The End of the World Book: A Novel

by Alistair McCartney

  Perhaps dear Jarosław is right, and homosexuals are bringing about the downfall of civilization. For whenever I close my eyes, all I see is him and his brother, pleasuring themselves on their double-headed dildo, which is as identical and pink and blank as they are, self-pleasuring themselves in these last days, amidst the ruins and the rubble.

  U

  UMBRELLA, MY AUNT JOAN'S

  My Aunt Joan's decline was gradual and took place over a period of fifty years, but after the death of her daughter, Robin, my Aunt broke her hip and became utterly housebound. She spent the rest of her days in bed, beneath her mauve polyester eiderdown, watching daytime soap operas and reading women's magazines. When she had visitors she put on her housecoat.

  She confided in me that the thing she missed most in the world was walking in the rain beneath an umbrella. How good and sweet the world seems when it rains, she often said. Even more, she missed getting to collapse her umbrella when the rain had ended; she missed walking in a world that was green and still dripping, filled with a feeling that she and the world could start all over again.

  Although she no longer required its use, she kept her old umbrella in sight, at the foot of her bed. Her umbrella was red, with a pattern of oranges on it.

  Sometimes when I visited, it would begin to rain, and my Aunt would ask me to bring her the umbrella. I'd open the windows. Sitting up in her bed, she'd open the umbrella and from beneath its canopy try to approximate the feeling.

  UMBRELLAS

  I like all umbrellas. I'm partial to those white frilly parasols skater boys carry around here in Los Angeles in the summer, holding them above their buzzed heads as they whiz past me on their skateboards, in an effort to protect their complexions. And although I don't condone the use of them, I appreciate poisonous umbrellas, like the kind a KGB agent jabbed into the thigh of the Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov in London in 1978 while the Bulgarian was waiting for one of those red Routemaster double-decker buses that are now extinct. The tip of this umbrella happened to be filled with the poison known as ricin, and Markov would die four days later. It is said that the offending umbrella had a black background with a pattern of red and white bicycles. It would be safe to say that life has been a passion of umbrellas. The word umbrella comes from a Latin word meaning little shadow. Some Roman theologians speculated that the underworld was just one big endless umbrella, beneath which all of its inhabitants cowered. I tend to forget I am mortal, but then I find myself out walking on a rainy, blustery day: the force of the wind inverts my plain and sober black umbrella, the fabric lifts up like the skirt of a cancan dancer, revealing its silver underlying structure, soaking me through to the bone, gently reminding me that everything has a skeleton.

  UNCONSCIOUS, THE

  Prior to Freud's invention of the unconscious, where did people put things?

  The ancients thought in terms of caves. Each person had his own cave, lined with moss and lichen. I have to say I like the idea of these caves, and if Freud were around, I think I'd tell him that I'd like to do an exchange, that I want to return my unconscious, and to please give me back my cave.

  In Anna Karenina, they think they are too modern for caves. It is the 1870s, and they are somewhere between caves and psychoanalysis. The characters are constantly digging holes in which to bury the things they'd rather keep hidden. Usually they send one of the servants in to do the digging, so the frightening thing will be concealed not only from others but, more importantly, also from themselves. This explains the dirt on Anna's long, perfumed gloves, the dark soil around the plunging neckline of her gown. Her cheeks are growing hollow, sunken from all the repression (or is that just the morphine?).

  Repression also takes place on the outside, on the surface of the skin. Whenever Anna is approached by a feeling she does not wish to feel, which, as the novel goes on, is increasingly often, she drives it away with a blush, like the crack of a hot pink whip.

  But it seems that in nineteenth-century Russia, wishes of every persuasion are mainly being stored inside. Everyone in the salons of Moscow and St. Petersburg is waiting impatiently for Freud to arrive. Everyone is divided. They all sense this inner division, are haunted by this division, but no one has the language to describe exactly what it is they are feeling. Until Freud comes, they must make do.

  I feel like there is a red, gold, and black lacquered Chinese screen in my brain, says Anna to Vronsky, partitioning the better part of me off from myself.

  UNCONSCIOUS, THE FUTURE OF THE

  A U.S. company with factories in China is currently working on an unconscious that will be detachable. The user will be able to put the unconscious on and take it off at will, with the aid of a little strip of Velcro. It's unclear what effect this will have on the conscious mind, but it will make repression so much more user friendly and bodes well for repression's future.

  UNCONSCIOUS, MY

  The thing I most enjoy about being alive is the fact that you get to have an unconscious. Without it, living would be unacceptable. Just between you and me, I spend far too much time there, browsing all the glittery information. But judgment aside, it's so nice having an unconscious. It's like having an abyss in my head, just behind my face, and God must have invented the face to hide this abyss. On waking, if you wish to remember your dreams, you have to be very quick, because you can already hear your dreams going back to where they came from, hurling themselves into the abyss.

  UNDERWEAR

  There is nothing more sexy to me than a man who has barely any conscious mind and whose unconscious is dangerously close to the surface; it's as if he is walking around wearing nothing but a pair of white jockey underwear.

