We Are the End

by Gonzalo Garcia

  He could just leave. He should pack his stuff and go to Abdul’s and buy things from his list and just book tickets to see Eva. He stands and just as he’s closing up his IDEAS book, Jaime comes in.

  Jaime hangs his coat and leaves his umbrella by the door.

  ‘You look like you just jumped into the Mapocho, huevón,’ he says and Tomás laughs but Jaime doesn’t.

  ‘I finished. I have your story,’ Tomás tells him, instantly realising that the only possible outcome is…

  ‘So, let’s hear about it,’ Jaime tells him, sitting on his office chair with both hands on his knees.

  ‘OK.’ Tomás looks at the shelf and listens to the protesters shouting out louder than ever.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Yes… So stupid, these Blue Peace hippies, huh? Did you know how soon we won’t even be able to smoke inside?’

  Jaime sighs. ‘I don’t smoke. So what’s with the story?’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ he starts, and could Jaime just die? Like right now, could he die? Could he have a heart attack? Catch fire. Tomás does have a lighter. ‘Well, it’s about lots of things. Different things.’

  ‘Great work.’

  ‘No, wait, I’m getting to it, to the good bits, just wait.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘OK, well, it’s about a dude who has to save his girlfriend from freezing to death in the Antarctic and he befriends this animal, a penguin or a walrus or something, and they have to get to her before… Well, before—’

  ‘Before what?’

  ‘There’s this iceberg heading towards the ice block she’s frozen in, and it’s going to smash it all to pieces. Thing is, the pillar she’s inside also holds the world together, and once the iceberg hits it, the whole world will end.’

  ‘So how does he save her?’

  ‘Well, he rescues her, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, but how?’

  ‘He goes up there and dives or something. I don’t know. Maybe he needs to get some power-up before that lets him breathe indefinitely underwater.’

  ‘But wouldn’t the iceberg still hit the pillar? And wouldn’t he need to break the pillar to save her anyway? Wouldn’t the world still end?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But at least he rescues her, even if for a moment. I guess you could just roll on the end-screen after that… The credits or something.’

  ‘Look,’ Jaime says with a sigh, looking out the window. ‘That all sounds alright and I wish you the best of luck.’

  ‘What do you mean? I have the script here somewhere,’ Tomás says opening the bag looking for the pages he knows he doesn’t have, but he takes out his IDEAS book anyway and opens it on the list of Antarctic equipment.

  ‘Stop, man,’ Jaime says, turning to him.

  ‘What?’ Tomás looks back at him and closes his book.

  ‘It’s done, it’s all done now.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘You were taking so long. You were never here.’

  ‘Hey, you know why, you know it’s not been easy and—’

  ‘It hasn’t. But I have to give them a game next week or I’m out too. It’s done, I finished it.’

  ‘You finished it.’

  ‘I finished it. I tried to tell you but, well, you were never here.’

  Tomás doesn’t know what to say or do. If he had the script for a story he’d do something dramatic, like he’d take it out of his bag and slam it on Jaime’s desk, no, his fucking fucked up fucker face fuck and tear up a couple of pages in front of him and maybe even eat the first page while staring at him like the deranged do in movies, just so he thinks he’s capable of anything. But he doesn’t. Instead, Tomás grabs Jaime’s umbrella and Jaime stands in front of him but Tomás doesn’t care and he looks for the tip where the metallic bars join with the fabric and he pulls them all apart. It is, however, way harder than he thought it’d be and he keeps pulling but nothing comes off.

  ‘Come on,’ Jaime says, but Tomás keeps trying and a minute passes by in silence with Tomás trying to break an umbrella.

  When he gives up, he takes it under his arm and looks at Jaime one last time before opening the door to leave and when he does, he notices that Pedro, the Head of School, is there with his arms crossed and to his side is Fran, smiling at Tomás.

  ‘Dear Lord, did you just go for a swim in the Mapocho?’ Pedro says, inspecting him from head to shoes.

