The End of the World Book: A Novel

by Alistair McCartney

  BONES

  Bones are eerie, no? However, there's something undeniably elegant about them. They're like evening gowns compared to the rest of our bodies, which are clunky, and more like safari suits with big lapels and flared trousers. Yes, our bones are chic; they'll never go out of fashion, like a classic Coco Chanel suit. At the same time, there's something deeply sinister about our bones, just as there is something sinister embedded in the elegance of a Coco Chanel suit, by virtue of the fact of her Nazi collaboration. Our bones are Nazis. Even if you do not agree with this, you cannot deny that our bones are in collaboration with death. It's like they're waiting patiently for us, just like our mothers waited for us outside the school gate. Some days our bones are not so patient. My bones have been expecting me, but I am running late!

  BOOKCASES

  Sometimes when he opens me up, the musty odor that wafts out reminds me of the smell of an inky nineteenth-century novel that hasn't been read in a long time. I find myself thinking about the bookcase in our house, which was in my elder brother Andrew's room. It had sliding doors of frosted glass and two rows of shelves. The shelves were lined in a kind of paper with a floral pattern, but the corners of the paper were always curling up. Its sticky underside captured flies, whose elegant corpses rotted away.

  I spent so many afternoons by myself sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of that bookcase. Inside, there were outdated biology, chemistry, and economics textbooks that had belonged to my brothers and sisters; sets of both the Childcraft and the World Book encyclopedias; a Book of Wonders; Reader's Digests; Bibles whose pages were so thin, semi-transparent, edged with gold; and best of all, the novels my mother had won when she was a schoolgirl, like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, with her name, Beth Wildy, written inside each cover on a sticker explaining the reason for the prize.

  As I take in my strange odor, I feel like I'm once again in front of that bookcase, immersed in solitude and wonder, utterly absorbed.

  BOREDOM

  In the West, everyone is bored. Boredom is a condition. Boredom sets in very early, during childhood—some say it is established even earlier, in the womb, which makes sense, because those nine months prior to being born must be very, very boring—but it is perfected during adolescence. There is nothing more necessary than a teenage boy who is bored. Sometimes, as adults, when we become so bored by the excruciatingly mundane setup of the days—morning, afternoon, evening; waking, working, sleeping (to be human is an act of repetition)—that we feel like doing ourselves in, we try and remind ourselves that things aren't so bad. After all, we say to ourselves, we are not currently in Beirut being bombed by the Israelis. And at least we are not in Israel, about to meet a teenage suicide bomber, and to be blown up into little pieces. For a few hours we feel better about the tedious nature of our lives; but soon the boredom of our existence begins to sink in. We see the boredom with a kind of blinding clarity, and we realize that the boredom is so terrible we would prefer being bombed. Meeting a teenage suicide bomber would brighten up our lives considerably.

  BOTTOMS

  The so-called bottom, the passive partner in the practice of sodomy, is a kind of trapdoor through which the top dramatically falls. In sodomy a descent takes place. The term bottom, however, is inaccurate. In effect, any bottom worth his two cents must be profoundly bottomless; that is the only reason why a top would keep returning to his depths.

  BOUGAINVILLEA

  My cousin Karen had long hair with streaks of silver; it wrapped around her shoulders like a mink stole. She was the only member of our family who had been divorced. Together these two factors lent her an air of fatal glamour.

  One day Karen stepped on the thorn of a bougainvillea, and the poison flowed directly into her bloodstream, turning septic. She fell into a coma that lasted three days. As she slept, her mother, my Aunt Millie, sat constantly by her side, brushing her hair, hoping the steel bristles of the brush might rouse her daughter. On emerging from the coma, Karen said that while she was under, she could feel that her hair was being brushed, incessantly, and she wanted to tell whoever was doing it to stop, but of course she could not.

  Everyone told her that in the future she needed to be more careful; Karen said that she must have been distracted.

  Being punctured by a bougainvillea, she shrugged, was one of the conditions of being in a garden.

  BOYLE, ROBERT

  Seventeenth-century Irish scientist Robert Boyle devoted his life to gas. He was both delighted and troubled by gases, the odd place they occupied between matter and nothingness, their nightgown softness. Gases, he wrote, are a constant and terrible reminder of what I will eventually be.

  Though considered by others to be a scientist, Boyle regarded himself as a hunter, often referring to gases as wild spirits. He spent most of the seventeenth century in pursuit of that wildness: hunting gases, placing the gases in glass cages, watching the gases as they paced, creating laws that the gases would not obey.

  BOYLE'S HAIR

  Robert Boyle, who formulated the scientific method for the field of chemistry, and who is often referred to as the founding father of modern chemistry, had beautiful, long curly hair, which went down to his shoulders, and beyond, directly influencing the style worn by members of today's hard-rock bands.

  BOYLE'S LAW

  All day, gases float out of boys like ghosts.

