The End of the World Book: A Novel

by Alistair McCartney

  Four years before he died, he and approximately three thousand other believers gathered at Adelaide's Encounter Bay, at the edge of the Indian Ocean, to await the end of the world. His wife, my Aunt Alison, accompanied him. They brought a blanket to sit on, along with some sandwiches, a thermos of hot cocoa, and a transistor radio. Like everyone else, they sat and waited, watched and listened for signs—little rents in the sky, or perhaps the sound of hooves. Everyone had their radios tuned in to the same station.

  The moment the world was supposed to end came and went. It seemed the world was not going away—at least for the time being. Most people waited around for a few more minutes but then left, disillusioned, heartbroken. My uncle and my aunt were also disappointed but decided that while they were at the beach, they might as well take advantage of it, for they did not get to the sea often. They ate their packed lunch and drank their cocoa. A kiosk was open, so they bought ice cream and took a long walk along the beach, wading through the shallows. Bob rolled up his navy blue trousers, to stop them from getting wet, but, without his noticing it, the legs of his trousers unrolled into the waves, with their restless sense of order. The dark blue cloth became even darker.

  WILDY, HILDA

  My grandmother on my mother's side was born in 1898 and died in 1975 when I was three. From the few photographs I have seen of her, I know she was thin and strung as tightly as a tennis racket. She often wore her hair in twists and wore violently and exuberantly patterned dresses from another era, the Victorian equivalent of the psychedelic. There's even a photo of her holding me in her arms, taken not long before she died, but of course I have no memory of this.

  Once I went to the cemetery where she is buried, and, after much wandering around, I finally found her grave. I heard something coming from the grave, a kind of mumbling, and I knelt in the dirt so as to hear better, putting my ear to the ground, just like I used to put a glass to the door of my sisters' room so I could listen in on them gossiping. I remained in that position for a long time and sure enough, it was my grandmother talking to me, but, alas, everything she said was unintelligible.

  WILDY, MILLICENT

  My Aunt Millie had curly gray hair. She was a big woman and always wore bright polyester dresses with matching belts made from the fabric. She brought a platter of sandwiches to every family gathering: cheese and pickle, cheese and chutney, ham and pickle, ham and chutney, plain cheese, or plain ham. Her platters were highly anticipated. She always brought the sandwiches on a big china plate patterned with roses. She always remembered to take the plate home with her. Once, she failed to bring the sandwiches, and everyone was disappointed. My mother couldn't believe that Millie had not brought her sandwiches. That night the party fell apart early.

  At these family gatherings, which I generally found unbearable, Aunt Millie was always kind to me. She would kiss me with the distance of an aunt. She would ask me questions, gently. Somehow her questions made these functions slightly more bearable.

  My aunt and her husband, Colin, liked to get away. They'd head down south in their caravan and park it near the shoreline, as close as they could get to the hem of the sea. They liked to wade in the shallows and catch crabs in wicker traps and boil them in silver pots. Crabs would run sideways all around their caravan, but my aunt and uncle never ate these crabs; they only ate the ones they found in the sea. This is morality. Aunt Millie would wade in her dress. She'd hold up the skirt of her dress, but sometimes she'd be enjoying herself so much, she wouldn't notice that she had let her skirt drop and it had gotten a little wet, indicated by a darkening along the hem.

  In 1998 my Aunt Millie died of cancer of the pancreas; there were too many cells clustered in her body, their points cutting into her, as sharp as stars. My mother referred to it as a mercifully quick cancer. We're forced to go looking for mercy in the most hidden places, just as a hermit crab finds an empty seashell, and, using its claw as a door, closes the shell tightly.

  Aware that their mother was going to die swiftly, her daughters rented a ferry and invited all the family to take a slow boat ride up and down the Swan River. By then I had already moved away, but my mother told me all about it on the phone. The boat ride began at three o'clock in the afternoon and went on well into the night. It was very nice, she said. Everyone got too much sun and had a bit too much to drink. My aunt spent most of the time sitting on a big plush chair. According to my mother she looked so small in the chair and so frail. Her face looked thin, and her dress just hung on her. That's not how I want to remember her, my mother said. You remember she was a big woman.

