The End of the World Book: A Novel

by Alistair McCartney

  Eternity will be a space where either nothing is overdue or where everything is overdue. One would assume that its library card would allow for unlimited access, but maybe there are limits even in eternity.

  Either way, I will spend most of my time there leafing through the National Geographics, looking at the pictures with a different kind of longing. Every now and then, my mother and I will meet somewhere neutral, probably the reference area, and show each other what we plan to take out before returning to our separate sections.

  N

  NAME, A

  A name is a word fastened to a body, but tentatively, like the labels on the pajamas and dressing gowns we wore when we were children, which gave the name of the manufacturer and conveyed other necessary information, such as the reminder that these garments were highly flammable.

  NAME, MY

  Like all other human beings, whenever I venture out into the world, I have to bring my name. This is very inconvenient. There are eight letters in my first name, but if you need my last name, this comes to seventeen letters, and if you must have my middle name, Duncan, this adds up to twenty-three letters. If for some reason you require my Holy Confirmation name, Sebastian, we're left with a grand total of thirty-two letters. This means that wherever I go, I have to drag along with me a minimum of eight letters.

  Each letter of my name is made out of plywood and measures three feet by three feet, except for the first letter in each name: they measure six feet by six feet (so, even on those lucky occasions when I only need to bring along my initials, this is still a schlep). Each letter is painted bright yellow, like the lettering for McDonald's, and, in fact, the style of my lettering, especially the M for McCartney, often gets mistaken for a McDonald's sign.

  When I'm getting on a bus, I carry on one letter at a time; by the time I've got all the letters on, the bus driver and the other passengers have usually grown very impatient with me, and often curse me (and my name). I'm always getting splinters in my fingers (the plywood), and generally by the time I arrive wherever it is I am expected, I'm worn out. I sense how Jesus must have felt, dragging his cross all the way to Golgotha. In fact, I carry the t in Alistair over my shoulder, just like a cross. Having a name is such an exhausting, lumbering business. I've become increasingly interested in spaces where names are not necessary, in places that look down on names. And I'm seriously considering taking some of the letters from my name out back, as they say, and then burying them in the garden.

  NEGATIVE CAPABILITY

  In the early twenty-first century, we are still in this era of AIDS, the era that directly followed the golden age, just as we are still in the epoch of Romanticism.

  Technically speaking, any man who lets a handsome stranger take him without a rubber is a Romantic poet, in that he is following Keats's dictum and surrendering to beauty, placing beauty before any other consideration. In this sense, the bathhouses and sex clubs and chat rooms are full of poets, many of them wan and young and doomed!

  And surely there is nothing more Romantic than sitting in a bland, dreary clinic, awaiting one's HIV test results, suspended in that state of mystery, doubt, and uncertainty Keats described as negative capability.

  NERVOUS BREAKDOWNS

  A nervous breakdown is when a boy polishes himself so rigorously you can see your face in him. It is a special occasion, one that calls for the good china and the best cutlery.

  NIGHTGOWN, MY MOTHER'S

  I remember that my mother's nightgown was pale pink, 75 percent cotton, and delicately edged in barbed wire; you'd get electrocuted if you touched the hem, and anyway, they'd shoot you if you even tried to escape from my mother.

  NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

  There are times when I feel like I'm Johnny Depp circa 1984 in the first Nightmare on Elm Street, when he was at the height of his beauty, specifically in that scene where he's lying on his bed, wearing sweats and a tiny midriff top from which spills the sensual trace of puppy fat, and listening to music on headphones, trying very hard to stay awake so as to avoid Freddy Krueger. I know that just like Depp's character Glen Lantz, one day I too will become a fountain of blood; I too must eventually fall asleep, and dream that dream from which it is impossible to leave, the dream to which we must all succumb.

