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…
• • •
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.
He gets to the bridge in Baquedano and ignores the river and the plastic windmill salesman offering him another windmill, I looked for you without knowing where to go, and he crosses over towards Bellavista. He can hear himself breathe over the music so he turns it up, The streets I walked randomly, the places I have been to, and keeps running towards the San Cristóbal Hill, and he crashes against a crowd of ceviche eaters out in a bar terrace, Let me come home with you so that I, and they shout things he can’t hear but none of it matters because the music makes anything that happens part of the same scene, the same story, and I’m going to take one step that takes me…
He gets to Neruda’s house and the graffitied wall is filled with ‘Fármacos’ posters. Yiyo’s face is on some of them, but that’s fine, it was all meant to happen and he whispers Javiera Mena’s lyrics, going to take one step and crosses an empty stone fountain and gets to Eva’s violet house.
He rings the bell. There’s a light on in one of the flats and he tries to look for moving silhouettes inside but he can only see a chair next to a lamp. He rings again, twice, three and four times but nothing, and then the radio dies out and the song ends and the world without music is so disappointing and quiet and he’s just another person in Bellavista, another dude looking for…
He sits on the pavement opposite to wait and lights a cigarette, and just as he manages to turn the radio back on, a black SUV pulls over in front of him. A woman comes out to open the gates. She’s getting drenched and it takes Tomás a few seconds to understand that it’s Eva who’s smiling whilst she opens a door to somewhere he’s not yet been to, it’s her he’s not kissing, and that it’s him who she did not see.
He can’t stand at first. He can’t call her. She’s changed so much, he thinks, without being able to point out any specific changes. Maybe it’s the hair, much shorter than it used to be. Or maybe it’s how much thinner she looks. Or it might just be the makeup. But it could just be the rain. Whatever it is, he can’t get up and he notices he dropped his cigarette into a puddle and he doesn’t have any more left and…
Shit, he can get up! He gets closer to her but he still can’t… Is it even possible? Is it even her? He can’t yet see because the sky is fucking falling, the rain is heavy in the puddles, rivers forming at the edge of the pavement, and to see her, to really see her he has to hear her too, and ask her, is it really you? Is it… And only when she says yes and holds him and invites him into the house, and into the non-cream-coloured flat, and asks him if he’d please just stir those damn vegetables for the canard à l’orange and then asks him about his latest games, his latest stories, and she tells him about the holes of the Earth, the icy caves that reminded her of him all this time because they lead, well, they lead…
And she steps besides her car after the lock-button makes him appear in its orange flash. The rain makes them both look like standing shadows, no, not shadows, because shadows live, and neither of them moves at all, not an inch.
Tomás takes a deep breath and a step towards her. Even her shadow form is the best shadow form. His feet are soaking wet. His hair won’t stop dripping. He feels the weight of his jacket, getting heavier, heavier, heavier and what does his shadow even look like? He walks right up to her and he can finally see her eyes, the green eyes which remain calm despite everything. And so he remains calm too, but not for long, because he takes another few step towards her and now they are face to face and he can finally hear her breathing… Does she remember his breathing too? And it’s right now where Tomás wants to tell her about so many things and all at once: the dead bird at the office, the dead leaves of dead Serge stuck on repeat, the Satanists and The End of The World, his meaning to meet her all the way down in Antarctica, on a ship with as much hope as crew members, and his dad’s funeral, and then the second plane crash, the coffin crash, and his new friends, his new friend, his new… So much he finds it impossible to tell her about any of them.
‘Hi,’ he says instead.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asks, dropping her handbag on the tiny rivers on the pavement. ‘I can’t believe it. I honestly can’t believe you sometimes.’
‘I never thought I’d…’
‘You shouldn’t have come. What are we meant to…’
‘Do you know, do you…’
‘You need an umbrella. This is ridiculous.’
‘But, wait, I mean, sorry, do…’
‘Tomás, how is this good for either of us?’
‘Well, it, you know, I still…’
‘No. Don’t say it. You can’t just turn up. What did you think would happen?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe, something, I don’t know.’
‘I… I’m speechless. You need to leave.’
‘But I think we should…’
‘Please, Tomás, please leave.’
‘Not long enough.’
‘When is that? How does that make sense?’
She looks up at her window. He wonders if she ever looked up at his window. Did she ever see the HI – I HOPE YOU’RE WELL 
sign? He knows it’s stupid as hell, but he wishes he had it with him to show it to her.
‘Has it always rained this hard?’ she asks instead.
‘Sometimes harder. But, I wanted to…’
‘I need to go and get ready. It’s late. Tomorrow I’m…’
‘Why are you…’
‘Um… It was really not good seeing you. I don’t think you should come here again. Take care. Keep well.’