  ‘Are you kidding me?’ Tomás says.

  ‘No, not at all. We have to talk in my office. Now.’

  Tomás nods and when he’s behind Pedro, he notices Fran at the end of the corridor, looking at him and unfolding her right shirt sleeve and it’s full of red lines in all directions, full of cuts, and she pulls the sleeve back down before Pedro turns to her with a quick wave.

  They go into the office and inside everything looks like it was taken from the set of a nineteenth century TV drama: the old green leather chairs with carved armrests, faded paintings of flowerpots and people with hats smoking through long cigarette holders, a skull, a miniature ballet dancer inside a bell jar, and am embalmed owl looking out the window at the protesters still shouting downstairs. There are rows of embalmed birds in bell jars to both sides of the owl.

  Pedro sits behind his desk and turns to look at the owl. Tomás sits facing him.

  ‘Franziska told me you didn’t come to class today. Is this true?’

  ‘I tried, but I had been—’

  ‘And Jaime says he’s been doing your work for you.’

  ‘That’s not entirely true but—’

  ‘Tomás, how has this gone on the way it has? Why has it gone on the way it has?’ he asks, scratching his chin. ‘You do know that I must, above all, I must follow procedure. You do know that, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do I have to follow?’

  ‘Procedure.’

  ‘That’s right. And you know what happens when I don’t follow procedure?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Let me explain to you what happens when I overlook procedure. What is a university Tomás?’

  ‘A place where you get degrees?’

  ‘No. It is a universe. It is a system. It is, above all, a set of connected procedures, just like computer code. And what happens when one line of code fails?’

  ‘Ask Jaime.’

  ‘The whole system crashes.’

  ‘Like Bimbo.’

  ‘Like Bimbo. I’m so sorry Tomás. How I wish the elephant had been a hit. How I wish you had been on time for your classes. And how I wish you were the games designer you had the potential to be. Don’t take it personally, please don’t do that. This has not been an easy decision. It’s just procedure.’

  Tomás doesn’t say anything but he opens his bag, and since he doesn’t know what to do he opens his IDEAS book on a blank page and takes out a pen, because Pedro has to at least see that despite all these mistakes and misfortunes, he’s still trying. And so he pretends to take notes but only writes his name over and over, like his own students do in his classes. There it is, he did learn something from…

  ‘And I got a call from my PA saying some students had mentioned something about you harassing some of our students. Tomás, how long has this been going on for? I’m so sorry, I really am. I wish I could help you, but can you even imagine the stack of procedures this whole thing will entail if it becomes public?’

  ‘What?’ Tomás says looking up from his IDEAS book. ‘That’s just plain untrue,’ he says.

  ‘Well, so you haven’t done that either. What have you done? What do you do with your time Tomás? If there was something on paper, something to show, some publication, something… I could help you out. I mean, that would make it easier on the—’

  ‘Procedure.’

  ‘Exactly. I’m glad you understand. I mean, it is really awful. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘I’ve been working, trying to work, but—’

&nbs
p; ‘I don’t think so. Look, I just can’t have this place running like this. We talked about it with the Dean and you know what she said? Do you want to know what she said about you?’

  Tomás shakes his head.

  ‘She said you were “unnecessary”, that whether you are here or not, everything can happen without you and no one would notice, that you are an unnecessary budget to consider. And Anna says you haven’t done your marking. Your marking, Tomás, the most basic thing… Why didn’t you ask for help? You could have even asked me. There are procedures for late marking too. So, well, there’s no easy way to say this, but, well, you’re fired, as dictated by article 659 on page 442 on the Staff Manual.’

  ‘Fired?’

  ‘I’ll ask you this, would you employ yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you, really?’ Pedro says.

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘No, no. Let me ask you again. Would you employ yourself?’

  ‘No,’ he says, and Pedro just shakes his head.

