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⚽ The Last Man on Earth

by Gustavo Bondoni

The city loomed silently—I couldn’t believe it. I heard it was coming, but I thought it would feel like home.

I was wrong. This was something completely different, an emptiness on a scale beyond the imagination. It was supposed to be one of the world’s largest cities, a teeming megalopolis that never stopped. Both my copy of Lonely Planet: Buenos Aires and my net searches said the same thing: the city was a monster, with over fourteen million people, a colossus the size of Beijing, bigger than anything back home except New York or LA—and those were places I didn’t really believe existed.

Buenos Aires definitely existed. I could feel the cobbled streets under my feet as I walked blithely down the middle of a road, an activity that, just the day before, would have gotten me killed. But now, I shared the street with only a single sheet of paper that flew aimlessly ahead of me, pushed by the breeze like tumbleweed in an old western.

If a city of so many millions looked this deserted, I wondered what Minneapolis, my own little corner of the world would feel like in a similar situation. I thought about the emptiness I would feel, especially if this had happened in January, instead of in the middle of June like it did here. I thought of unplowed streets and drifts and shuddered.

Behind some of the windows, I was sure I could see movement. Flickers of darting shadows flitted away before I could get a lock on them. I thought I heard a television set through an open doorway, excited voices shouting in Spanish, but I was too frightened to go inside and, when I passed, the sound—imagined sound?—disappeared.

The next thing I heard was not a product of my imagination. An animal noise, of suffering and angst and frustration. A short, shouted “Ooh!”. I redoubled my step, wondering what had happened. I’d heard that sound before, and knew a short blast usually didn’t mean anything too serious.

I kept marveling at the desolation. I might have been the last person on the planet for all I could tell. I was standing in the center of one of the busiest commercial areas in one of the world’s biggest cities at midmorning. If I’d been walking on the sidewalk yesterday, I would have been trying to avoid the crowds.

Lost in thought and silence, I wondered if the peace would hold. I almost convinced myself it might.

And then it happened.

The sound was like nothing I’d heard before. The silence of the city was broken by voices, unmistakably human, that came from all around. Hidden figures from the ground floors at my sides, all the way up to the upper stories of the high-rises, all at once, the city exploded.

Windows opened, and people shouted at their neighbors. One storefront revealed the interior of a bar, where pandemonium reigned. The patrons were jumping up and down, shouting at each other, smiling, and hugging anyone they could get a hold of. Every single one of the manic shouting people I could see was dressed the same way: men and women alike enrobed in light-blue-and-white jerseys, vertically striped.

Small pieces of paper drifted from windows they’d been thrown out of like confetti at a ticker-tape parade, the shrapnel of exploding Buenos Aires.  

So that was it. Argentina one, whoever they were playing that day, nil. By my watch, the match still had more than an hour and a quarter left to play as the ecstatic shouts died down and the shadows returned to their TV sets, before the city returned to its tense silence.

I left the bar behind, and kept walking, feeling like an alien on my own planet.  Once more, I could have been the last man on Earth.

The only clue to life was the fact that there was much more paper on the ground than before.