The End of the World Book: A Novel

by Alistair McCartney

  PROGENY

  My paternal impulse is not what you would call strong. I'm not planning on having a child any time soon. I am the youngest of seven children; by the time I came around, my parents had tired of documenting their offspring. The novelty of photography and of progeny had worn off. This is understandable.

  As a result, there are very few photos of all my siblings and I together, when we were children. There is one, however; it was taken on the occasion of my sister Julianne's First Communion, immediately after the family had returned from church. Everyone appears in the snapshot, except for my father, who was, as it were, the photographer. As I scrutinize our strange faces, all pale and washed out and squinting, starting off with my eldest brother Rory, and examining each face in descending order, ending with my own face, which is surely the strangest, I can't help but feel that I am looking at photocopies of successively inferior quality.

  But who knows? There is a chance that this impulse for a descendant will kick in, and I will father a son. If so, he will be a violent, sullen son, beautiful, yet profoundly withdrawn. And I will build my son a tree house, which is the best thing a father can do for a son. I won't build it around an actual tree, but a telephone pole, right at the top. I will use very pale wood, blonde wood. It will be solidly constructed. I won't build a roof, so it will provide little, if any, shade.

  This way, whenever my son needs to get away from me, and from the world, he will be able to run away to his tree house, and close his eyes, and listen to the wires stutter and hiss, just above his head, all day long.

  PROUST, MARCEL

  We can see In Search of Lost Time as a kind of anticipation of the Holocaust. Proust senses the Holocaust everywhere. In the puffy sleeves of women's ball gowns, in the lining of men's opera capes. He is in a frenzy of memory, in a hurry to get everything down, to indulge in the practice of remembering, a practice that will soon become a luxury. He is fully aware that they would have taken one look at him and shipped him off immediately, in a first-class cattle car, lined with velvet, to a place with a strange name like Dachau or Auschwitz—the very syllables cutting into one's tongue like hatchets—a place where the sun would have slanted over the roofs of the barracks, glinting the gray slates gold, and the sunset, meeting the smoke rising from the crematoriums' chimneys, would have tinged the smoke pink, and he would have felt compelled to describe everything. We sense that Proust, an anticipatory creature, is profoundly relieved to be homosexual, Jewish, and sickly in the first decades of the century.

  PROXIMITY

  My godmother told me that there is such a thing as getting too close to God. She said it's like when you light the stovetop, and you stand too close to the cooker, and the flame, up high, leaps up, singeing your eyebrows and a little bit of your fringe. There is no pain, she said, just an odor that escapes from God, sweet and terrible, unmistakable. We're young again. We're burning again. We are not yet ready for this proximity.

  PSYCHOANALYSIS

  Psychoanalysis is a science of boys, originated by Sigmund Freud, a man with a beard. Freud visited dormitories of sleeping Viennese cholos and went from bed to bed, waking them up one at a time, taking down their dreams, and then letting them go back to sleep. He taught us to pay close attention to the drool collecting at the corners of a dreaming boy's mouth. After careful consideration, Freud came to the conclusion that the boys who don't exist are more important than the boys who do, and that it is not the violent little cholo cruising down the Ringstrasse whom you love, but the painfully shy cholo who waits patiently for you in the burnt-sugar depths of your heart.

  PSYCHOANALYSIS, THE END OF

  It is said that at the very moment Freud formulated his conception of the ego, which in lay terms is sort of like a black patent-leather handbag, along with its dark and shiny accessories, namely the id, which is more like a big glossy pterodactyl with a very sharp beak and big pointy wings floating above the handbag, and the superego, which is exactly like a nice Colt .45 hidden inside the handbag, pointed directly at the pterodactyl, his mind leapt forward to a future not that far away, when all dreamers would curse him, would stop dreaming and spit on him, into his open mouth. He envisioned a time when his science would no longer be capable of explaining anything, let alone the hearts of humans, when it would make more sense to say things like the heart contains gleaming razors, the heart is made up of night and the night contains pearls.

