The End of the World Book: A Novel

by Alistair McCartney

  INSANE ASYLUMS

  When they finally come and take me away to the insane asylum, the walls of my padded cell will be the exact shade of hot pink and made from the very same synthetic material as my mother's padded pink dressing gown.

  INSOMNIA

  After tucking me in, my mother would go into the kitchen and put the knives to bed, but not before they knelt on the linoleum and said their prayers. Only then would she tuck them into the drawer lined with sticky shelf paper of a gay and floral design. She'd sing the knives some lullabies. But still they'd lie awake, tossing and turning. They had great difficulty sleeping.

  In our house the knives were up all night.

  INSPIRATION

  Quick, before it evaporates!

  INSURGENTS

  Toward the end of the twentieth century, in an effort to be taken more seriously, homosexuals began to refer to their boyfriends as partners, since boyfriend seemed too juvenile and insubstantial a term to convey the gravity (and terror!) of a lifelong union. Although there are numerous definitions of the word partner, the one that sticks in my mind is one of two persons who together own a business. The idea of our love being reduced to a mere working arrangement makes me distinctly uncomfortable. With this in mind, I have decided that from now on I'll refer to my boyfriend as my insurgent. Although this is still not quite the right word, and although currently it has other connotations, I like it better, and I think if we all used it, we might be taken considerably more seriously.

  INTERESTS, MY

  The only machines I'm interested in are the ones that are yet to be invented; the only behavior I care for is the kind that will never be understood; the only feelings I want to feel are the sort that will last a thousand years.

  INTERIORITY

  Currently, we find ourselves subjected to the seemingly endless chatter of people nattering on their cell phones in public, letting us in on their most banal intimacies, and spilling secret after secret, but this is just a taste of things to come. Soon there will be no such thing as interiority. Everything humans used to do quietly inside themselves will be carried out in public. Our dreams will be dreamt in full view of one another; we will attend other people's dreams like they attended public hangings in the nineteenth century. In each of us, our unconscious will be lewdly on display, like a prostitute sitting in a shop-front window. Our thoughts and fears will be organized neatly for all to see, like those pieces of raw red meat in my butcher's display case. (Whereas our thoughts will be available for purchase, our unconscious will be rented out by the hour.) And our perversions that we once concealed at whatever cost will be set out for all to admire, like the porcelain figurines in my mother's glass cabinet. To get to the soul, humans will have to go very far away, so deep inside themselves that most will die of thirst or exposure long before arriving.

  INTERNET, THE

  I suspect that death will be exceedingly boring and a bit like being on the Internet, which is also, let's face it, rather boring. Well, it's interesting for a moment or two—and probably death will at first catch our interest—but then very quickly, it gets tedious beyond belief. Just like the Internet, death will not be a space per se; death will be more like myspace.

  As one searches the Internet—and perhaps we will similarly search death—one fades away from life and drifts off into the ether and gets that glazed-out feeling until eventually one just sort of disappears. The longer one stays connected to the Internet—when we are dead we will similarly be connected to death—one feels as if one is already dead. In this sense, the Internet is a prelude to—and a kind of dress rehearsal for—death.

  INTERNET, PLACES OF INTEREST ON THE

  The Internet was discovered in the early 1990s, and one of the most popular places on the Internet is the so-called chat room, which is where people go to overcome their crippling loneliness and to meet other people, without ever having to face them or smell them.

  Because of this popularity, and due to the severity of loneliness at this point in time, chat rooms can be difficult to get into, but once you are in them you feel as if you could spend the rest of eternity there. In this sense, chat rooms are like coffins, but ethereal coffins, coffins made out of Cool Whip, coffins that are light and airy. Actually, considering the communal nature of chat rooms, it would be more accurate to say that chat rooms are like spacious mass graves.

  There are all sorts of chat rooms where people can go to meet people with common interests. If they want, they can even arrange to meet these people in person, face them and smell them. For example, gay men who are interested in getting infected with a virus known as HIV can go to so-called barebacking chat rooms, and suicidal Japanese youths who want to meet other suicidal youths, so they can commit suicide together, can go to group suicide chat rooms.

  Although there are specific areas on the Internet that cater to the needs and interests of people with a healthy death wish, the entire Internet is sort of like a plug-in death wish. With its combination of Eros and Thanatos, Sigmund Freud would have probably felt very happy on the Internet; most likely he would have become addicted to it, just like us, and he would have formulated a complex theory, but ultimately would have been unable to cure his addiction.

  INTERNET, PRIOR TO THE

  Apparently the Internet runs on remarkably few wires. As we speak, birds are busily pecking away at the wires that keep the Internet up and running. Some of these birds are real and some of these birds are fake, just like in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (which reminds me: I should be more like Tippi Hedren).

  Eventually, the birds will wear down all the wires, causing the Internet to break down, and then things will become grim and very lonely; life will quickly turn violent and bloody, just like when the birds arrive in Hitchcock's film. Whether we like it or not, we will have to go back to how it was prior to the Internet.