  UNDERWORLD, THE

  As soon as Rimbaud arrived in the underworld, he sent Verlaine a postcard:

  I can't wait until you get here. Can you come a few days earlier? Be sure to bring a few cardigans: at night the temperature drops quite rapidly. I didn't think I would miss living and all its complex arrangements, its days like little accordions, but I do.

  Speaking of which, I've taken up the accordion. It is a demanding instrument.

  I've also started writing again, but they refuse to provide me with a desk, claiming there's a shortage of them, so as soon as you arrive, I'm going to need your corpse.

  UNIFORMS, SCHOOL

  I expect that just before we die, it will be like when we were children, on that evening prior to the start of the new school year, when we were filled with dread. Before carefully packing our schoolbags, we'd sit on the bedroom floor and line up all our new books and pens and pencils and pencil cases and erasers. We'd gaze at them with a feeling approaching, yet beyond, apprehension.

  With this is mind, perhaps like Quintilian we need to start making some preparations for death and acquire some things that will be not only useful but also necessary in death; perhaps there is a list somewhere of items that are required in death.

  At the Catholic Boys School I attended, the uniform consisted of a light gray shirt, a green and gold striped tie, a green blazer with the school's insignia stitched in gold, long gray socks with one green and one gold stripe running horizontally at the top, shiny black shoes, dark gray trousers during the winter, and tight gray shorts for the summer.

  Each night my mother would iron my uniform and lay each item on the back of a chair in the kitchen.

  Perhaps death will smell just like those freshly ironed articles of clothing. And maybe there is a uniform I will be similarly obliged to wear when I am finally accepted into that institution we call death. Each year, I will outgrow death's uniform, out-glow it, and will have to make a special visit to a store where I will be fitted with a new uniform.

  Surely in death we will learn many things, many essential things and many useless things. Everything we learn we will do so by memorizing.

  At the start of each school year, nothing inspired more dread than those black school shoes. Inside their cardboard box, which was like a cheap coffin, they nested in pale gray ti
ssue paper. When we opened the box we were greeted by a rustle and the deep odor of brand-new leather. Everything was brand new, terribly new.

  UNION STATION

  Whenever I find myself downtown at Los Angeles' Union Station, waiting to take a train ride, I'm reminded of a game I used to play: I'd look up cities in the pages of the World Book Encyclopedia and pretend that instead of living in Perth, Western Australia, I was living somewhere else.

  I generally picked places in the United States; at one time or another I must have imagined that I was residing in every one of the then fifty-biggest cities in America. I lived in them all: not only the obvious choices, like New York or Chicago, but also less obvious ones, like St. Louis, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Detroit, Indianapolis, Milwaukee. At the time, any of these seemed preferable to the city in which I had been born.

  However, when playing this game, the cities I returned to were those major urban centers where it would be easiest for me to get lost, cities such as Los Angeles, for instance.

  I must have spent countless hours poring over photographs of noteworthy places to visit in Los Angeles. I would picture myself superimposed in front of some of these structures, like the 32-story Civic Hall, which, at 464 feet, was the tallest building in Southern California (remember, although I was absorbed in this activity during the 1970s and early '80s, my family's edition of the World Book was published in the early 1960s). I often envisioned riding the elevator in this building straight to the top (usually accompanied by a chiseled, handsome man wearing a porkpie hat). We'd stand on the roof, holding hands, looking out over the sprawl of Los Angeles, at all the low white and pastel buildings, with their red tiled roofs, our eyes temporarily blinded by the light's brilliant glow.

  Once in a while I envisaged that together this strange man and I would leap off the roof, still holding hands, preceded by his porkpie hat. We'd flutter down swiftly after it, where it would be waiting for us, upturned on the pavement. The police would paint outlines of both our bodies and the hat.

  My other visions of life in L.A. weren't quite as dramatic. And in them I was always alone. I'd be eating a cheeseburger and a thick shake at one of the city's many strange-shaped restaurants, in the form of hats, rabbits, or shoes. I'd find myself standing in the ragged shadows provided by the fronds of the palm trees lining one of the city's many boulevards, the trees that, according to World Book, remind travelers of the trees in tropical Africa.

  Or, like today, I'd simply be waiting to take a train at the beautiful and unusual Los Angeles Union Station, which follows the Spanish Mission Style of architecture so popular in California.

  Of course it's only in retrospect that I realize I played this game with the sole intention of forgetting myself and imagining another, brighter version of myself.

  As adults, we learn all too quickly that such forgetting is impossible for any sustained period of time. However, standing in the white sun outside Union Station, whose stucco exterior looks exactly as it appeared in those photographs from fifty years ago, or, standing inside the station's dim, tiled halls, which, apart from the electronic schedule—whose digits announce whether my train is on time or if it has been endlessly delayed—also look identical to those black-and-white images, I do feel like someone else, at least temporarily, a superimposed version of myself.

  Often slightly overheated, the station has a musty, stale smell, which recalls not only the claustrophobia of childhood, with its dense, close odors, but also the claustrophobia of an old encyclopedia, with its moldy pages. Either way, I feel remarkably at home and unusually peaceful, for it is as if I am literally waiting inside The World Book, volume L for Los Angeles, and this is exactly where I have always wanted to be.

