We Are the End

by Gonzalo Garcia

  They get to Plaza Italia and Matilde parks next to a lamppost facing the Feria Artesanal.

  ‘Come,’ she says, opening a thick padlock with a key.

  They walk into the long outdoor corridors where all the shop counters are now covered by tin curtains that rattle in the wind. They get to Abdul’s shop. Matilde lifts up the curtain and walks in. Inside and in the dark everything looks different. The shelves that in the day are so full it’s impossible to find anything now look empty, invisible, and they’re all alike, just stands holding shadows pushing against one another. And the hanging crucifixes and rosaries and the tiny wind-bells sway slowly but he can still hear them. They sound like wood creaking about to break.

  ‘Here,’ she says by the red door in the corner, the one Abdul keeps locked.

  ‘I don’t think we’re meant to go in there.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she says, showing him a lock of Abdul’s hair with the key attached to it.

  She goes in and Tomás follows her.

  ‘Close the door.’

  ‘OK,’ he says and closes it. In the dark and with the damp heat inside the room, Tomás thinks for a moment that he’s home in his flat, and that the different door at the entrance, like the river, can change at night but inside everything’s always the same.

  • • •

  What is it about the beach that makes it so inviting? Is it the waves? There are studies out there suggesting that the frequency of the crashing waves, their tonal evolution from the low fall of water to the high sizzle of the foam is not unlike the sonic transformations we undergo the moment we’re born. And so the sea is as close as we’ll ever get to birth again, the beginning of it all, the first connections of your inner wiring, the creation of your very own universe. But, again, what about the beach, the part that the water refuses to touch? Why build houses, no, whole towns, why watch the tides in and out, maybe even the sunset, if what we really want is to drown under the crushing immensity of our first memories?

  Tomás is looking at the beach house with Eva’s old telescope. It has a front porch with hanging flowerpots arranged under two neat windows. Daisies, there are a crap-ton of daisies in the pots and lining the walls of the house.

  ‘We could stay there for a while,’ he tells her.

  ‘If that’s where the sea is taking us, then sure, fine by me,’ she says.

  The ship keeps getting nearer, breaking ice as it does so. The noise is unbearable. It’s the volume, the tension, it’s what an amplified tooth-removal surgery would sound like, and so Tomás feels it at the ends of his mouth.

  They are too close to the island for the ship to keep going. They will have to row their way there with one of the safety boats that Serge keeps on board. Tomás has never had to row before. ‘It’s simple,’ Eva explains, straightening her back against the front of the little wooden boat. ‘You pull back, use your legs, stretch your legs and then use that weight to move your arms. It’s not really your arms doing it all, it’s the things you do before the oar even touches the water that count.’ Tomás does it, out of synch, and they start to turn instead of advancing. Eva just watches him. She believes in him, in his capacity to get them both wherever she wants to be, which is where he also…

  He’s getting the hang of it now. He stirs past dead ice, past the bulks of rock that stick out like black frozen tumours, like gathered piles of ash in a smoker’s basement, secret and unnecessary, and he rows until his back aches, his arms ache, his butt and his legs ache, and what level of pain do you have to be in before you can say that you, the whole of you, your very soul or any of that shit that you believe is located at your very core, how much pain until you can announce to the world that you hurt, that your soul aches?

  Tomás has only been rowing for twenty minutes or so and he’s ready to give up. But Eva motivates him, ‘Go,’ she says, ‘we’re so close,’ but Tomás has no way of knowing how close they really are. She told him to keep rowing and to keep facing the ship they left behind with Serge waving at them and making an O, a U, and an I with his arms. Then a C and… ‘We’re so close.’

  Suddenly, they hit land. It’s a surprise to Tomás that when he turns around, the once tiny island is now just part of a much larger world, where ancient civilisations have come and gone, where strange animals he’s probably never seen before will have evolved according to their instinctive desire to make even the most secluded of places their homes. But even then he knows, just as much as she does, that right now they are completely alone.

  ‘Look at that house,’ she says. ‘That’s our house. We can get settled in and keep searching for the holes in the ice from here.’

  ‘That’s our house,’ he repeats.

  ‘It has daisies.’

  ‘And a front porch.’

  ‘You could write your stories here.’

  ‘And you could live yours.’

  ‘Right, but first I’ll make us something to eat.’

  Tomás takes a Zelda beach towel from a stack of Zelda beach towels in the corner of their bedroom. He lays it flat on the sand and takes his IDEAS book out. He’ll write something about her, something better than Zelda, and as he begins to brainstorm ideas about saving people, saving Eva, he notices that the ice caps are breaking, splitting with a thick and dark crack that leads straight into the setting sun which this time, he just knows it, will set for good.

  • • •

  But then Matilde lights an old gas lamp. Surrounding the room is a shelf filled with cassette tapes, old cameras and reels of film. And in the centre, there’s a red couch and a film projector on a coffee table. The projector is facing a white bed sheet spread out over a clothes hanger line attached to both ends of the room. On the floor there are old toys, a train set, farm animals and plastic soldiers, and old rubber truck wheels, like those in the shop, piled up in the corners.