  INVENTIONS

  I find the whole notion of inventions somewhat disturbing and kind of creepy. Having a name is bad enough; the only thing that could possibly be worse would be to see one's name branded into a new machine that everyone touches. I can't think of anything more horrible than inventing something with a smooth, shiny surface, a machine that never ceases to work, a machine in which you must constantly observe your own reflection.

  (Though perhaps just as bad is the fate of those inventors whose name is immediately forgotten, whose very memory is devoured by the terrible usefulness of their object. Please, I beg you: don't invent anything. If I catch you inventing anything, I will immediately destroy it; I will do everything I can to ensure that no one will ever know how to use it.)

  I am interested, however, in the slow distortion of inventions, the way the bonnet was originally designed to look like a Greek helmet, yet its form gradually altered, over time losing all resemblance to the original. I am also drawn toward the blueprints of inventions never realized, especially ones where you can still observe traces of the inventor's tears. And inventions that have been gently vandalized or defaced with graffiti are, of course, splendid.

  What interests me most is when inventions become obsolete almost immediately, the quicker the better, and said objects are placed out on the curbside, left to fall slowly into a graceful state of disrepair, left to rot in direct moonlight.

  INVENTORIES

  The world is made up of nothing but sorrow. (Except for this birdsong, sweet knives, just to the right of me.) The world is filled not only with objects, but death objects. And I have been assigned to take inventory.

  IRA, THE

  As I watched the news report in which Gerry Adams, leader of the Sinn Féin, announced that the Irish Republican Army was renouncing violence and decommissioning its weapons, I found myself growing deeply nostalgic, associating as I do the violent heyday of the IRA in the 1970s and early '80s with the violent heyday of my childhood, so much so that the memories blur and mingle, explode into one another.

  When I recall childhood, I recall the hunger strikes I went on, just like Bobby Sa
nds, except I wasted away on nothing but red meat and refined sugar. I recall the bombs that were detonated as I opened kitchen cupboard doors. And how Adams's bright red beard tickled me when I kissed him goodnight. Most of all, I remember my mother, how kindly and gentle her eyes looked through the little slits of her black wool ski mask. And how soft the wool of her green ski mask felt against my smooth face whenever she held me.

  So, when Adams made his public statement, I felt deeply betrayed, as if he were announcing that he was decommissioning memory.

  Unlike Adams, I will never renounce the bright violence of my childhood.

  IRONY

  Whenever anyone is not blushing in Anna Karenina, he or she is being ironic. In the men, irony mainly takes place beneath their mustaches, though sometimes their calves are ironic. For the women, irony is associated with childbirth, with household budgets, with evening. Every now and then irony and a blush will occur in the same sentence, but always in that order, for the blush dissipates, dissembles the irony. Irony cowers when faced with a blush.

  No one excels more at irony than Anna herself, who is like Socrates in a ball gown. She is the only character who is able to blush ironically. She is the only one whose irony can withstand a blush. Her irony is so refined it is capable of destroying blushes. To distract herself from her pain, she has gowns made to order, sewn out of yards and yards of irony.

  ISOLATION

  Isolation is good. Any boy suspected of carrying the imagination will be forcibly detained and placed under the brightest quarantine, for a period of time.

  J

  JACKSON, MICHAEL

  Although in regards to mishandling the boy with cancer, Michael Jackson was found innocent in a court of law, and upon leaving the courthouse made the statement, Iam innocent and I will always be king, my twelve-inch-high Michael Jackson porcelain doll has just been found guilty in a court of dolls and will be executed tomorrow right before dawn.

  JAMES, HENRY

  Unfortunately, I don't really have anything to add to the discussion on Henry James, except that when I read his sentences for some reason I think of hooks, tiny hooks, like the hooks that can be found running down the backs of curtains. I imagine him composing his sentences out of these hooks, whose minute prongs are just the right shape and size to plunge into his characters' psyches; I see him at the end of each day, his fingers raw and bloody from working with such fiddly, tricky hooks.

  As I peruse the work of James, I also recall one of my train journeys, during the course of which I had a conversation with a cholo by the name of Ricky, who had a tattoo of roses around his collarbone, and salmon pink bandages on his legs, but who never disclosed to me the reason for the bandages. Toward the end of the journey, which was long—the train had been somewhat delayed—as downtown Los Angeles loomed in the near distance, Ricky said to me in a manner that was distinctly Jamesian, Downtown, you can get up to anything. You can find individuals of all persuasions and appearances; as we parted I found myself wishing that our train had been delayed endlessly. (Of course a cholo into Henry James would be the ideal.)

  And of course, upon opening one of James's novels, I think of the obvious: his loneliness, and his exceptional forehead, that marvelous cold marble church dome of a forehead. I envision him on those particularly desolate nights, at a loose end, lining all his books up in a row, from left to right—beginning with the least difficult and ending with the most difficult—trying not to think about boys, yet every now and then failing and wondering if his ideal could be waiting out there only for him, a young man, the intricacy of whose beauty would not match but exceed the intricacy of James's own melancholy. However, on the whole, I imagine James successfully avoiding the subject.

