And because he’s been smoking ever since he got up, he hasn’t had time to do anything else, even less to open the box, which still remains untouched by the front door. Now that he’s on the last cigarette, he’s dreading its contents because whatever Lucas decided to include inside would reveal what others think about his plans and how badly they think he wants Eva back. What if they thought he was joking? What if they thought that he was a joke? And even worse, what if they thought that he’s been doing all of this to make himself seem less of a bore, or as an attempt to intimidate them with eccentric claims of an impossible journey? He just hadn’t considered that what may be easily believable to one person does not always make it so for everyone else.
And so he sits by the box and wonders whether he should open it at all or just return it and start over by himself. But then again, don’t long journeys always constitute a certain degree of madness to those who stay behind? Weren’t the Spaniards he learnt about in school, those explorers who set out to unknown places, considered nuts by the rest who were too afraid to go with them? Plus, he knows Eva very well, too well, and as he once told her after sex (when, if you perform well it’s OK to lie about your feelings for dramatic effect), if there’s anything, anything he could be crazy for, it was… Ugh…
Fuck it. He gets the knife Fran left by the hobs and cuts the tape around the box to open it. Inside there’s a lot more than he expected, all piled up like Tetris bricks from the bottom up: a tent, a sleeping, an old gas lamp, packs of gas, a ski mask, two tennis rackets, a few DVDs without a cover and a compass with a neck chain.
He puts the compass chain around his neck and turns around on the spot but the compass needles stay still. He hits it a couple of times and they start moving and Tomás can’t help himself and says ‘Yes’ out loud, but the needles move slowly and then get stuck right where they started. He sighs but then wonders if maybe the rain has something to do with it and maybe the Blue Peace people were right to protest against it, the lack of direction it pours down in every drop. They should try harder. It’s OK, he thinks, it will work in Antarctica.
He takes out the sleeping bag and the tent. He opens the tent bag first. It must be from the 80s because it’s pink and grey but this is better in case he ever gets lost, since even in the darkness of his flat it looks bright as hell. He moves his couch against the wall and spreads the tent on the living room floor. He then takes the smaller bag full of fine metal sticks and starts building the arcs.
Once it’s up, he crawls inside and he can’t hear the rain and he likes how it makes all the light coming from outside shine pink. He wishes it were colder though, just so he could see how effective it is for the conditions he imagines himself under. His freezer still works, and if he didn’t have the frozen chicken inside, he would leave it open and camp nearer to it. But he’s had it for so long he just can’t get himself… So he starts taking off his clothes instead until he’s fully naked and only wearing the compass around his neck.
Next, he takes the sleeping bag out and spreads it inside the tent, before reaching down into the box for the ski goggles to put them on.
‘Hi Eva,’ he practises in front of his tent. ‘Remember me Eva? It’s been a while but… Hi Eva…’ he starts again in different tones before deciding that tones don’t matter because he sounds fucking mental, and actions reveal way more than words can ever do.
He goes inside the tent and as he lies there on the sleeping bag, he thinks about the job he no longer has and how the hell his mother and sister will react to the news. His mother will tell him that he needs to seriously consider his future, that despite him always being her child, he is not a child anymore, and that what he wants out of life should not be more important than what he ought to be doing with it. But she won’t tell him what any of that involves just to make him understand how clueless she thinks he is. Then, his sister will just let out a quiet laugh and say that none of it surprises her, and that he should go and live with his mother because she’s lonely but really, she would just enjoy seeing him in his childhood room so he can admire how far she’s moved on with everything he still doesn’t have, and with Alejjjjandro on her side to boot. And his father, well, at least he’s not going to… And so he decides to keep it all a secret for now. He’ll send them a postcard (do they have postcards in Antarctica?) when he’s there and it will also have Eva’s signature on it, and they will finally realise that he too was destined to a remarkable future, where all his failures will turn out to be life lessons for everyone else.
