IDEAS BOOK P. 64:
Today it’ll be a game about… No, fuck it, today I can’t write a game. My. God. I’m writing a fucking diary: quarter-life crisis UNLOCKED. Now I have truly become it (it = terrible megadouche). I didn’t mean to start being it, promise. Then again that’s what it would say. It’s just I can’t stop thinking about my first job, back when jobs seemed exciting, and every shitty little thing that you knew you were too good to do seemed like an exciting possibility to show it (regular ‘it’).
I got my first job through my dad with Clover, age 16. I was to work for a month in the summer (that felt like a year) at the Paper Cutting Department. Yup, they have a Paper Cutting Department, and my job was to cut up ice-cream ads to place outside street kiosks. But that isn’t why I’m thinking about all of this. The reason is Bernardo, Bernardo the veteran paper cutter.
I got an email telling me where to meet him. I was to go to the basement. Then the guy who took me to the stairs told me not to worry if Bernardo seemed a little off, which is what someone who does worry about how off he was would say. And so I worried.
He left me in front of a broad blue plastic-coated door, a constant SHIN-SHIN-SHAN-SHAN-BIP-BIP-BIP inside. I waited there for a few minutes. I opened the door. Bernardo had his back to me as he tended a machine where he was cutting the edges of a giant chocolate cornetto. Damn was he good at cutting those little corners on the chocolate flakes.
‘Hello,’ I said, still in the doorway.
‘Hurry, hurry. Get your apron and you can help me with this. My name’s Bernardo. I cut things.’
He said that. I shit you not. He said he cut things.
‘I’m Tomás, I’ve never cut anything,’ I should have said.
‘You’ll learn, though it’s not easy,’ he said with a sigh.
‘That’s what I want. I want to learn. I’m ready for anything,’ I definitely did not say.
And this is when Bernardo turned to me and I could see him full. Well, full isn’t quite right. His right hand was missing and he had made a knot on it with the extra sleeve length over it.
‘I learnt the hard way kid,’ he said, and all I thought was, shit, this guy works in a basement, in a FUCKING BASEMENT and HE LOST A HAND to a chocolate cornetto, the worst way to lose a hand (I could never eat a chocolate cornetto ever again), and shit, shit the world is unfair, and shit the knot is disgusting to look at, and the knot only makes it MORE VISIBLE. That’s right. A naked stump would have remained hidden given the appropriate lighting conditions but… A knot. A basement. Ice-cream. No hand. Fuck.
‘Be careful with that machine,’ he told me. ‘It’s French and it’s expensive,’ he added, and he pointed at it WITH THE KNOTTED ARM. By that time I just wanted out of it all. I never touched the machine. I was careful. I quit. Dad shouted about quitters. He called me ‘a quitter, just like Argentinians.’ But Bernardo just shrugged a disfigured shrug, an asymmetrical shrug, and what he told me I will never forget.
‘It’s not worth it kid.’
• • •
It’s just past midnight and Tomás is wondering if the rain will ever stop. When he got home he lay down on the sofa and stared at the hole in the ceiling for so long he’s not sure if time went by too quickly or if he fell into a sleep too light to notice. Then he got up, and lighting his way with his phone he made himself some coffee. But since the kettle has burnt out, he had to just fill the French press with hot water from the tap. It still tasted the same though, because he waited even more than five minutes for it to brew. He went to his window to smoke and got angry at himself for not being able to quit and briefly considered how clean his apartment would be if he didn’t waste so much time smoking. He’d probably be in the Antarctic by now! And so he decided to chain-smoke so as to only have ten cigarettes left by the end of the night and from tomorrow he’ll make sure to buy only packs of ten.
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 liquid 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.’
‘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.