  UNIQUE, THE

  Profoundly embarrassed by their uniqueness, my fingertips are constantly blushing, not only when strangers enter the room but even in my own presence. Deeply private, they have taken to wearing miniature masks to cover up their dizzying, singular little patterns (this has helped with my vertigo!). My index fingers now wear the tiniest executioner's masks, sewn out of thick black cloth, with three minute slits where the eyes and mouth would be, if they had them. My thumbs prefer to conceal their identity behind diminutive black-wool ski masks, just like Lilliputian terrorists might don if they wanted to commit miniature atrocities in a miniature model of the world. And my so-called pinkies, in the manner of rapists, wear teeny bits of pantyhose, which distort and give a scary appearance to their whorls.

  UNWINDING

  Everybody should have some way in which they can unwind, forget themselves, negate themselves and, more importantly, the century. I myself enjoy jumping repeatedly through a hoop that has been set on fire. There's something about it that is very relaxing. Plus, if people want to watch, you can charge ten cents apiece and the applause at the end is deeply satisfying. I used to be so good at it, leaping effortlessly out of my century. But lately I have been finding this task increasingly difficult, one that requires a good deal of forethought. Perhaps it is just me, but it seems to be harder to escape this century; I think it was much easier to escape the last century. The fires these days are growing warmer and warmer, while the hoops themselves are becoming tinier and tinier.

  V

  VACATIONS

  Every now and then I feel a pressing need to flee the alphabet. So I put on a jacket, pack a suitcase full of razors, and stow away on a silver rocket. It's a long journey to the moon, but I clench my teeth and try to be patient. When I finally arrive, it's always cold, and I'm glad my jacket has a zipper. I take out the first razor. Crouching down, I slice off a little of the moon's gray rind to send to the folks back home.

  VALENTINE'S DAY

  My father was born on Valentine's Day 1930. The fact that he was born on this day interests me, as he has always struck me as a man with a most austere heart.

  In 2001 he experienced a series of minor heart attacks, like those mild earthquakes that don't do much damage, just cause the teacups to tremble, but scare you into humanness nonetheless.

  What is the word for these reminders of mortality? How often do you get them? Let us call them heartmassacres. There are those among us who experience them daily.

  Most days I can feel my heart itching to get out of me. It is brown and grainy, the same color and texture as dog food.

  VAMPIRE BATS

  I like to think of my heart as a sort of vampire bat, with nice, pointy, razor-sharp teeth, a wingspan of approximately one foot, and a face that is ugly, yet cute. Though I wish my heart were the true vampire bat, more than likely it is merely the common vampire bat. Still, most people are pretty scared of my heart. When it is daytime in my body, my heart sleeps; just like a bat, it hangs upside down from the ceiling of my body, its silky wings wrapped around it like an opera cape. But most of the time my hearts flies aimlessly around inside me, where it is almost always night.

  VAMPIRE BATS, RABID

  My heart is probably (no, definitely) rabid, just like the rabid bat that here in Los Angeles flew through the open window of an eighteen-year-old boy's room and bit the boy, who has subsequently become the first boy to contract rabies in L.A. since 1991. The boy woke up from his dream not because of the bite on the inside of his left leg but because he felt something dripping onto him, which, health authorities claimed, must have been rainwater falling from the bat's wings. The bat was captured, but then, after questioning, released out the window. The boy's prognosis looks grim. The bat flew directly to my house here in Venice, where I keep it in a cage. I've named my bat Memory.

  VANDALS

  I like all vandals and find all acts of vandalism interesting, but the most interesting vandals of late are the three sixteen-year-old Boy Scouts, who, whilst on a scouting expedition in Red Fleet State Park in eastern Utah, dug up a 190-million-year-old set of dinosaur footprints and promptly proceeded to rigorously and systematically destroy the ancient artifact.

  (The identities of the boys were never disclosed; this is fine by us
, for it is not their identities we are interested in; we have no interest whatsoever in anything remotely to do with their identity or, for that matter, anyone else's identity.)

  It seems one of the boys put his fingers in the cracks in the dinosaur footprints, trying to pry them apart, fingerfucking the ancient as it were. When this failed to work, he proceeded to throw the tracks against the ground, thus shattering them. The two other lads gathered up the chunks and proceeded to throw them into the reservoir, slowly and silently and rather solemnly. The splashes made were impressive.

  Although a sign clearly identified the dinosaur tracks, the ringleader of the group, who, like the others, wore his uniform to the hearing, claimed that he had not seen the sign, and that although he knew they were destroying something, he was not exactly sure what they were destroying. In all honesty, he said, it was an innocent act of destruction.

  Later on he admitted he knew that, whatever it was, it was very old; he further admitted that he hated the idea of anything being older than him.

  A park ranger observed the entire incident from nearby, crouched behind a bush. When asked as to why he did not stop the proceedings, he claimed that he was unable to move, pondering the strange combination and philosophical implications of the adolescent and the prehistoric. He was fixed to the ground, mesmerized, as it were, by the destruction.