with Eva, and a day without breakfast. Still, he got hold of a banner on his way to work and left it by the door for her to see. When Eva came back she had sex with him and cooked patates sautées and some strange thing with duck liver he can’t remember the French name of, and maybe the protests aren’t so bad after all…
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