  BOYS, BOX

  Currently, here in the United States, the supermarket box boy—in his baggy black pants that vainly strive to conceal the curves of his body; in his drab and shapeless jersey T-shirt with name tag, that, paradoxically, reveals the perfect symmetry of his rib cage; in the unselfconscious manner in which he pauses in the aisles of the frozen food section, lost in contemplation; in the graceful way he hunches over and maneuvers the silver shopping trolleys; and in the extreme grace with which he takes a pair of box cutters to a box containing 1,000 cans of dog food—is perceived to be the ideal of beauty.

  When compared to the box boy, all other young men are seen as ugly, deformed, and so hideous that they are executed in states that permit capital punishment. Some boys who can't bear the fact that they are not box boys do the work for the state and take box cutters to themselves. In states that operate from a more liberal perspective, boys who are not box boys are incarcerated, potentially even rehabilitated.

  BOYS, IMPALED

  Once, on the front page of the newspaper, there was a photograph of a boy who, whilst climbing over a metal fence, slipped and found himself impaled on one of the fence's big spikes. This was years ago, when I was nine or ten; the boy appeared to be my own age. The sharp black tip of the spike had gone right through his face, which bore a look of astonishment and deep surprise. The caption claimed that he had been trying to get into the yard of a house that he believed to be haunted. It seemed the boy was rescued and survived. Once a week or so, I still think of this boy and wonder what became of him. Surely he went on to do great things.

  BRAILLE

  Can you believe Louis Braille was only fifteen when he invented braille, the alphabet of small raised dots that can be read with the tips of the fingers? Apparently he got the idea from a dot-dash code punched on cardboard that some captain used to send important messages to his soldiers at night.

  I wonder what Homer would have thought of braille? It's said that Homer liked being blind. You can see his point—that it might have been far richer and more exciting being blind in antiquity than being able to see everything perfectly well in modernity.

  Apparently Homer wandered around from village to village, telling stories, led about by a boy. At night, when Homer made love to his boy, who was probably around the same age as the young Louis Braille—you know what they were like in antiquity—tracing the tips of his fingers over his boy's acned face and shoulders, he must have gotten a glimpse of what it would be like to read The Odyssey, or any epic, for that matter, in braille.

  BRUEGEL THE ELDER, PIETER

  When we recall chil
dhood, it would be nice if our memory of said childhood was as complicated and intricate as that painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder titled Children's Games, in which we see hundreds of small children in a village playground, engaged in violent action, participating in an alarming array of games: it is the two boys in the foreground of the painting, spinning hula hoops, that most capture our attention—one of the boys has a swollen head, though he could also be wearing a mask—as well as the boy who is slightly behind them, just to the right, strung over a wooden bench, each limb held tight by another child. Each game is utterly unique, yet despite this variety, all the games share in common a decidedly menacing, in fact, deeply sadistic, undertone, a quality all childhood games tend to take on; in fact, many of the games Bruegel depicts have a positively inquisitorial look about them, as if a little trial is taking place, a miniature inquisition—some of the children are even wearing pointy hats, just like those worn by the heretics, or was it the inquisitors?—but as I was saying, our recollection of our own childhood is not nearly so intricate.

  What we recall is sinister, just like in the painting, no doubt about it, sinister with a capital S, but it is there the similarity ends.

  Our memory of childhood is much more blurry and indistinct, far more vague. It takes place in soft focus, as if Vaseline, normally reserved for penetration, had been placed over the screen of our memory, resulting in a paradoxical failure to penetrate childhood. Our childhood, or our recollection of it—one and the same thing—has more in common with the work of Pieter's son Jan Bruegel the Elder, a minor artist, who has gone down in history known as “Velvet Bruegel,” due to the fact that he painted many people dressed in velvet. We remember our childhood—and the accompanying proceedings—as if it were all one long, violent length of velvet.

  BURIED, BEING

  I am already looking forward to being buried. How infinitely cozier death will be, all snug in our coffins. I expect that in death my libido will be just as strong, if not stronger than it is in life. Just as now, whenever I'm feeling a bit frisky, I'll reach over to you, though I will have to crack open the lid of my coffin—which hopefully won't be too heavy—and then tap on the side of your coffin.

  Dare I say it, but I think that our passion for one another will deepen in the afterlife. The feeling in my heart for you, or the feeling where my heart used to be, will cause the sides of my coffin to quiver and shake like the hips of Elvis.

  Every now and then I'll flirt with the choicest earthworms as they wriggle their way into my orifices, and with the cute corpses with particularly exquisite skeletal structure. I'll probably develop a huge crush on the first handsome grave robber who ravages my grave, though this grave robber will be emotionally unavailable, in the strictest sense of the word, and this crush won't go anywhere, anywhere.

  BURIED ALIVE, BEING

  When I was a kid I would often wake up in the morning while it was still dark and feel like I was buried alive; I could taste the soft, black dirt that was falling steadily into my mouth.

  Each night my mother would tuck me tenderly into my grave, which was extremely well made, each corner tight. The bedside lamp gave off its bleak glow.

  BUTCHER, THE

  When I'd walk to the local shops with my mum, my favorite destination was the butcher's. I don't think I've ever been happier than when I was there at the butcher's with my mother. I don't remember much about the butcher himself, except for his apron, which had thick blue and white vertical stripes. His assistant, who was still a boy, wore an apron that was virtually identical but a number of sizes smaller.