• • •
Tomás is in a beach house with Eva. She’s just finished watering a row of tiny daisy pots she keeps by the front porch. She’s going to start cooking. She waves at Tomás. Take your time, she says, take your time, it will be a while. So Tomás stays on the sand, on his old Zelda beach towel writing up games, which are just as good, no, better than Zelda.
As he gets closer to the end of the story, he realises it’s getting dark and he can’t keep writing and Eva has still not called him in. The lights in the house are on.
‘Eva?’ he asks, still sitting.
No answer. Have you ever been in a beach in the dark all by yourself? Did you ever feel like what made the ocean beautiful (the power of the waves, the foam, the washed up knots of algae, the sound, the noise) suddenly became terrifying?
‘Eva?’ he asks again, standing and tidying his notes and towel and he faces the ocean and then, then it begins.
At the end of the ocean, Tomás sees the sun, still lit but lighting nothing, and suddenly, it turns black, a shadow, a sphere of ash that slowly falls into the waves and just disappears. Tomás drops his towel and his notes.
It takes roughly eight minutes and twenty seconds for the sun’s light to reach the Earth. It takes far less to end someone else’s suffering. A few seconds in fact, the time it takes you to say whatever it is that you know people want to hear, the three perfect seconds in I-love-you, the longer four in I-still-love-you or the immediacy of a smile. And yet you can’t do any of it. The sun has stopped working and every second is a second nearer to the – very imminent – end.
Tomás runs into the house. He can hear Eva in the kitchen. He wants to kiss her, no, fuck her, no, just look at her. She turns to him with a smile, a white wine glass on one hand, a wooden spoon on the other.
‘You want some?’ she asks, holding up her glass.
He shakes his head. Two minutes have gone by.
‘We have to go to bed,’ he says. ‘We have to go to sleep.’
‘What?’ she asks. ‘We can fuck after we have the canard à l’orange, Tomás. But nice try,’ she says, still smiling.
‘No, you don’t understand,’ he puts her glass down. Three minutes. ‘We have to go now.’
She frowns at him, rests the spoon on an unlit gas hob. There are eight of them. Four minutes. Tomás takes her hand and pulls her towards him. She resists, shakes him off.
‘What’s up with you?’ she says, pissed off.
‘We don’t have time to argue.’
‘No one has time to argue, Tomás. That is why it’s unpleasant.’
‘No, I mean…’
He takes her from the waist and pulls her even harder. Five minutes. She almost trips. Almost. And he takes her hand and runs into the bedroom. It’s dark, so dark, and she’s not resisting anymore, six minutes, and all he wants her to do is sleep, just sleep for God’s sake, the one thing people must do every single day, the one thing that gets harder the more you do it as years go by, and another minute goes by. Seven.
And she does fall asleep. She’s breathing deep. He sits besides her and looks outside from the wide-open windows of the room. It’s too late for him. You can only save one person, he thinks, there’s never enough time.
Eight minutes. Tomás hears the soaring waves of the ocean, the last cries of the seagulls, the low whistle of a faraway ship and he stands to the sound of a waterfall… Only it’s not a waterfall, but the air which has began to fall in liqu
id form, liquid doom, and the windows cloud over with water, so much water, so little air, and he coughs, and time’s almost up, and he looks at Eva under all this unbearable noise and she’s awake, she’s awake, she’s awake and five, four…
‘Je t’aime,’ she says, and there’s nothing he can do about it.
• • •
He closes his eyes and then there’s a loud knock at the door and so he gets out of the tent and covers his crotch with his shirt and opens it. There’s a guy with a motorcycle helmet and a pizza box in both hands. They look at each other in silence for a few seconds and then the guy quickly gives Tomás the pizza and Tomás has to catch it with both hands so his shirt falls and the guy pulls down the shade of his helmet.
‘I didn’t, I didn’t, or… It’s a mistake.’
‘No problem sir,’ he says.
‘Would you like a coffee or something?’ Tomás says just to say something to stop the guy from looking at him.
‘Enjoy your pizza. Here’s a coupon,’ the guy says, putting a coupon on top of the pizza and then he just leaves.
