‘No, I mean it,’ she says, sitting up and leaning on her elbows.
‘Look, since you don’t really know me that well I’ll promise you one thing… When you come back, if you come back, I promise I’ll be the same, just because, I guess, because you don’t know me.’
She smiles at him and takes her chewing gum out of her mouth and stretches it between both her hands.
‘Look,’ she says, as she cuts a gumball off and sticks it above them. Then, she does it again and again and he joins in too and in just a moment they fill the desk with chewing gum constellations in no particular order. No squares, no circles, just shapeless stars and Tomás looks across at the troll doll and he swears its smile just grew a little.
‘They look like stars,’ she says.
‘They do.’
But then they hear steps outside and someone trying to get in.
‘Hey, it’s me, Jaime. Let me in!’ he says, knocking.
Tomás comes out from under the desk and stretches his hand to help Matilde up but she gets up without looking at him.
‘We better go,’ he says.
Tomás unlocks and opens the door. Jaime’s wearing a suit.
‘Did you bring back my umbrella?’ he asks, but then looks past Tomás and to Matilde and frowns. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘What are you doing here?’ she asks him.
‘I work here…’
‘Oh,’ she says, taking Tomás’s hand. ‘Let’s go.’
‘I’m here with my new girlfriend too, in case you’re wondering,’ Jaime tells her, adjusting his tie.
‘I wasn’t, but good for you,’ Matilde says. But as she pulls Tomás towards the door, Fran appears playing with a pair of scissors.
‘Oh, you so fast a one,’ she says to Tomás. ‘How count many that is already? Two, three girl? Who know, yes? It not like is you are keeping no count,’ she says to Tomás, snapping the scissors close.
‘By the way,’ Matilde tells Fran, ‘if he tells you that he writes stories, that’s all a lie. He’s only in charge of the gameplay mechanics.’
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Tomás says, and Matilde nods and they start running down the corridor and they hear Jaime shouting ‘Text me!’ and then arguing with Fran but Tomás keeps running: past reception, down the stairs, through the hippies and their banners and then finally they get to Matilde’s motorbike.
‘Sorry you didn’t get your stuff,’ she says.
‘I can’t believe you went out with Jaime.’
‘Let’s go,’ she says, unlocking the bike chain.
‘I mean, he could be your dad.’
‘He’s as old as you, Tomás, and you went out with…’
‘Hey, he’s at least two years older.’
‘Fuck,’ she says, looking at her bike.
‘What happened?’
‘Look on the other side, the hippies sprayed it.’
Tomás looks at the other side of the motorcycle and sees a large neon pink ‘CO2’ painted at the back.
‘Crap.’
‘Yeah.’
‘At least it goes with my helmet now,’ he says, putting his pink helmet on.
‘You’re an idiot,’ she laughs.
‘Yes, but you went out with Jaime.’
‘And you went… Alright, alright… Where to?’
‘Just round the corner. Yiyo works at AudioPop.’
‘The glass building with the strip club in the basement?’
‘I think they call it pole fitness.’
‘Sure they do. Let’s go.’
She starts the motorbike but this time she drives straight on and all the hippies standing against rainfall have to move to the sides. Matilde almost runs over John Lennon and they all wave their arms and call her a bitch and a huevona but she doesn’t care. She doesn’t give a shit. She just drives on, and he holds on to her.
She turns at the avenue and for the first time in his life, Tomás sees it empty and large and open and he wonders, how could anyone ever want to leave this? But, as always, the ride doesn’t last and they get to AudioPop and Matilde chains up the bike again and they head into the shop.
Yiyo’s inside playing guitar for a group of schoolgirls in their uniforms gathered in a semi-circle around him. He’s using a delay effects pedal that makes any note he plays fill the shop. Tomás can hear the rattling of loose snare drums until it all ends in feedback and the crackling noise of a loud amp that sounds like a car radio under a tunnel.
