He suddenly recalled something he had learned at school. In fact, most of what he knew came from the rock and from school. The only exceptions were his mother’s advice not to play with poor kids (though even without her insistence, he had never intended to), and his father’s instruction to stay close only to the rich (just like his mother). He could list more, but they would all amount to necessities forced upon him.
Taken together, the unavoidable lessons he learned at school—whether practical skills or speculative disciplines—always collapsed into a single conclusion: as capitalism intensifies, survival requires building some kind of personal pipeline, a source of income beyond labor itself. Whatever one possessed, it had to generate money—or “true value”—and once it accumulated to a certain point, it had to be set in motion on its own.
Even if incomprehensible luck or coincidence were to lower a mirage-like ladder into someone’s life, the conclusion remained the same. And that conclusion effectively bewitched everyone. Had capitalism succeeded in pulling Sisyphus out of hell? People, seduced by the hallucination of voluntariness, dragged hell directly into their lives. Aside from the essential act of rolling money uphill toward a summit, all education really taught was how to recognize moral blemishes that might obstruct that motion.
But now, on this beach, capitalism existed neither as fetish nor as abstraction, neither as theory nor as metaphysics. There was nothing left to roll.
Once, a fellow guard who had stood watch with him insisted loudly on the virtues of socialism. Despite endless historical footnotes and revisions, he preserved one central proposition: labor will lead humanity to liberation. For many people, until quite recently, this had been treated almost as an axiom.
He tried to compare the two, to classify them. If one were framed as liberation from labor, and the other as liberation through labor, then how should this beach be described?
And then there were the anarchists. Not so much as a political position, but as a graphic symbol—a decent-looking graffiti logo printed on T-shirts. People who wore them wandered around in small groups, picking fights with everything in sight. He had never been directly confronted, but judging by the expressions of those who had, the “anarchists” seemed less threatening than hollow and lethargic. Even thinking the word anarchist made him nearly fall asleep. No—he could no longer count how many times he had drifted off. Sometimes, waking up, he felt as though he were breathing in a pleasant sea breeze.
To him, anarchists were closer to people smashing things when viewed from above, from inside Wilson. Or perhaps it was that among people smashing things and snickering in resonance, there happened to be a few wearing shirts that read ANARCHISM.
When tightly clustered, they energized one another. Long ago, they had begged for jobs, then fled after painting buildings with blood-red star symbols. Once their escape faded from public memory, for reasons unclear, they began prioritizing banks, government offices, and courts—smashing and burning them. Was the strange thrill of spray paint no longer enough? Even then, when the world had not yet been emptied of everything, no one stopped them. Or rather, no one had the will to. They organized nothing, yet were always organized. No matter what they did, the overwhelming indifference toward them remained unbroken. Whether one was among them or merely watching, the situation was uniformly cold. Feeling dull, he thought of an old film.
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A depiction of the end of the world. Despair branching endlessly according to character. In one so-called normal family, the moment of annihilation is paradoxically rendered as a brief rest. The patriarch sits squeezed between the narrow edges of a long dining table, praying, “This too shall pass.” The relatively large daughter sits upright, asking her father painful questions. Each time, the patriarch pretends not to hear—though his wrinkles deepen toward her direction—and recites longer verses, louder.
The mother, apron tied, seated near the kitchen with the drooling youngest son barely able to rest his chin on the table, stares blankly. She keeps returning to the kitchen under the pretext of reheating food, wasting water, weeping silently. Each time she wrings out a damp cloth, the chaos outside—dismissed as nothing—draws nearer with heavy steps. The mise-en-scène peaks with a monologue from an uncle who seems both highly capable and chronically unemployed. A lavish feast on the table; legs shaking endlessly beneath it. Anxiety is carved up somewhere out of sight as they wait helplessly for the end—but the moment of being consumed is never shown. Or else, scenes so explicit, collective, and perverse that he could hardly imagine them for more than two seconds: plunging pleasures indifferent to method or object, ugliness or shame.
Yet the reality he experienced lay not even in a specific scene, but beyond the credits that dragged on long after the film ended. Media portrayals of a “last supper” always resolved into silence and stillness at their peak—but somewhere beyond the frame, a pulse was always beating. Reality was not in the woven ritual, but in that pulse. There were quiet people, but no calm ones. When the final moment arrived, people almost without exception poured into the streets. Family was too small, too constricted a unit to contain anxiety. Not in response to any signal, but all at once, far too many people burst out. The more they pushed one another away, the more tightly they chewed into each other, entangled.
When life ceases in humans or animals, pus hidden deep beneath the skin seeps out within a day, dispersing quietly through every opening, no longer troubling the hollowed host.
Like ignorant lovers who mortgage their expectations of one another—mutually, justifiably tormenting each other, gnawing away at that collateral—until no expectations remain, at which point they separate as though nothing had happened.
Perhaps, on the eve of the final moment, the blanket of sexuality—one that could only be felt by passing through the institution of family—was grotesquely insufficient to cover anxiety. It could not withstand fear compressed and concealed until explosion. People needed more people. And as more people chased still more people, bodies spilled out, strewn everywhere. Others piled atop them, flowing, seeping, erupting.
From atop the rock, he looked down on everything. Even people he had never noticed before—were there people like that here?—had all emerged, frantic, unsure what to do. Without exception, they raged. The spectacle seemed to say that between striking, shooting, clawing—and stroking, groping, measuring, kissing—there was nothing at all. Or rather, that they were never different to begin with.
