The End of the World Book: A Novel

by Alistair McCartney

STARS, YELLOW

  There is an anecdote about the first time Walter Benjamin saw someone he knew wearing a yellow star: it seems Benjamin went up to his friend on the street and ran his fingers over the star, going from tip to tip, and he couldn't think of anything to say except how soft the felt was.

  STINGRAYS

  If the unconscious were to finally escape the body—an act it attempts at least once a day—it would look very similar to that flat sea fish known as a stingray. My unconscious would look not like the gigantic fourteen-foot stingrays found floating off the coast of Australia, which I sighted occasionally as a boy, but more like the small stingrays skimming through the shallows of California's Pacific Ocean that I encounter today as an adult. These stingrays move slowly, at the speed of dream; they arouse in one a sensation of the uncanny, similar to the sinister feeling one experiences in a bad dream. They like nothing better than to lash with their spiny, whiplike tails the Achilles' heels of boys who are foolish enough to tread on them, causing a painful wound.

  Yes, my unconscious is a baby stingray. And, if it ever manages to get out of my body, it will do just as the stingrays do, loitering where it is warm, in the sun-basked shallows, waiting patiently to sting me or those who come anywhere near me.

  STORIES

  My mother's stories of her childhood were always very short and broke off abruptly and jaggedly, like, When I was a little girl, I came down with scarlet fever and almost died; I thought there were ants marching across my pillow, I thought I saw the face of the devil in my bedside lamp; or, When your Auntie Helen was little she went down to the big castor oil bush near our house, picked off a bunch of the thorny berries, and ate the seeds inside, which are poisonous, and almost died. They're barely stories, just shards really. They ended not in death but in a brush with death.

  My father constantly smoked a pipe and was therefore unable to tell any stories.

  STORIES, ABSENCE OF

  Take me seriously when I say I have no stories. I couldn't tell a story to save my life, though perhaps I could tell a story to endure this life. And probably, under certain circumstances, say, for example, if I were kidnapped by terrorists and placed in a cage measuring four feet by four feet, and informed that unless I came up with a story, I would be beheaded and it would be videotaped, then, I suppose, under such circumstances, I might be able to come up with a pretty good story.

  STORIES, HATRED OF

  I don't hate them anymore, but I used to hate them so much that I made quite a name for myself. As I walked down the cobblestone streets of Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade, little kids would run behind me throwing stones at my coattails, squeaking in their high-pitched voices, Look, look, there goes the story-hater!

  STRIPES

  In Luchino Visconti's film Death in Venice, the stripes on Tadzio's sweater are black and white and horizontal and thick; the sweater buttons up: four buttons extend down from the polo collar along the shoulder. The stripes on this sweater are similar to the black-and-white horizontal stripes on the sweaters of the gondoliers, whereas the stripes on the collars of Tadzio's sailor suits are diagonal—one suit has a blue collar with thin white stripes, while another suit has a white collar with blue stripes, also quite thin. It is these stripes that cause Gustav von Aschenbach to feel as if nine pit bull puppies are barking in his heart and to subsequently die whilst lounging on a deck chair on the seashore, a chair whose fabric is likewise striped, blue and white, with the horizon. All these stripes are relatively different from the stripes on the collars of the sailor suits worn by the Vienna Boys' Choir, the choir of boy sopranos founded in 1924, shortly after Adolf Hitler's failed putsch of 1923, which resulted in him being imprisoned and writing Mein Kampf from behind bars, which are like stripes. The Vienna Boys' Choir wore navy blue sailor suits, with pale blue collars, and with white diagonal stripes, as distinct from the stripes on the uniforms worn by inmates at Auschwitz, which were thick and vertical, either dark gray and light gray, or dark gray and white, though the stripes on the collars of these uniforms were also on a diagonal. Today, these uniforms are disintegrating at an alarming rate. To slow down the rate of disintegration, and to keep the stripes from falling apart and altogether disappearing, attendants fill the uniforms with bodies made out of foam, like large, human-sized rag dolls.

