We Are the End

by Gonzalo Garcia

  ‘The cheque should be on your system somewhere. Check again.’ He just doesn’t want to have to come here again. He has so much to do, so much to think about – though he could be back tomorrow (or the day after), but he had set tomorrow aside, the whole week aside, to write a whole story based on all his notes.

  The clerk slides the papers back to Tomás and the guard comes to take him outside by the arm. Tomás and the guard look at each other in silence.

  ‘It’s procedures, my friend. Why can’t some people just understand?’ the guard says, shaking his head.

  When the guard deposits him outside, a protester comes and takes a picture of him.

  ‘Banker assholes! Treating our people always like shit! Enjoy it while it lasts. This will end, you will end!’

  Tomás sighs. He’s back with the revolutionary penguins. He has his last cigarette on his way to the university offices.

  When he gets there he sees a blue Vespa attached to a lamppost amidst all the Blue Peace hippies. But when he walks closer to it to check if it’s Matilde, one of the hippies hops on it and leaves.

  He makes his way up to the office and the new secretary frowns at him and stands from her seat.

  ‘You again,’ she says.

  ‘I need to talk to the Head of School. Or Jaime. Is Jaime around?’

  ‘He’s teaching.’

  ‘And Pedro?’

  She sighs and picks up the phone.

  ‘Someone’s here to see you… Sure? OK.’ She looks at Tomás and sits back down. ‘What are you waiting for? He’s in there waiting for you.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Tomás walks his old corridor and readies the old student papers out of his bag. He knocks but no one answers, so he just goes in. Inside, Pedro is holding a skull and facing the row of embalmed birds in bell jars on his bookshelf.

  ‘Come here Tomás, come here.’

  Tomás walks over by the window and he can see all the hippies shouting downstairs.

  ‘Do you know why I keep these?’ Pedro asks pointing at the birds.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘They remind me, every time I come into work, that one day I will die too and all that will be remembered of me will be short moments frozen in time and all out of context.’

  ‘Alright… Well, I brought you the marked papers.’

  Tomás puts them on Pedro’s desk. ‘I was hoping we could talk about—’

  ‘No, no talk. Look at them outside.’ Tomás look at the hippies and he spots John Lennon shouting into a megaphone on a stage.

  ‘What about them?’ Tomás asks.

  ‘They want to be remembered too.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So you never had your great idea. Jaime told me you never came up with the story. You don’t get a place in my office Tomás, because you leave and then you’re forgotten.’

  ‘So I can’t have my job back?

  • • •

  IDEAS BOOK P. 97:

  CHAOS CREW: Urban Revenge. LIGHTNING SQUAD: Arma-fucking-geddon. NUCLEAR WINTER: Hot Shots. DOOM. QUAKE 3: Arena. CALL OF DUTY 4: Modern Warfare. WOLFENSTEIN 3D.

  What do these all have in common (apart from their generic titles)? Well, they’re all big hits and they’re all First Person Shooters (FPS), in which you run around killing people or aliens (or both) in first person, that is, never seeing your avatar’s reaction to all the killing you make him or her do (in some old ones you do get a tiny face at the edge of the screen, but the only expressions available are rage and fear). In fact, they often create ludonarrative dissonance, a conflict between gameplay mechanics and story elements, because sometimes you can even kill your digital partner or innocent civilians and just go on with the story as if nothing had happened. Bioshock is one of the few that do it on purpose, since the game world is a bonkers under-water capitalistic utopia gone wrong, and yet you, as the player, are locked into a gameplay format which lends itself to self-interest, and can only really focus on one point of view (a capitalistic utopia).

  But what could we do differently? We could change the setting and take the format away from wars and conflict zones. There was once an unofficial Wolfenstein 3D clone (Wolfenstein is about escaping a Nazi castle ran by mecha-Hitler, part machine, part Hitler) called Noah’s Ark 3D, in which you are Noah and instead of a gun you use a slingshot to shoot at sheep trying to attack you. It was a piece of shit, but at least it tried to take the violence out to appeal to a younger, and crazy evangelical audience. Now the question is, can we make a non-violent (and non-evangelical) FPS?

