The End of the World Book: A Novel

by Alistair McCartney

  HIBISCUS

  The flower I most associate with my mother is the hibiscus. In particular, the dusty pink hibiscus. There's a huge hibiscus bush near where I live, covered in hundreds of these flowers, their petals creased and pink like her skin. It's perpetually in flower. Naturally, whenever I walk or ride my bike past this hibiscus bush, I think of my mother. I think of hundreds of my mothers. All of them with dyed red hair. I imagine she has found a way out of this terrible and beautiful singularity and has been launched into immortality, unlike the hibiscus; whenever my boyfriend picks one of the flowers and puts it in a vase on the ledge above our kitchen sink, these flowers die quickly, always by the end of the day.

  HIP-HOP

  Once in a while I forget who I am and I think that I'm the white hip-hop bride of Jay-Z, which is funny, because although I love hip-hop's exuberance, and although like so many white males I gravitate toward this music in a concerted effort to forget my whiteness, I don't really like Jay-Z. Yet still, there are times when I am convinced I'm going to marry him, and am almost certain that he's bought me an Oscar de la Renta gown, all beaded and crème, like a heavier version of my mother's wedding dress, and I'm carrying this gown everywhere with me. But even though I'm about to marry the biggest hip-hop artist around, and despite the gown's exquisite beadwork, I'm still really insecure; in fact, I'm positive that before the big day Jay-Z's going to break up with me.

  HISTORY

  Hegel believed that history was tapering to a sharp point, like the tip of a witch's hat. Doodles of witches' hats can be found in the margins on every page of his lecture notes. History is a witch!, he was fond of saying to his students, and you are history's bitch.

  HOLES, BLACK

  At some point humans will no longer use the word boy. Instead, we'll refer to young men as black holes. I love black holes, those stars that can't bear being stars, like a boy who can't bear the weight of being a boy, and so collapses in on himself, sucking everyone and everything that is around him in, all objects. Surely everyone has known a boy like this, a boy from whom nothing, not even light, can escape. Surely everyone has gotten dangerously close to such a boy.

  HOMOSEXUAL

  I think I am mentioned somewhere in the Bible, if I remember correctly.

  HOODIES

  The most significant cultural product to come out of the West in the late twentieth century is what is commonly known as the hoodie, those sweatshirts with hoods that boys and young men wear. Eventually, the only thing our generation will be remembered for will be the hoodie, our most noteworthy cultural achievement, though, in a way, hoodies originated with monks in the Middle Ages, so in this sense we are not even original. Hoodies are illegal in public places in English cities, where video cameras are everywhere, because the wearing of a hoodie does not allow the cameras to see the boys' faces, and thus gets in the way of proper surveillance. The English authorities are acknowledging not only the resplendent nature of boys' faces but also the transcendent power of the hoodie, though a hoodie is really nothing more than a shadow, a shadow worn by a shadow, a shadow that can keep you warm, a shadow you can hang on a hook.

  HULA HOOPS

  Hegel claimed that he was inspired to become a philosopher when he was just a boy, playing with a hula hoop made out of birchwood, just like the hula hoops the Nazis used in their mass rallies in sports stadiums, where thirty thousand boys would hula-hoop as displays of Hitler's armed might; boys and spectators alike were hypnotized. Something in the hula hoop suggested the movement of thought, he wrote. Hegel also claimed that unlike his ex-boyfriend Immanuel Kant—or that cunt Kant, as he disparagingly referred to him, who liked to go out walking through the birch forests to get all his ideas—he did his best thinking whilst hula-hooping; in his later years this became a problem: he could not think without his hula hoop. Still, Hegel hula-hooped his way through systematic philosophy and met the deadline for his final book, titled After My Death, at five o'clock on the afternoon before the Holocaust.

  HUMANS

  I think I'm getting a little bit better at being human. I've become more used to that continuous, low droning sound, and to the idea of death, and until death, the fact of duration.

  Now that I've finally worked out the system, it's quite easy, even relaxing. At times, life takes on a quality that is almost vaudevillian, structured as it is in a series of short, independent acts.

