The End of the World Book: A Novel

by Alistair McCartney

  PERSONAL TRAINERS

  Someone must have been telling lies about me, because somehow I have found myself with a personal trainer. When I turned up at the gym yesterday, I was met by this trainer wielding his clipboard at the entrance to the gym.

  As is common with personal trainers, he had a thickset body, a large behind, and no neck. He was masculine, but catty. He was extremely positive, to the point of being destructive. I tried to explain to him that I did not require a personal trainer, that I had not asked for a personal trainer, and that, in fact, the last thing on earth I wanted was a personal trainer; but he did not hear me, or he pretended not to hear.

  Instead, he walked me through my regimen and explained very calmly that I must see him three times a week, and I must do everything he says, and I must pay him. If you wish to see results, he said.

  PERVERTS

  Up until the 1950s, perverts wore felt porkpie hats, and stitched (by hand) boys' white jockey underwear into the silk lining of their hats. The pervert's hat could be considered a reliquary, a receptacle for storing something sacred, like those ornate reliquaries in churches that contain relics of medieval saints, such as the thread of a saint's shirt, although this would fall into the category of second-class relic. A first-class relic would be a splinter of a martyr's bone. Perverts were very important to the hat industry, and, recognizing this, the industry marketed hats directly to perverts. Apart from porkpie hats, bowlers, southwesters, and fedoras were also popular with perverts. However, the hat industry fell into decline, and many hat factories that used to turn out thousands of hats a week were shut down. Perverts had to move their secrets elsewhere, for example, sewing them into the lining of their skulls. Hats used to be quite common; now they are rare. No one mourns this fact more than a pervert.

  PEWS

  At our church the pews were as smooth as skinheads. As the priest gave his homily, I would sit there, trying to induce the pew to give me splinters, trying to seduce the pew.

  PHILOSOPHY, WESTERN

  The beginning of Western philosophy in 600 BC coincided with the invention of mirrors, just as all thinking implies reflection, a collision; at the academy, philosophers argued over the question Is there anything in the world that is not a cage? while cholos lay around wearing nothing but long white socks, listening intently. Hence philosophy can be perceived as something edged with longing, and every philosophical text is an attempt to not be distracted, to refuse tears. I'm wondering what the implications for this discipline might be if we were to shave off Socrates' beard or heighten the length of his robe by, let's say, three inches, and how philosophy is unable to cope with this ragged thing we call the self: something composed of longing. How to allow red leakage into your answers, how to keep one's vision from turning into a system? the pre-Socratics asked. The philosopher's thought caves in when faced with a boy as open as a doll's house, in a radical state of unblushing.

  PHOTOCOPIES

  Although there are simply so many terrific things about living at this particular moment in time in post-industrial capitalism, and although I would be hard pressed to single out any one of them as my absolute favorite thing, if I had to, under threat of torture and enforced isolation and extensive interrogation, I would say the thing I most like about living right now would be photocopy stores. I just love them, especially the twenty-four-hour Kinko's photocopy stores we have scattered all over Los Angeles.

  It is hard to put my finger on exactly what it is I like about them, apart from the sheer romance of copies. I enjoy the sound all the machines make as they happily copy away; somehow I find it very soothing. I like the fact that they're often breaking down, just like us, and I take pleasure in the deep inky smell that wafts out of the machines when the assistants open them up to replace a cartridge.

  And speaking of the assistants, there are always really cute young men working at the stores, who wear shapeless uniforms and nametags, and who lean over the machines in a suggestive fashion, at times in a state of absolute abandon. The light coming from the top of the machines is bright, like on a porno film set. The photocopies themselves can be perceived as more promiscuous originals. At this point in time, here in the West, the only erotic spaces left are Kinko's photocopy stores.

  Finally, I am moved by the intimations of these stores, the implication that if we can photocopy a paper by Heidegger, perhaps, eventually, we'll be able to photocopy anything and everything: Brazil, my mother, roses, electricity, your moans. In a world without originals we'd never lose anything, a world without loss, what a weird, sweet thing!

  PHOTOGRAPHY

  I'm not that interested in photography, but I am interested in its origins, with man's discovery that exposure to sunlight turns some things dark. Way back in the Middle Ages, an alchemist, while working on one of his mysterious experiments, trying to find a way to live forever, accidentally splashed silver nitrate onto the smooth inner thigh of his (male) peasant assistant. Ouch! He rushed his assistant outside and noticed that the silver splash had turned black in the sunlight.

  After centuries of trying to control this phenomenon, photography was the end result, indicating that most things become less interesting when controlled.

  However, I do like the fact that photography finally confirmed the category of the negative, the inescapable, and quite lovely, reality of the negative.

  And I am drawn toward those old cameras that required the sitter to be very still for a long time if they wanted their picture to be taken. Imagine if this were still the way! No one would have the patience to be stationary for so long, and there would be no photos! I would like to invent a camera that obliges the sitter to be still for even longer, that requires a father and son to remain motionless until the end of time.

  PLAGUES

  Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year gives a fictional account of London's Great Plague of 1665, in which approximately 100,000 people died, and during which 40,000 dogs and 200,000 cats were destroyed, as it was believed these animals spread the plague.