  ‘What is this?’ he asks.

  ‘My dad made this room when Mum died. He used to be a filmmaker. I mean, that’s what he said when he was young and she was still around but he never finished a film. He’s been trying to make one ever since. Pretty sad isn’t it? The way old people never move on, and become so ashamed of it they lock it all up.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, stepping carefully past the toys on the floor to sit on the couch.

  ‘Anyway, I found this for you,’ she says, showing him an old reel of film.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I told you, it’s a surprise.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘But first,’ she says, walking to a stack of shelved old records. ‘Stravinsky or Max Richter?’

  ‘What?’ Tomás asks back, not knowing who the fuck Max Richter is.

  ‘Just answer the question.’

  He supposes that like any question between men and women who do not know each other well, it is a trick question. He also supposes that it has to be about a contrast, for the answer to mean completely opposite things, or she wouldn’t ask it. In fact, he doesn’t know much about Stravinsky either, but he thinks he was most active in the 20s or near the 20s, or was it maybe… Matilde is asking him how old he is, how old he feels, if he is also active and part of his 20s, or if he relates to the classics as if they were his contemporaries, but none of it matters. Listen to Stravinsky’s Elegy on cello in Santiago and the streets will still cry out songs meant for Swiss Springs and somehow make sense and…

  ‘Max Richter,’ he says.

  ‘I fucking knew it,’ she says.

  He will have to hear the city in another way now, in ways meant by Max, and whether the guy was barely a caveman hitting skins with bones or a trendy twenty-first century German electronica genius, it doesn’t change the fact that the streets will still sing HERE – NOW – ALONE – OLD whenever you are here, now, alone and old.

  And she knew it. She fucking knew it. And what does that even mean? Should he have surprised her? He remembers that Eva once said that you can only surprise someone once you really know them. She didn’t say how long this took
or how you decide you really know someone. He asked her. He said, ‘Surely when you first meet someone everything’s a surprise. Don’t you think this is why they call it honeymoon phase? Surely you fall in love because you like the surprises. They like books? Wow, you do too. They like coffee black and out of an expensive capsule machine? Wow, so do you. You like fucking from behind because it’s rough but do not mean any disrespect? Wow, you are soul mates!’ He had said all of this during breakfast and Eva just watched him as she spread Bonne Maman apricot jam on her halved baguette. She paused for a few seconds, sat up straight, and then she said, ‘You don’t know the difference between discovery and surprise, Tomás.’ She only ever used his name when he’d done something wrong, and it made him feel like a child. ‘You might never understand it,’ she continued, and he intervened. He said, ‘But what about all those forty-year-olds, those tired, sad-looking sleepwalkers who can only ever talk about getting up, getting their children up, going to work, what they had for lunch – always the same – and how they sleep – always badly? What about them? How are they supposed to be surprised?’ Eva looked at her halved toasted baguette and put it back on her small plate. That’s right, he took her appetite away. Then she said, ‘After all those years, what people miss are the surprises, not the discovery,’ and she stood up and left him to pay for their uneaten breakfast.

  Matilde fixes the needle on the record player and Max Richter comes on in a dark ambient hum. She puts the film reel in an opening on the side of the projector and turns it on, and then switches the lights off and sits by him on the sofa, covering him and herself with an alpaca blanket.

  It’s a silent film, and it starts with writing:

  It is possible to only give a brief mention

  of the hardships of that perilous

  journey down the great ice-fall.

  Onscreen: a black and white ship full of people and horses and dogs. The sailors are dancing while the ship remains stationed by the harbour and people outside are waving handkerchiefs like one massive cueca dance by the sea. Eva must have shown everyone her new ballet moves on her way there, she joined a ballet school and… Then there’s a sailor getting a haircut and he laughs as the hairdresser passes him a mirror because he just lost all of his hair.

  Oh, I think he should stick to grooming the horses

  before trying his hand with the Captain.

  They were the happiest days for the company.

  And then they left New Zealand and there was

  silence and the loneliness of the vast ocean.

  The image of the ship fades out and the title screen shows up: THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE. Tomás is worried. Not because of the silence or the vastness of the ocean. No, what he’s worrying about is the fact that there are only men on the ship, and they’re all good dancers and then there’s the loneliness of the ocean which, like the loneliness of the city, would break anyone given enough time in those circumstances and then love and fucking would become a logical… Eva on a ship full of men and full of loneliness, like anyone else, would find it easier to forget about him and then she had stopped smoking, got herself new… Of course, he’s worrying for nothing because he’s pretty sure she left on a plane, or even better (because it’s less crowded), a helicopter.

  During the next ten days, they had

  to fight for their lives. More than once they lost

  their way, and found themselves in ice that

  for miles was broken by pressure

  into the most appalling confusion.

  ‘Imagine how scary it must have been to get completely lost out there on your own,’ Matilde says.

  ‘Yeah, but it’s kind of their fault for leaving.’ Max Richter is still looping the wave of piano notes. The melody never changes. Is there a melody? The volume, what they can and can’t hear, the direction of the notes and the origin of arpeggios, that’s always changing.

