The End of the World Book: A Novel

by Alistair McCartney

  MAD COW DISEASE

  At the moment, the disease I am most interested in is mad cow disease, otherwise known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

  I've been a fan of this disease for a while, but I think my interest was really sparked that night I saw the news report about the French teenage boy who had contracted the disease. Although it had not yet been proved, it seemed he probably acquired it from eating hamburgers at McDonald's.

  The report showed video footage of the boy prior to his becoming mad, looking bored and sullen, wearing a hoodie and jeans as baggy as cow udders. Although in these images he appeared to be attractive, since he had been infected, he had become devastatingly beautiful.

  He lay in his hospital bed, with nothing but a white sheet to cover his skinny, naked body, which was elegantly elongated, like a boy in an El Greco painting. His skin was so pale, almost semi-transparent, like a bar of soap.

  Inhabited by an odd glow, he looked directly into the camera. Unlike in the earlier footage, the boy was smiling, and he appeared to be calm, as serene as Christ in El Greco's painting of the Resurrection, though of course the smile and the sense of serenity probably meant nothing, considering that the disease makes the brain as soft as a kitchen sponge and forms holes in the brain.

  His mother sat by his side, holding her son's constantly shaking hand. She told the reporter she was first alerted to the fact that something was wrong with her son when she noticed he was crying more than usual.

  The report then cut to a paddock of cows, I believe they were of the Schleswig Holstein variety, with white patches on their black coats, like clouds, and horns slanting forward, but curving inward. It seemed these cows had just been tested, and one of the cows had turned out to be mad, so the authorities were going to have to destroy (as opposed to slaughter) the whole lot. The cows were waiting around in the paddock, waiting to be destroyed, seemingly unaware of their fate, looking as bored as teenage boys, though perhaps they were aware of their fate and simply bored by it.

  We were then taken back to a final image of the boy, who, by the look of things, had gone far beyond fate. There was no question of Resurrection. He mumbled something in French, which a voice-over translated as Take me away from here, to a country where all the boys are mad.

  MAD COW DISEASE, LIVING IN A TIME OF

  The French teenage boy with mad cow disease left a profound impression on me. Ever since seeing the report I have stopped eating beef, not out of fear of catching the disease, but on the contrary: I will only eat beef if the butcher can say with absolute certainty that the cut of meat he is selling to me is from a cow infected with mad cow disease. No butcher has been prepared to make such a claim.

  MAGPIES

  When I was a boy, most of spring was spent avoiding magpies. They lived in the branches of the eucalyptus trees scattered all over our neighborhood; whenever we walked beneath these trees, the mothers would swoop at us, in an effort to protect their newborn babies. Periodically, there were stories in the newspaper of children who had been blinded in one eye as a result of such incidents. Although I carried a rolled-up newspaper around with me, waving it over my head, it didn't deter the vicious birds from coming down, again and again, to thwack their black-and-white wings against my head, wings that were muscular, as if the birds worked out. At best, I got a bit of newsprint on the parts of them that were pure white. There were times I went about with a black umbrella, which worked better.

  I knew that these birds wouldn't stop at the eye. They'd peck open your skull with their black beaks and drag out little bits of your brain and your dreams to line their nests, which opened at the side and had a domelike cover, like St. Peter's Basilica.

  Although these encounters left me with a certain dread of magpies, not to mention a pronounced fear of spring, I don't hold a grudge against these birds. In fact, today, there are times when I'm out walking, and I find myself almost wishing to be swooped by a magpie. I recall particular instances of swooping and feel something approaching nostalgia.

  I also feel somewhat of an affinity with these birds. Perhaps it's because of the delight they take in imitating the sounds of other birds. In the early twenty-first century we have been reduced to imitation; we might as well learn from the magpie and enjoy our mimicry.

  Sometimes I just want to retire from the twenty-first century, with nothing but a magpie, keep it in a cage, reform it from its thievish ways, and teach it to speak a few simple syllables.