  At first the narrator, H. F., constantly oscillates between hope that it was just a scare and despondency over the rising death toll. He keeps careful tally of the dead, and draws up little weekly mortality charts.

  As the number of deaths continues to mount, there is no more oscillation: the fear in his heart is as still as a frozen lake. Defoe's narrator takes long walks through the ever-dwindling city and imagines that soon there will be nothing left but numbers: black, abstract, glittering.

  PLAGUES, THE AESTHETICS OF

  Apparently, during the early days of the great plague, men wore these beaklike masks over their faces, hoping that it would protect them. Some men who participated in the practice of sodomy took off all their clothes but kept their plague masks on, and this was considered to be not only sensible but also sexy, just as men kept their white socks on during sex when that other plague began in the early 1980s.

  PLANE CRASHES

  Although we are terrified of plane crashes, specifically being in a plane crash, which would of course end our being, we get on planes of our own free will, so we can fly to dusty corners of the world, and so we can have a break from our identities. Yet some aviation experts speculate that not so long from now, there will be major plane crashes every day. Then there will be plane crashes on the hour. Plane crashes will increase in frequency until, eventually, every plane that takes off will crash. Despite this, people will continue to buy tickets, not to arrive at a particular destination, but to crash over a specific place. Finally coming to our senses, we will cease flying altogether. Like spiders, we will stick to our own dusty corners of the world. There will be no respite from identity.

  PLANE CRASHES, THE HISTORY OF

  In the history of plane crashes, the only plane crash I would recommend is the one in that dream I had, shortly after the death of my sister Jeannine's first child, Cooper, who died when he was only seven days old. In the dream, Jeannine was a passenger on a plane that crashed into t
he sea. She was wearing a light cotton nightgown with a lacy scalloped hem and collar, just like the one my mother used to wear. But my sister emerged from the wreckage, safe and sound, as they say, in fact, much safer than she was before the plane crash. She slowly waded back to shore in her nightie, embodying the purest form of safety.

  PLASTIC

  I like plastic. Currently my favorite object in the world is this nice plastic spooky skull goblet I bought from the Halloween section in a Rite-Aid drugstore. It sits on my writing desk, and it provides all sorts of inspiration—it's a muse of sorts—especially regarding the plasticity of death. The word plastic comes from the Greek and means fit for molding. Whenever I look at my goblet, which is increasingly often, it reminds me that death, just like life, is not only spooky but also pliable, capable of being shaped, formed, reimagined, reinvented. And that death is in some sense artificial, synthetic. Death is plastic. All of this makes death—and life—a little bit less spooky.

  PLATO'S CAVE

  In Plato's “Allegory of the Cave,” everyone goes to have sex in this particular cave, because the light is very flattering, dark, and grainy. Though often people go there, and although that night they might think they look really good, they don't meet anyone. They stand with their backs against the craggy rock of the cave, feeling the moss and the water drip down the napes of their necks, and feeling lonelier and lonelier as the evening wears on. But sometimes they leave the cave for a bit and go out into the sunlight, where everyone looks haggard. Then they go back into the cave and see a couple of cute men, but they don't hook up with them. Their eyes have adjusted to the dark, and they can tell these men are not that cute.

  Apparently Plato got the whole idea for the cave whilst contemplating the asshole of one of the broad-shouldered boys who was always hanging about in the corridors of the Academy, waiting for his autograph. The asshole, which according to Plato was similarly a place of shadows, a place of learning. The asshole, which could not be written down. The asshole, which was itself an allegory. Plato believed that just as with a cave, when you finally crawled out from a young man's asshole, into the sunlight, you found yourself blinking, unable to see anything.

  PLINY THE ELDER

  As Vesuvius erupted, Pliny the Elder put an ear to the world and listened to the lava. He recalled his own definition of a volcano: a hot opening in the earth's surface, like a boy's mouth that is impossibly red. The thought of red openings made him think of his nephew; he hoped he was safe.

  Mentally, Pliny the Elder began to take notes for the first essay he would write in the afterlife: “On the Benefits of Volcanoes.” He sat very still and took in the glow.

  All of a sudden the Elder hated the Younger, hated time, hated nature. Yet one must embrace volcanoes—that's how the essay would close. He looked up, and as the lava swept over him, he could not help but marvel at how rigorously the gods erase and erase, until there are no more traces.

  PLINY THE YOUNGER

  Pliny the Younger sat in the small boat and watched as Pompeii disappeared beneath a sheet of red and black lava.

  Ashes and hot cinders rained down on him, along with lapilli, or little stones, but luckily he had remembered to bring his umbrella. Somewhere in the city his uncle was suffering terribly, or perhaps had suffered terribly, and was now participating in whatever follows great suffering.

  Pliny noticed a bit of lava on the hem of his robe and wondered if it would wash off. The small boat bobbed on the sea's surface, as boats will do.

