The End of the World Book: A Novel

by Alistair McCartney

  RIMBAUD, ARTHUR

  In my boyfriend Tim's copy of Rimbaud's Illuminations, and Other Prose Poems, which he's had forever, there's a little poem he wrote in it, in Manhattan, around 1980, when he was barely twenty-two, and when the plague was just getting up and running:

  everybody likes rimbaud

  everybody looks like rimbaud

  everybody wants to fuck rimbaud

  This is my favorite poem in the world (sorry, Rimbaud!). I don't think I've ever read anything wiser, or truer.

  RIOTS

  On the tenth day of the riots in Paris in 2005, during which young men of Arab and North African descent rebelled against the hopelessness of their situation, a McDonald's restaurant in the working-class suburb of Corbeil-Essonnes was burnt to the ground. Nothing remained except for the statue of Ronald McDonald himself, who continued to sit near the skeleton of the counter, looking over his ruined kingdom, unscathed, calm, shiny, almost jubilant.

  Indeed, it is said that those statues of Ronald McDonald are formed from such sturdy material that 2,000 years from now, when every trace of you and me is long gone, when our bones have been ground down to something finer than cinnamon, Ronald McDonald statues will still be around; in fact, they may be the only enduring statuary from this century.

  People will gaze in perplexed awe upon that placidly smiling form with the curly red hair, with the round, white face and the luscious, red lips, with the red nose and the curious black triangles under each twinkling eye. They will gape in wonder at the ripe, Rubenesque curves of his pear-shaped figure, draped in the yellow one-piece jumpsuit with the white and red striped legs and arms; they will gawk at the sheer abundance of his big red boots. Future generations will assume that this was our God, or that this was our ideal of beauty.

  The very thought makes one collapse, makes one want to rewind the riots and lick up the ash and rubble—this being the semen of rioters.

  ROMANTICISM, GERMAN

  Sometimes when you gaze upon and down into the awe-inspiring ass of a man, you feel like you're the guy in that painting by the nineteenth-century German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich—Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog, I think it is—a painting in which we see the back of a man who is wearing a black coat, and who is standing by himself at the edge of a rocky gorge or precipice, filled with rolling, soft, gray mist.

  Just like this lone individual, we are similarly poised at the edge of something. The sight before us, of a man's ass, is equally overwhelming. We feel very alone, isolated even, but oddly connected to it all. (Who knew we were German Romantics?) And like the little guy in the black coat we could go on looking all day, although just like him we can't see a lot, every man's ass hidden as it is in mist and fog.

  ROSES

  The strangest, most memorable odors rise out of boys! At first we can't place the odor, but then we realize it smells like two-week-old rose water; we are reminded of our mother's habit of never changing the water in a vase of roses, and, as the odor continues to emanate from the boy, we recall our mother and feel pleasantly reassured. The asshole is the repository of memory and of nostalgia. All boys take us directly back to childhood; all rank odors remind us of rank odors from very long ago.

  ROYALTY

  The only member of royalty who interests me is the cholo who rode his bicycle up and down our street that day, all day. He was wearing khakis and a white wifebeater and long white socks. I believe it was Johann Winckelmann who described the classic simplicity and quiet grandeur of the cholo. And on this particular cholo's perfectly shaved head there sat a bright Burger King crown.

  S

  SAHARA, THE

  As a kid, I loved those old black-and-white movies set in the Sahara. I don't remember much about their storylines except that in every one of them there was a mute character, whose tongue had been cut out of his head. This character always knew everything that was going on but was unable to tell anyone. I daydreamed a lot about going to live in the Sahara with one of these men. I even had a scheme to get there. In the morning when I waited for the bus on Leach Highway at the end of our street, sheep trucks would come by full of bleating sheep, which, my mother informed me, were being sent to Arabia to be slaughtered in a special way. I planned to hide amongst those sheep.

  It's been years now since I have seen one of these films, but every now and then I get this feeling that I actually fulfilled my dream, and that I am living in the Sahara. I sense that my life is an old black-and-white movie unfolding in the Sahara, and the narrative conditions of my life require a mute character, but that mute character has turned out to be me, and the sand is blowing into my gaping mouth, ceaselessly, ceaselessly.

  SAILORS

  Although there are so many appealing things about sailors—the fact that they brought the plague to Europe in the fourteenth century, and the disease known as scurvy, which was common on long voyages, as well as the disease known as gangrene, which required amputation of limbs, and of course their complex relationship to sodomy, which was common on long voyages, as well as the drowned sailors who sleep at the bottom of the sea, and the dead sailors who dream at the bottom of me—historically we have invested far too much in sailors. Viewed objectively, sailors are nothing but navy blue cloth and white stripes or white cloth and blue stripes and gold buttons.

  SAINTS

  There are currently more than 10,000 saints in the Roman Catholic Church. In the Roman Catholic Church only I have the power to confer sainthood. In the chapel at my school there was a wooden statue of a saint, I forget which one; at some point, saints, like boys, begin to blur into one another. Somehow over the years a hole had formed right where the saint's asshole would have been, and, over the years, boys stuck their fingers in the hole, fingerfucking the saint as it were, making the hole smoother and smoother, so you didn't have to worry about splinters. Even today, I'm at my best when I have my finger in a saint.