‘I didn’t order any!’ Tomás shouts as the deliveryman leaves. He sighs. Then again he hasn’t eaten and he’s happy to find it’s a thin crust Hawaiian pizza, even if it doesn’t fit in with the whole Antarctic thing. He eats someone else’s mistake inside the tent and decides not to brush his teeth to make it part of the authentic experience of camping out in the wild.
He stretches on the sleeping bag. Tomorrow he’ll make sure he thanks Lucas for all the stuff and he should really apologise to Matilde because, after all, just like his new equipment, who is to say what’s necessary and what isn’t, and who one day might or might not have a role in this whole story? Plus, there are no hobs in the box and he will have to go back to the shop for them, two of them at the very least.
He looks at the compass one last time and he’s sure that now the needles are moving just like they’re meant to. Maybe the rain has finally stopped.
16
The Oxygen Tank
IDEAS BOOK P. 70:
Another game. A game about strategy, an RTS: Real Time Strategy. And like all strategy games, it will be about earning the power to destroy other nations, no, the whole world at the press of a button.
But most games of this type have too many countries, cultures, tribes, factions, or whatever you want to call them and Jaime cannot, will not, create more than one, because he said one is enough, and that it only takes one of these groups to destroy itself and everything with it. He’s still going to make it a two-player game though, so really it’s his laziness which will direct the fate of this virtual world.
But how can you make an original RTS nowadays, what with all The Lord of The Rings’s bullshit collateral residue of green mean people and wizards and all that fucking fantasy nonsense? How much of a format can you change before you ruin it completely? When does it become something else, something unintended?
This game will feature only France. It will start you off as French cavemen and women (they grunt with throaty Rs) and well, in caves, and you will be hunter-gatherers. You skin animals, make pelts, and weapons made from bones and have tons of off-screen sex in tiny mud huts, which release chimney smoke whenever they are being used. You will feel so productive, so reproductive, that you will ignore the fact that the objective of the game is to destroy yourself.
When you’ve farmed enough animals, collected enough grain and built irrigation canals, the resources counter at the top of the screen will shine green. You click on it…
And in comes the Bronze Age. The huts are now mud houses (did they already… who cares!) and you are building daggers and swords and bronze-pointed arrows so what used to take ages, killing animals and gathering wood and so on, is now a matter of seconds. You keep making weapons and the blacksmith will shine blue and you click him and he says ‘Oui?’ and…
The Iron Age happens, and you keep making weapons, an army that would guard all you’ve ever built, and more babies, always more babies, and for every baby a sword to guard their babies, and so on until the first gun arrives (somehow, in the game the French invented guns too – remember to Google) and now, now you’re so fucking safe no one would ever dare…
Revolt! You’ve taken over the Bastille, you’ve decapitated your way to democracy, Vive La France, and now you can finally rest but…
Industrial times ahead. The train, the plane, shopping, a 9-5pm job the title of which none of your friends can understand, and modern babies, and for every single one of those features, those UPGRADES, you now have five guns, two jet planes with eight missiles each, and even a nuclear bomb. No one will ever dare stand against you now. You’ve even conquered the moon and Mars. That’s right, and on each you have more nukes and babies. And now you’ve no idea what to do. You explore into space but most of it is plain rocks floating about and they are barren. They remind you of how little there was to worry about in your hunter-gatherer days. You envy the microorganisms probably living under those rocks. You wish you could de-evolve whilst keeping the knowledge you’ve accumulated over the years, your pride, your history, you.
So now the game offers you nothing. No one needs you because it plays itself. That’s how good you were at it. The guy who used to be the blacksmith is now a nuclear researcher and he shines red. You click on him. ‘Oui?’ he asks you, and gives you two options: 1) Nuke yourself back to the Stone Age and b) Sit back and let the days and nights cycle on and on in autopilot with babies and bombs coming out of every fucking building you ever built.
‘Oui mon seigneur,’ the man will say to either option. You take a deep breath and you consider how long it took you to get to this stage. Now what would you choose?