  SUBLIME, THE

  According to eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke, when we watch the porn movie Hot Rods 2: Young and Hung, in particular the scene in which the movie's star, Kevin Williams, is sodomized by one man, we find this beautiful—it is well formed and aesthetically pleasing, and all elements are in proportion to one another. However, later on in the movie, as we watch Kevin get sodomized by two men simultaneously in the so-called act of double penetration and observe the astonishment and terror and pain wash over his face in a pleasurable wave of grimaces, this scene shocks and overpowers us; in this sense it is not merely beautiful, but sublime.

  SUICIDAL TEENAGE BOYS

  Recent reports have linked the suicides of several teenage boys to the drug Prozac. I guess the theory is that although the drug lifts these boys out of their depression, it also gives them the motivation to kill themselves, a motivation they did not have when they were depressed. The term is involuntary intoxication. It has something to do with the gloomy specificity of teenage male hormones. I've also read that whereas with male adults, Prozac is meant to diminish the libido, to the point that it seems such a thing as the libido was never invented and never existed, with teenage boys, the effect is contrary. For them, it's like taking ecstasy. Again, something to do with the blissful specificity of teenage hormones, like finding oneself in an avalanche of bliss. Recently in Riverside, California, the parents of one suicidal teenage boy on Prozac found him in his bedroom doing inappropriate things to his friend, another suicidal teenage boy subscribing to Prozac. The boys defended themselves by saying that they were fucking to distract themselves from thoughts of death. Both of them were wearing nothing but salmon-pink bandages on their wrists, covering up their most recent attempts.

  SUICIDE BOMBERS

  Today, terrorists are very active and very popular, just like they were in the 1970s. The most common form of terrorist is what is known as a suicide bomber. Unlike the terrorists in the 1970s, who almost always wore ski masks—sometimes made of pure, 100 percent wool, and sometimes acrylic—to hide their identities, suicide bombers usually don't wear masks, because, paradoxically, these masks would attract too much attention and reveal their identities.

  As a result, whereas in the 1970s people had no idea what the terrorists' faces looked like, whether or not they were handsome, whether or not they were blushing like brides, embarrassed and overwhelmed by the magnitude of what they were doing, today we can see the suicide bombers' faces.

  (Suicide bombers are not to be confused with insurgents who kidnap Western boys and then behead these boys on videos that other Westerners eagerly watch via the Internet. Insurgents wear masks.)

  Instead of ski masks, suicide bombers working on the ground like to wear dynamite vests. Before they go out on their missions, they will often stand in front of their bedroom mirrors, wearing nothing but these dynamite vests, seeing how they look, examining themselves from every angle, wondering what it will feel like to explode. Suicide bombers traveling by air prefer to wear Nikes, because they can hide wires in the thick soles, and there is talk that one day corporations will sponsor suicide bombers, just like they sponsor sports stars, and some say that terrorism is going to replace rock and roll, which has lost its edge.

  Most suicide bombers fall between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five, which means that I am right at the cut-off point. After my next birthday, I will be too old to be a suicide bomber; I am already over the hill, just as, objectively speaking, I am over the hill in the gay community, which worships youth, and I suppose suicide bombers also worship youth—or its potential for destruction—in their own way. In fact, the average age of suicide bombers is eighteen.
Most of them are still boys, exploding boys, putting their hormones to other uses. The difference between a normal teenage boy with regular suicidal tendencies and a teenage boy with aspirations to become a suicide-bomber, is, at times, marginal.

  Being so young, a lot of these suicide bombers are naturally smooth. But even so, and especially if they're hairy, before setting off to explode themselves and the people around them, they shave their entire bodies, except for their eyebrows and the hair on their heads, in preparation for destruction and for paradise.

