The End of the World Book: A Novel

by Alistair McCartney

  HAIR, DYED

  My mother dyes her hair red. She began dyeing her hair red in 1943, when she was fifteen, and the Holocaust was already well underway. That year she also read Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea. Suddenly, the business of dyeing her hair took on great meaning, especially the waiting for the dye to set, the anxiety over the outcome of the color. In 1945, when WWII ended, to celebrate, she dyed her hair a shade redder than she normally dyed it. She knew she was running a risk, but in the context of the end of the war, and sailors, such brightness could be overlooked.

  After the Holocaust, my mother continued to dye her hair. Once a month, she bought hair dye from the local chemist's. Leaning over the basin in the bathroom, she would apply the dye with a soft brush and then occupy herself for an hour. While she waited, she'd make herself a cup of tea, watch a daytime soap opera, or read a bigprint mystery. There was a science to it.

  These days I am told she goes to the local hairdresser's, where a nice girl does her hair for her.

  Heredity is the process, small and mysterious, by which living things inherit characteristics from their ancestors. My three sisters all dye their hair red: in my family this is the limit of resemblance.

  HAIR, GRAY

  Before too long, I may have to go get a blue rinse or a lavender rinse, like my godmother. Or I will also have to dye my hair red with such cunning that no one can tell, just as my mother does on a monthly basis. From that day on, passionately, I shall correct my identity.

  HAIRCUTS

  Interesting things happen when you get a haircut. When I was a kid, I remember more than one occasion when the barber cut my ear with his bright silver razor. Once, to distract me, he gave me a copy of Playboy and turned it to the centerfold, which I stared at while my ear continued to bleed steadily. Today, whenever I go to the barber's to get a so-called crew cut, I often think about Joan of Arc and everything that resulted from her crew cut—being burnt at the stake, etc.—and I worry that, just like hers, my crew cut could also have unforeseeable consequences. My barber gives me good advice and says things to me like, Homie, no need to flinch from the blunt side of my blade. Generally the aftermath of my haircut is less dramatic than that of Joan of Arc's, but there is always a deep depression that immediately follows a haircut.

  HALLOWEEN

  If you look closely at my body, you will see that it has been produced cheaply in a factory; it has an edge, and a bit of elastic at the back, like a long and scary mask.

  HANGING ONESELF

  We've all got necks and we've all thought about hanging ourselves, at one time or another. We've all gone to Home Depot and spent far too much time in the section where they sell lengths of rope. I gave up on the idea of hanging myself years ago, realizing that in my case it was just not practical: there was simply no length of rope in the world that was long enough for me. While one end would have to be tied around my neck, the other would have to be secured to the moon.

  Still, the other night, out of curiosity, and for old time's sake, I hung a noose from the highest, sturdiest branch of the peach tree in our front yard. Although I quickly gathered that I would not require its use, and that a rope had failed me yet again, I left it hanging there, to save myself the bother of untying the knot. I wanted to keep my options open; and after all, I thought, the rope could very well come in handy for someone else.

  HARDY, THOMAS

  In the novels of Thomas Hardy, the effects of the second wave of the industrial revolution on rural England can be seen everywhere, particularly in the more efficient forms of sadness emerging in humans; there is an increasing speed to his characters' melancholy.

  Yet the grayness of the English landscape is being constantly and exuberantly interrupted by the simple movement of young farmers taking off their breeches, bending over, and exposing the bright pink of their assholes, which pierces through the gloom, suffusing the landscape with a shade Hardy called bonnet pink.

  HARDY BOYS, THE

  As a boy, I enjoyed reading about the exploits of the Hardy Boys, particularly any story in which the swarthier of the brothers, dark-haired Frank, who was older by one year, was kidnapped, taken to a mansion, blindfolded, and bound to a chair that was usually placed in front of a grandfather clock.

  I also enjoyed their Detective Handbook, in which I learned that asshole printing was the principal means of positive identification for boys, particularly boy criminals. In the chapter titled “No Two are Alike,” I discovered that the asshole of every boy is unique, and that although many assholes are similar, none are identical. One Marcello Marpighi, an Italian professor of anatomy and pornography, stumbled upon this fact in 1686.

  The chapter also explained that there were eight basic asshole patterns; I have retained a memory of all eight patterns to this day, my favorite ones still being the classic plain whorl and the denser, more intricate accidental whorl. Sometimes criminals, like the infamous John Dillinger, who was seduced by the FBI in 1934, tried to erase their asshole prints by burning their assholes with acid. However, at the FBI there were thousands of gray filing cabinets containing the inked asshole print of every criminal ever arrested, and these records were classified according to both an alphabetical and numerical formula. On a more melancholy note, I learned that asshole printing was used not only to solve criminal cases, but also to identify boys who had died in airplane crashes and other disasters. Once a boy is dead, the chapter concluded, the specificity of his asshole leaves the world.

  HATS

  In many of the photographs taken of my mother as a young woman, she is wearing a hat. Often they're very big hats; I recall one photo where she's wearing a huge, black hat; its brim is upturned, threatening to fly away. As a child, for some reason I imagined that in this hat she looked like Mata Hari.