  First, we’d have to disarm you. You no longer have a Glock, or a P7 or a Desert Eagle. No M16s or AK-47s and definitely no grenade launchers or anything that could blow up an opponent.

  And there’d have to be no opponents because you won’t have guns and… No, you will have to run away. You will be a digital Ghandi and just take a few bullets until the baddies run out of ammo and start chasing you to punch you in the gut and… Now there’s violence again so no… In this game you understand, you UNDERSTAND that the baddies are not baddies but just regular people who expect a regular wage to live their regular lives and that it’s nothing personal, there are no hard feelings, in the fact that they would like you dead… And again… More violence… Now they don’t want you dead. They just want to talk to you, you know? But you don’t want to talk. You have no guns and the thought of having a long chat with a computer character is so embarrassing that you keep running away… But they still want you to chat with them. They even send you an invitation: CHAT WITH US. You ignore it in your inventory: Ludonarrative dissonance. But then you wonder what is there to do in the game. If you can’t shoot, if you can’t kill or hurt anyone, why would the game do it to you?

  And then you die.

  • • •

  Tomás leaves and he makes his way to the bridge in Baquedano to buy more cigarettes. But when he gets to the middle of it, he decides to just stand there and look at the water. No job, no girlfriend, and likely to move back with his mum. What a fucking cliché. He should be in the Antarctic, on some boat breaking sheets of ice like in that movie Matilde showed him. But no, Eva came back and she brought him nothing. They probably didn’t even discover what was at the bottom of those underwater ice caves that she always mentioned. It wasn’t about the results, they’ll say, it was about being able to come up with more questions, with a way to ensure that no one could ever again be certain of anything that goes so deep into the ocean. Instead, he’s here in Santiago, and despite the fact that he might never leave, he finds himself missing it. And it’s not about the distance, not about how far he is from all the skyscrapers around him, or how the river at night can only be beautiful from the bridge, or even how rain sounds better from the inside of a bedroom. It’s about time, so much time, because even from the top of the San Cristóbal Hill, even when the whole world’s under him and he can see it all, it is made up of so little. It’s the things he remembers. The walks in the park. The benches they sat on. The plans they were making. It’s about Paris! And the silence of a look before a kiss and the way she always broke them off when she heard someone else near. But he can’t put the images into order, and the more time that passes the more Santiago will be filled with the things he’s forgotten. Such a waste of time. And isn’t that what moving on means, to agree to waste time, to declare yourself absent from this fucking city?

  He walks to the kiosk to buy cigarettes but it’s another salesman who greets him.

  ‘Hi,’ Tomás says, ‘where’s Matías?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I’ll just have a twenty pack of Camels please.’

  ‘Here you go.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You should probably try to give up, my friend. These things will kill you.’

  ‘You’re right, I should,’ Tomás says, thinking that he needs to start buying his cigarettes somewhere else.

  He takes the bus home to avoid the crowds of protesters. They never go on buses and he doesn’t kno
w why, but it might be that no one can look threatening waiting for a bus driver to open doors only wide enough for one person.

  On the bus, he looks for his phone in his pockets but can’t find it. He had been an asshole to Matilde again, and although he’s sure she’ll understand (Jesus, man), she must still be waiting for him to answer her texts. He presses the button for the bus to stop but it doesn’t work. An old lady with a trolley sighs and looks at him and presses it again and it makes a loud TING.

  ‘Thanks,’ he says, standing up.

  ‘Men today,’ she says with a sigh, ‘so utterly useless.’