  Though I shouldn't speak too soon: sometimes I get so over being human that I begin to search out other possibilities of what I might be—a dog's muzzle, or a boy's bicycle—and the alternatives look promising.

  HUMMEL FIGURINES

  Surely there is nothing more revolting or disturbing than those so-called Hummel figurines, which are much loved by white supremacists and by women of my mother's generation. These German figurines first appeared on the horizon in 1935, two years after the Nazis' rise to power.

  Standing four inches tall, these figurines are mainly of plump Bavarian children with chubby knees and fat, rosy cheeks; their swollen heads are usually out of proportion to the rest of their bodies. As a rule, the boy figurines are dressed in lederhosen and alpine hats; the girls wear traditional dirndls and kerchiefs. The children are generally depicted in states of idleness, lolling beneath the shade of a birch tree, or feeding geese, though occasionally they are represented in states of pain (see Hummel figurine number 7,641: boy with toothache).

  The Hummel phenomenon was the result of an artistic collaboration between a nun fated to die of tuberculosis, Sister Maria Innocentia (formerly Berta Hummel), and a porcelain manufacturer by the name of Franz Goebel.

  It is of interest that although Hummels were immediately popular, they were almost immediately banned by the Nazi Party, on the grounds that they did not adequately represent the “noble Aryan race.” However, some historians of the Hummel suggest that the ban was for entirely different reasons, namely that Hitler was deeply unsettled by the uncanny proximity between his misshapen physiognomy and that of the Hummel. Far from being distortions of the German race, the figurines were suppressed for being far too accurate.

  Of even greater interest is the fact that after WWII, when workers cleared out the ruins of the so-called bunker, the underground structure in which Hitler took his own life, thousands of tiny fragments of Hummel figurines were found amidst the debris. Despite concerted efforts, the figurines could not be reconstructed.

  HUMMINGBIRDS

  God, I love hummingbirds! I like how stressed out they are, and how they move their wings so quickly—sixty to seventy times a second—that they look as if they have no wings, like their wings have been amputated or hacked off. Their wings beat as fast as the eyelashes of anxious boys, as fast as we humans tend to think. And their intricate flight patterns are weirdly similar to our patterns of thought: they can fly not only forward, into the future, or hover there, in the present, but they are also the only bird that can fly backward, just as we humans are the only creatures so hopelessly committed to thinking backward—that is, to remembering. It seems like all hummingbirds can think about or care about is nectar, and if they couldn't get it, they'd kill themselves, slit their tiny violet throats. At night they must collapse into a state of honeyed torpor. Always on the go, on those rare occasions when you see a hummingbird pause on a branch, to take everything in, it really doesn't resemble itself.

  HUNCHBACKS

  The moon's been hanging so low in the sky lately that I keep hitting my head on it. I'm beginning to develop a stoop. Its starkwhitebrightness gives me a headache. I bet if you licked the moon, it would taste like aspirin. Soon we will live on nothing but aspirin. Soon we will all be hunchbacks.

  HYDRA, THE

  I have nine voices, all of them terrible, just like the dreaded Hydra and her nine heads. Whenever I encounter any one of my voices, they horrify me; I'm turned to stone, like those who gazed upon the Medusa. Whenever I cut off one of my voices, two more voices grow back in its place. To truly kill these voices I have to behe
ad them, one by one, and burn the neck of each voice, but then there is the one voice that refuses to die; to do away with my immortal voice you'll need to bury it under a heavy stone.

  I

  I

  Naturally I resent every letter in the English alphabet, but there is no letter I resent more than the letter I. In fact, this so-called letter is not a letter at all. It is nothing but a mask, like a plain white mask one wears to the Carnival in Venice; and just as in porn director Kristen Bjorn's Carnival in Venice, what the I conceals is obscene, pornographic.

  However, as much as I dislike the I, I am fully aware that it is essential: like a sea green mask worn by a surgeon in an operating theater, it protects not only the wearer, but also everyone around him. One needs this mask, one requires the services of this letter and cannot live in the world without it.