  SALOME

  They say that when Salome kissed the decapitated head of John the Baptist, she could still taste honey and locusts on the prophet's breath. However, in requesting the head of the prophet on a platter, she didn't go far enough. In my opinion, her request was far too modest. She didn't ask for enough. She should have taken her desires one step further and demanded that her stepfather Herod bring her not only the head but also the unconscious of John the Baptist, on another silver engraved platter.

  That said, ever since the giving of this gift, in AD 28, no gift has quite matched up. All gifts are not entirely what we wished for. The exchange of gifts takes place in the shadow of Herod's gift, and within this shadow, we all shiver and smile and say thank you, but the look on our face gives away that fact that we are severely disappointed.

  SANTA BARBARA

  Located on the Pacific Ocean, Santa Barbara, population 92,325, may at first appear to be a paradise of sorts. But, as they say, appearances can be deceptive, and if we have learned anything by now, it is that there is no such thing as paradise. Santa Barbara, whose economy relies on the plastics and tourist industries, is actually filled with death, crawling with ex-hippies who have been transformed into yuppies, what are otherwise known as the living dead. It is really just a big cemetery, population 92,325 skeletons. It is a very sunny, very brightly lit cemetery.

  From a class perspective, it is also a mangled capitalist dystopia. Class distinctions there are so extreme that if Karl Marx, exiled from Germany, instead of fleeing to London, had fled to Santa Barbara, he surely would have changed the first sentence of the Communist Manifesto to say something like The specter of Marie Antoinette and her wig and her powder is haunting Santa Barbara.

  Actually, I think he would have taken one look at Santa Barbara and stopped writing the Communist Manifesto altogether. He would have lost all hope in any possibility that his theory might succeed. Though maybe, if, like me, Marx had found himself there on the weekend of the so-called Fiesta, which celebrates and fetishizes Spanish Colonialism, in particular the mission that was bu
ilt at the cost of thousands of lives of Chumash Indians, if he had been out and about on the Saturday night of the Fiesta, when all the cholos come in from outlying areas, and the streets are covered with pink and blue and green confetti, he would have written another kind of manifesto, a much better manifesto, and called it the Cholo Manifesto, or the Confetti Manifesto; he would have come up with a whole other theory whose impact would have been far more enduring.

  SATIRE

  Whether I like it or not, I am in large part a satirist. I might as well enjoy it: having been born into an age that is unavoidably satiric—satire being a natural response to overwhelming foolishness and horror, the two qualities that perhaps most characterize the present day—I have no choice in the matter. (Though even with satire, one can still be tender.) Still, I cannot ignore the fact that there are spaces that satire cannot reach, and instances in which satire turns against us. The main instance being death. Let us call these self-exposed spaces.

  SCABS

  Approximately one third of childhood was spent picking at the scabs on our elbows and knees. For this task we required our hands, which we otherwise kept in our pockets like daggers placed in scabbards. Ah, bright red scabs, which were the jewels of childhood.

  SCALPING

  I was a great admirer of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her Little House on the Prairie books, which were such authentic portraits of frontier life. I especially enjoyed the parts about getting maple syrup directly from trees, and the scenes where white people were scalped. Somehow in my imagination the two acts would mingle: after getting scalped, maple syrup would be poured into the victim's brain. But, eventually, reading about making maple syrup and being scalped wasn't enough. I wanted firsthand experience of producing maple syrup. I needed to know what it felt like to be scalped.

  SCISSORS

  Just as a pair of scissors is basically two knives joined together, a boy is essentially two boys joined together. Je est un autre, said Rimbaud, before knifing off to Abyssinia. A naked boy is a pair of your mother's pinking scissors. We wish the boy could be more like those safety scissors they handed out to us when we were children, but, realistically, nothing can keep the boy safe.

  SCOTT, BON

  Willagee's most famous son is surely Bon Scott, former lead singer of the heavy metal band AC/DC. Scott grew up in Willagee after his family emigrated from Kirremuir, Scotland. His turning to heavy metal seems a natural choice, given that the Scottish accent, with its harsh vowels and turgid tones—particularly in the region where he is from—is the linguistic equivalent of heavy metal.

  In 1980, just a few days after Scott died of a drug overdose, some graffiti appeared on the wall of our local chemist: BON SCOTT, FORGOTTEN NOT. I was lucky enough to perceive this slogan, this inscription, the very first day it cropped up, as that morning I happened to have gone on an outing with my mother to the local chemist to purchase cough syrup and jelly beans (for the glucose). The local authorities quickly erased the graffiti, but overnight it resurfaced. After several efforts, the authorities gave up.

  To this day, if you go to Willagee you will see this graffiti. Just a short drive away, in the local cemetery where my grandmother and my aunt Joan are buried, the cemetery in which I wish to reside one day, you can find the tombstone of Bon Scott.

  Like him, I grew up in Willagee and am of Scottish descent. Unlike Bon Scott, I am destined to be forgotten.