  When he gets home he takes his phone from under the table and lights a cigarette. The last text from Matilde says, ‘I guess we did what I wanted. I will go and I will forget the week ever happened. I should thank you but I won’t. x.’ Then he reads a text from Yiyo, ‘LP launch party tonight in Bellavista. We’re going touring after that. Come say goodbye!’ Below that, it says his phone’s memory is empty and two other texts come up with Matilde’s name but they’re blank. He goes over the photographs on his phone to make space and most of them are about Eva: her showing their apartment keys in front of her parents’ fig tree, DELETE, her posing with a new summer dress she bought herself for a New Year’s Eve, DELETE, her showing him the miniature Eiffel Tower statue, DELETE, her pretending to be testing something out of a pan with her finger, DELETE, her with her back to the camera looking down at the city from the hill, DELETE! He doesn’t see the rest and just deletes them until the phone says that he has no more photos to look at, and that he should try using the new filters to make everything better and worth keeping.

  Matilde’s texts don’t appear and Tomás readies himself to go see Yiyo (which is to say he puts his shoes back on). But at the door he turns and opens the freezer and takes the frozen chicken out. He looks at it all contorted and sighs.

  ‘Fuck you, you fucking douchebag fucking chicken,’ he tells it and bins it and it falls like a brick and just as it hits the end of the bin, his phone rings with Matilde’s name bright blue on the screen and a bird commits suicide by banging its head on his smoking window.

  • • •

  And Eva has stopped breathing but he hasn’t. In fact, as the tidal wave takes over the world, he finds he’s able to breathe even better under water. It’s pitch black now, there is no up or down or anywhere to go. He doesn’t know where Eva is. He doesn’t know where he is. He can’t light a new cigarette to pass the time, or write a new game idea, which may or may not make him a millionaire, because the waves take, and they take and take and spoil and spoil everything with their unexpected sways. There is sometimes a flicker of pink and green, but it’s far, so far into the deepest places of the ocean or the sky, and he knows then and there, that the dying fireworks of the world are dying forever. So he waits for the last explosion of colour, the last time he’ll see the remainder of the world he used to know and… BANG! He can only breathe, breathe deep into the lack of air and let the currents take over while thinking shit man, one day the sun sets and on the next you have nothing.

  • • •

  In Santiago every shadow is triangular, edging past pavement cracks and bending over walls to end on sharp peaks that stick out like knives. When he stands still, he looks like a triangle too, and he cuts the peach-lit walls into darker parts and then he knows, and she knows, she knew, that even shadows leave permanent marks that divide the world into little intangible bits of information like the stillness of a misremembered anecdote, or the sound of his own breath before voicing her name.

  Outside the Bar Loreto, there’s yet another queue of goths. Some of them must be in their forties because they have velvet capes and top hats and they’re smiling instead of being ashamed of dressing up like children playing wizards.

  He queues behind them and sees Jesús at the door, stamping hands. Beside him, a faded red and pink poster that says ‘Fármacos: TO THE END’ and behind the band name there are rows and rows and rows of… Tomás can’t stop looking at them.

  ‘Hey, it’s you,’ Jesús tells him, adjusting his top hat.

  ‘Hi,’ Tomás says. ‘How much is it to get in?’

  ‘For you, ten thousand.’

  ‘Oh, but it says five,’ Tomás says, looking at the sign by the door.

  ‘First off, why do you ask then? Second of all, it’s five for the general public, free for my friends… And you’re neither, man. You’re more like Lilith, fucks with my friends and then leaves them alone.’

  ‘Who the fuck’s Lilith?’

  ‘It’s ten thousand pesos.’

  Tomás looks inside his wallet and he has nothing.

  ‘Hey, look dude, my friend Yiyo’s playing inside. He expects me to be there.’

  ‘Yeah, well, a lot of people expect you to be there.’

  But then Tomás sees Yiyo pass by the entrance.

  ‘Hey!’ Tomás shouts and Yiyo comes out to hug him.

  ‘Dude, come in, we’re about to play.’

