The End of the World Book: A Novel

by Alistair McCartney

  However, perhaps Kafka would have saved Czech gay cinema from itself. Maybe, if he were still alive today, he would have taken it upon himself to invent a more sickly form of gay pornography, a more sober form—one in which endless pleasure takes place amidst endless rows of gray filing cabinets; in which the actors are much, much thinner, where the bones get in the way and clank against each other during the act of lovemaking, like medieval armor; in which the boys all turn their heads and repeatedly cough between kisses, hacking up phlegm of the most lurid colors; and in which lust is exposed for what it is, the most efficient and insidious form of bureaucracy.

  Yes: where is Kafka when we need him to develop a gay pornography in which loneliness is never overcome but, on the contrary, far more heightened, to the point of being crippling, a pornography in which boys are promiscuous with their sadness and spend all their time searching for new forms of hunger, new kinds of yearning?

  D

  DANCING

  I used to go out dancing every night. Then I cut back to Saturday nights. Lately, I have been going out dancing less and less. Before I know it, I will no longer go dancing.

  This doesn't really worry me, because I figure I can dance when I'm dead. When I am dead, I'll have far less to do. Therefore I'll have more time and energy to dance. The issue of whether or not I'm too old to go out dancing will no longer be an issue. I'll also weigh less and therefore be a better dancer.

  All you need to dance is a bit of music, the wind tapping against your skeleton, your skeleton keeping time with the wind; all you need is your bones.

  DANCING, BREAK

  Break dancing began in 1974. Since then it has gone in and out of fashion, but in my head break dancing has never gone out of fashion; in my head there are always boys break dancing. These boys are wearing Adidas tracksuits with zippers that aren't working; the majority of them haven't eaten for days. They're laying down sheets of cardboard in the public spaces in my head, and break dancing so rigorously they break their own bones; you can hear the bones snap beneath the music coming from their ghetto blasters. The boys continue until they can no longer break dance, until they have to be carted away to be incinerated and subsequently replaced by other boys who have been waiting all their lives for this opportunity.

  DANDIES

  We think about Kafka the bureaucrat, filing away, and Kafka the ascetic, skinny yet illuminated, like a lamppost passing judgment over lovers, but what about Kafka the dandy?

  In early photographs of the writer, taken when he was a young man, he is quite the fop. In his frilly shirts and his beautifully cut three-piece suits we see that his body was less painfully thin back then, sensuous actually: Kafka with curves.

  In my favorite photo, young Franz stands against a metal fence that encloses a cemetery. His fine hands with their long, elegant fingers grip the railing. His chin is lowered coyly, his left leg raised girlishly, as if he is about to do a high-kick. Tombstones peep out from behind him. There is the hint of a smile on his lips, but there is also something terribly earnest in his expression: already, he knows the seriousness of the pose.

  If one investigates his face closely, one can see that he is already dreaming of the day when he will become the dandy of bureaucracy.

  DARKNESS, THE

  The other day I found myself at a loose end, wandering the hallways of the progressive university where I teach. The halls there are very clean and blank and smell of antiseptic, like in a hospital. I'm always expecting nurses to appear from around the corner, in their starched white caps, but they never do. Universities, like hospitals, have always frightened me; they're similarly full of illness, and so much learning takes place at them, it's eerie.

  I went back to my vacuum cleaner of an office, and, as it was still my lunch break, I started to think about death. I recalled that game we used to play when we were children, asking each other questions like, If you had the choice between being burned alive or drowning, which would you choose? Of course, we always chose drowning. As an adult I have continued to play this game, but only with myself. Sitting at my desk, I posed the question, if I were going to be murdered, would I prefer to be shot or stabbed? I sat there for minutes, but couldn't decide; the method of death seemed less important than the issue of whether the murderer would be handsome or not.

  Admittedly, these were not very progressive thoughts.

  Feeling proactive, I decided to make a list of the various ways in which someone can exit the world, starting with the nearest exit and ending with the furthest, a sort of to-do list.

  I was about halfway through my list when there was a knock at the door. Instead of pretending I wasn't there, I answered the door. It turned out to be my associate Gleah. She offered me a spoonful of a so-called Choconut Spread, but I declined; as a general rule, I only have sweets in the evening.

  I tried to hide the list from her, but I think she must have seen it, she must have noticed the way my eyes were all glazed like those of a porcelain Victorian doll, because she looked directly at me and said, Cheer up, Alistair; although the darkness can exhaust you, and although you may easily become exhausted by the darkness, you can never exhaust it.

  DA VINCI, LEONARDO

  I like all those sketches of Leonardo da Vinci's, of which there are almost 7,000. His male anatomical studies are amazing, especially the close-ups he did of their assholes, particularly that famous one, where he drew the man's asshole as if it were a kind of whirlpool, full of all sorts of crazy currents, and with bits of moss and rock-like formations around the edges. What a genius! He really had a knowledge of men far beyond his time.

