The End of the World Book: A Novel

B

B < 15 =   Just as in the Victorian Era, to conceal their bodies, women wore bustles and layers of stiff crinolines, and this had something to do with repression, in our era, boys wear baggy jeans and extra-extra large hoodies; this also has something to do with repression. These boys are also hiding something. Sometimes when boys wear baggy clothes, the shapelessness of the cloth and the way it hangs on them draws attention to their mortality, like a pirate’s skull and crossbones on a mast. We become painfully aware that boys have skeletons, or rather, that they are nothing but skeletons. At other times, the bagginess distracts us from their mortality . We are able to forget this truth and relate to boys as if they are immortal, as if they are nothing but flesh, as if they have no bones. B, J My Aunt Joan died in 1992. Although her death was mourned, deeply, it did not come as a surprise. Her health had never been good. My mother put it down to the fact that her elder sister had never liked milk, and, ever since she was a child, had refused to drink it. <= My aunt had her own opinion on this matter. She traced it back to 1938. She and her husband, Bob, were newlyweds, living on a ranch in the far north of Western Australia. Bob was away on business, and her stomach had been upset for a few days. Thinking nothing of it, she had been taking baking soda and eating lightly. On the night of the third day, however, my aunt was woken up by a streak of pain. She had no idea what was wrong, but she could tell it was serious. Doubled over in distress, she stumbled outside and told one of the ranch-hands she needed a doctor. Covering her in his moleskin coat, he lifted her up onto his horse and secured her to it with a length of rope. Together they rode through the night to the nearest hospital, almost 100 miles away in the town of Broome. My aunt told me that for most of the journey she was delirious . She knew they were heading to Broome, but she thought she was a Chinese boy, on his way to join the pearl divers there, who are known to hold their breath for up to an hour at a time. At one point she thought she was a piano fastened to the horse. Every now and then she was lifted out of her delirium by the bumps in the ground and the dank odor of the horse’s dark red coat, before plunging back into it, even more deeply. The next thing she knew, she was lying in a narrow bed in a pale pink room. A nurse was placing a thermometer beneath her tongue. There was a tube sunk into the vein of her right wrist. She asked the nurse what had happened and the nurse explained everything to her. My aunt’s appendix had burst. The doctor had gotten to her just in time, removing the organ before it poisoned her blood. The nurse gave her a cup of broth to sip and opened the curtains a fraction, to let in a dash of sunlight. Elated at this second chance, yet still feeling somewhat peaked, my aunt resolved then and there to dedicate the rest of < 16 = < 17 = her life to showing God how glad she was. She would show God her gladness in every way: through prayer; through plucking the feathers from chickens; through watering petunias and ironing perfect creases. B, R On May 7, 1943, at approximately 3:34 a.m., my Aunt Joan gave birth to a baby girl in her and my uncle Bob’s pale blue house in the Canberra suburb of Holder. They named my cousin Robin, after the songbird with the rust-red breast and the dark back, though we should remember that this songbird is not singing for us. This bird’s so-called song is not a song at all, but a deterrent, a warning. For the next forty-three years, Robin worked and slept and dreamed and occasionally loved. Then, on December 12, 1986, at approximately 2:32 p.m., having grown tired of life’s intricacy, Robin gassed herself in the garage of the pale blue house in the Canberra suburb of Holder. She lay down on the garage’s concrete floor to receive forty-three years’ worth of dreams; the fumes wrapped around her like a feather boa. I hardly knew Robin. I remember she was lean and wiry and kind, and had curly graying hair. She liked tennis and was good at it. Perhaps, upon entering that space we cannot enter, she immediately changed into a bright white tennis outfit, with a little white tennis skirt with crisp pleats, and she is spending eternity playing tennis, leaping back and forth over the net. Canberra, the city in which Robin lived and died, is the capital of Australia. Planned as a model city in 1911, its foundations were laid carefully according to a series of so-called song lines, bordered by three power points. It is designed in a series of discrete circles: the center of the city, the government zone, radiates out neatly into a civic center, business and commercial districts, an industrial sector, the university site, parks, and tidy residential areas built on both sides of the curving Molonglo River. Not one of the circles overlaps or spills over into the other. The end result of this design is not so much one of beauty, but of order. ,  Although we don’t have a name for the era in which we presently live, in the future, long