We Are the End

by Gonzalo Garcia

  ‘I brought my raincoat.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Come on.’ She walks over to the booth and gestures for two tickets and she pays for him and he’s glad because he still hasn’t remembered to call about that inheritance cash. Tomorrow, he’ll do it tomorrow if there are no protests.

  ‘I’ll pay you back tomorrow,’ he tells her as she gets her change back.

  ‘Who told you I’d see you tomorrow?’

  Tomás doesn’t know what to say so he steps on the cigarette even though he hasn’t finished it.

  ‘I’m messing with you,’ she says laughing, and the guy in the booth laughs too and when Tomás looks at him he shrugs with a smile.

  The lift is coming down all empty even though it’s still real noisy at the top of the hill.

  ‘Awesome, we get to have it all to ourselves. It’s been ages since I last took one of these,’ Matilde says.

  ‘Yeah, I used to come here a lot.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ she says as the lift doors open to the sound of the chain pulleys coming to a halt.

  They get on and sit down facing each other from opposite sides of the lift. The wooden boards on the floor and the ceiling, the small cracks and the netted windows… The lift, Tomás thinks, the lift does make him feel welcome because it’s just as he remembers it.

  Tomás looks out the window to the side of the rising hill and Matilde does the same on her side facing the city.

  ‘This side is much better,’ she says. ‘The buildings will look like stars from here.’

  ‘Maybe, but I can’t see much with all the fog.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’ll start raining again soon… Chewing gum?’ she asks him, holding out a piece towards him.

  ‘Thanks,’ he says, surprised by the fact that it isn’t mint-flavoured. But then again, she’s so young.

  The lift starts to pull and vibrate and then slowly begins to rise. They don’t talk and Tomás watches Matilde all still and focused, looking at everything outside turn small as they move up and Tomás wishes he could get closer to Matilde, share the exact frame of the view before her. There’s a moment in the lifts where the whole of Santiago becomes visible and he always thought it was sad and beautiful, the way you can only see the whole when you’re that far away, because didn’t it also mean that being close to something is only knowing a part? Yes, maybe this is why Eva said she knew she could do better, this is why she needed the distance. She did it not in order to lose him but out of love, so that she too could then look at him from afar and see him whole. And he is sure that this must be love. No, not that Hollywood rom-com need to merely know the defects and the mistakes just so characters can then claim to have accepted them. Those are just the parts. It is about knowing and loving even what you reject and could never forgive which is really not the…

  But just as they’re coming to the middle of the line it starts showering with rain and the pulleys on the ceiling start to creak as the wind hits the lift walls. And then the lift comes to a halt and begins a gentle swing.

  ‘Ah, fuck,’ she says smiling at him.

  ‘Best days in Santiago, huh?’

  ‘Yeah… If there’s one thing I’ll miss in this city it’s the way you can’t plan anything because nothing ever works like it’s supposed to.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  They can’t see the top of the hill or the city from here so they have to look at each other instead.

  ‘The Virgin Mary on top of the hill, they say it’s the only virgin in town,’ he says, ‘what do you think?’

  She laughs. ‘Probably true, though the fact that there isn’t a male virgin statue says something that’s way more accurate than that.’

  He laughs too. He had never even thought…

  ‘Those are some pretty badass clouds,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Once, I went on a trip to see a cousin down in Punta Arenas, and he said it rains so much there that he sometimes stops believing the sky’s actually blue, you know?’

  ‘I’ve never been there.’

  ‘It was a joke and all but I think there might be some truth to it, the way you can just forget how things were, or forget how things are behind what you can see. We’ve had such a long winter. Haven’t you ever thought, I mean… When you can’t see the sky, that it is not blue, that there is no sun, that they’ve disappeared and you will never see them again?’

  ‘No, because you know it isn’t true.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, but…’ she takes the chewing gum out of her mouth and sticks it under her seat and Tomás finds it too disgusting to watch.

