The End of the World Book: A Novel

by Alistair McCartney

  SHOES

  In 1942, at the age of fifteen, Otto Rosenberg was sent to Auschwitz for being a gypsy. He found himself assigned to polish the shoes of Dr. Josef Mengele, until, in the doctor's words, I can see my face in them. While Mengele was busy injecting Gypsy children with petrol, or cutting apart and then stitching Siamese twins back together, Otto worked diligently, with a soft rag and a tin of black polish. Resting between experiments, Mengele would come around, and together they would gaze into the shoes, in which Otto saw not only the doctor's reflection but also his own, held in the shoes, trapped in those glossy black walking mirrors.

  SHOES, NIGHT

  When you dream, you put on your nightshoes.

  SILENCE, MY FATHER'S

  Although throughout his life my father has worked in a number of occupations, first as a sailor, then as a fitter and turner, and finally as a gardener, all along his real occupation has been silence. He has worked for silence for close to eighty years. He has never missed a day. When it comes time for him to retire from silence they will give him a big gold watch. Silence was the trade of my grandfather, whom my father took after, just as I now follow in my father's footsteps.

  I come from a long line of silence. I suppose I will need to have a son, so he can carry on this work of silence when I am gone.

  SKATER BOYS

  Los Angeles is virtually infested with skater boys. From time to time, when things get really bad, and it approaches epidemic proportions, the health authorities here have used the phrase A Plague of Skater Boys, just to scare us! In the summer, these boys cast their shadows, which are spindly, like the shadow cast by a lead pencil. These shadows announce and anticipate the imminence of the skater boys' disappearance, just as all shadows do, and the skateboards even cast their own shadows, somewhat like the shape of a stingray—stingrays are like skateboards, if the latter had souls. Oh, to see inside the soul of a skater boy! I like the clunking, whirring sound the wheels of their skateboards make on the hard concrete, and I like how focused skater boys are: all they care about is skating; everything else is dead by comparison. If only I could have some of that focus! Yet, just like us, they live for those brief, bright moments when their skateboards leave the ground and it seems—just for an instant—that they might never come back down, but simply ascend, ascend.

  SKELETON

  This is a nice word for cage. This is a kinder word.

  SKULLS

  The old skull was no good, too light, too bony. It seemed completely incapable of doing what a skull is supposed to do. But this new skull is gorgeous and brutal. It wishes you well.

  SLUTS

  I have extremely positive associations with the word slut, and, in general, I feel very warmly toward sluts, who are like wands, or a combination of a wand and a wound. Gazing down into the fleshy red hole of a volcano, listening to the bubbly lava whilst hooking one's toes to the rim of the volcano so as not to fall in, one can only conclude that nature is a slut.

  When I was a child, I used to think the whole world was a slut that would freely offer itself up to me. Now that I am no longer a child, I know that the world is not a slut. It is actually quite chaste and does not yield up its bliss so easily.

  SNAILS

  There are 7 razors in a week, which makes 365 razors in a year. There are more than 80,000 species of snails. We could learn a thing or two from the snail, like how to live anywhere: in Arctic wastelands, in tropical jungles, or at the bottom of the sea. And if we invested in some of its lovely, slimy properties, we could have that nice, sticky, silver solution that they leave wherever they go. Just like a snail, we could crawl across the edge of a razor, taking our time, without coming to any harm.

  SNAKES

  A snake is lucky! It has that delightful backbone made up of three hundred small bones, whereas we—man—have a lousy thirty-three bones in our backbone. A snake can sunbathe, just like us, but can also withstand temperatures way below freezing, unlike man, who gets a cold and has to drink cherry-flavored cough syrup out of a plastic cup. Because of their astonishing backbones, snakes are highly articulate. The reticulate python is the longest snake in the world—its length is that of six brand-new bicycles strung together, ridden by six violent boys! And, of course, what makes us envy the snake the most is that when it's tired of itself, it just sheds the old skin, turning it inside out and leaving the hollow tube before slithering off in search of new colors, whereas we cannot leave our hollowness.

