Tierra del Fuego
First published in Causeway/Cabhsair 7-1 (May 2016)
I can’t recall how long I’ve been here. Three weeks, maybe more. I had the rations worked out but somewhere, sometime, numbers started lying to me. One became two, many became none. Time played games. The dregs of my old life. Dark and light, night and day. It’s pretty meaningless if you think about it. The orbit of the planet, the counter-clockwise spin of the Earth, the rise and fall of the sun has little to do with us.
To the west, where the sun slinks away down the spine of the range, was my home. It’s in darkness now, submerged. This setting sun nothing to the buildings and roads. I sit on this cliff edge, my back to the world, before me only sea and ice. What was once a city is now a headland.
I always imagined a climax. The end of the world. Everyone did. An explosion, an implosion—wind, rain, the arid heat of a desert compressed into a nanosecond burst. It wasn’t like that. Slow. Imperceptible. The tide didn’t turn. It’s so simple. The tide didn’t turn. It kept coming, coming, coming. Met obstacles, flowed away, rose, eroded. There’s not much left now. Not much but water. Waves batter these mountains. The water is eroding, causing subsidence. If I come down off my mountain, I’ll drown. So I’ll stay here, me and my tent, my dwindling supplies, and see which takes me first. Hunger. Thirst. Death by water. Death by cold. Death by landslide. Death by madness. What does it matter? The spin of the Earth is nothing to me.
Rising suns, rising tides. My elder brothers were fishermen, a day’s work done before the day began. We’d sit on the harbour with wine and dried squid and I’d listen to their stories of the waves, the swell, the squalls and spirits. By the time my turn came the fish had gone, the currents shifted taking the warmer water away. Emptier and emptier, their trawlers, their stories. So I worked on shore, clambered up scaffolds and built homes. They packed their families onto their fleet and sailed away over the roofs I’d shingled, over the cement I’d mixed. They sailed away while I climbed these bitter peaks. Futile, both futile, death by altitude, death by drowning.
Over the horizon there’s more of the same. Over the horizon are different peaks, different tents, new brothers, the same ocean, the same waves scolding their hulls, scolding my cliffs. The spin of the Earth, rising suns, rising tides. It means nothing, means everything. Death by everything, death by nothing. The end of the world. I zip my tent. Zip my sleeping bag. There are worlds, more worlds than you can count, more than you can dream. Alone at the end of the world, the wind rippling the canvas. Tell me a story, I say, the canvas shushing like grass, tell me a story of this world, of other worlds, a story of Khartoum, of La Paz, a story of Anchorage and Adelaide, a story of Minsk, of Penang, a story of open seas, a story of high mountains, a story of dark nights and bursting mornings, a story of the shattering north, of the blistering south. Tell me a story, I say, a story of death, a story of the end of the world. For the spin of the Earth, this rising of suns, the rising of tides, what are these if not stories? Stories the universe tells itself between big bangs and black holes. Stories of creation. Stories of destruction. Tell me a story, I tell the emptiness, the silence.
Tell me a story.
A story of the end of the world.