VANISHING
Vanishing is just as important.
VARICOSE VEINS
As a kid I was fascinated by the dark purple, knotted, so-called varicose veins that snaked beneath the pale skin on my mother's legs. When I asked her about these swollen veins, she said she believed she acquired them after bearing seven children, and from carrying so many shopping bags full of groceries over the years. I was always listening in on conversations where women discussed their veins and hearing about women who'd had their veins removed in the hospital and then had to wear special elastic stockings.
Just before she leapt off the rocks, Sappho, in an interview conducted right at the edge of the cliff, claimed she did not fear death. Never, she said, will I get varicose veins. My thighs will forever be those of an altar boy's.
VAUDEVILLE
Sometimes I feel like I'm a ventriloquist's dummy, like little Charlie McCarthy, the dummy that belonged to 1930s vaudeville artist Edgar Bergen.
In his act, Bergen wore a black top hat, a black silk cape, and a monocle, and Charlie wore a matching hat, cape, and monocle. At one time the most popular ventriloquist in the world, with the decline in interest in ventriloquism, Bergen lost favor. He subsequently fell into a deep depression and would apparently just sit inside his house for days on end, saying absolutely nothing, with his fist inside little Charlie.
I don't really know who my ventriloquist is. I suppose it must be God, whose fist is buried so deep inside me I cannot get away, whose lips are held as motionless as possible, and who's been practicing steadily to develop this ability.
VCRS
Although the video cassette recorder, otherwise known as the VCR, was invented in 1971, it was not until 1981 that an affordable version became available to the general public. At approximately the same time, AIDS appeared on the horizon, similarly becoming available to the general public.
In retrospect, one cannot help but notice that the VCR, with its unnerving ability to fast-forward and to speed up time and in its power to erase—that is, to effectively annul time—bore a remarkable resemblance to the workings of the AIDS virus, which seemingly overnight turned twenty-year-old men into doddering eighty-year-old ladies.
Furthermore, it now seems suspiciously convenient that in the same year gaggles of gay men began to die so suddenly, the accompanying technology of the video camera also appeared on the market, allowing these young men to document themselves for posterity and to somehow freeze, as it were, the all-too-rapid flow of time.
Perhaps this was mere coincidence, and the two events were utterly unrelated; remember, unlike VCRs, these young men were ultimately unable to store time or to replay or rewind it. Yet one cannot deny that in 1981 something very odd was happening to time.
VERTIGO
Whereas in everyday life, young men do everything they can to conceal the fact that they have an abyss, in gay pornography there is no such concealment.
In so-called centerfolds, boys and men spread their abysses wide open. Some particularly virtuosic boys pry their abysses apart with their thumbs. Often these abysses are shaved, so as to display their depths to better advantage. The models smile broadly, as if to say, Look how happy I am to have my very own abyss!
In gazing at these centerfolds, we find ourselves standing at the edge of an abyss; we peer into its pale and dark pink depths. In doing so we become giddy, faint.
VICTORIAN ERA, THE
In my Victorian era, life is even more repressive than in the real Victorian era. There are corsets, just like there were in the Victorian era, but only boys wear them, and just like the women who wore corsets in the other Victorian era—the one that ended, unlike my Victorian era, which is just getting up and running—these boys are continually fainting because the strings on their corsets have been pulled far too tight. Furthermore, these corsets have even more strings and require even more time to put on and take off. In my Victorian era, which you are all invited to, there are also opiates and smelling salts and crinolines, the constant swishing sound of crinolines. There are two Jack the Rippers. There is a writer by the name of Charles Dickens, but he does not work in the genre of realism. And there are no bustles. Though there are some boys who appear to be wearing bustles, when you get near to them, on closer inspection, beneath the gas lamps, you realize they are not.
VIEWMASTERS
I'd really like to see the Grand Canyon, both for intellectual reasons—you just have to love a nation that turns an abyss into a national monument—and for aesthetic ones, because I hear it is actually very beautiful; some abysses disappoint deeply, but this abyss, I hear, is a genuinely majestic, awe-inspiring abyss. However, if I am truthful, I have to say that I would much rather go back to the house I grew up in, probably around 9 a.m. on a Sunday while everyone is at church, break in through a window, sneak into my brother Andrew's bedroom, pull the old fruitcake tins out from under his bed, specifically the scratched gold one that contains the boxes of slides, and perceive that slide we had of the Grand Canyon: I think there was a little burro in the image if I remember correctly, and a cute boy on the burro, and maybe someone wearing a poncho, and behind all of them the Grand Canyon's orangey emptiness. Yes, I would like to lie on the carpet and perceive this three-dimensional image through the magical technology known as the Viewmaster, perhaps the only technology that has served humanity well, the only technology that will ultimately survive.
VIOLINS
There is no evidence that the nerves of boys were ever used to string violins.
VOICE
Surely there is nothing more natural or more normal than to hate one's own voice. Every red-blooded American boy despises his voice. All my life I have been profoundly disconcerted by my own voice, not to mention repulsed by it, ever since that day in first grade, when, for the first time, my voice was recorded and then played back to me on a tape deck, sounding high and uncanny, like the Swiss Alps!