  NOISE

  Writing is such a fragile business, far more sickly and nervous than the business of living, which by comparison seems positively robust. So, quiet birds! Otherwise I will be forced to cut out all your tongues; I will then be obliged to place them in a little pink-gray heap by the side of the road, as a warning. That will put an end to your boasting, your banal joy at the morning, your digging it in that, as humans, we do not have wings.

  Dear neighbor, I can't bear the harsh sound of your broom, its coarse bristles, the effect of your sweeping combined with your interminable whistling. Whistling is a minor art, though not as lowly as writing! Cease at once, otherwise your tongue will be next! Besides, don't you know that all housework is futile? (Though aprons on boys are adorable.)

  And to those birthday revelers three doors down: stop singing “Happy Birthday” immediately, or I will come over, knock politely, and, taking the knife normally reserved for cutting into birthday cakes, orally castrate every one of you, the birthday cake's pink frosting and the accumulation of wishes still staining the blade.

  Finally, to my own tongue: yours will be the last to go. This will be just punishment for telling the wrong story, always the wrong story. We have to move into silence, and how can I do this while you're still drooling and approximating?

  NOOSES

  Ever since the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969 and the subsequent birth of Gay Liberation, gay men have been wearing their T-shirts as tight as hangmen's nooses.

  NORTH KOREA

  Just as I expected, all the sadness in my heart promptly disappeared when I gave up love and joined the nuclear program in North Korea.

  NYQUIL

  Whereas Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, and other French poets of the nineteenth century partook of the green intoxicating drink known as absinthe, we indulge in the green cold and flu formula known as Nyquil, which is maybe even more decadent, and like absinthe, leads to heavy sleep, and to an increase in dreams.

  O

  OBJECTS

  The most beautiful object I have ever seen is Kafka's first writing desk. He received it when he was nine years old. The desk is very plain: dark wood, four spindly legs. No drawers to conceal secrets or legal documents. I can see him sitting at that desk, trying to resist writing with every ounce of his puny body, trying to ward it off, but eventually, unable to resist, giving in. The desk was lost during that onslaught of objects known as the Holocaust. Unlike Kafka's sisters, all three of whom died in concentration camps—Elli (1941), Valli (1942), and Ottla (1943)—the desk reappeared some years later. Somehow, inexplicably, it survived the onslaught.

  ODORS

  Last winter, during the first heavy rain, as soon as the rain was over I went outside, eager to inhale the fresh vapors. I was, however, greeted by a terrible stench rising from the ground and lingering in the air.

  I called the Los Angeles County Health Department and eventually got hold of a nice official with a sexy voice—I think he said his name was Franz—who explained that this rotten, sewer-like stench of death was the result of the rain flooding storm drains, which were filled with the rotting garbage, animal corpses, and human waste that had collected steadily and quietly over the summer. Spurred on by the rain, the detritus had quickly begun to decompose.

  So Baruch Spinoza was right, I said. I told my Health Department official about the ideas of the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher, who claimed that we are literally living in God, coughing and crying inside God.

  But, I added, this proves that we are not merely residing in any old part of God, but that we are living, for the most part quite happily, in the asshole of God, and this explains why leaving the world is so difficult, for we have to squeeze our way out thr
ough the tight sphincter of God.

  Franz seemed genuinely enthusiastic about this idea and promised to offer my explanation to other callers.

  ODYSSEY, THE

  In my Odyssey, nothing much happens, except for each morning, when men, still yawning, are fingerfucked by the rosy fingers of dawn.

  OLD MEN, DIRTY

  I'm profoundly ambitionless! Actually, I have one ambition: to become a lonely, dirty old man.

  It's lucky that I have this ambition, because, whether I like it or not, one day, before I know it, I will wake up to find that there is a glass of water on my bedside table containing a pair of clunky false teeth. Just to check, I will swill my tongue around in my mouth, and sure enough, it will be empty (thank God for my tongue, otherwise my mouth would die of loneliness!). My upper gums will be hanging loosely, like drawing-room curtains.