  Sometimes I'd dream, not so much of the butcher, but of his apron, that I was hiding beneath its folds. At other times I'd dream of a butcher's apron that had not only stripes but also little pink and yellow flowers in the white spaces, just like the flowers on my mother's apron. These aprons were worn by someone who was both the butcher and my mother.

  As my mother inspected the meat, I'd stand there and daydream that I was the butcher's assistant, working there beside him, and that at night he'd take me out in a red-meat dress to a ball whose proceeds were all going to charity. I imagined him sticking little bits of the reddest meat in my mouth. As my mum pondered her decision, I'd breathe in the strange, sweet smell of the antiseptic, which didn't quite cover up the real odor.

  All the various kinds of meat were arranged in the butcher's glass display case, just like my mother's Hummel figurines and Royal Doulton figurines in the display case in our living room. Whereas the contents of the case at home were set out somewhat haphazardly, the butcher had a real flair for arrangement. The meat was arrayed extremely artfully, carefully classified and categorized. How orderly death could be!

  BUTTER

  During the Holocaust, whenever Gertrude Stein began to think about what was happening to the Jews, it frightened her terribly. She'd take long walks, but out in the air one could not deny that Europe had gone rancid. So she would return to her work, yet even then she'd catch glimpses of the Holocaust, waiting there for her behind her endless sentences: a void so great it could not be covered up by any amount of repetition, one so vast it threatened to swallow all her things. She would put down her pen and set her mind to more pressing matters, like where to find eggs, sugar, butter.

  C

  CAKES

  As a boy, when I used to go with my mother to the Museum of Western Australia, my favorite part was the reconstructions of rooms from the days of the early settlers. There was a parlor of a wealthy family, which was all dark and velvety. There was a dentist's office, full of monstrous equipment. But the best room was the general store. It had glass jars of old-fashioned candies, and, best of all, a glass case containing little pink and green cakes supposedly made in the nineteenth century.

  Every time we paused in front of this display, I'd ask my mother what she thought the cakes would taste like. She'd try to explain that the cakes were no longer edible, and that, if I opened the glass case and picked one of them up, before it had even reached my mouth it would crumble into a fine pile of dust.

  I never listened, or more accurately, I refused to accept her argument. I believed the cakes would be delicious. And, in a way, I continue to refuse to accept this argument. Offer me any cake, and I will eat it, but in my heart I'll be wishing that I were eating one of those ancient cakes.

  CALCULATORS, POCKET

  Pocket calculators were invented in 1972. During the 1980s pocket calculators were the height of eroticism. They were also very helpful, enabling us, as it were, to calculate our own worth; it was disconcerting to see how easily our worth could be calculated. Most pocket calculators were solar operated; these would not work in certain places, for example, if we found ourselves in a coffin with a lid that had been nailed shut.

  CATASTROPHES

  There are three main kinds of catastrophes. There are those that happen so suddenly, and without warning, that they do not even give victims the time to be surprised. Victims find themselves in a space just prior to surprise.

  Then these are those for which a welcome mat is laid out. Victims line up in an orderly fashion and wipe the soles of their shoes before entering quietly into the catastrophe.

  And finally there are those catastrophes that are inevitable and will occur in the future at an unnamed date. These are my favorite kind. They give us something to look forward to. I heard on the news that California is the state best prepared for a catastrophe. This puts me at ease. Now all I can do is wait patiently on all fours for the catastrophe.

  CEMETERIES

  For the visitor to Los Angeles, a must-see—in fact, the only thing you need to see during your brief visit to this city—is the Rosedale Cemetery. Located at the corner of Venice Boulevard and Normandie, it is home to approximately 150,000 citizens. The best time to visit is on a Friday morning, at around 7:45 a.m., which is when twenty or so shirtless freshmen from the nearby University of Southern California complete their three-mile run, which ends, quite fittingly, I think, i
n the cemetery's shady, slightly higgledy-piggledy grounds. (The somewhat disorderly aspect of the cemetery reflects the somewhat disorderly aspect of the boys, of all boys.)

  Whereas the cemetery has been here since 1916, most of the boys have been here—here, meaning the world—since around 1988, which creates a nice contrast.

  Taking advantage of their well-deserved rest, these boys flop on the ground, exhausted (as distinct from dead). Many of them lean their shaved heads against the gray tombstones, as if the tombstones are pillows. Through a pair of binoculars, one can see the sweat trickling down the backs of their necks, some of it finding its way into the worn grooves of the inscriptions.

  CENTURIES

  A century is a period of 100 years. Most relationships do not last this long. This is depressing. Almost none of us last the length of a century. Before a century has happened, we become skulls. I want to write a book that takes a century to read, or a sentence that lasts 100 years. Humans hang on the century they find themselves in, like shirts hanging on wire coat hangers; our legs dangle off the edge of a century into nothing. I'm glad I'm not living at the beginning of the twentieth century, because the Holocaust would still have to happen. It's better to be able to relate to almost everything in retrospect. I've only had seven years of the twenty-first century and I already know I don't like it. Oh God, I don't want this century. This century has already passed its expiration date. Can I exchange it for another kind of century?