Leave it to me then to become a writer, that pitiable profession that involves staring all day at a page, an act that is in essence no different from gazing all day down one's own throat, examining all the little nicks and scratches on the lid of one's voice box and peering at those bands of tissue that stretch across it, the so-called vocal cords.
The very thought of one's voice is enough to make one want to reach into the throat, cut out the vocal cords with a pair of sewing scissors, and put the cords to better use, perhaps tie them, like a bow, around a birthday gift.
Giraffes, which seldom use their voices, have the right idea! We could learn from giraffes. They say this exotic animal's reticence is due to its underdeveloped voice box, but, in fact, its voice is highly sophisticated, sort of like Katherine Hepburn's—a giraffe's silence is simply due to its detesting the sound of its own voice.
The only respite I ever get from my voice is when I come down with a lovely case of laryngitis. My voice unwraps itself from the rest of my body like a skinny red scarf, as if it wants nothing whatsoever to do with me. For as long as I am unable to speak, I feel so much happier, and lighter; there is no greater pleasure.
However, even I must admit that, now and then, there are those rare occasions when something enchanting appears out of my voice and I am delighted, just as I was delighted when I'd open my sister's jewelry box and the tiny plastic ballerina with her scrap of net lace for a tutu would pirouette awkwardly and obsessively to the hurdy-gurdy music.
But, all in all, my attitude toward my voice is, to put it mildly, not good. More than anything, I would like my voice to somehow find its way to the bottom of an ocean floor, sort of like when there is a terrible plane crash and all the necessary information lies on the bed of an ocean that is so deep no diver could ever possibly access it; what is essential is irretrievable, contained in the so-called black box.
VOICE, MY
Whether I like it or not, my voice is a product of the grammar of this century and the last century. As it says in the Bible, Proverbs 71:2–7, We are born amidst blo
ody bits of grammar, and we die in jet-black streams of grammar. Yet my voice also comes from very far away, dreamgrammar, from so far away you can barely hear it. My voice is the linguistic equivalent of the moon. To fully appreciate it, you'll need a big, old-fashioned ear trumpet.
VOICE, THE NEXT
It is said that the concept of the voice as we understand it today begins about 439 BC with Socrates, who is said to have had a husky voice, not unlike the voice of Burt Reynolds. When the philosopher spoke, the boys would sit beneath him with their faces upturned, letting the irony drip like honey into their open mouths.
This playful philosopher was deeply troubled by the thought of what happened to the voice while the tongue was engaged in other, more pressing matters, for example, while French-kissing his male groupies in-between lessons, in the cool passageways of the Academy. Where did the voice go? And what became of the voice after we died, how long did it echo?
With this in mind, seeing that the voice was in fact invented, it seems that it could be similarly disinvented, or replaced by a better invention. Historically, we are approaching the end of the voice.
VON GLOEDEN, WILHELM
In his photographs, von Gloeden came up with a mathematical formula for beauty: boys and rocks with a bit of sea. When the fascists came to his house, he was out watering the geraniums, enjoying their odor. The musty smell of the leaves reminded him of something else he liked, something even mustier, but he couldn't think what. The first thing he noticed about the soldiers was their boots: the leather was supple and as shiny as licorice. While they smashed the glass plates of his photos, he wept openly, unable to take his eyes off their splendid boots.
Look closely: you can see evidence of his tears all over the ruined negatives.
VOWELS
Whereas Rimbaud gave each vowel its own color and texture, I see vowels as plain, uniform things. Despite their different sounds, when I shut my eyes all vowels look alike, and they come on a string, like those strings of balls daddies inserted into their boys' assholes (the asshole being the sixth vowel) in all those Falcon porn movies from the late eighties, when we were already deep in the plague. What new plagues await us? AIDS has two vowels.
VOYAGES
The four weeks it took my parents to get to Australia by boat is nothing compared to the length of time it will take me to return to childhood, where everyone lives in corduroy slums and shabby tents of blue and orange cellophane. All my loved ones have come to wave me off at the dock. There will be absolutely nothing to do on this voyage but sit and remember and throw memories—which are not in themselves interesting—off the deck and watch them splash and sink. This voyage will be endless, interminable.
W
WALKS
No doubt when the world ends—and it is not a question of if but when—we'll take a lot of walks, in an attempt to walk off the discomfort that will surely arise in us with the end of the world. We'll probably go for walks in the morning and the evening—that is, if we'll still call these times of day morning and evening. Just as before the world ended, we'll bring the dog, but most likely, based on a what's the point argument, we won't bother with the leash. Our walks will be meandering, and the conversations we have along the way will be even more meandering, and I bet that on our walks we'll find strange things, things we've never seen before. For example, we'll find an apple crate on the side of the road, and at first we'll be very excited at the thought of all those apples, which we probably won't have seen for a long time—no doubt we'll have been dreaming of apples—assuming that at this stage of the game we'll still call it dreaming. But then we'll open the crate up, only to discover that it's full not of apples but of boys' heads, teenage boys with buzz cuts—around sixteen by the look of it. Their heads will be packed very neatly, stacked carefully one on top of another, in pale yellow straw.