  IDENTITY

  Scalpel.

  IDENTITY THEFT

  Whereas everyone else in this country seems concerned about identity theft, I am, on the contrary, intrigued by it, vaguely titillated by it. I hold out hope that someone will come along and relieve me of the burden of my identity, so I will finally be able to do what I have always wanted to do: replace my identity with another identity, or better yet, just leave it empty and continue happily with no identity. It seems, however, that my identity does not appeal to these identity thieves; they are not attracted to my identity, which is homely and is forced to wait all lonely in the wings like a wallflower at a country dance.

  In the meantime, just as a teenager I practiced kissing in the mirror, I now commit identity theft against myself, nightly.

  IMAGINATION

  Leave the cage door open.

  IMPOSSIBLE, THE

  There are periods of life when nothing interests me, other than the impossible. Up until such times, I am interested in other things, but I subsequently lose interest, and the impossible becomes the only thing I am interested in.

  INDEX LIBRORUM PROHIBITORUM

  Begun in 1559, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum is an official list of books the Roman Catholic Church strictly forbids its members to read, considering these books to be antithetical to the Church's teachings. In the Vatican there is a library housing every one of these books, staffed by young priests. More than anything, I want my book to find its way onto a shelf of this library, a very high shelf, a shelf so high that whenever one of the young librarian priests has to retrieve my book, he will be forced to stand on a little ladder, and whoever is below will be able to look up his robe. I keep sending a copy to the Vatican. I even had my mother write a letter, the gist of which was My son's book is evil, signed not only by my mother, but also by our parish priest and the parish's choirboys, and I enclosed the letter inside the book. But the Index keeps on sending it back with a letter of their own saying that they don't think my book is antithetical enough. They aren't fully convinced that my book poses a real threat to the faithful and the devout.

  INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, THE

  My favorite epoch of sodomy occurred between 1760 and 1790, when men tended to crowd together, and there was a rapid expansion of sodomy, a speeding up in the rate of sodomy itself. This was the result of using both science and capital in solving the problems of sodomy. Sodomy was completely changed by steam. Observing the men who worked in the factories of Sheffield, Engels wrote that soot and dirt cover their faces and hands like the grimmest form of glitter. Young men subjected to serious social evils, wearing nothing but black silk top hats, sodomized one another against a backdrop of smokestacks. Even the machines blushed.

  INFIDELITY

  What we learn from the character of Oblonsky in Anna Karenina is that when you are on your way back home from adultery, first off all, turn down the volume on that cheerful pink glow.

  And second, don't bring your boyfriend back that gift of agiant pear. The pear is bigger than Oblonsky's head. His wife, Dolly, having just learned of the infidelity, wants to smash in her husband's skull with the pear. The pear is not mentioned or seen again after page two, but it lingers, rots. We never find out what happens to the pear.

  INFORMATION, THE AGE OF

  We live in the age of information, an age in which we are all very informed, and in which dead bodies are highly prized, much more than living bodies, because you get far less information from a body when it's alive.

  INHERITANCE

  My mother has promised to leave me her travel diary from 1956, and some Hummel figurines, and her hot pink dressing gown, and her pale pink nightgown, and then some things that can neither be grasped nor displayed.

  It is said that in 1856 my great-great grandfather on my mother's side somehow came into a piece of property in lower Manhattan. To claim the property, he had to sail from Scotland to Manhattan. Violently seasick, he was forced to disembark at the first port and had to forgo his claim.

  When my father dies, I will inherit his pipe, and his olive green cardigan, and the love letters he wrote to my mother. I will inherit his gathering silence and the inky clouds in his brain.

  INITIALS

  Using the jagged edge of a torn-up can of Coca-Cola, I used to carve my initials into the pink and gray bark of the eucalyptus trees in our front yard. I watched as thick, golden sap oozed slowly out of the letters. Once in a while I imagined slitting my wrists with the Coke can, and my mother coming back from the shops, only to find me lying at the base of the tree in a pool of my own blood, my initials above me like the inscription on a headstone, the Coke can placed carefully nearby.