  Tomás looks at the skull. Unnecessary? He knows that this is the sort of moment he’ll be replaying in his head for the rest of his life, coming up with edgy answers, maybe even a quotation from some famous civil rights activist who also endured a great injustice. But right now the skull and the protesters outside are all he can think about, how unnecessary they are, all of them, and then he thinks of Eva and he must remember to tell her how necessary she is, how necessary she’s always been, and how necessary all the little details she wished for him to change also were: the hobs in the kitchen, the French dinners, the Trans-Siberian train… Those are the things that matter and he knows he can change it all in a day, in one decision.

  ‘Do you have any other comments to add?’

  ‘No,’ he says.

  ‘You have until the end of the month to empty your office.’

  Tomás nods and gets up and waits in silence for a handshake or a goodbye and when he realises it isn’t coming (because that would be unnecessary), he turns and leaves.

  He passes by Anna who, for the first time in his life, pretends not to see him and instead fiddles with a bunch of forms on her desk as Tomás heads onto the stairs.

  Outside, the protest against the rain is still going on and Tomás briefly considers joining them just because he feels like shouting too, and he knows all these people also gather because they all feel like shouting but really, is there anything more unnecessary than shouting for the rain to stop?

  He walks past them and heads towards the river. He leans on the edges of the bridge and he looks down at the waves and he wants to cry and think about Eva but with the noise of the traffic and couples walking by, and business men and women talking on their phones, his sadness would never be authentic.

  Instead, he opens Jaime’s umbrella and thinks about jumping into the Mapocho. He lights a cigarette and trembles with the cool rain still touching him behind the neck. And when he closes his eyes there’s a moment where everything is quiet and it’s just him and the river, the river and him, and the wind picks up and lifts the umbrella and breaks it at the joints.

  Remember the story of grandfather Diego buried under the seventh hole at the Golf Club? Well, now, looking down from the bridge at the river of shit, at the shitty ocean passing under him, Tomás remembers his grandmother. Yes, she had irritable bowel syndrome and would often burp out loud at dinner parties and yes, that began shortly after her husband’s death. But no, this isn’t why Tomás is thinking about her over all this moving shit. He’s thinking about her because he lights another cigarette.

  His grandmother Andrea would often tell him she wanted to die. Even as a child. ‘I wish I were dead,’ she would say after telling him about the horses she used to ride in the stables she used to own. She told him she was tired, and smoked as much as she could. ‘I want cancer,’ she said, ‘I want it to be my star sign that takes me to the next world.’ Tomás remembers the stars that night because they were the same as on any other night. And he remembers even better that two years later, cancer came. The stars hadn’t moved but she said, with a quiet laugh and pointing at the sky, ‘I told you they would take me back,’ and Tomás didn’t know whether to cry or laugh so he did both.

  Anyway, that same weekend his grandmother died in a bus. The driver was drunk. Chile had beaten Argentina 2-1 in a friendly match, and he was wasted. Grandma Andrea had been out in town getting her favourite tobacco, Blue Drums, and was on her way back home to die a little slower, predictably, and with her family, but BANG and the sky had nothing to do with it.

  Tomás sighs and drops the umbrella into the river and it doesn’t even splash. Neither would he. It’s at that moment that the plastic windmill salesman walks up to him pulling his cart full of windmills now covered by a sheet of plastic that rustles in the wind.

  ‘Windmill?’ he asks Tomás, holding onto his beret.

  ‘No thanks, not today.’

  ‘Can I have a cigarette then?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Tomás says, handing him the packet.

  ‘Amazing huevón, you bought a packet of twenties, no one does that anymore. Can I take two?’

  ‘Yes, sure.’

  ‘It’s a shitty river isn’t it?’ the salesman says lighting his cigarette.

  ‘The shittiest.’

  ‘Here,’ the salesman says, picking out a windmill from his cart. ‘Free of charge.’

  ‘No, don’t worry, that’s not necessary.’