  I will then pick up the duvet and look down, only to discover that I am wearing nothing but an antique, red satin jockstrap. Perplexed, I will look up, and there will be a gold hook on the back of my bedroom door; no, there will be three gold hooks, and hanging on each hook will be an olive-green raincoat, three olive-green raincoats, the kind that only dirty old men wear, and all these raincoats will belong to me. It will be a lovely, gray, rainy day. It will be a time of discovery.

  OEDIPUS

  Once a week I find myself picking up volume O of the World Book Encyclopedia and turning to a reproduction of Ingres's sublime painting of Oedipus. Gazing upon this painting, my initial response is always one of sorrow; this is not so much because of the terrible fate of the unfortunate king—the whole business with killing the father and marrying the mother, not to mention the gouging out of his own eyes, and then the ultimate indignity of having a complex named after him—no, my sorrow is on account of the fact that Oedipus lived so long ago. With his head of dark, curly hair, and with his sensuously fleshy, almost overripe, yet smooth, supremely muscled body, the boy is just my type. (Both when he could still see and, even more so, once he became blind.)

  Ingres depicts Oedipus in a face-off with the Sphinx, who, incidentally, with her lion's paws, woman's head, bird's wings, and serpent's tail is not at all my type physically, though I will be the first to admit she has a great personality. The two of them are participating in a kind of staring game, just like the one we used to play when we were children, but theirs has particularly high stakes. However, Oedipus is not making eye contact with the Sphinx: he is looking directly at her rather large breasts, which resemble fake ones, though this cannot be, as it will be a few years before silicone is invented and injected into mythology.

  It appears that Oedipus is deep in the process of deciphering the Sphinx's riddle; he is on the verge of solving it. We are privy to the moment just prior to the solution of the riddle. Oedipus is about to speak, continuing that chain of dreadful, though seemingly inevitable, events that constitutes his life.

  Yetwe can almost imagine that things might have turned out differently. Staring at this painting, we can conceive that Oedipus, bored with trying to guess, could have given up and gone home. If this were the case, we would still remember Oedipus, though for a divergent set of reasons. We would not associate him with tragedy, with incest, or with those useless, burnt-out eyes. (The incident of patricide might have been left undiscovered.) We would not affiliate him with fate at all. We would remember him only for the beauty of his calves, the muscularity of his thighs.

  OEDIPUS COMPLEX

  They say that Oedipus blinded himself with a brooch of his mother's. My mother had a so-called cameo brooch: on it there was a white silhouette of a Grecian lady's head set against a dark blue background. Its gold pin left tiny holes in her cardigans. So I wouldn't have to go through the whole drama Oedipus went through, I jumped ahead and stuck the gold pin of my mother's brooch into both of my eyes, eager to get on with the myth.

  ORGAN-GRINDERS

  The art of organ-grinding is fast disappearing, almost as quickly as we are.

  There used to be an organ-grinder and his little monkey on every street corner, distracting us from our troubles. Now we have nothing to distract us and we must pay attention to each trouble, individually. They say that when the world ends, almost no one will be spared. God will destroy virtually all of his inventory. No one will be left except for one lone organ-grinder, cranking the handle of his hand organ; its tinny, jerky music will issue forth into the newly vacant air. Though, of course, no one will be there to listen. And no one will be there to give a little money to the organ-grinder's little monkey, in its red Chinese silk coat and its red fez with the black and gold tassel, whose withered little hand will be extended out, waiting patiently.

  ORGASMS

  In Ludwig Wittgenstein's The Sad Investigations, scribbled on pieces of paper whilst he was out cruising in the Wiener Prater park in Vienna, he writes of orgasms: One sees things (primacy of skin, annulling of the world) like windmills, thousands of them, turning slowly in the wind.