  All these hats were lost to time except for one pillbox hat that was kept in the top cupboard of the closet in my parents' bedroom. It was covered with a sort of ruched material that must have been white once, but had gone gray; the hat had come to resemble pictures I had seen of the brain. When no one was around I would try on this hat and say to myself, I am wearing my mother's brain.

  I'd often ask her what had happened to the rest of her hats, and she would tell me that she had no idea; a look would pass over her face like the crisp shadow cast by one of those hats' wide brims.

  But then my mother's face would brighten. She'd tell me that it didn't matter; when she entered heaven all those hats would be waiting for her, in their boxes. Upon arriving in heaven, the first thing she planned to do was to take those hats out of their tissue paper and try them on, one by one.

  HAUSFRAUS

  We have visited so many gay men in their tasteful, sparsely decorated houses that we have lost count of both the houses and the men inside these houses, in which, on first glance, not a trace of dirt or dust is to be seen; nothing appears to be out of place.

  On closer inspection, though, everything installed in such houses, even if it appears to be clean, is actually residing at the edge of decay, and everything, while it seems to be in order, in reality teeters on the brink of the abyss and at the edge of the higgledy-piggledy.

  With these findings, we can safely say that gay men are the neurotic Viennese hausfraus of the twenty-first century. Though, in Freud's absence, I'm not sure what we can do about it.

  HEAD LICE

  One morning when I was in third grade, the health authorities came to our school. They had us form neat lines on the handball courts and carefully checked our skulls and the state of our spines, writing down the results on yellow pads of paper they kept in their clipboards. Although I was disappointed that I did not have curvature of the spine, I was elated to learn that I had head lice and was to be sent home immediately.

  That week I spent in quarantine with my mother was the happiest week of my life. Every day she would wash my hair, which had been cropped close—like Joan of Arc's or one of those French collaborators who slept with the Nazis—with tincture of larkspur, a
shampoo that stank of tar. Afterwards, she'd sit me down at the kitchen table and run a comb with metal teeth through my hair to brush out the dead lice. Their minute, wingless, almost transparent corpses fell quietly onto the sheet of semiopaque wax paper she had laid out.

  Last night I dreamt that once again I was a child with head lice. In the dream I could feel their tiny hooked feet clutching at my scalp and their little beaks drawing my blood. Then, just as my mother appeared, bearing a silver comb and a roll of wax paper, I woke up. It took a few minutes for it to sink in that I was no longer a child, and that I had been cured of head lice; upon realizing this, I sank into a depression that stayed with me the rest of the day.

  HEART, THE

  I think it's interesting how much the heart can hold. Sort of like avast handbag. Yes. My heart is like a bloody handbag with crude stitching, hanging from a red leather strap; the strap is attached from the vena cava to the right ventricle. My heart is like Anna Karenina's red handbag, which matches her plush red lips, the one she takes on the train after she's first met Vronsky, on that night journey where she's trying to suppress her delight, but she can't. Let us be more like Anna Karenina.

  Just like her handbag, my heart contains all sorts of things: English novels, and paper knives, lots of paper knives. And like Anna, I have a tendency to surrender a bit too quickly to delirium. It seems the heart can hold so much—it amazes me just how much my heart can accommodate—but then suddenly it seems it's had enough, and then? Let us recall Anna Karenina.

  HEART, HISTORY OF THE

  The history of the heart begins around 1200 AD with the Aztecs, whose complex religious practices emphasized large-scale human sacrifice; this frequently involved ripping out the heart of their sacrificial victims with a big knife made out of volcanic glass, and holding up the heart to the sun, to get a better look at it in the light. I've been a big fan of the Aztecs ever since I was a kid and saw an etching of one such sacrifice. When confronted with the opacity of the heart, what they did seems very practical.

  Shortly after, on May 30, 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake by the despicable English; long after she was all ash, her heart refused to burn. Everyone who had come to watch her burn went home, but Joan's heart sat in the near dark, casting a low, squat shadow.

  Afterwards, the heart went through a relatively quiet period, that is until the late nineteenth century and the arrival of the author Henry James, whose early novels were fairly simple but whose style became increasingly complicated in a concerted effort to reach his heart, which was red and hard and curved, its elegant lines somewhat resembling the red granite tomb housing the remains of Napoleon at the Hôtel Des Invalides.

  In the twentieth century, nothing of great interest occurred to the heart until the birth of my father, and the appearance of his marvelously bleak heart. When he is not using it, he places it on the mantelpiece on a little stand, so everyone can admire it.

  And then we must return to my heart. Unlike St. Joan's, my heart is highly flammable. Sometimes I experience this four-chambered organ as something Bach might play, blood pumping out with the melodies; sometimes it hangs there inside me like a red Chinese pear. But then there are those other times, when my heart feels like an impostor, just like the man who uttered, Louis XVII, c'est moi, claiming to be the true son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, but who, after all, turned out to be nothing but a clockmaker. After he died his heart was placed behind glass in a royal necropolis; over two centuries, it came to resemble a small piece of driftwood. Now there is a problem: what to do with this false heart?

  I need you to drop me off deep in a forest, so I can go searching for the monster that keeps watch over my real heart.