after you and I are gone, and we are nothing but skeletons, God’s cages, future generations will look back at our epoch and define it as the Epoch of the Banal. Historians will say that this era began around the year 2003, with the election of a former bodybuilder and actor—star of such illustrious films as Twins and Kindergarten Cop—by the name of Arnold Schwarzenegger, to the position of Governor of California. In a footnote they will mention that this man also happened to be the son of a Nazi SS officer. They will add that this epoch’s status was really secured in 2004 with the reelection of one George Bush Jr., a simple, wizened little man, sort of like the postindustrial equivalent of the village idiot, to the position of president of the United States. A footnote will mention that he was the son of a previous U.S. president of the same name and was in a sense a photocopy of that president. But historians will agree that the real arbiter of power during this era was a pop singer by the name of Madonna, who cast a long shadow over this entire period, and ruled the charts for sixty-three years, her reign equaling that of Queen Victoria. Experts will describe our era as one in which there was no hope of doing anything even vaguely original, an era in which the imagination and all the tattooed, baggy-clothed muses were placed under court injunction. Although these experts will acknowledge our many efforts to overcome this pervasive banality, they will also be firm in saying that all our efforts ultimately failed. < 18 = < 19 = They will conclude that our lives were heroic yet futile, a combination that, in retrospect, will seem somewhat poignant.  In the early twenty-first century, having grown tired of the plague, profoundly bored with it, men once again took to fucking without rubbers in a practice that came to be known as barebacking . Some people thought these men had a death wish. In interviews, these men denied having any interest in death. They claimed they barebacked because the tip of a condom felt like the tip of an inquisitor’s hat, as if an inquisition were taking place deep inside them. ,  In summer, on the weekends, Dad would take us to the abyss. We’d leave first thing, so as to get there before all the good spots were gone, and to make a day of it. We’d place our blue and white striped deck chairs right at the edge of the abyss. When we weren’t frolicking in the abyss, we’d just sit and gaze into the abyss. Dad would bring his little transistor radio, and listen to the cricket, or tune in to an easy listening station, which made the abyss even more relaxing. Mum always made us bring our cardigans, because even though during the day at the abyss it was hot, often by the end of the day it would get quite chilly. We always brought a packed lunch and sodas in a plastic cooler, because the prices at the abyss’s kiosk were simply outrageous, though Dad often treated us to ice cream. We’d try and lick our ice-cream cones as quickly as we could, but in the heat the ice cream inevitably melted and trickled down our fingers, over the edges, into the abyss. B, B  Recently, a wild brown bear appeared in the Bavarian Alps, the first wild brown bear to appear in Germany since 1835. The bear was sighted in that disconcertingly beautiful landscape we have come to associate with Adolf Hitler, the landscape he loved to paint, in a style that would come to be known as evil pastoral, a landscape more recently known for gay porn, the location of films such as Bavarian Bareback, a film in which boys who look like Hummel figurines come to life to have unsafe sex. At first, all of Bavaria welcomed the bear with open arms, but gradually Bavaria began to rethink its welcome. Bavarian authorities claimed the bear posed a danger to humans and had already raided a beehive and a rabbit hutch. No one knew how to interpret the appearance of the bear, which had made its way across the German Alps from Italy. Some said it was a good omen, a very good omen, others that it could only mean bad things. Unable to decide , hunters killed the bear. The shooting has happened, the bear is dead, said the Bavarian government’s bear expert, who then went on to say that the bear had been transported to a facility where a top taxidermist was ready to take accurate measurements of the skin belonging to the dead animal.  God wore one. Socrates had one. Marx and Freud and Darwin all had them. Where would the history of ideas be without beards? Gay men wore them until AIDS came along and hair became disconcerting : homosexual, all too homosexual. We shaved off our beards; some took this as a sign that we were distancing ourselves from God. Though perhaps we were merely waiting to direct our prayers to a clean-cut God, a God that was yet to be invented. Let me remind you, Kafka never wore a beard. If you have to wear a beard, let it be one of those fake beards, which must be glued on. B,  Unlike the rest of the world, I have never really liked the Beatles. In fact, during certain periods of my life, it would be accurate to say that I have hated them; and even when I was not actively despising the