It can’t be too urgent if Yiyo hadn’t come to find him himself. Matilde walks over to the harps section and fingers random strings. Tomás waits for the girls to leave once Yiyo starts packing up the guitar gear.
‘Hey man,’ Tomás says.
‘Oh, hey,’ Yiyo says, dropping a wire as he turns to Tomás.
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know how to tell you, dude… I don’t want you to be all upset about it. I just thought… Well, maybe, I don’t know if…’
‘Wait, I know… You got signed. Is that it? You finally got the band signed. Don’t worry, man, I’m happy for you, really.’
‘Um, yeah. Thanks. We did get signed. We start touring in a month actually. You should come with us. You could always play the keyboard or something. Textures, you know, dude? It’s all about textures.’ Tomás imagines himself playing keyboard arpeggios no one will hear whilst wearing a black turtleneck that no one will see.
‘Textures? But you don’t have keyboards,’ Tomás says.
‘But we should. And—’
‘I’m fine man, really. I won’t be here anyway. I’m going through with my trip to see Eva.’
Yiyo hangs the guitar up between other guitars and just stands there facing the shelves and touching single strings. Behind them: the perfect scales of a harp and the laughter of schoolgirls who are looking at each other’s phones.
‘You know, man, I sold the drum kit. That fucking blue piece of shit drum kit,’ Yiyo says, looking sad. ‘Dude, you have no idea how much I wanted to sell that piece of shit.’
‘I know man, I know.’
‘And for such a long time.’
‘I know.’
‘Like, I don’t think you do. It’s just now, like the band and everything, like I don’t really care much about it. I don’t even enjoy the songs that much. And it started when I sold the fucking kit. We got signed and all, but we’re not coming up with new material. It’s like, harder for some reason. I even fucking called the new owner you know? To get it back, I mean. I know it sounds mad, but if I could have it back, then maybe, I don’t know, maybe it would change stuff back to—’
‘Man, don’t worry, you’ll be fine, you always are.’
‘I don’t know man. Anyway, that wasn’t why I called you here. I wanted to talk to you about Eva,’ Yiyo says, without turning back to face Tomás.
‘What about her?’
‘Well, dude, she’s like—’
‘Hey, would it be OK if I got your autograph?’ Matilde asks Yiyo. She’s over in the corner of the shop, playing with a small harp.
‘Um, sure, do you have a paper or something?’
‘No.’
‘Get some from the printer at the counter.’
‘Hey, what’s going on?’ Tomás asks; he watches as Matilde steps away, looking for paper.
‘Oh, yeah, sorry…’ Yiyo says, turning back to the guitars. ‘She, like, came back.’
‘What?’
‘Eva, she’s back in Santiago. She told me not to tell you, but I thought you should know in case you ever run into her or something.’
‘She’s back. Eva’s back. Like, right now she’s here…’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where is her flat?’
‘You know where.’
Matilde comes back with an A4 sheet of paper and as Yiyo grabs it to sign his name on it Tomás starts running. He runs out of the shop, he runs past the motorbike, past the crowds of schoolchildren gathering for another protest,
past the kiosks and the hippies with their anti-rain banners and the traffic jams and the puddles full of rain and the skyscrapers all in gold and he keeps running because tonight everything will change, and he needs to make sure that he’s ready for it. And by change he means that he will get back a life that for a moment he thought he had lost, which then isn’t change at all but WHO THE FUCK CARES, she had crossed an ocean, an OCEAN, just as he would have done for her, and they will show each other that nothing, no matter how frozen and cold, not continents and not even time, can stand between them. He just runs and runs and hopes that she’s still wearing the same yellow dress that she was wearing back when…
He stops by another music shop and the blue drum kit is on sale.
20
The River of Shit
But nothing happened. They ate canard à l’orange and fucked just liked they’ve always fucked, Eva on top first until she comes, and Tomás on top after that until he comes. And they fell asleep so tired from the whole trip, the ocean and the fucking, that they didn’t wake up for another two days.