  According to my mother, as soon as it got dark, fairy lights came on. Yellow and pink and green. There was a hired DJ, and the young ones even did a little dancing.

  WILDY, WILLIAM

  My mother's father died a good ten years before I was born. In photographs he looks extremely distinguished with his slicked-back white hair and in his three-piece suits—always with a fob watch peeking out from the waistcoat pocket. I believe he worked in insurance, which saw the family moving about quite a lot. For a time, when my mother was a young girl, they lived in Perth in the suburb of Claremont, in a big old rambling house with rooms that used to be servants' quarters and even a stable. Apparently my grandfather used to go out to the stables at odd hours and talk to the ghosts of the horses that were once kept there. According to him, the horses were all albinos with pink and pale-blue eyes. He would go out with a brush and comb to groom these horse ghosts until their coats glowed.

  WISH, BIRTHDAY

  During childhood, the best part of a birthday occurred at night, when one was sitting at the kitchen table, holding the knife above the birthday cake, about to make a wish. One sat hunched over the cake like a miniature old man. The candles on the cake were lit and were in fact the room's only source of light.

  At this moment, no one is more alone or enigmatic than the birthday boy. Although surrounded by his family, as he silently makes his wish it is as if he has plunged into a deep crevasse, or gone away on a slow voyage to the Arctic. There is always the possibility that he could turn his knife on all his family, or on himself. As he pushes the knife down into the cake's frosted depths, everyone searches his face, trying to penetrate his wish, but without success.

  WISH, DEATH

  I used to think I had a death wish. On clear days, I could see it shining there, caught in the folds running across my brain. It must have gotten stuck on its way down.

  Small and bright, it looked like something a jackdaw might want to steal or a cheap gewgaw one finds in a Cracker Jack box. At other times it looked more like a scalpel someone had placed carefully on a little shelf in my soul. It seemed to be lodged there, indefinitely. But it turned out to be another kind of wish.

  I must admit I feel a little lost without my death wish. Life can be boring without its shine. As we speak, nothing has replaced it. Where my death wish used to be, there's just an empty, scooped-out space.

  WITCHES

  Throughout history, people have liked burning witches. In the sixteenth century, hems on witches' dresses rose four inches, so you could see the witches' knees as they burned. The utmost tip of the witch's hat was always the last thing to burn. Although some people made the effort to go to the actual burning, most people stayed home to watch it on TV.

  Prior to the Enlightenment, people thought a witch burned due to the escape of an imaginary substance called phlogiston, but then science proved that a substance (for example, a witch) needed oxygen if she wished to burn. This laid the groundwork for the future of the discipline known as chemistry and clarified things for the witches.

  WITCHES' HATS

  When the Enlightenment began and the witch-burnings stopped, people had no idea what to do with themselves. They began to watch a lot more TV. And then there was the problem of all the leftover witches' hats. Some people threw them in the trash.

  Everywhere you went, you saw black, pointy hats poking through the holes in wire trashcans. Others le
ft them out on the curb in the sun to fade and rot and get peed on by dogs. Those with a tendency to hoard put all their witches' hats in the closet, just in case.

  WITTGENSTEIN, LUDWIG

  Wittgenstein claimed that from the age of twelve he ceased dreaming almost entirely. Thought, he said, erases dream, and naturally, for someone whose business it is to think, there can be no such thing as dreaming. The entire history and structure of philosophy, he said, could be destroyed by one single dream.

  He became resigned to a life without dream, though occasionally, perhaps once every ten years, Wittgenstein dreamt that he was touching the hem of Socrates' robe, and the hem was unraveling. Believing this to be the case, he would wake up and go immediately to the kitchen drawer where he would pull out his sewing kit, grab a needle and thread and a silver thimble, fully intending to mend Socrates' robe at once and to perhaps give the thimble to Socrates as a parting gift.