  HEAVEN

  Very little is known about heaven, except for the following: all wings must be taken off immediately upon entering heaven. Wings are detachable: they are inserted into the wearer's skin on bits of twisted wire, like the wire we used to attach those raffia flowers we made when we were kids. All along heaven's walls there are wing racks, just like coat racks, with hooks spaced apart at regular intervals.

  The economy of heaven is built around disposable razors; all inhabitants must work at these disposable razor factories.

  There is no carpeting in heaven. This puts an end to those little electric shocks we gave one another in our first year of school. It destroys the possibility of receiving carpet burn when engaging in sodomy on the living room floor. Heaven has a concrete floor. Heaven will be hard on the ankles.

  HEGEL, GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH

  In 1807 German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel published his first book, The Phenomenology of Boys; it quickly became a favorite of Continental boy scholars. In this book Hegel stated that the historical sequence of boys was crucial, and that various boys represented successive phases in the historical development of boys toward ever-greater stages of cuteness. Hegel taught at the universities of Jena, Heidelberg, and Berlin, though, as he noted, it was at Heidelberg where I gained my deepest insights into the essential nature of boys, obviously because at Heidelberg the boys were by far the cutest. Some of his other titles include Boy (Logic), Boy?, and Boys Are Not and Never Will Be Systematic, Even If I Want Them To Be. More than any other philosophy-lecher, Hegel established the philosophy of boys as a major field of study; no attempt as ambitious as Hegel's has been undertaken since.

  HEIDELBERG MAN

  Sometimes when I think about the Holocaust I feel that the only way it could have been avoided—and that perhaps it would have been all for the best—was if everything had stopped with the so-called Heidelberg Man, who lived in Europe when it was nothing but glaciers some 400,000 years ago, and of whom there is no record except for a segment of his lower jawbone, found in 1907, near Heidelberg, in glacial gravel.

  HELL

  Despite all our rather fancy Hieronymous Bosch–like visions of hell—this idea we have that hell will be one monstrously scenic panorama—apparently in hell there is really not much of a landscape to speak of. The surface is flat, like your mother's ironing board, except for a ledge that runs along the length of hell, narrow as a ribbon. There is little variety by way of postcards.

  HELL, CHAINS OF

  Apparently, when you arrive in hell, first of all they let you freshen up and unpack. You're allotted five coat hangers and one drawer. Once you are settled, the first activity, as it were, that you must participate in is the fitting of the chains that you are to be shackled in for eternity. The chains are not real chains but chains made out of crepe paper, in shades of pink and green, very much like the chains we made on rainy days, when we were children. Once you have been fitted, you are instructed to move extremely carefully, so as not to tear the chains.

  HELL, CUISINE OF

  There is plenty to eat in hell and after every meal they give out mothballs, those small white balls that fascinated us when we were children, which we found inside the pockets of coats and jackets in our parents' closet, and which closely resembled candy, but were merely deterrents to stop the moths' pale, fluttery bodies from feasting on sleeves and collars.

  HELL, PSYCHOLOGY IN

  I've got bad news for you! You assumed that when you died you'd finally escape psychology, but no: it seems the discipline of psychology continues on after death.

  According to Carl Jung, who is now in hell, psychology in hell is just the same, but reversed. For example, while I am still alive, I am what you would call an introvert in both the technical and non-technical sense of the word. I am shy, somewhat unsociable, and my mental interests are less in people and events than they are in the exciting world of my own inner thoughts. In hell, it seems I will be an extrovert, hardly interested at all in my dreams, and mainly interested in parties and current events. Most likely I will be one of those extroverts I can't stand, outgoing to the point of being annoying. And although currently, while alive, I am also what you would call a narcissist, in hell, according to Jung, I will be far less caught up in myself and fa
r more considerate of others. People who didn't like me on earth and thought I was self-obsessed will like me a lot more in hell.

  HELL, PUNCTUATION IN

  In hell, I am told, the rules of punctuation are very simple. In fact, there are only two forms of punctuation. I imagine this must come as quite a relief to hell's weary citizens, things already being hard enough.

  When one ends a sentence in hell, instead of using a period, one makes a mark resembling the pointy tip of a devil's tail. And if one wishes to emphasize a particularly strong feeling at the end of a sentence, one draws a little pitchfork, standing upright, which basically serves the same function as an exclamation point.

  It is interesting to note that pitchforks appear far more often than tails, hell being a place that brings out exceptional feeling.

  When one seeks to express one's immortal suffering in hell, one conveys it through short, simple sentences.

  There used to be a third form of punctuation, resembling one of the devil's horns turned upside down; this served as the equivalent of a comma. However, it was removed from hell's grammar just over a year ago. At first this resulted in a certain amount of misunderstanding, along with shortness of breath, but people have adapted their style, as people will do.

  HELL, TEMPERATURE IN

  Remember when you were a kid at the beach on a really hot day, and the sand was so hot, as was the bitumen in the parking lot, that you ran across both surfaces going ouch ouch, and in the process burned the smooth soles of your feet? This is what hell will be like. Hell will be deeply nostalgic. Your eternal damnation will be spent walking on tiptoe.