By the time Tomás got out of bed, Eva had already left the house. He now walks out onto the front porch and finds her gearing up (a helmet, a camping bag with hooks and rope and boots with spikes on the soles) at the beach, sitting on a Zelda towel. He waves at her and she waves back.
‘Are you ready?’ she asks him.
‘I’ve just woken up,’ he says, combing his hair back.
‘Then you’re ready,’ she says, tying a final knot on her bootlaces. ‘I found the ice hole, Tomás, I found the entrance and who knows what the hell we’ll find down there.’
He nods because he wants her to find it too, but not because he believes they’ll find anything even remotely interesting, but because he wants her to stop, to stop looking at the ground for answers, as if the whole fucking universe was a question mark, a puzzle that needed solving. He wants her to look at him with the same sense of wonder, though he knows that once this is over, there might not be any wonder left in the…
But he nods anyway, and he follows her down the beach, up a hill, down a hill, and then, in the midst of a clutter of bushes on top of the dunes, a frozen cave, a hole, like an abandoned well. Tomás picks up a handful of sand and drops it inside. No sound whatsoever.
‘You first,’ she says with a big smile.
‘I don’t think so,’ he answers.
‘I’ll meet you down there. I always will.’
Would you go down first? Would you jump? And if so, would you do it under any circumstance, without any gear or plan as to how you’ll get back up afterwards? Or a better question would be, what if you don’t want to get back up afterwards, what then? Can anything prepare you for the stupid, the silly, the uncomfortable, the downright self-destructive leaps that people take for love?
Tomás isn’t thinking about any of these questions. His only worry is finding Eva once he’s down there, but she hugs him and kisses him, ‘Je t’aime,’ she says, ‘je t’aime vraiment,’ and he jumps and slides through the icy tunnel which, to his surprise, isn’t dark at all even though it looked it from the outside. He can even see his own reflection opposite him and he’s no longer afraid. He doesn’t even feel like he’s falling, but flying, flying down, down and turning and down some more and he’s gaining speed, going so fast that every time he tries to think about Eva he gets forced into a new turn, a new fall, a new direction which needs all of his attention because he could get stuck in mid-flight, he could crash and crack the walls he needs to keep intact for her to fly down too, and then, suddenly, he drops to a room, the frozen belly of the Earth, and there’s a frozen table in the centre with service for two. Tomás sits and waits for Eva and then he…
But she doesn’t arrive. He can’t even hear her. He starts to eat the bread left on the table, drink a glass of white wine as slowly as possible: the things people do to pretend they haven’t been stood up. He notices that Serge is down here with him and he pours Tomás some more wine. ‘Oui, ça,’ Tomás tells him, ‘she will arrive any minute now,’ he adds, ‘you’ll see,’ and Serge just smiles back in silence.
And what comes down the tunnel, after five mini baguettes and a full bottle of wine isn’t Eva, but a rope ladder. Tomás is tired, so tired, but Serge points at it and then takes away his plate so Tomás knows he has to climb it. What had felt like ages falling now only takes a few seconds in reverse. It was so shallow, he thinks, so shallow, and he’s out in only seven steps.
‘You didn’t jump,’ Tomás tells Eva, now sitting in front of her.
‘No, I couldn’t.’
‘Why not? I was waiting for ages.’
‘You’re always waiting for me.’
‘I meant down there.’
‘I know. But I couldn’t. What would be left of us if I had followed you? What would we do then?’
‘But it’s what you wanted.’
‘Yeah, and I always will.’
And then they walk back to the house by the beach.
‘I’ll make us something to eat,’ she says.
‘I already ate.’
‘Alright then, I’ll fix myself something.’
‘I’ll stay here and work,’ he says, spreading out a Zelda towel on the sand.
‘So how was it? I don’t want to know the details, just your opinion. Was it wonderful?’ she asks him, with such a big smile, with such large eyes that it is impossible for him to betray her expectations, despite him feeling that she just betrayed his.
‘It was wonderful,’ he says.