  WONDER

  We have learned that it is possible to die from too much wonder.

  WONDERS, THE SEVEN

  I've always been enamored of, and far too interested in, things that inspire wonder. Inevitably, this predilection of mine goes back to childhood. (Though I dream of an age where nothing will go back to childhood, an epoch in which, to make sense of the self, we will look in the opposite direction.)

  But, unfortunately, my taste for wonder can be traced directly back to childhood, to that Book of Wonders I spent so much time with as a kid. I remember the book had a red spine and gold lettering. What I wouldn't give to be back home, sitting in front of our bookcase, reading all the names on the books' spines like one reads the names engraved on headstones—a bookshelf is a kind of cemetery—and, upon finding that Book of Wonders, to leaf through its pages, while coughing from all the dust. Whereas in my memory the book is a hefty tome, I bet if I held it in my hands today it would seem quite modest, maybe even tiny—when we encounter objects from our childhood they appear drastically reduced in size and sinister, like a skull shrunk by a headhunter.

  The section of the book I spent most of my time looking at, or loitering in, was the chapter on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Although I liked them all—the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, built by the mad King Nebuchadrezzar II, so his wife would feel more at home, and of which there is no record that they ever actually existed; the forty-foot-high Statue of Zeus at Olympia, destroyed by fire in 426 AD; the Lighthouse of Alexandria, as tall as a thirty-six-story skyscraper, which was toppled by an earthquake in 1375; the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, which was gradually destroyed by a series of earthquakes over a period of time; the Temple of Artemis with its 100 columns, razed and burned so thoroughly by the Goths in 262 AD that no stone remained, destroyed so completely that when the Crusaders came in the 1100s and inquired about the temple, people looked at them weirdly and asked, What temple?; and, of course, the Pyramids of Egypt, the only structure on the list still standing—the wonder I spent the most time salivating over was the Colossus of Rhodes, the 160-foot-high bronze statue of the sun god that stood over the harbor of Rhodes in the 200s BC. Apparently ships had to pass beneath his legs to get into the harbor. The thing that most intrigued me about this statue, apart from the fact that it was this giant naked man, was how short-lived it was. Whereas the Temple at Halicarnassus stood for 1,000 years, and the Lighthouse for 1,600 years, the Colossus only stood for 56 years. In 224 BC an earthquake caused Colossus to break off at the knees. His ruins, however, lay on the ground for the next 800 years; apparently the bronze chunks excited more wonder than when Colossus was standing.

  The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center opened in 1973 and were of course destroyed in 2001, giving them a lifespan of less than thirty years. As, like you, I watched the destruction on TV, again and again, rewinding the destruction, fast-forwarding the destruction, pausing the destruction, I found myself thinking about the Seven Ancient Wonders and feeling that at this point in time antiquity and modernity were somehow touching. Someone called Antipater first compiled the list of wonders in the 100s BC. Surely, I thought, if he were around, he would have gone immediately to his list, crossed off the pyramids, and added in their place the Twin Towers. Perhaps it had been obvious to everyone else all along, but he would have finally realized something: now, for a structure to make the list, it must no longer exist. This is the condition of wonder.

  WORDS

  Give me a word that doesn't fold back on the world.

  WORDS, FAVORITE

  In my mother's vocabulary, the most commonly used word was garish. She organized her world around the concept of garishness. We all need an organizing principle to make life livable and to make sense of a world, which, on closer inspection, makes no sense. My creed is lust: what is yours?

  When I was a boy, mum taught me to see the world according to this principle. Whereas our next-door neighbor Mrs. Ibensen's purple bougainvillea was far too gaudy, our pink and orange bougainvilleas were pleasing to the eye. And whenever my Aunt Helen dyed her hair a shrieking red, although mum would assure her sister that the color was fine, she would later confide in me that, in her opinion, the shade was a tad too red.

