The Competition

Here’s the tourmaline water shimmering with an oily iridescence. Here are gelatinous tufts at the embankment edge littered by Styrofoam cups, green nylon netting, rusting trollies, plastic bottles and shopping bags, broken glass and disintegrating debris. This right here is the river. This right here is the time I can never get back. It’s easy, my sister said, to make some money when you’re clever. Just enter a writing competition. Just imagine pawning the heart-shaped locket your ex-girlfriend gave you. But the truth is, I don’t have a heart-shaped locket. I don’t have an ex-girlfriend. I’m not even a fully fleshed out human being at all. I’m just a quickly made-up character created to try and fulfil the needs of an imaginary audience. The strange thing is, there isn't any audience here, only a big market shaped hole where you put the words in and wait for the money to come out. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no need to create anything imaginary. I just need to walk right out of the compound and onto the street. There’s a pigeon whose crunched beak is baking in the November heat. That pigeon was alive yesterday and now it’s dead. Maybe it couldn’t find food. Maybe it couldn’t afford to live. Maybe it got hit by a car and wasn’t able to afford a trip to the vet. No biggie though. It’s just a pigeon, right? It’s just a pigeon whose crumpled face is squished in, whose intestines are sizzling on tarmac.

I’ve been up all night applying for new contracts, even though my boss Gareth made me go in yesterday for the first time in a week. His wife is in hospital because she overdosed on opioids. They waited too long to inject her with naloxone after her breathing stopped and now she’s in a coma. When I went into work today, I smiled right through Gareth like an X-ray. He can’t afford to pay his wife’s medical bills, especially not after his mother died and he was forced to apply for a funeral loan. He’s got numbers hanging over his head, that’s for sure. He’s working at least eight different contracts, including a couple of nightshifts. Everybody knows Gareth is probably going to kill himself soon. We all want him to get emotional help, but nobody has the luxury or time to care in this place. The only thing we can do is keep smiling for the customers and hoping they tip us a little bit extra. It’s best to avoid the issue completely and keep trying to sell our products to the can-pickers that come into the shop.

Our store sells pictures of clothes. Can-pickers purchase images of the things they’d wear outside the compound if it wasn’t so hot and they pin these photos onto the chest panels of their cooling suits. After a couple of days outside the compound, the colours shrivel under the intense glare of the sun, at which point the can-pickers return to buy more high-resolution images in new styles. These glossy photos contain a variety of designs exhibited on the bodies of models whose heads have been sliced off above the neck. Their anonymous poses are languorous, their skin is smooth, and they are usually adorned in satin or velvet. In contrast to these luxuries, you usually see the can-pickers themselves down at the riverside with great nets harvesting aluminium cans flowing down from the streams. They work all hours of the day and night with their grey eyes and grey skin. You can see them coming in and out of the cooling compounds, their eyes bruised purple and deadly still in their sockets. Most can-pickers succumb to exhaustion, fall in the water and drown eventually. However, the can-pickers who do come into our shop always buy the nicest, most expensive photos for their chest panels, so I suppose there are some benefits to the job. It might be worth the risk one day to do it myself, but only for a little while to boost my funds.

I don’t think I’d want to become a can-picker long term, but recently I’ve been seriously considering it. I’ve got a lot of pressing concerns hanging over my head at the moment. The main issue is that my sister keeps threatening to kick me out the house if I don’t pull my finger out and find a fifth contract. Frankly, there’s so little fat left on my body that there’s not much for her to kick out. Nonetheless, I’ve still been trying to bring in extra cash by completing even the most mundane of tasks. That’s partly why I started writing this story in the first place. It’s also partly why I scooted off to the side this morning when Gareth approached me. The truth is, nobody wants to speak to close coasters like him. Nobody wants to be the Last Talker and get burdened by a hopeless emotional outburst full of vitriol and anguish. The Last Talker always gets asked a variety of uncomfortable questions. They get besieged by the desperate pleas of a no-hoper and end up starring in an imaginary fantasy scenario where one individual gives up their life to save the other. These last-ditch attempts to survive often contain impossible proposals such as short-term individual loans or a contract trading, and these events regularly cut into one's own contract hours quite severely. However, the Last Talker usually still feels obliged to provide emotional closure to the person in question. They believe that by reiterating the hopelessness of their own position, it might serve to alleviate even a modicum of guilt from their conscience in the future. However, everyone knows the Last Talker can’t do anything and their conversation simply delays their inevitable ending. In Gareth’s case, I imagine he’ll jump off the Kita Bridge. If the impact from the fall doesn’t kill him instantly, he’ll quickly drown in the water below. The toxic liquid will soon cause his flesh to dissipate and then he won’t have to worry about his wife’s hospital bills or his mother’s funeral loans any longer. He won’t have to suffer the indignity of selling photos of clothes to rich can-pickers who come into our shop. The worst thing is that if Gareth died, I’d probably be next in line to take over his managerial position at the shop. Knowing how I'd benefit, I don’t think I could face being his Last Talker. It's more pleasant to think about the rules of competitions like this than to think about the rules of contracts.