‘Thank you,’ she says, and then walks off to water the daisies in their flowerpots before going inside.
Tomás sighs and watches the setting sun. ‘Je t’aime,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t do it,’ she said, and the sun blackens out into a sphere of ash that falls apart at the very last waves of the ocean. He gets up. He sits back down. The daisies she just watered are the first to die. Would she save him?
• • •
He’s sitting down in front of his desk with his head on his crossed arms, and the back of his neck is wet from the dripping ceiling above him. His phone is lit up and he sees Matilde’s name on it, which no longer matters.
Instead, he opens his laptop and goes on Facebook and lights a cigarette. He looks for Eva’s profile but it isn’t there. He clicks on Yiyo’s and checks the Common Friends list and scrolls down to find it but nothing. He looks through his contacts list on his phone and presses on Eva del mundo and he’s surprised he had forgotten he used to call her that. He presses on her number and waits for it to start ringing. He holds his breath and his face feels hot and he readies his voice and then…
‘Please leave your message—’
‘Eva,’ he says, as soon as the answer machine lady speaks for her. He hangs up and throws his phone at the wall and it makes a dent and a paint crack, but it doesn’t break like they do in movies. Of course, he should have predicted that this would happen, that she’d make sure to show him how much she’s changed, how much she’s learnt about herself, how much better than him she now knows she can be. Yes, because like most people who suddenly claim to have found themselves, she has erased her Facebook profile.
He gets up and leaves the flat. It’s only just past eleven at night and she never goes to bed before midnight. He can get there quickly if he runs. He must see her, he needs to know that she’s really back, that she remembers him and that she still…
• • •
IDEAS BOOK P. 90:
So games nowadays cost more money to make than ever. Most triple-A titles, the big corporate hitters, cost more money than Hollywood movies. But if they do well, they make much more than movies do. In the race to maximise profits and add value to a game with very little effort, studios introduced a new type of media content: Downloadable Content (DLC). With DLC, studios can sell you an unfinished, unpolished turd of a game and then make you pay for additional packages of information so that you can then finally play the game you think you bought.
If you don’t have internet shoot yourself, you’re fucked, though if you don’t have internet DLC is the least of your worries.
This is how it works. Your avatar is wearing brown and grey rags while he destroys dragons or some other dragonny shit like that. But there’s a DLC out there, an ad popping up each time you pause to save your game. It offers you a new costume, a ninja costume, a zombie costume, a golden fire sword and a shield with cool mirror lighting effects. Now you feel shit about wearing dirty rags so you buy it all and now you’re happy, only you just saw another guy riding a fucking unicorn across the sky when all you have is a pet worm. DLC: Unicorn. Buy. Check. And so on.
And so Jaime wants to do a game with DLC and unicorns How about making a game about DLC? The game starts you off with nothing but a naked avatar and 500 coins. To get more coins you need a job. The DLC to get a job is 250 coins. And that’s just for an interview. You’ll need clothes: 50 coins, and you’ll need to go to university, another 199 coins. Now a month passes and you have one coin to do everything from exploring to hanging out with your friends, to dating (all of them separate DLC: Friends packs) and what do you do? We sell you 500 coins more for the price of the full game, though now you’ve spent so much time and money on it that you might as well, and you even think it’s an investment.
And then our servers break and all you paid for gets taken away and Jaime will be laughing his ass off with his pockets filled with your tears, because the funny thing about DLC, of being able to add and subtract content from a game, is that deep down you know you never owned it in the first place.
• • •
He puts his headphones on and tunes to Sonar Radio and it’s playing Javiera Mena’s ‘Como Siempre Soñé’. He runs to the beat trying to not step on the lines in the pavement. It amazes him how different songs make a different city, I get near to you, without being able avoid it, how unrecognisable something that’s been there forever can become, You don’t know that I looked for you throughout the city, and then in a matter of minutes, then, just like that, your eyes before you sleep, all come to an end.
We Are the End Page 29