most popular and most well-loved band in the world, < 20 = < 21 = it is safe to say that I’ve always held a deep-seated grudge against them. Although I have of course heard their songs, I have never sat down and listened to one of their records. Disturbingly, there have been times when people have told me, You look like one of the Beatles. Equally disturbing is the fact that I bear the same last name as the Beatle who I have always entertained particularly violent thoughts against, Sir Paul McCartney , whom, I must admit, I bear a slight resemblance to. Our last names are spelled in exactly the same way; hence we are linked by not only physical but also grammatical sameness. McCartney is not the most common name, and it stands to reason that, somewhere down the line, we are ever so distantly related. This leads me to think that just as with every form of hatred, this hatred I have for the world’s most loved band is simply another form of self-hatred. Yet perhaps not everything leads back to the self—perhaps nothing leads back to the self—and this form of hatred is entirely justified. A few nights ago I dreamt about the Beatles. Given the complex set of feelings I harbor toward them, this should come as no surprise. I dream of them often. Usually, these dreams are of a violent, sadistic nature. They tend to involve knives and feature scenarios in which I slowly cut one or more members of the band to ribbons (all set to a soundtrack of one of the countless hideous Beatles albums!). In some of these dreams, I wear a badge, like a fan might wear. However, my badge doesn’t bear the inscription I love Paul, but rather, I want to destroy Paul. But in this particular dream I was holding one of their albums (I believe it was their ninth album, the self-titled but nicknamed The White Album) and seriously contemplating listening to it. This album had an inner sleeve, which was not merely the inner sleeve for the record itself, but the inner sleeve containing all the liner notes necessary to explain the secret of who I am. The inner sleeve of myself. I saw very clearly that it was quite possible I could learn to like the Beatles. Now that I have some distance from the dream, I cannot help pondering that, if I could learn to enjoy the Beatles, I could learn to embrace anything, even this ragged thing I call my self.  Throughout Western history, philosophers have spent a lot of time contemplating beauty. As they’ve done so, drool has slithered out of the corners of the philosophers’ mouths. (One need only look closely at the surface of philosophy to see that it is drenched in saliva.) Pretty much what they have come up with is that every encounter with beauty begins very promisingly but inevitably ends in a musty atmosphere of disappointment and a failure to return one’s e-mails and phone calls. As Plato said so fittingly , Beauty is barbaric, beauty must be destroyed.  At some point between 1774 and 1793, the wooden posts of beds, which formerly had been covered with draperies and hangings, became visible. Naturally we were pleased with this development, giving us, as it were, a better vantage point, and making it much easier to watch men dream. ,  The term body is far too inaccurate and general to faithfully describe such a peculiar and complex habitat. I prefer to think of my body as a smuggler and of myself as the smuggled, illegal substance . Or, that my body is the suitcase the smuggler is carrying, made from 100 percent crocodile leather, containing a secret compartment in which the self will never be discovered.  At my gym, which you are welcome to join, all of the bodybuilders are really depressed and clutch at razors, bleeding all over the < 22 = < 23 = floor of the gym. At various stages of their workout they stop and see that there is really no point, because whatever machine they’re working on, and whichever part of the body they’re developing that particular day, ultimately, every machine is an abyss machine, one that, with every movement and every repetition and every set, only makes the abyss wider and wider, so as to more easily accommodate them. The bodybuilders pause to take all of this in, before resuming their workout.  Bones are eerie, no? However, there’s something undeniably elegant about them. They’re like evening gowns compared to the rest of our bodies, which are clunky, and more like safari suits with big lapels and flared trousers. Yes, our bones are chic; they’ll never go out of fashion, like a classic Coco Chanel suit. At the same time, there’s something deeply sinister about our bones, just as there is something sinister embedded in the elegance of a Coco Chanel suit, by virtue of the fact of her Nazi collaboration. Our bones are Nazis. Even if you do not agree with this, you cannot deny that our bones are in collaboration with death. It’s like they’re waiting patiently for us, just like our mothers waited for us outside the school gate. Some days our bones are not so patient . My bones have been expecting me, but I am running late!  