  MAN

  The term comes from a Latin word meaning dark chamber. Aman is essentially a kind of box that light cannot enter except by uncovering the anus. Those men who have too much light in them are basically uninteresting. The device for holding the sensitive memories, like a strip of negatives, is at the other end of the man.

  A man is one of the least important instruments of communication and expression. Actually, he is the least important.

  “MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, THE”

  The 1985 gay porn movie The Other Side of Aspen plays out in a remarkably similar fashion to Edgar Allan Poe's short story “The Masque of the Red Death,” which was first published in 1842. Just as the revelers in Poe's story, seeking to sequester themselves away from the red plague, which has been devastating the country for years, party on in Prince Prospero's heavily fortified abbey, the men in The Other Side seek solace from the ravages of the gay plague—the so-called hot pink plague, which has been devastating the country for close to four years, and is, in this sense, a new plague—by hiding away in a ski lodge and engaging in an endless orgy.

  And just as in Poe's story, where a sinister masked figure arrives at the party, in this porn classic, a guest whom no one knows appears at the lodge—he's somehow gotten through the snow—his identity concealed behind a red wool ski mask. (In the future, all gay porn actors will wear ski masks. The face will be considered un-erotic.)

  However, whereas the guests in Poe's story are horrified by this ghoulish masked stranger, who is Death himself, and attempt to turn him away—an attempt that of course in the end proves to be futile—the guests in The Other Side, perhaps knowing that there is no longer any point in hiding and that any attempt to do so would be ineffectual, welcome the masked stranger, who is Death himself, into the fray.

  MCCARTNEY, ALISTAIR

  One Sunday at Mass, in the usual hubbub of leaving, a woman who was not my mother took my hand, under the impression that she was my mother and I was her son. I must have been six or seven. I became aware of her mistake almost immediately, and with my free hand I tugged at the hem of her dress, which had flowers on it and was made from a slippery material, like the dresses my mother wore. But this woman paid no attention, and I was too timid to say anything. It wasn't until she got to the door of our church that she realized her mistake. Blushing by the wooden collection box, she returned me to my mother and located her actual son. I remember my mum had a good laugh about the whole incident in the car on our way home.

  But maybe I've got it all wrong. Maybe that woman, utterly oblivious, took me to her car, buckled me in, and drove me home. Perhaps on arriving home, she saw that she had taken the wrong boy, the wrong son, but, too embarrassed to admit it, kept me, and raised me as her own, while some other boy went home with my family. That is, I was not returned. I am only under the impression that this is who I am. On that Sunday in 1978 an exchange took place.

  MCCARTNEY, ANDREW

  My brother Andrew was named after one of my father's brothers. Uncle Andrew died when he was just five years old. My mother told me some things about him, this ghost uncle, that she had learned by way of my grandmother, Margaret McCartney.

  Apparently, Andrew loved Westerns and liked to wander around the streets of Motherwell, Scotland, in a big cowboy hat and with a little lasso. He would traipse around the town, the lasso wound about his tiny hands, the hat slipping down his skull.

  Everybody in the town knew him; he talked to everyone. According to my grandmother, he was such a bright little boy. P
eople said he had a glow about him. On his walks he lassoed everything he encountered: dogs, clouds, milk bottles, the church, women's underthings hanging on backyard clotheslines.

  In the winter snow would collect on the wide brim of his hat. He would go home and hold the hat in front of the stove, watching the snow melt.

  One day while Andrew was out on one of his walks, he found a bottle of soda waiting for him on a red brick wall. The bottle was full, not of soda, but of bleach, and apparently Andrew drank every drop.

  MCCARTNEY, DAVID

  My grandfather on my father's side died of a heart attack in 1946 at the age of forty-six. The symmetry of his death unnerved certain members of the family; others somehow found it consoling. He was washing himself at the basin in the upstairs bathroom of his little house in Motherwell, Scotland. Did he have a chance to look up at the plaster statue of the Virgin Mary that stood on top of the medicine cabinet, surrounded by rolls of toilet paper? No one knows, but when enough time had passed, it became a running joke that he died looking up the skirt of a virgin.