  I also like those sketches he did of naked men with wings attached to them, anticipating airplanes by hundreds of years. The notes that accompany these sketches are very interesting. (Incidentally, they were written with his left hand. Although Leonardo was right handed, he wrote everything with his left, and backwards, then read his notes with a mirror, taking being an invert to extremes, and showing off a bit, in my opinion.) Predicting the jet trails left by actual airplanes, Leonardo writes that his male planes leave long streaks of pink in the sky, a result of the heat from the men's anuses coming into contact with the cold atmosphere.

  With these latter sketches, everyone thinks Leonardo was trying to solve the problem of human flight, but in this they're mistaken. He was trying to solve the problem of what to do with a man when he gets too much to bear: send him up, into the air.

  DEATH

  Death wears mirrored sunglasses, exactly like the shades Erik Estrada wore in the popular, award-winning late '70s T.V. series CHiPs, which followed the adventures of two California Highway Patrol motorcycle officers. Erik Estrada is Death. You can see your own reflection in Death's shades, but you can't see Death's eyes. That's the Death part. Paradoxically, the sight of the young Erik Estrada's thighs, encased in his tight crème regulation pants, is the only thing in the world capable of keeping Death at bay.

  Death carries a green hose. Death is moving slowly toward the front lawn. It is summer, early evening. All the children are playing outdoors. Death is wearing an orange jumpsuit brighter than a thousand cans of Sunkist soda. Death is watering the front lawn for our mother. Where is our mother?

  Death only wears jackets with shoulder pads, which reached their height of popularity in the mid-'80s, that decade of death. Death is a matter of style. Death wears shoulder pads to conceal the fact that he has very narrow shoulders. Death should really consider working out; but working out must anger Death, working out being nothing but a defense against decay, atrophy, failure—all the good things about Death. Death despises everyone who lives but especially dislikes bodybuilders.

  DEATH METAL

  Back in the late twentieth century, specifically in the decades that have come to be known as the 1980s and the 1990s, it seemed that every other day, teenage boys, tired of the sturm und drang of adolescence and inspired by the death-positive lyrics of so-called death-metal bands, were taking their own lives i
n very violent ways, which, according to sociologists, was typical of young men: a gun in the mouth and a car over a cliff were the preferred modes of suicide.

  We can see these young North American men who were infatuated with death as direct descendants of the young European men, who, in the late eighteenth century, read Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, which ends with the lovesick hero with the supremely heavy heart taking his own life. Upon its publication in 1774, the book inspired two crazes on the Continent: one for wearing blue coats, just like the coat moody Werther wears; and one for suicide.

  In this sense, although the first death-metal album did not technically appear on the horizon until 1985, with the release of Seven Churches by the band Possessed, this genre or subdivision of heavy metal was already slowly getting underway in 1772 when the then-twenty-three-year-old Goethe, in residency at the Court at Wetzlar and fresh from a failed love affair, began writing the book to ease his own heavy heart.

  And indeed, listening to death metal, it's almost as if all those black, stormy clouds Goethe's doomed hero swoons over had somehow been plugged directly into an amplifier; it's as if Goethe's Romantic period had gone electric, just like Dylan went electric and inspired the wrath of the hippies, who had long hair like death-metal fans and were really just like death-metal heads, but without the interest in death.

  I actually think Goethe would have seriously appreciated death metal, particularly during his Romantic period, but maybe even after he abandoned Romanticism for Classicism—there's a sonic purity and structural complexity to this music that would have appealed to him during his mature phase—though he probably would have listened to it on headphones, so as not to wake the rest of the house.

  Today, death metal is not quite as popular a genre as it was in the last century, perhaps because in our century death is everywhere: everyone is besotted with death, which is no longer the province of teenage boys. Historians argue that death metal's popularity peaked in 1994. Similarly, not quite as many fans of death metal are taking their own lives—historians argue that this trend also peaked in 1994. Yet one can still attend concerts where thousands of teenage boys with long, stringy, greasy hair, with acne-embroidered faces and shoulders mouth the death-friendly lyrics, bang their heads in unison, and twist their fingers into the shape of horns, so every one of their clammy fists become little sweaty Fausts. The black T-shirts they wear over their often scrawny frames bear in glittery silver letters the names of the bands they most favor, good names like Morbid Angel, Carcass, Suffocation, and Entombed; however, in acknowledgment of the debt these boys and this music owe, all their T-shirts should bear the one name: Goethe. These boys are completely unaware; they have no idea how Romantic they are.

  DEMOCRACY

  I'm as big a fan of democracy as the next homosexual. It gives us the freedom to choose between wings and claws. Sometimes we choose wings, sometimes we choose claws.

  But I can't help feeling that at some point, while no one was looking, the whole concept of democracy and freedom became very small, miniature, actually, like the Diorama of Colonial Officials wearing three corner hats and thigh-high white boots with buttons running up the side, burning tiny little copies of the New York Weekly Journal in an attempt to put down criticism, and pushing the fire about with their tiny canes, all of which could be seen in New York City in the 1950s as part of an exhibit on freedom of the press at Federal Hall National Memorial.