  PUB, THE

  My father tells me that even when he is not physically at the pub he is still at the pub, in a metaphysical sense, because in his heart there's a tiny pub, frequented by extremely small, violently drunk, but very happy, bleary-eyed locals.

  Q

  QUEENSLAND

  Between the years 1946 and 1952, my mother lived in Brisbane, the capital of the Australian state of Queensland, where, she told me, all the houses were on stilts, so all the furniture in the houses—sofas, curtains, etc.—wouldn't get ruined when there were floods, which there often were, floods of a tropical nature, as well as big flying cockroaches, big as angels, angels that make you shiver and must be exterminated.

  During her stay in Queensland, on Saturday nights my mother frequently went out dancing to a place called Cloudland, and like all the other girls she would adjust her skirt, so the lacy edge of her petticoat would show, just slightly. And, she told me, she was constantly adjusting her hair, because the humidity virtually destroyed her curls, both in the southern part of the state, which was semitropical, but even more in the northern part, which was tropical, meaning there were mangrove thickets, and where my mother once rode on a glass-bottom boat, over and along the coral ridge that is known as the Great Barrier Reef, and she looked down at all the different colors, and she became overwhelmed by all the colors, and, glad to be back on land, she wrote postcards.

  QUESTION

  Throughout the history of philosophy, every philosopher has sat down to work in the morning in relatively good spirits. Lurking in each philosopher's mind is the thought that perhaps this will be the book he has dreamt of all his life, the book that will destroy all questions and explain everything so thoroughly that there'll no longer be any need for the world.

  By the evening, in whatever century, the philosopher is always stiff: philosophy has had a profound effect upon the spine. Even more so, he is depressed. The questions follow him everywhere, panting, snapping at his heels, questions such as what is the relationship between philosophy and bad breath, philosophy and lost love, philosophy and crow's feet, philosophy and erections, philosophy and yawning, and one question in particular: why does all thought end in failure?

  QUESTION MARKS

  I like question marks. I think it was sexier, though, when we called them interrogation marks. It's always quite touching when you look up someone in the encyclopedia, someone who lived a long time ago and has since dripped into obscurity, and their dates of birth and death are each followed by a question mark, as if there's a question as to whether they were ever really born at all, or ever truly died. Every direct question should end with a question mark, for example, Do you fully understand that one day you are going to die? But life and even more so death are more like indirect questions, which do not require question marks, for example, I asked you whether you really understood that eventually you are going to die.

  QUINTILIAN

  Quintilian was a Roman rhetorician who wrote a twelve-volume work called the Institutio Oratoria, which examined the training of the would-be orator from infancy to death. Beneath all of Quintilian's highly elaborate rhetorical systems one senses the presence of things decidedly non-rhetorical: things like babble, prattle, puke, baby rattles, death rattles, last gasps, and spittle.

  Throughout the book he gives some strange and contradictory advice. For example, commenting on the fire that swept through Rome in AD 64, the one during which Nero was said to have played the lyre, and afterwards blamed the Christians for, putting many to death, Quintilian blames rhetoric, and advises the reader to
burn it.

  Another practical piece of advice the Roman instructor offers involves keeping a suitcase under one's bed, in preparation for death, a suitcase packed with the subtlest rhetoric, which, he assures us, will be of the utmost necessity when dealing with the nuances of the afterlife.

  QUOITS

  We didn't have a family photo album per se. Our photographs were scattered all over the house, as if our house itself were a kind of photo album. I would come across old snapshots slipped inside books, in envelopes, in shoeboxes and drawers. One afternoon I found a black-and-white photograph of two teenage boys, by the sea, playing a game of quoits. The boys were wearing strange ruched black underwear that looked very glossy against their white skin.

  I took the photo to my mother; she tried to remember who the boys were but eventually admitted that she didn't recognize them. When I looked up quoits I discovered that this game, which involved throwing iron rings at a peg stuck in the ground, had originated in ancient Rome, and, back then when young men played quoits, they didn't wear anything. Over 2,000 years it seemed nothing had really changed, except, at some point, young men put on strange underwear.