  JERSEY

  In 1958 my parents went on their honeymoon to the island of Jersey, which occupies an area of only forty-five square miles in the English Channel, and which is known for its buttery cows and its Nazis, who occupied the island between the years 1940 and 1945.

  While my parents were there, they went on a tour of a dairy. Some of the cows were gray and dark fawn and almost black, while others were reddish brown, the same shade my mother dyed her hair. There were big silver canisters full of yellowish milk; as they walked, my mother saw her reflection everywhere: a bride, multiplied. When the workers weren't looking, my father scooped the cream from the top of one of the canisters.

  I remember finding in a shoebox at home a postcard from their honeymoon, with a picture of some cows on the front. On the back, written in lead pencil, in my mother's hand, there was a note of a dream: Dreamt that I lost my veil.

  Below this brief account of my mother's dream was the postcard's description of the cows: Notice how the horns curve inward.

  JEWELERS

  The task of erasing one's self is painstaking. There are many little sides or facets to self-destruction, and each facet must be polished and cut to exactly the right shape and size. If one wishes to destroy oneself, one must be a diamond cutter, like the kind they have in Belgium; one must have a steady hand and a jeweler's eye.

  JOAN OF ARC

  We need to burn Joan of Arc again. We need to give her another haircut, but this time, let's make it half an inch shorter. We need to make sure the flames rise higher, yapping suddenly at her ankles like small orange dogs climbing out of volcanoes, and we need to make the flames stylized, like those painted on the side of a cholo's lowrider. We need to rewind Joan of Arc. We need her to defeat the English four more times, and then we need to mark the spot where the stake stood in the marketplace at Rouen with a statue, but this time place it a little to the right. We need the Burgundians to sell her to the English for 17,000 francs (not 16,000 like last time), and we need to place peaches on the pyre. We need to condemn her and then just as before we need to turn away from the dreadful sight.

  JOCKSTRAPS

  It is not until one observes one's jockstrap hanging on the back of a chair that it sinks in that one is mortal, and that long after one is gone, one's jockstrap will remain, off-white, somehow skeletal. It is only then that one fully realizes the harsh and profound melancholy of the jockstrap.

  JOURNEYS, SEA

  My mum and dad tried living first in Motherwell and then in London, in a little basement flat. But my mother missed her sisters. In 1962, with their two young ones—Rory and Fiona—my parents took the slow sea journey from Portsmouth to Perth, Australia. It took four weeks and cost the family of four twenty pounds.

  My mother tells me that to pass the time she knitted. She spent a lot of time washing the salt out of her curls. Sometimes she dreamt that her wool was getting tangled with the waves. And that the world was full of tiny portholes, just like the ones in their cabin, and if you wanted to escape the world all you had to do was smash the glass in those holes.

  JUPITER

  Like Jupiter, the heart has extreme gravity. You're so much heavier on the heart. It has some red spots on it, some unusually red, and you can never see the heart because it is covered in violent gases.

  In this sense, Sappho, in her explorations and expeditions into the vastness of the heart, was the first astronaut. She faced many dangers, the chief one being the impossibility of escaping the heart. Of all her discoveries, the most significant was that love would never dream of inhabiting the heart, which is basically uninhabitable.

  Notice that Sappho's helmet flattens her curls. Look at her staring out the window of the rocket, how pale and solemn her face is through the glass.

  K

  KAFKA, FRANZ

  When I think of Kafka, which is often, I never picture him writing. I prefer to think of him doing mundane things, like working in the moderately sized asbestos factory of which he was part owner for four years, his feet up on the desk, doing a quick sketch of an asbestos nightgown designed especially for his mother, telling the workers not to weep on his machines. This job supposedly ruined his lungs and probably led to his early demise from tuberculosis at the age of forty.

 
I also like to think about him in his last days at the sanatorium, his temperature rising in the late afternoon, and his cough, mournful and melodious, as if his lungs were an accordion playing the most unheard-of music. The kind of cough that lacerates the listener's heart.

  Some of the thoughts I have of Kafka are decidedly impure. I blush easily (did Kafka blush?) so I don't want to go into detail, but let me just say that afterwards the pages of my copy of Die Verwandlung are all sticky.

  Whenever I am asked the question Who is your type? my answer is always immediate: Franz Kafka. However, this position is untenable and everyone compares unfavorably because no man is quite sorrowful enough; no man's hips are narrow enough. No one can dance as soberly as Kafka. No one's love is as pitiless.

  KAFKA, FRANZ, AFTER

  Kafka of course died at the sanatorium in Kierling on June 3, 1924. Hence we live not in 2008 but in 84 AK—After Kafka. Yet there is nothing after Kafka: nothing of interest has occurred since his death; everything written since then should be destroyed; and the farther away we get from Kafka, the worse it all gets. However, adjust your calendars accordingly.

  KAFKA, FRANZ, DREAMS OF