  She laughs but he really means it. Why must people always try to prove how far they can go? Is it because they can then come back and tell you that you’ve always had everything and that you should appreciate even the things you hate because actually, they’re not so bad, not as bad as the EXTREME things they’ve done. Must we really have a death wish so we can then say we, and everyone else, should love life? That’s right, he’d been right all along. Eva left just so she could then come back and tell him, as she always did, that he complained for nothing, that gas bills don’t matter. But then she’ll say that she actually even missed them on her time away. And just like you can’t argue with the dead, you can’t argue with those who come back from nearly dying. All these sailors, all these male sailors, when they got home, they spent their time proving that everyone else’s lives were small and petty and stupid and they can prove it by preaching the unarguable sadness of the sea.

  ‘I bet they missed their homes so much. I’ll miss Lucas and Jesús and my dad so much. It’ll be hard,’ she says. ‘You know something, I’ll even miss you.’

  ‘So don’t go,’ he says, ‘stay here.’

  ‘There’s nothing here for me to do though. I can’t stay here my whole life.’

  At times it was almost impossible to find a way

  out of the awful turmoil in which they found

  themselves. Then, we saw one solitary penguin

  Roosting in the rays of the midnight sun.

  ‘You can’t possibly know that,’ he says, ‘that there’s nothing here for you.’

  ‘Don’t judge me. You’re leaving too. And at least I’m leaving because I worked my ass off to leave. I want stuff to write about. You’re just going for a girl.’

  ‘That’s not entirely true,’ he says, wondering what the hell he can say next but he doesn’t have to say anything because it’s dark and no one wants a long and full explanation in front of a movie screen. He looks at her with the lights of the film making shadows under her eyes and under her nose and mouth and she’s looking straight at the screen, so beautiful and dark she could be anyone and Tomás could kiss her. But then, the loud noise of waves breaking against the ship fills the secret room.

  If the ship failed to break the ice,

  she was put in a stand some distance away.

  Then, with more way on her,

  she would ram again, and usually split it.

  The ship breaks the ice and sails past the cracks leaving behind it nothing but floating ice cubes in what used to look like part of a whole continent. Tomás doesn’t understand how such a miserable sight could make anyone happy.

  Matilde’s holding her knees up to her chest and she’s so still.

  ‘Sorry,’ Tomás says. ‘I think I’m just nervous about leaving. But it looks like an amazing place. Thanks for showing me this. It makes me want to go even more and you’re right, there’s nothing for us to do here in Santiago.’

  She looks at him and smiles but Tomás knows that despite her meaning well, she’s smiling because she made his life here seem pointless even before she’s even left.

  We took risks, we knew we took them.

  Things have come out against us and

  therefore we have no cause for complaint

  but bow to the will of providence.

  We are weak, writing is difficult,

  But for my own sake I do not regret

  this journey…

  And then the film cuts to a handwritten note left by some sailor who died trapped in a snowstorm saying the same thing: I DO NOT REGRET THIS JOURNEY…

  ‘Tragic, huh? It kind of bummed me out,’ Matilde says as the violins kick in mixed with Max Richter’s piano. The film comes to an end without even a credits screen. Then, the projector comes to a stop too and the end of its hum leaves the dark room feeling empty.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says.

  ‘I thought you’d appreciate it. How did it make you feel?’ she asks, lifting the needle from the record player.

  How did it make him feel? The ship leaving, the on-board dancing, the splitting ice and the lonely ocean
, how did it all make him feel? He has no fucking clue but he…

  ‘I feel like I’m there already,’ he says.

  She takes his hand again and they hold hands in silence for a few minutes.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asks back, looking at him with the same shadows on her face as before.

  ‘I’m going to go home.’

  ‘Then I’ll go home with you.’

  19

  The Blue Drum Kit

  So you like thinking you’re special, right? You like thinking that somehow your interpretation of the activities you share with others, the same daily routines, is different to everyone else’s, yeah? You love that, admit it, no one here will listen, and you love it even more when there’s music and the singer really gets you, you really get them, but no one else does. Now imagine you want to tell the girl or guy you’re fucking exactly what you do and don’t like. You love the weirdest things, you tell yourself. If you were honest you’d say you like blowjobs, handjobs, fucking from behind, slight pain, eating pussy, having them eat your pussy, choking, being choked, unprotected cocks, anal, and big firm tits, big firm cocks, and they ask you what you like again and you tell them it’s just too weird to say, that they’d think you’re a creep, a maniac, a sociopath, but this only makes it more interesting and they keep asking you and asking you and won’t let go… So you tell them, you give them the whole list, and it turns out they like the same things as you do and tell you that every person they’ve been with before likes those same things too. And now you wish you hadn’t said anything, and you realise you don’t even remember the lyrics to the songs you call your own, only the choruses, and you let some random tune playing in the background dictate the movement of your hips, which are the same as every hip in the planet, so you stop altogether and they look puzzled. You keep still. A minute, two minutes pass by, but you don’t move and they look even more puzzled. Then they laugh and tell you that no one in the world fucks like you now.