Tomás can’t move again. He wants to move but he just can’t. What is it with the rain that once it has you, you almost forget that it’s falling? Is it perhaps that it is then you finally realise that it is water, only water, and that it falls just as violently on any floor, roof, person and animal? Does it take a storm for you to finally realise that none of it was really meant for you? But Tomás isn’t thinking about any of these questions. In fact, he isn’t thinking much at all. He can only repeat the final words. Keep well, keep well, keep… And then he turns round and heads towards the river of shit.
Tomás is trembling and his hair drips. If this moment were a videogame it would be a bug, a game-breaking bug, in C++ it would be a dash, GAME OVER, Insert Coin… And no story would be able to save it.
He picks up a cigarette from a puddle and tries to light it knowing that it won’t work. He takes his headphones off and sighs. He’s surprised by how life without a backing track has no drama, no opening tune to new situations and no tragic climaxes for an ending. It’s just small sounds: the birds and the wind through the tree leaves, the traffic always humming, and the banal percussion of breaking branches, steps on the pavement and the creaking wooden tiles of the old Bellavista bars. But that’s fine. Tonight, Tomás has no choice but to be a part of that city, the lifeless city, the real Santiago.
He walks away from Bellavista and gets to the bridge in Baquedano again. He goes to the kiosk at the end of the bridge to buy some cigarettes.
‘Hey Tomás, how are we doing tonight, po’ huevon?’
‘Hey Matías, not good, not good at all.’
‘Oh, shame, shame. You know what my mother always said? When things turn to shit, buy expensive alcohol.’
‘She said that?’
‘Yes, always. Lucky for you I have very expensive alcohol.’
‘Can I just get some cigarettes?’
‘Of course. You know I have boxes of ten again if you’d like… Although, if I may say so myself, I recommend not getting those. I mean, imagine running out and not being able to give one to a lady at the disco. I wouldn’t want to be you, that’s for sure.’
‘Twenty will be fine, man. And no one says “disco” anymore.’
‘Thank you, thank you. And what do they say then? Here,’ he says, handing Tomás the packet.
‘I’m actually not sure.’
‘Disco it is then.’
‘Bye man.’ Tomás waves and walks to the centre of the bridge.
He looks down and he remembers that he’s done this before, but he isn’t sure which part, because he should have predicted this would all happen and maybe new things from now on will seem like memories. Is this what happens when you turn old? Life should be counted in hours, in seconds, just so everyone could know how old he feels right now. The water under him swallows all the noises of the city and he’s glad he doesn’t have to hear any of it for as long as he stays there. Everything disappears at the bridge and even though he knows rivers erode the edges of their flow, he is sure that this one has stayed the same and will carry on changing nothing long after he’s gone.
He starts his walk home and it feels like the longest walk he’s ever had to do. Then, when he gets to his corridor he can hear Jesús’s heavy metal playing through the door. He notices that his own door is open.
‘Fuck my life,’ he says, banging his head against it. The piece of cracked ceiling isn’t on his desk, the rug’s dry, and there’s no trash on the kitchen floor. And on his desk there’s a full French press with two coffee cups beside it. One of the cups is the naked woman cup he got at Abdul’s. The tent is still there and he tries to see if anyone’s inside. Nothing.
‘Hello?’ he says, lighting his way in with his phone.
He hears someone walking in his room at the end of the corridor, so he gets the axe by the fridge and tiptoes his way to the noise.
‘Hey!’ he shouts.
A girl screams in his room and then laughs.
‘What are you doing?! It’s me.’
‘Oh,’ Tomás says, putting the axe down by the door. ‘What are you doing here?’
Matilde walks up to him.
‘I was with Lucas and Jesús. You weren’t answering my texts. So I knocked and noticed the door was open so I thought I’d fix your flat a little. Look, you have a bed now. Well, it’s still just half a bed. These manuals do not make it easy, huh? Want to give me a hand?’
‘Look, I’ve had the worst fucking… I need to be alone.’
‘Come on, give me a hand,’ she says with a smile, showing him her hammer.
‘I just want to sleep.’
‘That’s fine, but at least sleep on a bed tonight. Come—’
‘Please, leave. Leave. I didn’t ask you to do anything. Nothing fucking works. Nothing gets fixed. Get out. Have fun in New York. Just know that no one will give a shit about stories over there either. No one gives a shit about anything.’
She lets the hammer fall and puts on her coat. She makes her way past the corridor and she doesn’t say a thing. At his door, Lucas and Jesús are waiting for her without coming in.
Lucas gives him a long stare before they all disappear and he can lock the door, which he bangs his head against several times.
He goes inside the tent and puts on his ski goggles and he’s glad he’s wearing them, because with them on he won’t have to know if he’s crying or not if he passes by his own reflection on the windows. He stays on the sleeping bag straight and starts his radio again but it’s playing Fármacos and for once he prefers to cope with the silence. The world has no echoes, no delay, no distortion and no release. It’s just streets in Santiago, and most nights they’re empty. His life is this, he thinks as he lies down on his side, it is this and nothing else.