  QUOTATION MARKS

  Wittgenstein later rejected his Sad Investigations, claiming they just weren't sad enough: to write such a book one would require sentences composed of black tears. Yet the book contains lasting insights, for example: the o of the glory hole and the o of my mouth mirror the two o's in philosophy. During such extra-philosophical activities one's mouth begins to taste like a goldmine. One's knees begin to ache terribly, waiting for the boys to arrive, waiting for quotation marks to flee the scene.

  QUO WARRANTO

  Quo warranto is a Latin phrase that means by what authority do I describe the world? Today the term is used in courts of law to determine whether an individual has the authority to describe anyone or talk about anything. Inevitably, the courts decide that the individual has no authority. So what to do with the tongue? In the early days of the twenty-first century the tongue poses a problem; the individual as we formerly understood it is dead, but still describing, and still warm, like a brand new corpse.

  R

  RABIES

  As a boy I thought about rabies quite a lot. I was convinced that any day a rabid dog who had wandered a great distance just to find me would come up and bite me on the inside of my left thigh, giving me rabies. I would run home and go into the kitchen, where my mum would be peeling potatoes, and there would be a little bit of foam at the corner of my mouth, delicate as Bruges lace, and she would know.

  I knew that I didn't have to worry about contracting rabies from other boys who had already been bitten by rabid dogs. I could even French kiss a boy with rabies, because, as I learned from the World Book, although the virus resides happily in the saliva, it cannot enter skin that is unbroken.

  Whenever I walked around our neighborhood and came across one of the local stray dogs, I'd look carefully at the fleshy folds at the corners of its mouth to see if there was any froth there. Every day I expected to meet a rabid dog, or a rabid boy, but I never did meet one or the other, and I never had rabies, and I continue to have some regrets about this.

  RATS

  My boyfriend and I have rats! Tiny, nervous rats, with extremely high levels of anxiety. They make themselves known only at night, by scurrying in the roof above our heads. Although the soft scampering sound keeps Tim up, I actually enjoy the noise of their little feet; I imagine it's what dreams must sound like, hastening their way through the brain.

  Our rats also like the garden, especially the ivy. Sometimes I see their rat shadows in the moonlight, the outlines of their noses as pointy as party hats. This is the last straw for Tim, the gardener: he's built a small wooden house, like a birdhouse, and filled it with poison.

  There is a scientific theory that one out of every ten rats is descended from the same rats who in Sicily in 1346 scuttled along the ropes that led from the ships to the docks, bringing to Europe the bubonic plague, the so-called Great Mortality, which would kill approximately twenty-five million Europeans within the space of five years—one third of the population.

  This means there is a very real possibility that our rats are distant relatives of those more notable rodents. Although this sounds farfetched, just recently a boy in Los Angeles County was treated for bubonic plague, the first case here in twenty years. He came down with the usual symptoms, including the characteristic black lumps under the skin, as if the body is trying to photograph itself for posterity. And the last urban epidemic of the plague occurred in L.A. in 1924.

  It seems that plagues, like love, never really disappear. They almost vanish, only to reappear. Perhaps soon in Los Angeles we'll see a new outbreak of a new plague, and just like in London when the plague arrived there in the seventeenth century, there'll be demented prophets wearing animal skins, telling everyone they're doomed. Whereas the doomsayers in London stood outside churches, ours will lurk outside mini-malls. To be honest, I think these men are already here.

  However, I find it hard to imagine that our rats are carrying within them the promise of such destruction. Still, though perhaps not quite as auspicious, I am certain that our rats are trying to express something; they have something important they wish to convey.