  POPE, ALEXANDER

  At the age of twelve, the Augustan poet Alexander Pope began to develop a hunchback. The hump in his back crept up on him slowly, over a period of months; he remained a hunchback for the rest of his life. His “Essay on My Hunchback,” written in heroic couplets, is considered to be his most important work. He attempted to forge a form of verse that mirrored his hunchback perfectly, one whose rhymes had their own little hunches and their own abnormal curves, but, after years of trying, he failed.

  If one peers beneath the satire and the wit, one finds great sadness in Pope's work, whirlpools of it. One can see that all Pope really wanted was for some young man, reeking of the pastoral, to come over to his little cottage in Twickenham and spend a small portion of each day with him. All Pope truly yearned for was a boy with bits of straw in his hair, who smelled of warm milk. A lad who would place his rough hand beneath the poet's shirt and proceed to stroke and caress the contours of his hunchback.

  POPE JOHN PAUL II

  During the last months of Pope John Paul II's gradual yet irreversible decline, I could not help but notice that the hemline of his robe was often falling. Apparently, the Vatican's seamstress did not see fit to mend it—perhaps thinking that there was no point—he was on his last legs anyway.

  What with the stream of drool that was a constant presence at either corner of the pope's mouth, and what with the slurring of his words, to the point that everything he said was incomprehensible—a level of the unintelligible that began to take on an air of the mystical—the falling hemline only added to his generally disheveled, slatternly appearance.

  I preferred to think of him in his better days, particularly in the mid-'80s, after he recovered from the assassination attempt on his life, which occurred in 1981, the same year that we first began to hear about that rare homosexual cancer.

  Back then, the pope was the image of glowing health, defiantly vigorous, racing around town in his bulletproof popemobile, making regular public appearances to read from his book of nature poetry, of course whilst wearing his bulletproof vestments.

  At first the idea of this strapping pope dying was inconceivable. He had entered his holy office in 1978, when I was six years old. I had therefore always associated him with childhood and had at some point formulated a theory in my head, a superstitious theory, as all theories are, that the day this pope died, childhood would end; he would no longer be the Pope and I would no longer be a child.

  And the very thought of the Vatican without him was also unimaginable. Surely the other people who lived there would not know what to do with themselves; for them it would be like one of those long, terrible nights at a nightclub, when there's no one even vaguely cute, no one you'd ever dream of seducing, or even rejecting.

  But gradually I became not only used to the fact that Pope John Paul II was ailing but also somehow pleased with it, taking my mind as it did off the fact of my own slow and similarly irreversible decline.

  POPES, ANTI-

  All too often when one is getting ready to go out on a Saturday night and trying on an assortment of different outfits, one feels exactly how the pope must feel, before he has an audience, trying on all his vestments and looking at himself in the mirror and thinking he looks fat in all of them, not even like a pope, more like a bishop. Even though he reminds himself that he has far more jewels than a bishop, nothing seems to go with anything: his low, open, red shoes with the embroidered crosses clash horribly with his low, broad-brimmed hat. He would prefer to stay in his bedroom in the Vatican all night, but he forces himself to go out.

  And after returning from a night out, when one is standing in front of the bathroom mirror and cleaning one's teeth, to forestall decay, one feels profoundly weary, just like the pope must feel after he returns from a trip around the world to spread the Word, and although he is so powerful, all powerful, and can make saints or break saints, for a moment or two it seems to him as if he has no power, temporal or spiritual. One feels the same, like a worn-out, completely powerless pope. Not merely powerless, but false. One sees one's own face, yet sees not the self, which has been displaced, but a self that has been improperly elected, a self that is in direct opposition to the self. In effect, one feels just like the real pope must feel when he is confronted by a good-for-nothing anti-pope.

  PORN, PRE-CONDOM

  Just like you, I love watching pre-condom porn. My favorite film is probably He Seems to be Reaching for Something, directed by Praxiteles, the greatest
Greek gay porn director of the 300s BC. In this film, some of the Gods (today we call them cholos,) wander around, cruising through the maze of antiquity, while others just stand about, waiting to be picked up, with one hip thrust out into space in the pose that was dubbed the S-curve of Praxiteles, the S standing for sex. All of them have a look of dreamy, ice-creamy contemplation on their faces; life's good in the sex-curve. They all appear very relaxed, probably because they are Gods, not to mention the fact that AIDS is such an impossibly long way away.

  PORN STARS, DEAD

  At night, all the ghosts of dead gay porn stars swoop down from Porno—which is where gay porn stars go when they die, just like anyone who isn't baptized goes to Limbo—to visit boys and men who are dreaming that there is no plague. The porn ghosts know better than anyone that to haunt someone and to love someone amounts to the same thing. The ghosts pry open the sleeping men, who creak like haunted houses, specifically the floorboards and the doors.

  POSTCARDS

  My father is, as they say, a man of remarkably few words. In this sense, the postcard is the ideal medium for him, in that it is a limited space in which to say something.

  Every two years my father goes back home to Scotland and always sends me a postcard written in his spidery handwriting. Although his mother passed away in 1985, in his most recent postcard he wrote that he was taking long walks with his mother, looking at the heather, and was always sure to bring his umbrella.

  Although the postmark said Motherwell, Scotland, it is still in question as to where exactly this postcard was sent from, what region?