  If someone caught me in a weak moment and, just as Alcibiades was asked to pick between wisdom and beauty, asked me to choose between democracy and sodomy, I might choose the latter. I might place my faith and trust in sodomy, and the less democratic, the better.

  DEPRESSION

  Ever since my mother told me that this heavy, black feeling hovering in my head is actually a ball gown, made out of yards and yards of deep black taffeta, not only do I no longer dread these depressions, I actually look forward to them. They are the highlight of my year: for I am not depressed; rather, I am going to a ball. The whole experience has taken on a sumptuous quality.

  And sometimes, just to make depression a bit more interesting and a bit more fun, I like to think that there's an octopus in my brain, whose body, like that of any old octopus, is soft and pear-shaped, like a dark blue pear, and whose head, which is joined to the body by a really short neck, contains those eyes that are eerily similar to the eyes of higher creatures—that's us—and whose mouth is surrounded by eight writhing tentacles, the undersides of which are lined with candy-pink sucker disks.

  Although, on the one hand, my octopus' appearance is horrible, I remind myself that this is just its appearance. From another perspective, my octopus is quite glamorous. (If only I had an ounce of my octopus' glamour. Then I would no longer be depressed!)

  Frightening or appealing, this octopus also has an opening like a funnel beneath its head, just as men have openings that are like funnels. My octopus uses its funnel to force out water, causing its body to shoot backward through my brain, like a rocket, with real force. Then, in a desperate attempt to escape from its pursuer—I suppose the pursuer must be me—my octopus squirts out that nice inky fluid through its funnel—a concealing device, like language—forming an inky cloud in my brain, so whenever I go inside there, it's impossible to see.

  DESCARTES, RÉNE

  It is said that Descartes had a great fear of dogs. He turned toward philosophy to dispel this fear and to master it, but it only served to distract him: in his dreams, the presence of dogs was constant; their snarls haunted every corner of his philosophical system. And he was subject to a recurring dream in which he was wearing a studded dog collar with his name engraved on the metal disk hanging from the collar and cogito ergo sum written on the inside of the collar.

  In 1649, when Queen Christina of Sweden invited Descartes to her court to teach philosophy, he accepted, unaware that she was exceedingly fond of dogs and did in fact own 173 of them. All over the palace he kept on slipping in pools of the beasts' saliva.

  During his third month at court, the queen's favorite, a tiny red schnauzer named Heartfelt, somehow got hold of the only copy of Principles of Philosophy. Descartes took to bed. Terribly weak, he did not have the strength to shoo away dear little Heartfelt, who slept at his feet. The philosopher never recovered from the shock of this incident, dying three weeks later.

  Today, if you visit the museum in Stockholm, you can view this copy of Principles, which was retrieved from the dog. The manuscript is turned to page 172. If you look closely, beyond the words, you can make out tiny teeth marks.

  DESCENT

  When you write something, you write it down. This implies that a descent has taken place, between the time of the event and your recording of the event.

  Let this be a gentle descent.

  DESIRE

  Desire is an earwig, which has little pincers and destroys bouquets of flowers and may be found in decaying bark and other moist places and enters the ears of boys while they dream.

  Or, alternately: desire is a scorpion, which is also active mainly at night and slips into the boots of cowboys while they sleep, so when the cowboys who are still yawning get up in the morning and put on their boots, it can sting and hopefully kill the cowboys.

  Desire must be one of these two things.

  I need to be desired by everything, animate and inanimate: old ladies with lavender blue hair, ironing boards with covers of little toadstools, Slobodan Milošević, rotting red apples, but not rotting green apples.

  Unlike desire, the world doesn't mean much to me. I'm rarely there, and I hardly ever use it. I have the world gathering dust over in the corner, leaning up against desire.

  DESKS

  The thing I liked most about school was those little desks we sat at when we were children, the ones with the wooden lids. Those desks were radiant.

  In the top right corner was a round, scooped-out space for an inkwell, though by the time we were children, inkwells were n
o longer in use and this space was already redundant. Next to that purely symbolic space, there was a long, shallow dip for a ruler, pens, pencils, pencil sharpeners, and, best of all, our beloved eraser, which left its soft gray snow wherever we made a mistake.

  Although the lid of the desk was made out of wood, the rest of it was metal. In winter, our knees chattered like teeth against the cold metal undersides of our desks, sometimes so violently the desks themselves trembled.

  Exercise books and textbooks were kept inside one's desk: the wooden lid opened up like that of a coffin.

  At some point during the school year, every boy took out the silver device used for drawing circles known as a compass and carved his name into his desk's lid. This was painstaking work. Some boys would turn the compasses on themselves, pulling up the gray legs of their trousers or the gray sleeves of their shirts, and carving their own names or the names of other boys into their skin.