• • •
Tomás’s mouth is so dry from all the pizza. He wriggles out of the tent and takes off the goggles and his face hurts around his eyes. He drinks water from the tap and puts his clothes back on. He has a cigarette by the window and laughs to himself thinking about the stories the pizza delivery guy must be telling his friends and the way in which someone’s greatest misfortune can be someone else’s comedy for a day.
He leaves his flat and outside it’s raining very thin drops so he decides not to take his coat again. Walking to the metro, he notices that the streets look more crowded and much larger than they usually do. He wonders if this is a side effect of being jobless, the way the city can expand and contract, breathe, depending on where you go and what you have to do in it. And with the new crowd in mind, he decides not to wear his headphones for the first time in years, because if he’s still a part of the noise, he needs to learn to accept it.
But in the metro he remembers how quiet everyone always is and he finds himself tapping the rhythm of a song that doesn’t exist and no one even looks at him, so he puts his headphones back on and the sounds of the scratching train tracks fade to the ambient keyboards of Yiyo’s music.
Tomás dislikes watching people all silent and alone because if he looks for long enough, there is a moment in which everything they own, all their clothes and all their gestures, they all seem to have a reason, a hidden purpose and very specific projections. The summer dress is there to impress, the beards and the tattoos to show others how alternative they are and that they can take the pain, and the dude with nothing worth anyone’s attention wants to fit in by being invisible. What really gets to Tomás (and he’d never admit to this) is that in this moment where everything is part of a lie, he must assume that there are also hidden truths that no one’s sharing or even… And how can anyone live in a city with thousands of people and always be hiding, taking trains and walking and fucking but never sharing a thing? But he also knows that these moments don’t last and soon he’s looking out the metro window again and waiting for the brakes to spark and announce that the noise of the world will be back as it always does all around him.
When he gets to Abdul’s shop, Tomás realises he still hasn’t got the inheritance money and he hopes Lucas will still let
him take some things again. After all, it is really not his fault Matilde doesn’t want anything to do with Lucas, that she friendzoned him. Abdul is shelving a pile of books with Jesús. Lucas and Matilde are reading next to them.
‘Hi,’ Tomás says, but no one answers, so he picks up an old music box next to him and pretends to look for the key and then ‘Hi,’ he repeats, louder than before.
‘Did you know that birds sing to have sex and people just copied birds and started singing to get laid too?’ Lucas tells everyone, pointing at the book on his lap.
‘You should get a bird then,’ Abdul tells him. ‘You could use the advice.’
They laugh at Lucas and then see Tomás. Matilde doesn’t look at him and instead just continues reading a book called The End of Mr. Y.
‘Hey, about the other day,’ Tomás says to Matilde, opening a book from the shelf and paging through it. ‘That was out of line. I’m sorry.’ His book is called Understanding Football: Beyond Boredom.
‘And I’m reading.’
‘You’re not… What is it about?’
‘I am. I’m at the beginning so I’ve no idea yet. It’s a very weird book though… Did you come here just to piss me off?’
‘No, no, sorry. I came to thank you for the box. It’s all very useful. So… Thanks.’
‘You should thank Lucas.’
‘I will.’
‘But be careful. I told him we made out.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘Because it tires me to keep on encouraging the egotistical delusions of young men.’
Tomás closes the book and picks another. He notices it’s one of the few books he’s actually read from start to end. It’s an old copy of Don Quixote. He had to read parts of it at school every week for a whole year and remembers hating it because he didn’t believe (and still doesn’t now) that a conviction could be so strong as to render a man’s constant failures absent from his mind when they’re so clearly damaging to him. And how could Matilde call anyone deluded? Isn’t she the one going to New York? Isn’t that whole city one big delusion, the biggest windmill in the world? He places the book back in the shelf and decides to let the whole thing go because Lucas is watching him and because he figures that without a job, he might need to start worrying a little more about making and keeping friends.
We Are the End Page 23