  SNEAKERS

  Whenever I'm walking around my neighborhood of Venice and encounter a pair of sneakers dangling from a telephone wire, my thoughts inevitably turn to the boy who tossed those sneakers up there. Although most gestures are terrible, in that they imply a repetition unto death, and perhaps even beyond death, I don't mind this gesture, just as I didn't mind the gesture that cholo enacted for me, lifting up his white tank top, placing the hem in his mouth, so he could show me the name of the gang that had been recently tattooed onto his stomach. In fact, I consider throwing sneakers up on a wire to be quite a hopeful gesture. As I look up at the sneakers, I find myself wondering how many attempts it took until the sneakers stayed put.

  And although I know that the sneakers are meant to serve as a gentle yet firm reminder that we have entered a particular gang's territory, alerting us to the splendid and quiet dangers that await us, and therefore urging us to enter with care, the end result is not only threatening but also full of melancholy. The sneakers indicate not only the gang's presence but also a boy's absence, for the boy who got the sneakers up there is nowhere to be seen. And whenever there is a breeze, which there generally is in Venice, the laces of the sneakers kind of flutter, recalling the ribbons on an Amish girl's bonnet.

  SOCRATES, THE CLOTHES OF

  I read somewhere once that Socrates loved the sun, and, when he wasn't trying to convince his fellow Athenians of their own ignorance, he liked to sunbathe. Contemporary accounts say that the philosopher's face was perpetually sunburnt. He worshipped not only the actual sun but also those miniature suns, whose rays peeped out from beneath the hems of his students' robes. Before drinking the hemlock, Socrates had requested that after his death all his belongings be evenly distributed. The women who came to clean up his house found that the collars and necklines and sleeves of all his robes were sun soiled, singed. They threw them out in a heap on the side of the road. No one respectable would wear such garments; not even the slaves would touch them.

  SOCRATES, THE DEATH OF

  Upon observing David's painting of the death of Socrates, specifically the young man passing the cup of hemlock to the philosopher, the first thought that occurs to us is, well, we wouldn't mind having a boy like that pass us some hemlock; we wouldn't mind a bit of hemlock ourselves.

  The young man's strong back is turned toward us. He's wearing a rust-red robe—one sleeve falls off a creamy, muscular shoulder; the robe's hem finishes just below the knee, displaying his muscular calves, just as through the cloth of the robe the outline of his sensual behind is highly apparent. His face is hidden in his hand; he's overwhelmed with sorrow, just as we are overwhelmed with a different sensation, though perhaps sorrow and the sensual are not as far away from one another as we might think.

  Upon tasting the hemlock—but before saying the bit about Asclepius and the rooster—Socrates is said to have licked his lips and commented that he knew the taste already, that it tasted like something else. Having kissed the lips of more boys than he cared to remember, having been betrayed by more boys than he cared to recall, having been deeply acquainted with the gold leaf bitterness of boys, he was already familiar with the taste. I hope, he said, taking another sip, that there will not be boys in the next world.

  SODOM AND GOMORRAH

  After the Flood, my favorite bit in the Bible is Sodom and Gomorrah. I think I like it because I can relate to it. I particularly like the part when the angels come to Sodom, and all the men hear about this and go to Lot's house, where the angels are staying. N
aturally, the men all want to know the angels, and they're at Lot's door, and they're just about to open the door when the angels blind them, so they're left blindly groping around the frame of the door. I know just how they feel. But I also like to think about Sodom and Gomorrah prior to all the destruction. More often than not I feel like those men must have felt just a little bit earlier, when they were still very excited about the possibility of knowing the angels.

  SODOMY

  For the Augustan poets, sodomy was primarily a technical concern, best expressed in couplets; the act itself was full of barbs and jabs, innately satirical, incessantly verging on the mockheroic. Yet the necessity of a top and bottom invoked harmony, balance.