  SEDUCTION

  We can pinpoint the exact moment the seduction began: July 22, 1994, in a drab little hotel room in South Kensington (one day, a museum will build an accurate reconstruction of this room). It was the night before the bombs exploded, just down the street at the Israeli Embassy. The time of the seduction was around 11:33 p.m. (see, we are already getting approximate).

  First, you took off your spectacles, the frames of which were very thin and gold. I've never seen nerves, but I imagine that is what they might look like—fine and twisted and gold. I didn't take off my glasses, because I wasn't wearing them yet. I'm older and blinder now, not as nearsighted as you, my dear—I can see a bit farther—and today I require glasses to correct this defect.

  So you placed your glasses on the bedside table and leaned into me.

  Since then, you must have removed your glasses ten thousand times, a conservative estimate. But the seduction has not ceased. It has been continuous, at times relentless, working quietly, day and night, like a big gold machine that leaves little scraps, the scraps of seduction, which we later put to good use.

  Not even the end of the world could put an end to this seduction.

  SELF-AWARENESS

  I can think of nothing worse than sitting with someone in silence, watching as they reflect upon themselves. It's like watching a face catch fire, watching a face do its detective work, watching a face inform on itself.

  SELF-DESTRUCTION

  Apparently, the most densely populated section in eternity, and the hardest one to get into, is the Section of Self-Destruction. Above the entrance there is a sign: Every Boy Is a Device Designed to Destroy Himself under a Predefined Set of Circumstances. Its residents live in dormitories, in bunk beds. At night after lights out, you can hear them whispering to one another, reminiscing about razors, how they gleamed in the moonlight.

  So as to keep the inhabitants busy, they are all assigned to work on an Encyclopedia of Self-Destruction. The goal of the encyclopedia is to document all knowledge of self-destruction. The encyclopedia's aim is to reach both readers who are self-destructive and those readers who are not.

  The categories are exactly the same as in the World Book Encyclopedia, but the entries must all relate the category to the topic of interest, namely self-destruction. At times, this can be a stretch—for example, identifying precisely how sewing machines or sugar beets pertain to the act of destroying oneself—but sooner or later, the writers find the connection; everything, it seems, goes back to self-destruction.

  SELF-HATRED

  Despite the innumerable experiments we have conducted on the self, experiments whose conditions were all carefully controlled, despite the very pretty colors that were produced during the course of these experiments, mainly within the confines of test tubes, despite the initial excitement we experienced over the loud fizzing noises emanating from the test tubes, despite the endless data we have gathered on the self, despite all the pocket calculators we have gone through—not to mention all the Bunsen burners—despite all those lab coats we have placed in black and yellow plastic trash bins clearly marked Hazardous Waste Material and then subsequently destroyed, after splashing a bit of the self all over ourselves, and despite all the burns we simultaneously experienced, burns of varying degrees of severity, I need not remind you that all these experiments have essentially been failures, though nowhere near as big a failure as the failure of the self. Today, the only thing we can still say for certain about the self is that it would prefer to be someone else.

  SELF-REFLECTION

  When we are born, we come complete with little mirrors lodged in our skulls in which we can see ourselves and everyone else 24/7. These mirrors are similar to rearview mirrors found in cars except, with our mirrors, thoughts often appear to be closer than they actually are, hence paranoia.

  It seems we spend most of our lives trying to dislodge these mirrors. We seek out sex, we seek out dreams. But even within their haze and gauze, we find that we are blessed—that is to say, cursed—with the habit of self-reflection.

  For example, the other night I dreamt I was on an endless escalator, but in the dream I found myself thinking, In other dreams I've been on much longer, far grander, more infinitely unfolding escalators.

  Or you might be having the best sex, where everything is being destroyed and dissolving, but still you find yourself thinking ahead to the next time you have sex, hoping that you'll be destroyed even more.

  In this sense, dreams and sex just don't work like they used to. Traditionally, there was always the last resort, this being death, but
today, in the twenty-first century, not even death can supply us with what we crave: absolute oblivion. Nowadays, apparently, in death you spend even more time thinking about yourself, moping about. To find the self-forgetfulness we really crave, it seems we will have to go further than dreams, further than sex, further than death.

  SEX ADDICTION IN ANTIQUITY

  In antiquity everyone was a sex addict. This was 2,000 years prior to anything even remotely clinical. Amidst all the shimmeringness, sex addiction made perfect sense. To be a sex addict was logical, a good thing.

  SHADOWS

  It seems that death will be remarkably similar to life, a thought that should fill anyone with horror. Yet there will be one major difference: whereas in life it is our bodies that are first and foremost, in death it will be our shadows; our bodies will appear only at certain times of day, under certain conditions of the light. The same will go for objects. In the afterlife, the shadow of your little school desk, the one into which you carved your initials, will be a constant presence; in fact, you'll see the shadow of your initials, which were already like a shadow, and therefore can be construed as the shadow of a shadow; the school desk itself will become visible only in the late afternoon, in the movement toward dusk. Your shadow, but not you, will sit and write at the shadow of this desk. (As this is already pretty much the case, it will not require too great of an adjustment.) And it confirms something we have always suspected: that our bodies are insubstantial, secondary; it is the outline our body casts in the shade that is of far greater importance.