  When he died it was still early in the morning, that gray hour when milkmen place milk bottles on doorsteps. Was that the last sound the world had to offer David McCartney, the clink of glass against glass? In fact, it was the milkman who first heard the commotion of my grandfather's dying. The milkman knocked on the front door to see if everything was all right. No one else in the house had heard a thing. The children were still asleep, deep in dreams; my grandmother was in the kitchen making breakfast, where the teakettle was shrieking. And the plumbing always made such a racket.

  Before he died, my grandfather made roads for a living. He went around with a team, all over Scotland and Ireland, laying the bitumen down to surface and waterproof the roads. He was in charge of painting the white lines down the center of each road. I am told that he liked his work. And why not? Roads are useful. They take you where you long to be. More importantly, they take you away from where you no longer wish to be. They make yearning possible. Roads get you places. Everybody needs roads.

  MCCARTNEY, FRANK

  In 1955 my Uncle Frank, who worked as a detective for Scotland Yard, died of cancer. He was thirty-four years old. He went quickly. My mother never got to meet him, but she told me that he was supposed to have been very kind. Frank was (so she was told) a terribly kind and extremely gentle man.

  At the time of his death, my uncle was working on a case involving the corpse of a young woman found floating facedown in the dirty green water of the river Clyde, the river on which Glasgow is situated, the river that empties out into the Firth of Clyde and from then on into the Atlantic. That's where she was heading.

  According to Scotland Yard's records, the victim had long red hair and was wearing a white dress with red polka dots, cinched in at the waist with a wide red belt. A group of fishermen scooped her up in their net. This woman's name was Margaret O'Riley. Her case was never solved, though there was vague talk of her getting involved with a bad lot.

  I have a photograph of my father and his elder brother, taken shortly before Frank's death. In the photograph my father wears a dark wool overcoat, a white shirt with a sharply starched collar, and a black silk tie. There is something suggestive in his crooked grin. His ears stick out boyishly; his dark eyes glitter and his black hair curls and shines. He looks like a boxer or a handsome young gangster.

  Frank chose to be photographed wearing a camel trench coat with a boxy cut and the collar turned up. He has a broad face and bushy eyebrows; a ray of freckles spans the bridge of his nose. To conceal from the camera his thinning hair, Frank wears a jaunty porkpie hat. The felt brim of the hat has been curled and pressed so well that its shadow casts a deep incision into the white backdrop.

  The manner of his dress leaves no doubt in your mind that he is a detective. He could not be anything but a detective. As if to make sure there will be no confusion, Frank holds a magnifying glass up, a joke shared by the brothers. The glass magnifies nothing but the empty white space between them.

  My father and my uncle have the same lopsided grin. The right sides of their mouths veer drastically up. When Frank is dead, my father will smile and people will sigh and say how much young Jimmy looks like Frank; the resemblance is quite eerie.

  Whereas my father's smile is unabashedly cocky, Frank's smile does in fact seem kind.

  Gazing at the photograph, I imagine that my father is thinking about girls. Not one girl in particular, just girls, plural. At church, in the baker's, down at the pub, in the factory, on plush velvet seats in the darkened cinema.

  Frank, on the other hand, is surely thinking of only one girl: Margaret O'Riley. Her swollen blue-yellow body. The bits of green seaweed they found tangled in her red hair.

  I cannot help but detect a trace of weariness in my uncle's smile. He looks worn out. Is he tired from work? Or can he already feel the cells overmultiplying in his body, like sinister polka dots? Perhaps he feels nothing as he stands still for the photographer. Perhaps he waits for nothing but the miniature explosion from the camera and for the photographer to reappear from beneath his black cloth.