  Jesús lets him through with a frown. Inside, it’s the familiar thumping of the bass and the strobes of green and red through clouds of smoke, and groups of people dancing and drinking and keeping their distance with other groups doing the same. Yiyo leaves him in the middle of the dance floor and Tomás looks at his phone. He should answer Matilde’s text message. Particularly that last text message. He wants to tell her that it’s fine, that even though most people will tell you that any second, any random moment could change your life forever, most outcomes are predictable and have been programmed full of bugs and mistakes, and it isn’t even destiny or some bullshit belief in the afterlife. No, all it takes is the knowledge that the spark of the moment does not light anything you didn’t know was already there, and that stars and all their constellations have never spoken to you, even though you speak for them every night. But he doesn’t write anything and looks up at the empty stage. He notices that everyone around him is wearing a black T-shirt with a white print of troll dolls that says ‘Fármacos’ under it, and Tomás laughs and wishes he were under his desk at work again.

  He looks for Jesús to ask him about Matilde, as if by apologising to someone who knows them both he’d be easier to forgive. And lighting a cigarette in the middle of the crowd gathering at the dance floor, he suddenly has an idea. Fármacos come on the stage and all the people in troll doll shirts start screaming and whistling and Tomás makes his way out against the pushing crowd.

  Outside, he finds Jesús alone.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, but Jesús just looks at him. ‘I wanted to ask you… Has she left? Has Matilde left already?’

  ‘Why would I tell you?’

  ‘So she’s still in Santiago?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Tomás sighs and drops his lit cigarette inside his satchel. Jesús laughs as Tomás tries to find it. And it’s there that he takes out the folder with the inheritance cash information and blows the cigarette ash out of it.

  ‘Wait, how much do you still need?’ he asks Jesús.

  ‘From you? Ten thousand.’

  ‘No, no, in total… For the End Of The World, I mean.’

  ‘Well, the guy in Vicuña is charging just under a million. Last I heard, he found out that there might even be a 2% chance that the comet could end it all in 2018. Why?’

  Tomás smiles. ‘Here,’ he says, showing him the folder. ‘Here’s the money you’ll need. Read it, and call me later.’

  Jesús opens the folder and reads the number on the first page.

  ‘So you are actually mental.’

  ‘No, seriously, just take it and call me. We’ll sort it out. Where’s Matilde?’

  ‘Oh, she’s in a hotel called Valle Bonito,’ Jesús says, putting the folder in a backpack behind him. ‘Are you serious about this?’

  ‘Yes, I’m serious. Where’s the hotel?’

  ‘Right, it’s just past Plaza Italia, in front of the park by the river. You’ll find it if you just follow the road
. Dude, thanks so much for this. I’ll make sure to tell you how everything ends.’

  Tomás nods and looks around for a way to get to Plaza Italia quickly.

  ‘Hey,’ Jesús says, ‘she left me her motorcycle to take care of it while she’s gone. It’s over there by the bins. Here are the keys. Bring it back safe.’

  ‘I don’t have a license.’

  ‘But can you drive one?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s like a bike. Don’t be such a pussy,’ Jesús says, handing him the keys.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Oh, wait,’ Jesús says, reaching down to a cardboard box behind him, ‘here, take a shirt for you and Matilde.’

  Tomás puts on the troll doll shirt on top of his other shirt and runs to the bins to get the motorcycle. He turns the engine on and runs it against a lamppost and breaks the front light but it doesn’t matter. He pulls it out and to the side, gets on and accelerates and there are no mirrors, and so he just has to imagine what’s behind him or forget about it and just ignore it. Not being able to look back and guiding himself by the lights around him, he thinks that this is what it must be like to learn to fly and his dad would…

  The streets are all moving silhouettes and the sound of wheels sliding on rain. Drops keep bouncing at his face as if it were raining backwards and he uses his shoulder to wipe himself. When he’s past the ceviche assholes of Bellavista, the avenue opens wide and he turns to follow the river, with only the light of the buildings and the silver shine on the pavement allowing him to see into the road.

  He sees the hotel but he drives past it. Trying to brake into the side of the road he ends up crashing against a parked car and its alarm goes off. He stays there staring at it for a few seconds. People look at him, at the car, and he turns around and starts running to the hotel.

  When he gets there the lobby is empty. He rings the reception bell, waits a few minutes, rings again. Nothing. Tomás sighs and he turns to leave but before he crosses the glass doors out…

  ‘Hey.’