  For the Romantics, however, sodomy was an altogether different matter. Primarily a movement of irrational bottoms, they perceived sodomy as an act overflowing with feeling, always on the brink of becoming sentimental. Sodomy evoked ruins and fog-filled gorges and was best when conducted in deserted, moonlit graveyards, without restraint. Accordingly, language was to be barebacked!

  Despite their enthusiasm, the Romantics were acutely aware of the fact that every act of sodomy was tinged with melancholy.

  SODOMY, PHILOSOPHY OF

  Aristotle, an obscure Greek philosopher who hardly wrote anything, has some interesting things to say on this subject: Whereas as a philosopher I am horrified of holes, and I use thought to patch up holes, in sex they are my goal. During the day, think of one's student as an attic; at night, he becomes a crawl space. Sodomy is a spatial event. And by God, didn't Alexander look fine today in that skintight tunic, the one with the gold trim.

  SOUL, THE

  The Romantics likened the body to a kind of prison in which the soul was incarcerated. If this is so, my body is the Philadelphia Federal Detention Center, and my soul is the rapper Lil' Kim, who spent just under a year there. Just like her, my soul is glamorous and busty and petite, and it can be accused of perjury at times, which is why the diminutive rapper was there in the first place.

  The Romantics also compared the body to a cage in which the soul was similarly imprisoned. In this case, my body is a small rusty cage measuring three feet by three feet, the exact proportions of the cage in which my family housed our budgies. It logically follows that my soul is a little budgie, with bright feathers, yellow, green, and blue ones. Within the confines of my body, my soul seems to be able to amuse itself endlessly, doing quick jigs and deft acrobatic leaps, chirping and squawking, making light of the monotony. But at times, my soul also looks slightly bedraggled and somewhat forlorn, as our budgies often did; my soul can be seen pacing madly, and just like a budgie, it makes a real mess inside my body.

  SPEARS, BRITNEY

  Although I have no waking interest whatsoever in pop singer Britney Spears, I occasionally dream about her, because you can't control your dreams, which sounds a bit like a Britney Spears lyric: You can't control your dreams / so you might as well submit to your dreams. And in my dreams I meet her at a party, and she's very down to earth, and very friendly, and we get on really well (I think she sits on my lap), and as she prepares to leave the party I don't ask for her phone number (because after all, although we got on well, she is Britney Spears), and after she's left I kick myself, and keep kicking myself so hard I start to bleed and am filled with something far worse than regret, which would be a good name for Britney's next album: Something Far Worse than Regret. But I remind myself that she has my e-mail and she'll e-mail me, surely. So basically, some deeply submerged part of me that I would prefer not to have to confront really does care about Britney Spears, and what she thinks of me. At this point, the dream ends and I wake up, reentering a world in which everything is much more complex: the conditions of myself, the conditions of pop music, the conditions of Britney Spears.

  SPINOZA, BARUCH

  It is well known that seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, isolated from the intellectual community of Amsterdam and rejected by the city's Jewish community (of which he had once been a part), moonlighted as a lens grinder. After all, a philosopher needs to make a living.

  When he thought about it, the two lines of work were not so different from one another, their goal the same: to make people see. But, whereas his customers, picking up the lenses for their spectacles, never failed to thank him, individuals who found themselves exposed to his dazzling ideas, Christians and Jews alike, denounced him for his terrible, future-bringing clarity.

  Secretly, he often wondered if this business of lens grinding was perhaps his real work, his true calling; it was conceivable that the other thing he did, philosophy, was nothing but a frivolous pastime, a futile, rewardless hobby.