  ‘I don’t like this middle part in the lifts,’ he says.

  ‘It’s OK, I’ve been stuck here once before. There’s nothing to be scared of.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, thinking that, as always, Eva was right. Being here is like disappearing. But even worse, it makes everything around the lift disappear with them too. They can’t see anything with all this…

  ‘So when exactly are you leaving?’ she asks.

  ‘Soon. I still haven’t booked my tickets. I should really book my tickets. You?’

  ‘Next week. I’m pretty nervous about it now. I’m at the stage where I keep adding extra things to my checklist just to cross them out, you know? Like to feel prepared or something. I figured, the more I write down, the less I’ll miss, but I’m not sure that’s how forgetting stuff works… Apart from that, I’ve been translating what I write too, so I can use it over there. You know, E.L. Doctorow taught where I’ll be in New York.’

  ‘Who’s Doctorow?’

  ‘And you call yourself a writer?’

  ‘I write videogames.’

  ‘Oh. Well, you take them pretty seriously if you’re going all the way to the Antarctic to do your research. Can’t you just Wikipedia the hell out of everything nowadays?’

  ‘I’m actually going to see my girlfriend.’

  ‘She lives there? You meet online or something? Didn’t know Tinder had such a large radius.’

  ‘She’s working there.’

  ‘Amazing. How long have you two been together?’

  ‘Quite long. Long enough,’ he says, and feels his face turn hot so he looks out the window at nothing.

  She laughs. ‘It’s OK, a kiss isn’t cheating in my books. It was a pretty shabby kiss too. It really doesn’t count.’

  ‘No, no, she’s kind of my ex for the time being,’ he says, and he notices he’s swallowed his chewing gum. ‘But it’ll be fine.’

  ‘Shit, man, that’s tragic… I could write a story about you.’

  ‘Didn’t you have a boyfriend too?’

  ‘Yeah, but we broke up. I mean, I’m leaving. There’s just no point keeping anything like that,’ she says with a sigh. ‘It’ll just be extra baggage.’

  The rain softens and he can hear the crowds on top of the hill again.

  ‘How would you end it?’ he asks.

  ‘End what?’

  ‘The story about me.’

  ‘Not sure. However you want me to, I suppose,’ she says, and the lift begins to rise again. ‘I’d ask you.’

  Tomás notices that the ceiling is leaking when a few drops hit his head but he doesn’t move because he wants her to know that little things don’t bother him and also because it reminds him of his flat. He must get home and fix it before he leaves. His dad had once told him that the problem with his generation is that no one wants to suffer for what they want, that they expect everything to be done by someone else. But he was wrong because Tomás is willing to put up with a wet head just to remind himself of what he needs to fix and this makes him happy.

  ‘You should have brought a coat,’ she says, putting hers on. ‘It’s even raining inside now.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Hey,’ she says, coming over to his window and kneeling on his bench, her arms against his. And she doesn’t even look at him and it’s as if he weren’t there at all, until sh
e smiles and… ‘We’re here.’

  • • •

  IDEAS BOOK P. 76:

  Another game. A Survival Horror game like Silent Hill or Resident Evil. We will keep fixed-camera angles, the twisting and turning of straight long corridors with nothing but a few spaced out dissonant keys or a piano with full-on reverb. We will also keep the fact that it is always night, no matter how long you play for. But what we won’t keep are the zombies and monsters and no We’ll create Freudian monstrosities, literally, like actual cocks trying to eat your actual cock, or round ovaries that scream your mother’s name as they get nearer to you, where they will then spew out undead babies with your own face and voice (we’ll need to use camera functionality for this). The corridors in the game will be mazes of twisted mirrors, and we will succeed if you try to quit the game out of fear, which won’t be easy, because quitting will show you a cut scene of your mother going down on you and biting hard and then you’ll bleed out and turn into one of the undead babies and wait, no…

  Jaime could not possibly program something so complicated. He just can’t get liquids to not look like solids, so blood and spunk are out of the picture. Let’s start again.