For this competition, you must include a heart-shaped locket in the story. Like I said earlier, I don’t have a heart-shaped locket. However, I doubt that anybody will even read this piece in the first place, never mind notice my subsequent failure to include it. I imagine that the judges themselves don’t even get chance to look through all the submissions. If I were contracted to be a judge, I’d simply select a few from the pile, read them and then select the best of five. I wouldn’t let the reading of all those stories interfere with my other contracts in that way and I can only imagine that’s what the judges of this competition will do too. After all, people don’t really read stories anymore. It’s more of an economic function or an ancient tradition at this point. There are already AI programmed to write stories better than any human ever could and some individuals get paid good money to praise these robots for their ingenuity and fresh literary concepts. In spite of all this, these competitions for humans continue and people feel compelled to write out a list of things that never happened to them. In return for this time-trade, a lone writer and a lone reader get paid. Afterwards, a story like this might get put up online or pinned up onto a notice board. However, it’s a guarantee that nobody else will ever read it, since everybody’s already busy entering a new competition or looking for a new contract. If anyone ever does get spare time, they certainly don’t spend it reading stories like these. They just lie down on their bed, close their eyes and try not to think about anything.

Last night when I was closing my eyes and trying not to think, I started to wonder whether these kinds of competitions were actually archival records in the making. I started wondering whether I might even be the archival record myself. After all, how logical is it that the can-pickers would work for so many hours at a stretch for no good reason? And how does it make sense for the ecosystem to hold up when earth’s water is teeming with viscous putrefaction and iridescent gasoline? As for myself, it’s almost unreal that I should work so many hours for so little reward. Although there’s a lot of crazy things humans do for survival, continuing to get up in the morning whilst failing to envision a dream where the edge of today meets with the comfortable mirage of tomorrow is unfathomably depressing. And it might be a form of dissociation on my own part, but I can’t say for certain whether or not I’m an economic function myself. It seems almost as if I’m a part of something even more sinister than this competition against other writers, as if I’m a list of items bordering upon numeric binary values. These distinct boundaries press right up against my very organs and dictate whether I am awake or sleeping, employed or unemployed, alive or dead, winning or losing. There are only two options to choose from in this world. I’m almost certain that my life itself is a part of the content that’s being created. I don’t feel as if I have a name or a face. I’m only writing these things out because I feel compelled by some external force to express myself; I am a part of this nonsensical and unfathomably binary of living, even in spite of the fact that I don’t really exist.

And as I sit by this river, I see Gareth skulk across the Kita bridge and peer down into the fast-flowing river below. And in my hand, I imagine holding up the faded picture of the pigeon with its spleens on show and a heart-shaped locket wrapped around its broken neck. I can use this image to cover Gareth’s fall into the water below. And this right here is the picture I have created by myself. This is the image I created for this competition. And on the opposing riverbank, the spindly arms and legs of the can-pickers rhythmically move back and forth. To my right, a dead body floats past on the water close to where I sit and a photo of my own face is pinned onto the chest panel of its cooling suit. This face is featureless and blank. There are no defining characteristics. And when I stare at this picture and look into this face, I swear I’ve seen this formation of pixels somewhere before. And as I write these words, I swear that this competition entry has a point, that this story has a meaning; that this thing called my life can be brought to a satisfactory conclusion within a certain word limit. And I swear that these words are more than the drawn-out pleas of a Last-Talker attempting to covet the hours of a judge in this competition of living; that these hours were not wasted for the both of us; that we are not both competing against one another for this binary value called time, this thing which neither of us can ever get back.