  MCCARTNEY, MARGARET

  When I was eight, my grandmother came all the way from Scotland to visit us in Australia. I remember she wore the same yellow dress every day; it was very plain, not unlike the uniform worn by cashiers in supermarkets or hospital cafeterias. It buttoned up at the front, with large buttons made from the same material as the dress. Each morning she ate half a grapefruit, topped with white sugar.

  My grandmother brought framed photographs of her late husband and of my Uncle Frank. She kept them on the table next to her bed and wiped the glass down every day with a rag dipped in vinegar. I recall my grandmother as a particularly silent, dour woman, but once, she told me of a dream she had about Frank, that she reached into his coffin and extracted his lovely green eyes and then kept them on a mantelpiece in a glass jar full of vinegar.

  She didn't bring a photo of Andrew. They say that my grandmother never recovered from his death. There are only a handful of things that will not buckle beneath time: grief is one of them. Up until she died, if someone happened to mention Andrew's name, her face would fall like the rush of ice that begins an avalanche. It was as if her child had died just moments ago, and she was learning of his death for the first time. People would pass her their handkerchiefs: some monogrammed, some not. But she refused to be consoled. She would not accept them.

  MEAT

  Though the imagination is not like anything, if I had to compare it to something, it would be to one of those silver mincing machines you used to see at the butcher's. To my ears, the music this machine made was so much sweeter than any organ grinders.

  On some days, images keep grinding out of my imagination, raw and pink, like minced meat. They leave their stains. This is one of those days.

  MELANCHOLY

  God recently took me on as a sort of consultant. In an effort to cut back on (human) expenses, one of our first joint decisions was to get rid of the mornings, effective today. Starting tomorrow there will only be afternoons and evenings. Dusk will be much longer.

  At our first meeting the issue of melancholy also came up.

  Shall I make the boys less melancholy, do you think? he asked. So they don't even think about their wrists?

  It was toward the end of the meeting, and I was getting tired, and I found myself saying, Oh, no, make them more melancholy.

  Upon my recommendation, God's started making boys with twice as much longing and even darker circles under the eyes.

  MEMORY

  Thank God Marcel Proust is not around today to see what's happened to memory, how bad we've all gotten at remembering, and how good we all are at forgetting. Memory has become so tinny, like those poor quality recordings we made on cheap tape cassettes on tape decks when we were children. I'm probably the worst of the lot. If Proust only knew how poor my memory of childhood really is, and how much I have to invent to cover up this fact,
and if he saw me watching VH1 classic alternative music videos, ones from my childhood, which evoke powerful, murky feelings in me that must be attached to actual memories, yet I've forgotten the memory itself entirely, and only recall every lyric of the song, he'd probably rise out of his grave and feel extreme disdain for me.

  MEMORY, FIRST

  I have no first memory.

  MEMORY, MY SECOND ATTEMPT AT MY FIRST

  I suspect it may involve a white wicker crib: I'm lying in it, surrounded by toys; my sisters and their girlfriends stand above me. They're playing with me like I'm a baby doll, but I must be older, four or five. In the crib with me there's a clock with a rabbit on its face, the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, who's perpetually running late. He's wearing a waistcoat and holding his own little clock. But this seems far too convenient, too symbolic. If I am to speak truthfully, I suspect I am still standing at the entrance to the world, wondering whether or not I should enter, poised on the threshold of memory.

  MILK BOTTLES

  This morning I was woken up just before dawn by a soft clinking sound. Still half asleep, for a moment I believed I was once again a child, being woken up by the noise of the tousle-headed, acne-ridden, gently yawning milkman's boy who left bottles of milk on our doorstep five days a week. I only caught sight of this boy on a few occasions, on those mornings when I had to rise particularly early, but that handful of sightings was more than enough to furnish my dreams for many years. Throughout childhood and into early adolescence, I imagined the milkman's boy coming to my bedroom window, peeling back the flywire screen, and climbing into my bed; I thought of him there in the back of the van, by himself, sprawled out amongst the creamy glow of the milk bottles.