  You are a massive penis and you are the bad guy. It is not Survival Horror but the Horror of Survival, because you need people’s lifeblood to keep yourself erect or you’ll shrink to public shame and you’ll wander the dark cities, a lonely dick, getting numbers at the night club, getting hits on Tinder with Photoshopped pictures of your best angles, updating your Facebook profile with photographs of yourself next to expensive things and expensive people because being a dick needs to remain hidden… And you’re good at it, it’s in your DNA to hide amongst the crowd you secretly wish were dead or dying by your own doing, just so you can see yourself grow and tense up and almost come out of the joy of winning. You might meet other dicks along the way. They drive sports cars and segways and call themselves ‘entrepreneurs’ and will give you business cards when all you asked them for was to serve you a dry martini at the bar. And then you’ll go to a jazz café and you have no idea what jazz is all about, but there will be plenty of other dicks there who will tell you ‘it’s about feeling, man, it’s about breaking time and melody, it’s just so hard to explain it. It’s something you either have or you don’t. It’s about sadness, sadness, sadness and depth of character.’ But then you get bored of those dicks too. They’re too small and all you want is to meet a dick that can at least challenge you, send you to hell, think that you’re lame and crooked, because now you miss not being the largest dick in the room.

  So you get a tip from one of the little dicks at the jazz café. ‘Go to a math-rock gig,’ he says, ‘that’s the real underground music scene nowadays, and there you’ll meet much larger dicks.’ After saying this, he thanks you because you made him grow a little. Though because he thanked you, he shrinks back in an instant.

  So now you’re at the math-rock gig and it’s full of amazing cock pillars wearing hoodies and skinny jeans, dicks pretending to love the broken assonance of songs that start and stop for no reason at all, and you feel yourself grow just by being here. But no one here talks to you. They would shrink if they did. No one here even looks at you. Everyone’s about your size. You now wish you hadn’t taken the tip. You wish you weren’t as big. You wish you’d never been on Facebook and Tinder or met with the French bartenders pretending to be entrepreneurs. But you stay despite all this because you know, just as everyone at the gig knows, that leaving will have you shrink to your starting size, and then no one will even notice you at work or on your way home, the only two activities you’ll be able to do.

  And then, a depressed and lonely dick, you start to go to bars on your own, to nightclubs, and then Facebook, Tinder, but nothing works. It’s just not the same the second time round. You’re older. There’s no one like you. And now the bars and concert halls are filled with assholes.

  • • •

  When they get off the lift they pass by a long queue of people waiting to go back down. A guy in blue overalls has organised them by height, like a poster of human evolution. And the woman in the booth shakes her head, and the people in the queue look all mad at Tomás as if it were his fault the lifts had stopped for so long or that it had started to rain, and he whispers ‘Sorry’ to an older woman whose oversized handbag is in his way, but she doesn’t move or answer so he pushes against her and she curses something at him that he doesn’t hear.

  They walk over to the souvenir shop and Matilde tightens the hood of her coat. People are running around with their handbags and backpacks and even plastic supermarket bags on their heads to avoid the rain. In Santiago no one knows what to do when it rains and there are no roofs to shelter under, and everyone suddenly forgets it’s just water that’s pouring down from the sky and that’s it’s only there for a moment.

  Matilde starts to walk towards the steps that lead to the top of the hill. A group of young people run past them wearing masks of Piñera’s face with little holes instead of eyes. Matilde turns to them as they pass by.

  ‘I told you there would be protests today,’ she says, and Tomás nods and lights up a cigarette.

  They walk up the stone steps and when they’re at the top, they lean against the metal railing that encircles the summit. She holds the magnifying telescope beside them up against her face, knowing that without a coin it will all be darkness.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m finally leaving this place,’ she says, letting the telescope fall back in its place. Tomás nods with a smile because all they can see across the fog are the faded lights from the skyscrapers.