  INQUISITION, CHILDHOOD AND THE SPANISH

  My favorite period of history is the Spanish Inquisition, particularly the most intensive times, when there were regular burnings, between the years 1480 and 1530. My interest in this period began when I was a kid; in my Book of Wonders there was a drawing of one of the Inquisition's all-night torture sessions. Needless to say, I spent some quality time with this picture.

  In it, heretics were being stretched out on racks and suspended by hooks. It appeared that the torture was just getting going: one man's tongue was about to be removed from his mouth with pincers; the soles of another man's feet were ready to be prodded and tickled with a red-hot poker that had just been heated over a round pot of fire.

  Whereas the smocks worn by the heretics had hems that covered their ankles—out of modesty, I suppose—the inquisitors' smocks barely reached their knees. I recall that one of the inquisitors had very muscular calves. Everyone had a big cross on the front of his smock, like the crosses on the hot-cross buns we ate during Lent. The inquisitors wore smart hoods that concealed their faces, while the heretics wore nice dunce's caps, so-called corozas, with bits of blood spattered on them, that exposed both their faces and their grimaces. The face of one of the heretics was shadowed, as if to suggest that he was blushing. The tips of the inquisitors' hoods were so high that they almost (but not quite) touched the torture chamber's smoky ceiling.

  INQUISITION, GYMS OF THE SPANISH

  As a child I also read up on the Inquisition so I could learn more about it. I discovered that during the Inquisition, especially during the long, difficult cases involving heretics with exceptionally tricky souls, the inquisitors would go and work out, on their breaks, to take their minds off the Inquisition and to release some of the stress of the Inquisition, though, predictably, and more often than not, at the gym, all they could think about was the Inquisition.

  Still, the thought of the heretics' fate, or more specifically, the thought of their own relationship to the fate of the heretics, really motivated the inquisitors and pushed them on as they were doing their reps. Yet sometimes, whilst working out, an inquisitor would be so caught up in contemplating the depths of a particular heretic's heresy that the tip of his hood would get caught in the machine, not only posing a risk to the inquisitor, but, because it would take a while to untangle, also causing an inconvenience to the other gym members waiting to use the machine. (Historically, the Inquisition was in many ways a great inconvenience.)


  Although historically the inquisitors were members of various gyms, there is one gym that appears throughout the history books, a certain 24-hour gym. Apparently, all the main inquisitors went to this gym, and you often saw them in the locker rooms, wearing nothing but their inquisitors' hoods, displaying their muscular, vascular bodies, discussing various issues pertaining to the latest Inquisition, like the kind of wood that would be best to use for a particular heretic's stake, and how long they thought a certain heretic might take to burn.

  According to historians, the heretics themselves did not work out and were either skinny or fat. Between proceedings, it was quite boring; denied a valid gym membership, there was nothing for the heretics to do. Often the boredom became so unbearable that supposedly many heretics began to look forward to going to hell, which surely would not be so monotonous. At the very least, they could look forward to the next torture session.

  INQUISITION, MY SPANISH

  Some mornings, my boyfriend cooks sausages for me. They make a nice sizzling sound on the hot plate, like the burning bodies of heretics whose souls must be saved.

  INQUISITION, OUR SPANISH

  I wish I had lived during the Spanish Inquisition! However, it is pretty good to be alive right now during the current Inquisition, which is very official, and in which we are all under scrutiny. The look of our Inquisition is basically the same as that of the former inquisition: a lot of hoods and smocks; its methods are very interesting and include attaching men's hands to electric cords so the men think they're about to be electrocuted, but the cord is not even plugged in. Our Inquisition is unplugged, just like those MTV Unplugged acoustic sessions, like the one Nirvana did shortly before Kurt Cobain shot himself, because, as he said in his suicide note, Psychology has turned the self into an inquisition. At this point in time, if one is to survive philosophically, one must be a heretic; one must commit philosophical heresy and practice heretical poetics. Historically, whenever there is an outbreak of bliss, an Inquisition appears on the horizon, almost immediately, to suppress the bliss.