  Ever since 9/11, shaving one's body hair has been complicated, as it were, by suicide bombers; it used to seem a rather gay thing to do; now it seems a sort of suicide bomberish thing to do. Somehow, whenever one picks up one's disposable blue razor, one immediately thinks of Mohammed Atta, the deeply unattractive ringleader of the attack on the World Trade Center. It has become impossible to dissociate the idea of a smooth body from the idea of destruction, the body as impending doom. Statistics indicate that there has been a significant decrease in gay men's shaving of their bodies since 9/11.

  Many efforts have been undertaken to make it more difficult for suicide bombers to explode planes. People are no longer allowed to carry on any knives or knifelike instruments, such as box cutters or scalpels. There is also a device known as the body scanner that has been introduced at some airports. This X-ray security device makes it possible to see through a suicide bomber's clothing and to perceive immediately if there is a ceramic knife strapped to his calf muscle, a detonating device stuck to his left buttock, a plastic gun plastered at the base of his spine, just above his ass crack, a plastic explosive taped to his dick, or if there are wires attached to the inside of his left thigh. Now that we can see every curve of a suicide bomber's body, we feel infinitely safer. The images the scanner reveals are confined to the skin; they do not allow us to see what a suicide bomber has hidden inside his cavities, and in this sense, the technology needs to be further refined.

  SUICIDE BOMBERS, THOSE OF US WHO ARE NOT

  If you ask me who I am, although it's a treacherous question, one impossible to answer, a question I could die in the process of attempting to answer, I think I can safely say, in all certainty, well, I am not a suicide bomber. And I have no plans to become a suicide bomber. The closest I'll ever get would perhaps involve putting on a ski mask, and, metaphorically speaking, blowing up some of my favorite nineteenth-century novels, then reassembling the fragments. Although in one of his presidential addresses George Bush stated that the biggest threats to the stability of this country were terrorists and gay marriage, I don't pose much of a threat to you, except in the realm of your psyche. Perhaps if someone, or some system, were able to convince me, with a money-back guarantee, that if I blew myself up in the midst of a designated enemy, upon exploding, I would, like a rocket, be launched directly into paradise, where 100 of the most beautiful virgin cholos or Italian soccer players would be waiting to greet me, I too might get motivated enough to become a suicide bomber.

  But, we can only speculate, for no system could ever offer such a wondrous vision.

  SUN, THE

  There is only one sun in our solar system, so its self-esteem must be high, and its identity, clear. It must be easy to be the sun.

  SUNSET

  Every day the sun sets on us, all drippy and pink and contemptuous.

  SUPERGLUE

  Superglue was an integral part of the 1970s. Certain tasks demanded not just regular glue, but superglue. Boys in my neighborhood breathed in the fumes, then went wandering around, damaging and defacing. One heard stories of boys who had sat down on toilets in public restrooms only to find that the seats had been smeared with superglue. Stuck to the seats, firemen had to come and peel the boys off, in the process ripping up skin. To this day we continue to turn to superglue to repair things that have been broken. We remain beholden to and haunted by superglue.

  SWANS, BLACK

  The bird known as the black swan is found only in Australia and is the symbol of Western Australia, the state I am from. Up until the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh first sighted this species in 1697, Europeans used the term black swan as a metaphor for something that could never exist. I have no memories of these birds, with their dark, glossy black feathers, their strangely distorted necks that curve like question marks, their scarlet bills banded with a strip of white, and their elegant, ceaseless gliding. But their hissing haunts my dreams; the mere thought of them floods me with a blank nostalgia that is deeper and more substantial than memory.

  SYCHOV, ANDREI

  Currently, at the time of writing, there is only one angel, twenty-one-year-old Russian Andrei Sychov. On New Year's Eve 2005, Sychov, who two days earlier had joined the Logistics Battalion of the Chelyabinsk Tank Military College, found himself the subject of a brutal hazing—the practice known as dedovshchina, which translates roughly as the rule of grandfathers. He was forced to crouch in the snow for hours on end with his arms outstretched, tied to a stool, and, it seems, brutally raped. What ensued was the severe swelling of Sychov's legs, the death of muscle, and gangrene. To save his life, doctors had to amputate both legs, his genitals and one finger.