  ‘Although my dad says you never really leave home,’ she adds. ‘Come,’ she says, walking back to the last stone step.

  She takes her coat off and she places it flat on the step and then sits on it.

  ‘Let’s watch the lights one last time,’ she says.

  ‘We can’t really see any though,’ he says, sitting down anyway.

  ‘Well, we can imagine them then. It’s not like we don’t know where they’re meant to be.’

  And then there’s silence. No crowds, no kids with masks, not even the hum of the lifts and it’s all just rain and Matilde’s foot lightly tapping on the steps to no particular rhythm. Or at least nothing that Tomás can follow.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to put your coat back on?’ he asks, flicking down his cigarette.

  ‘It’s just water,’ she says, looking down at the missing city, ‘it’s just water and it doesn’t last.’ And then he holds her hand.

  18

  I Do Not Regret This Journey

  She said she’d come and pick him up on her motorbike in the evening. Tomás said that he’d rather take the metro or the bus, that he’s used to it, but she just answered that it wouldn’t bother her. And after holding hands for so long on the hill, Tomás thought it best to just keep quiet and accept, because she said ‘This is nice’ even though they had been soaking with rain and Tomás didn’t want to spoil the moment for her.

  But now, inside the tent and wearing his ski goggles and gardening gloves, he’s not too sure it’s such a good idea. No one can look manly sitting behind a girl on a motorcycle, grabbing her with your legs spread out just under hers. He knows it’s macho bullshit and he knows that’s such a dickish thing to worry about and Eva would give him hell (and he’d have another frozen feathered chicken in his freezer) for thinking like this but in a way he likes to know that he’s still young and stupid enough to care about stuff like that, which he calls his ‘dignity’ but in fact is something much, much less…

  He should probably put on some trousers or at least check the time but the sleeping bag’s comfortable and every time he moves, it makes a long ‘shhh…’ as if he were telling someone to be quiet. And then he stops moving and everything does go quiet, and he thinks it funny that even when Eva’s not with him, and even without a job, he still finds a way to order himself around. Again, such a dickish…

&n
bsp; The trousers can wait. He gets up and phone-lights his way into his smoking window, where he now decided to keep his cigarettes loose and in a line. Spreading them out will make him notice how much he smokes and make him feel guilty, so that he can then find it easier to want to stop. He takes his gloves off, turns the radio on and opens the window, hoping it’s still raining as hard as it had been last night. It isn’t, but then again rain is never hard, there’s just either a lot or very little of it. It’s all the same really, and the streets are just as empty.

  He smokes and leans out so that his goggles can catch a few raindrops in order to test them. They work, nothing touches his face and all the lights outside become circles of gold blurring into each other and it reminds him of last night, when the sky cleared away for a few minutes, and from the hill Santiago became dots of wet colour, dispersed and untidy like a teenager’s bedroom, before disappearing again behind the fog.

  He looks behind him at his room, still without a bed and the clothes just piling up but he won’t start tidying now because Matilde might arrive at any moment. Still, when did he stop caring about himself like this? People always say that when you’re single you should enjoy having your own time again, to do all the things you lost touch with over the years: videogames, clubbing, getting hammered, seeing old friends you no longer care about so you can care about them again, learning to cook, achieving something at work, shaving for yourself. But he knows he stopped doing these things because he never really loved them anyway and Eva was the way out. Then again, he might not want to start any of these activities because he’s not really single and that is just yet another…

  On the radio, the speaker is introducing Fármacos’s new album, and Tomás lights up a new cigarette. Yiyo’s on the radio. Yiyo’s on the fucking radio.

  ‘What are your influences?’ the radio woman asks him.

  ‘I don’t really believe in influences,’ Yiyo starts. ‘I wanted to add,’ he continues, ‘that I’m selling a great drum kit, if anyone’s…’