  ‘Nonsense, when you’re as old as I am, you understand that only unnecessary things can make you happy.’

  In the metro, he tries to imagine all the unnecessary things inside the box Matilde left in his flat.

  15

  8 minutes and 20 seconds

  IDEAS BOOK P. 64:

  Today it’ll be a game about… No, fuck it, today I can’t write a game. My. God. I’m writing a fucking diary: quarter-life crisis UNLOCKED. Now I have truly become it (it = terrible megadouche). I didn’t mean to start being it, promise. Then again that’s what it would say. It’s just I can’t stop thinking about my first job, back when jobs seemed exciting, and every shitty little thing that you knew you were too good to do seemed like an exciting possibility to show it (regular ‘it’).

  I got my first job through my dad with Clover, age 16. I was to work for a month in the summer (that felt like a year) at the Paper Cutting Department. Yup, they have a Paper Cutting Department, and my job was to cut up ice-cream ads to place outside street kiosks. But that isn’t why I’m thinking about all of this. The reason is Bernardo, Bernardo the veteran paper cutter.

  I got an email telling me where to meet him. I was to go to the basement. Then the guy who took me to the stairs told me not to worry if Bernardo seemed a little off, which is what someone who does worry about how off he was would say. And so I worried.

  He left me in front of a broad blue plastic-coated door, a constant SHIN-SHIN-SHAN-SHAN-BIP-BIP-BIP inside. I waited there for a few minutes. I opened the door. Bernardo had his back to me as he tended a machine where he was cutting the edges of a giant chocolate cornetto. Damn was he good at cutting those little corners on the chocolate flakes.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, still in the doorway.

  ‘Hurry, hurry. Get your apron and you can help me with this. My name’s Bernardo. I cut things.’

  He said that. I shit you not. He said he cut things.

  ‘I’m Tomás, I’ve never cut anything,’ I should have said.

  ‘You’ll learn, though it’s not easy,’ he said with a sigh.

  ‘That’s what I want. I want to learn. I’m ready for anything,’ I definitely did not say.

  And this is when Bernardo turned to me and I could see him full. Well, full isn’t quite right. His right hand was missing and he had made a knot on it with the extra sleeve length over it.

  ‘I learnt the hard way kid,’ he said, and all I thought was, shit, this guy works in a basement, in a FUCKING BASEMENT and HE LOST A HAND to a chocolate corn
etto, the worst way to lose a hand (I could never eat a chocolate cornetto ever again), and shit, shit the world is unfair, and shit the knot is disgusting to look at, and the knot only makes it MORE VISIBLE. That’s right. A naked stump would have remained hidden given the appropriate lighting conditions but… A knot. A basement. Ice-cream. No hand. Fuck.

  ‘Be careful with that machine,’ he told me. ‘It’s French and it’s expensive,’ he added, and he pointed at it WITH THE KNOTTED ARM. By that time I just wanted out of it all. I never touched the machine. I was careful. I quit. Dad shouted about quitters. He called me ‘a quitter, just like Argentinians.’ But Bernardo just shrugged a disfigured shrug, an asymmetrical shrug, and what he told me I will never forget.

  ‘It’s not worth it kid.’

  • • •

  It’s just past midnight and Tomás is wondering if the rain will ever stop. When he got home he lay down on the sofa and stared at the hole in the ceiling for so long he’s not sure if time went by too quickly or if he fell into a sleep too light to notice. Then he got up, and lighting his way with his phone he made himself some coffee. But since the kettle has burnt out, he had to just fill the French press with hot water from the tap. It still tasted the same though, because he waited even more than five minutes for it to brew. He went to his window to smoke and got angry at himself for not being able to quit and briefly considered how clean his apartment would be if he didn’t waste so much time smoking. He’d probably be in the Antarctic by now! And so he decided to chain-smoke so as to only have ten cigarettes left by the end of the night and from tomorrow he’ll make sure to buy only packs of ten.