WAVES
I think about my mother's bathing suit all the time, at least once a day. After she stopped going swimming, it hung in my parent's closet, in the dark, on a wooden coat hanger, and I suppose you could say it similarly hangs on a coat hanger in my brain, in the dark.
It was, if memory serves me correctly, a one-piece suit, navy blue, with big white polka dots, a little frill around the waist, and padded breast cups. Of course, there is no such thing as correct memory, and perhaps that is why I think about my mother's bathing suit constantly, in an attempt to remember and reconstruct it.
I happened to be there the day my mother stopped going into the sea. It was a Sunday afternoon sometime in the late '70s. I sat on the beach and watched as a wave advanced and as my mother ran in an attempt to avoid it. Her dyed red hair looked very bright against the wave, which looked very green. Although the wave would eventually, inevitably, catch up with my mother and dunk her, and she would pull her ankle and this would be the last time she would ever immerse herself in the sea—a historic occasion—for a while it seemed somewhat possible that she might outrun the wave and return safely back to shore.
But how could my mother, or anyone, for that matter, outrun something that is not in forward motion?
A wave is simply a rising and falling. The wind, which messes up my mother's hair, is lifting particles of salt water, and gravity is pulling the water down again. The wave is not moving forward at all. This can be proved.
WEIGHT, THE GREATEST
Just when I was finally getting used to no longer being a child, it seems that now I have been ordered to repeat childhood, from the beginning, word for word, as it were.
Whereas Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the eternal return states that everything we go through in our lifetime we will be forced to repeat again and again, an infinite number of times, and that everything will be exactly the same, from the biggest thing to the smallest thing, the contract I just signed states that this time around there will be small but significant differences. For instance, the toffee my mother made, the burnt sugar smell of which always drew me into the kitchen, will be slightly more brittle, and life will be even more gold, in a gold, dark way. And apparently whenever I open my little school desk to reach in for some pencils, they will be sticking out of something gooey, which, according to the contract, will be an old boy's brain.
I start first thing tomorrow! They'll wake me up just before dawn.
WEST, THE DECLINE OF THE
Back in antiquity, when ruins were brand new, men were the hottest. Since then, historically, beauty has been on a slow and irreversible decline.
WHITE ALBUM, THE
When the world ends there will be a little scratchy noise, like when you lower the stylus on an old LP. Something will be lowered.
After the world ends, when it is the end of time, perhaps it will finally be time for me to listen to a Beatles record. Perhaps it will finally be safe for me. I think I'll start off with The Beatles, also known as The White Album. My boyfriend's copy has four photographs inside, each bearing the image of one of the band's members. Once I was cleaning and I picked the album up off the floor and the photos fell out of the inner sleeve and fluttered down onto the ground. They looked like four retro, hippiefied versions of me.
The end of the world will not annul the self; it will lead to the terrible multiplication of the self.
Maybe I will enjoy the record. But maybe, just as I thought, I will hate it, and take it off immediately.
WHITENESS
When will all the other white people catch up and see that there is nothing more hideous than being white? As the century gets underway one feels increasingly sinister, nauseating, and somehow kitsch, like a miniature white chocolate sculpture of Count Dracula. Yes, one feels like a vampire: something without a reflection.
WIDOWS
In these late days of the plague, young men strip off their white jockey underwear solemnly and deliberately, like a dense, black lace veil being lifted slowly off the face of a widow.
WILDY, BOB
In 1990 my Uncle Bob died of cancer of the throat. The fact that the cancer struc
k his throat was particularly cruel; according to my mother, her brother was a beautiful singer, with a pure, deep voice.
My mother often spoke of one time when she and her brother were just teenagers. They were sitting on the verandah of their house in Adelaide. It was a warm summer evening, just getting dark. The slats on the windows were casting shadows as precise as the pleats in a skirt. As the shadows lengthened, Bob sang to her. According to my mother, a hummingbird appeared and hovered there, very close to Bob's mouth, for what seemed like forever. It was, she said, as if the bird were also entranced by his singing, so entranced that it wished to dive into Bob's mouth and disappear.
Bob went off to fight in WWII and spent some time in a Japanese prison on Borneo. My mother said that while he was away, although of course she missed her brother, she missed his singing even more. Sometimes she dreamt of a gramophone and that she had a record with Bob singing on it. She'd wake up, and although she knew it was impossible, she'd search through their collection just to make sure. Apparently when he came back his skeleton showed through and most of his teeth had fallen out. He didn't talk much about his time in the camp, but he continued to sing.
After my uncle died, I dreamt of a map of his throat. Lodged in the blue-gray space between the larynx and the pharynx was a hummingbird with bright patches of violet and red on its breast. The tiny bird was building a nest out of brown bark and green lichen in the relative safety of my Uncle Bob's throat.
From my own memories, I recall that my uncle was tall and very thin and very devout. There was something faintly metallic about him, as if his limbs were made out of rain gutters.
The End of the World Book: A Novel Page 25