  Angels as we formerly knew them were erased sometime in the second half of the twentieth century. Sychov is the first example of a new species of angels: these angels won't have wings but will be missing limbs, like in those old pictures of angels where they are just heads and wings. Angels have always been amputated. Historically, we have reached the end of the wing.

  SYNTHPOP

  In 1981, at approximately the same time the plague that would come to be known as AIDS appeared as if out of nowhere, the phenomenon that would come to be known as synthpop also appeared seemingly out of nowhere, though, like AIDS, it had been percolating quietly for a number of years. Whereas AIDS was characterized by diseases with names like toxoplasmosis and Kaposi's sarcoma and pneumocystis and cytomegalovirus, odd words that could have been easily mistaken for names of synthpop bands, synthpop itself was characterized by boys singing about love over simple and quick, tinny melodies played on an instrument called a synthesizer. Other typical instruments included drum machines and tape loops. The music had a sort of nice robotic quality to it, lovely and inhuman, that almost made it sound like it was played by robots, but it wasn't.

  Boys in synthpop bands were often very pretty and wore their hair in a spiky style, fueled by plenty of blue and pink hair gel, and, in the earliest days of AIDS, some boys took to using hair gel as lubricant because a rumor circulated that hair gel would protect you from the plague (it didn't).

  In 1981 a number of landmark albums were released in this genre, including Depeche Mode's Speak and Spell and the Human League's Dare. Later on, when people listened to these albums, the music reminded them of the plague, as if synthpop were the plague's soundtrack.

  Today, some historians claim that the period known as the early 1980s, a period that we have come to associate exclusively with the plague, was probably very much like the period known as the Dark Ages except that during the Dark Ages there was no such thing as synthpop.

  In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in synthpop, just as in recent years there has been a resurgence in the plague. Scientists even refer to the new wave of the plague. Still, after vast amounts of research into the relation between AIDS and synthpop, we have concluded that there is no relation whatsoever between these two phenomena.

  T

  TEARS, TATTOOED

  I like those small teardrops gang members sometimes have tattooed beneath the corners of their eyes. Some say it's meant to indicate that the individual has killed someone and represents tears he is unable to cry, while others say that it means someone the gang member loved has died. I knew a boy once who had such a tear. It had faded, but you could still see it, in sea-green ink, hovering at the corner of his right eye. He never told me why he got it, but he did tell me his theory of tears, which was that by the end of this century hum
ans would have run out of actual tears—a side effect of global warming—and, as a result, everyone would eventually get one of these tattooed tears. Everyone would be in a state of permanent grief. Everyone's relationship to the world would be clear.

  TECHNOLOGY

  Although every form of technology is essentially a failure, the camera, in its inability to tell us what the boy was thinking and imagining and dreaming of and wishing for and most of all, fearing, is surely one of the greatest technological failures. In fact, the camera is considered the second-most failed technology. It has failed to penetrate the boy's interior and that is precisely why we came here in the first place. It gives us no sense of the stench of the boy. In this respect, its failure is quite spectacular.

  If the camera only knew how much it had failed, it would kill itself, probably very violently, shoot itself in the lens, slit its shutters, and take a roll of pictures of its own death.

  But it can take comfort, for its ill success is nothing when compared to the technology of boys, which is the technology that has failed us most spectacularly.

  TELEVISION

  Large-scale network television broadcasting began in the United States in 1946, shortly after the Holocaust, which began in 1938 and can be perceived as the first act of technologically aided large-scale mass murder, though television was around before the Holocaust. In fact, during the 1933 Berlin Olympics, the Nazis transmitted the first public TV broadcasts in the world, showing images of athletes in their whites. The first person my mother saw on TV was Liberace, in 1956. The TV set was in a storefront window. My mother stood in the street in her coat and watched Liberace sparkle and play piano. Whereas the plague was televised live, during the Holocaust people preferred the radio, which they also called the wireless. They were not able to see the Holocaust; at home they gathered around the radio and listened to the Holocaust.