  RAZORS

  In the 1970s and 1980s it was common to find razors in places children frequented. In the summer of 1981 in Perth, Western Australia, a group of juvenile delinquents somehow managed to insert a series of razor blades into the curving, labyrinthine slides of the most popular water parks. Boys innocently enjoying these slides were consequently being cut to ribbons, and, staggering out of the highly chlorinated water, which had turned a bit pink with their blood, would collapse onto the bright green Astroturf of these institutions. In fact, I met one of these boy-victims; his skin was covered in faint scars like the thin red ribbons one finds in prayer missals, and just as a ribbon in a missal is there to keep one's place, likewise this boy's scars allowed one to keep one's place on his body. At the time of all these razor incidents, water parks were at their height of popularity, and we lived for them; compared to their structural elegance and aesthetic complexity, the sea was a disorderly mess, full of weird creatures that did not care for us. The appearance of these razor blades did not stop us from attending the water parks. In fact, we attended them more frequently, and with greater anticipation. So rose the stakes of our joy, and the intensity.

  RAZORS, OCCUPATIONS IN

  There are boys who take razors to themselves five days a week, nine to five; it is a full-time occupation. All their polyester suits are shredded. These boys are mere civil servants in the bureaucracy of razors. When they turn sixty, they will retire and receive a big gold razor. They will live quietly on a pension of razors. They will take up gardening and use razors to trim the roses.

  REASON, THE SLEEP OF

  I don't know about you, but sometimes, when I think about the world too much, it makes me just want to flop over on my desk and cross my ankles and go right to sleep, but the tips of the wings of all my little beasts who are hovering gently above me, watching kindly over me, keep tickling the back of my neck, and I can smell their warm stinky breath, so I don't fall completely asleep, unlike the man in Goya's famous etching of 1798.

  REFLECTION

  Whenever I approach a mirror, I cannot help but feel that my reflection has arrived there hours before me. If my reflection were waiting there to welcome me and to embrace me, that would be one thing. But I am becoming increasingly certain that my reflection gets to the mirror bright and early and lurks there, like a rapist or a murderer, in wait for me.

  RESURRECTION, THE

  In Rubens's miraculous tapestry from the seventeenth century, which depicts Christ emerging from his tomb three days after being crucified, the fact of the Resurrection pales before the fact of the legs of the Roman guards keeping watch, who are all wearing these short tunics, which reveal their muscular calf muscles and powerful thighs. One
forgets all about the Resurrection. One has to be reminded to pay attention to the Resurrection. The guards are cowering before the unbelievable terror and beauty of what is happening—just like me, they are frightened by beauty. My eyes linger on one soldier in particular, the hem of whose tunic is flying up, ever so slightly, and who is attempting to flee, just as I find myself doing when confronted with unbearable beauty.

  RHINOCEROS, SUMATRAN

  Recently, a Sumatran rhinoceros gave birth to a calf in the Los Angeles Zoo. Although this creature is said to endure captivity well, it was the first rhinoceros of its kind to be born in captivity in 112 years. Naturally this was a cause for celebration, although of a mournful kind, especially considering that of the five distinct species of rhinoceroses, most have found themselves in that terrible state of being almost extinct, nearly extinct, that is, rare.

  By nature a profoundly solitary creature, the Sumatran rhinoceros is smaller than any other, standing at a height of around four feet, and weighing no more than a ton. It has two horns, the front one being more conspicuous. Two thick folds of skin encircle its bluish gray body.

  In the wild, avoiding the day and those hunters permitted to hunt it with a special license, it takes long night-walks, inexhaustibly; it eats mangoes and twists saplings to mark its territory. In a zoo, I suppose it just thinks about these things, daydreams.

  I am interested in this creature, as I am interested in all beauty that is born into captivity, all species that hover on the brink of extinction but somehow find their way back.

  RICKETS

  When we were children our mothers went to great lengths to protect us from the disease of the bones known as rickets. So that we did not develop the conditions that result from rickets, conditions with nice names such as rosary ribs, funnel chests, knock-knees, bow legs, and chicken breasts, our mothers made sure we received plenty of calcium and direct sunlight. They tied us upside down, by our ankles, to the sun, so that we swung back and forth like pendulums. They sewed us milk dressing gowns and coats from scraps of the sun, in a concerted effort to stop our bones from becoming soft and twisting into shapes that simply were not normal.