  ORIGINALITY

  When one man is fucking another man doggy-style, the dogs are the orange of orange rinds, the dogs are burning, the man who is fucking is guilty of copying (by virtue of the physical fact that he is behind the man being fucked). Being is Fucked, as Heidegger would say. The man who is getting fucked was there first. He is somehow more original, more infinite.

  OUGHTS, THE

  Apparently the name for this decade we are currently in is the oughts, as in I have everything I need so I ought to be happy, but I am not. Our decade will be remembered as one in which things began to happen so quickly that it was impossible to grasp anything. Nothing of note occurred in this decade, the history books will say, adding, this decade is best forgotten.

  OXNARD, CALIFORNIA

  Dear reader: when the self feels like a sickness—that is, when saying I have a self is the equivalent of saying I have a cold, and a nasty one at that—and if every time you say I, you feel as if you are committing a senseless yet mundane act of violence, and if, because of all this, you are seriously considering a major career change—instead of working in life, you are planning on taking up a new career in death, which you believe will ultimately be more fulfilling—hold off ! Wait until fall, so I can show you the exuberance of the pumpkin fields that lie just north of Oxnard.

  P

  PARROTS, WILD

  There are wild parrots here in Venice. Every day they fly over our house and laugh at us. I don't know what exactly it is they're laughing about, though I suspect it has something to do with how colorless we are, unlike the parrots, which have more color than they know what to do with.

  Theirs is a form of laughter so jagged it seems capable of lopping the branches off trees, cutting down TV antennas. Yet within their mirth I detect not only something malicious but also a trace of sadness, as if, like me, they're tired of being wild, and all they really want is a nice cage.

  Despite this laughter, and despite the fact that the parrots seem to think we're a bit of a joke, we've gotten quite used to them. My boyfriend says that if they went away he'd miss them and wouldn't know what to do without them.

  There doesn't seem to be any risk of that happening, as lately the parrots seem to be visiting us with greater frequency, on the hour. And there's a new urgency to the noise they make, which is causing me to think that I've gotten it all wrong.

  Maybe they haven't been laughing at us at all; maybe parrots never laugh and are profoundly sober, humorless creatures. All this time they've been speaking—not just mimicking our language—but in their own tongue, in complete sentences. All this time they've been trying to tell us something, an announcement, like It's going to rain, or perhaps it's something slightly more important, such as, The end of the world is coming. The end of the world . . .

  PARTIES

  As children we must have attended at least five hundred birthday parties held for other children. And that figure is a conservative estimate. Although we try very hard to recall the details of these parties, we re
member virtually nothing of them. (Though we do recall a certain feeling that came with the arrival of an invitation.)

  In fact, as I reflect upon the parties I attended, all I can see is party hats, the ones we were required to wear at those parties, with the tight elastic bands that kept the hat on your head and bit into your chin; these hats were, in fact, a condition of remaining at any party. Yes, all I can see is endless rows of gold and silver conical party hats. And, though I could be imagining it, just a hazy outline of a cutglass bowl of fruit punch, and little glass cups next to the bowl.

  PEACHES

  Of all the fruit trees in our yard, the peach tree in the front is easily the most abundant. One summer, the tree was laden with peaches. At first my boyfriend and I were delighted with this abundance. So were the tiny, glossy, blue-black birds that occupied our garden, pecking with their bright yellow beaks at the peaches' red-yellow skins.

  But then peaches began to fall faster than we could cup our hands to catch them. Tim laid out a checked blanket on the ground to stop the peaches from bruising, as they bruise easily. At night, it looked a bit scary, like someone was sleeping beneath the tree.

  We began to feel overwhelmed by the peaches. The birds seemed to agree; from their tiny throats they issued calls like miniature screams. We hoped that there would be a late frost, or that perhaps one of the many enemies of peaches, such as brown rot, peach leaf curl, the Oriental fruit moth, Western X, or the peach mosaic disease, would come and infect our tree so it would need to be uprooted. We wished that something, anything, would come and utterly destroy our tree.