  And sometimes Spinoza's thinking took him to places even he did not care to see. He was subject to visions, which he normally stitched into his philosophical system, though there was one vision that refused to be integrated. It usually came to him while he was at work on a pair of lenses. Looking up for a moment, he would, in a distance that was beyond distance, perceive workers building a strange, gray structure comprised of rows and rows of prison houses, and brick buildings with chimneys, a place called Auschwitz, thousands of miles and 250-odd years away. Disconcerted, Spinoza would look back down and try to concentrate on the task in front of him, but even over the interminable sound of the lens grinding—like God grinding his teeth while he dreams—he could hear the workers busily hammering away.

  STALACTITES AND STALAGMITES

  As a child I was very interested in stalactites and stalagmites. In our Childcraft encyclopedia there was a whole section on these formations, complete with pictures of boys in caves. (If I remember correctly, the World Book entry on the same phenomena was not nearly as comprehensive.) It seemed that whereas stalactites drip on you and can gouge out one or both of your eyes, one trips over a stalagmite, which then rips through the flesh and muscle and tissue of your leg, grazing the bone.

  Even with this clearly defined distinction, for the life of me, no matter how hard I tried, I could never remember which was which, just as when you become an adult, it can be difficult to distinguish states of joy from states of despair; I find myself unable to appreciate the difference to this day. But sometimes I feel that I am in a dark cave, treacherous with both stalactites and stalagmites.

  STALIN, JOSEPH

  Stalin's dad was a cobbler. It is said that young Joseph liked nothing better than to watch his father hammer new heels into old shoes. It was expected the boy would follow in his father's footsteps; apparently, Stalin Sr. was disappointed when Joseph did not adopt the family trade, and didn't think much of his son's eventual career choice.

  Still, the transition from cobbler to dictator is a surprisingly small one. Stalin himself claimed that he approached his job employing exactly the same skill and application that his father had brought to the job of shoemaking and shoe mending.

  In his later years, whilst touring the Soviet Union, Stalin would often pop into the local cobbler's, to share a few words with the man; he'd listen to the sweet sound of the hammering and inhale the warm smell of the leather.

  Yet whenever Stalin reflected upon the millions of Soviet citizens who were dying from the purges and the famines and the deportations, he could not bear to think of their shoes. He preferred to ponder the loss in strictly human terms—for what is a human if not an abstraction? But a pair of shoes is a fact. One can control a human; it is far more difficult to order about a pair of shoes, to ask some shoes to dig a ditch for you.

  Faced with the problem of what to do with all those millions of pairs of empty shoes, Stalin saw them in his imagination lined up very neatly, stretching farther than Siberia, and it overwhelmed him.

  STARFISH

  I like starfish. They truly know how to handle loss. If a starfish, which is like a star that lives in the sea, needs to escape quickly from an enemy, it breaks off whichever of its five arms is in the enemy's clutches. It then has the ability to grow a new arm to replace the arm it has lost. Even i
f something so violent happens that the starfish is literally broken off in the middle, whatever remains grows back to form a new, and much stronger, much stranger, starrier individual.

  When faced with unbearable loss, we should go down to the sea at night and wade amongst the rocks. Completely ignoring the stars—which in their distance are genuinely lost to us—we should look toward the starfish.

  STARS

  When you stick your fingers in a man, you can feel stars swirling rapidly inside. You pull your hand out and notice that your fingers are all bloodied. You must have cut yourself on the cold, sharp tips of the stars. Your fingers are stained with stars. You peer inside him and it's like 2001: A Space Odyssey. My God, you gasp, it's full of stars.

  STARS, DREAMS OF

  I dreamt my all-time favorite dream in London back in 1994. In the dream there was a boy who lifted up his T-shirt and revealed a crude backyard tattoo of a constellation of stars on his flat stomach. He said, I'm the boy with the stars on his belly, and then I woke up. That's it. I don't really know why I like this dream so much. I've had far more complex and elusive dreams. I think it's my favorite because at the time it was winter and I hated London and the boy somehow made me feel less cold and less lonely. Although it was nice and mysterious, he also stated the obvious, and besides, he had a really great stomach.