  Together my mother and I wandered the neighborhood, separating the garish from the somber, gently policing the border of that which is bright.

  WORDS, LAST

  Except for my mother, no one uses the word garish anymore. Perhaps she is the last person on earth to use this word, and when she dies, the word will die with her. They will bury her with that word, and we will all be overtaken by unprecedented levels of brightness. We will die from too much brightness.

  WORDS, MY LAST

  I already know what my last words will be. Someone sent them to me in the mail, in an envelope marked Urgent, with a note in the upper-right corner saying, If this is not the address of Alistair McCartney, return in five days. As you can imagine, I was excited to receive them. I tore open the envelope at the dotted line, like some animal, and read the words. As per the instructions, I memorized the words and then destroyed the document. Not only did the letter disclose my last words, but it also revealed the dimensions of my deathbed (though not, interestingly enough, the date or method of my death). And, as per the instructions, every afternoon at four, I think of my last words; I recall them, as if I've already died, and then I rehearse them.

  WORKS, ABANDONED

  I am less interested in the works philosophers bring to light than in those they abandon, abolish, and destroy, such as René Descartes's book The World, which he planned to publish in 1633. However, upon hearing of Galileo's fate, Descartes, whose own book also advocated the heliocentric Copernican model—positing that the earth moves around the sun and that therefore we are less important than we thought—put his book aside and started on something else.

  It seems The World was comprised of treatises on things like machines and animals and man. Only small fragments of it have survived. Within these fragments, however, several themes emerge, one in particular: Rationality is to humans as a studded dog collar is to a dog, states one aphorism; another, Something hot and red constantly laps at me from within. The being who I casually refer to as “I” is merely a dog kennel; and, perhaps most suggestively, Although I have consciousness of the inevitability of my own death—which means I must be human, but barely—in every other respect I am profoundly doglike: the fear that grips me in the knowledge of my own death is nice and tight like a dog collar. In fact, I'm more of a dog than most dogs, just a canine with a scrap of consciousness. Let us bark in the face of death! I have nothing to offer but my saliva when faced with the world's calm indifference.

  WORLD, THE

  Perhaps, in the way I sometimes write about the world, you might suspect that I would prefer it to end, and in a sense you are right.

  For the longest time I was profoundly indifferent to the world. In fact, it would be fair to say that I didn't really like the world; I despised every single object contained within it. I was only interested in those thing
s the world couldn't hold, slippery, eellike, electric things.

  But lately, without my noticing it, a change seems to have taken place. I find that I have become increasingly interested in the world; some accuse me of being besotted with it. I admit it. I love every object and every hairline crack in every object.

  WORLD, THE BEGINNING OF THE

  They say that smack in the heart of eternity there sits a voluptuous cholo who is slowly and methodically knitting the world and everything held within it. For example, he knits woolen king crabs, which, due to their intricate anatomy, are extremely difficult to knit: he starts with the crab's shell and the long, sharp spine, then moves on to the tricky parts, such as the egg ducts and gill books. He knits woolen pairs of lovers, which are also difficult—he begins with the hands and feet, and keeps the lips and hearts till last. He knits woolen grand canyons, which are much simpler, and woolen lies, which are surprisingly easy.

  From far away, the constant sound of the needles clicking is merely irritating, but up close, if you are in eternity and standing beneath the giant thigh of the cholo, the noise of the needles is said to be deafening. So much so that you want to leave eternity, which of course cannot be left.

  WORLD, THE END OF THE

  When the world ends, and it is time for God to announce who the winners are and who the losers are, I just know I will be so nervous that I will not listen very carefully, like when I am meeting people for the first time and their names go in one ear and out the other.

  I had better be listening, because imagine how embarrassing it will be if, when God reads my name off the list, I am so distracted that I don't hear it. Or, even more embarrassing, imagine if I hear my name, but I can't be 100 percent certain if he told me to go on the right side with all the people going to heaven, the people who are condemned to eternal bliss, or to go stand on the left side, with all the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators condemned to eternal damnation.