Sometimes when he opens me up, the musty odor that wafts out reminds me of the smell of an inky nineteenth-century novel that hasn’t been read in a long time. I find myself thinking about the bookcase in our house, which was in my elder brother Andrew’s room. It had sliding doors of frosted glass and two rows of shelves. The shelves were lined in a kind of paper with a floral pattern, but the corners of the paper were always curling up. Its sticky underside captured flies, whose elegant corpses rotted away. I spent so many afternoons by myself sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of that bookcase. Inside, there were outdated biology, chemistry, and economics textbooks that had belonged to my brothers and sisters; sets of both the Childcraft and the World Book encyclopedias; a Book of Wonders; Reader’s Digests; Bibles whose pages were so thin, semi-transparent, edged with gold; and best of all, the novels my mother had won when she was a schoolgirl, like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, with her name, Beth Wildy, written inside each cover on a sticker explaining the reason for the prize. As I take in my strange odor, I feel like I’m once again in front of that bookcase, immersed in solitude and wonder, utterly absorbed.  In the West, everyone is bored. Boredom is a condition. Boredom sets in very early, during childhood—some say it is established even earlier, in the womb, which makes sense, because those nine months prior to being born must be very, very boring—but it is perfected during adolescence. There is nothing more necessary than a teenage boy who is bored. Sometimes, as adults, when we become so bored by the excruciatingly mundane setup of the days—morning, afternoon, evening; waking, working, sleeping (to be human is an act of repetition)—that we feel like doing ourselves in, we try and remind ourselves that things aren’t so bad. After all, we say to ourselves, we are not currently in Beirut being bombed by the Israelis. And at least we are not in Israel, about to meet a teenage suicide bomber, and to be blown up into little pieces. For a few hours we feel better about the tedious nature of our lives; but soon the boredom of our existence begins to sink in. We see the boredom with a kind of blinding clarity, and we realize that the boredom is so terrible we would prefer being bombed. Meeting a teenage suicide bomber would brighten up our lives considerably. < 24 = < 25 =  The so-called bottom, the passive partner in the practice of sodomy , is a kind of trapdoor through which the top dramatically falls. In sodomy a descent takes place. The term bottom, however, is inaccurate. In effect, any bottom worth his two cents must be profoundly bottomless; that is the only reason why a top would keep returning to his depths.  My cousin Karen had long hair with streaks of silver; it wrapped around her shoulders like a mink stole. She was the only member of our family who had been divorced. Together these two factors lent her an air of fatal glamour. One day Karen stepped on the thorn of a bougainvillea, and the poison flowed directly into her bloodstream, turning septic. She fell into a coma that lasted three days. As she slept, her mother, my Aunt Millie, sat constantly by her side, brushing her hair, hoping the steel bristles of the brush might rouse her daughter . On emerging from the coma, Karen said that while she was under, she could feel that her hair was being brushed, incessantly, and she wanted to tell whoever was doing it to stop, but of course she could not. Everyone told her that in the future she needed to be more careful; Karen said that she must have been distracted. Being punctured by a bougainvillea, she shrugged, was one of the conditions of being in a garden. B, R Seventeenth-century Irish scientist Robert Boyle devoted his life to gas. He was both delighted and troubled by gases, the odd place they occupied between matter and nothingness, their nightgown softness. Gases, he wrote, are a constant and terrible reminder of what I will eventually be. Though considered by others to be a scientist, Boyle regarded himself as a hunter, often referring to gases as wild spirits . He spent most of the seventeenth century in pursuit of that wildness: hunting gases, placing the gases in glass cages, watching the gases as they paced, creating laws that the gases would not obey. B’  Robert Boyle, who formulated the scientific method for the field of chemistry, and who is often referred to as the founding father of modern chemistry, had beautiful, long curly hair, which went down to his shoulders, and beyond, directly influencing the style worn by members of today’s hard-rock bands. B’ L All day, gases float out of boys like ghosts. ,  Currently, here in the United States, the supermarket box boy— in his baggy black pants that vainly strive to conceal the curves of his body; in his drab and shapeless jersey T-shirt with name tag, that, paradoxically, reveals the perfect symmetry of his rib cage; in the unselfconscious manner in which he pauses in the aisles of the frozen food section, lost in contemplation; in the graceful way he hunches over and maneuvers the silver shopping trolleys; and in the extreme grace with which he takes a pair of box cutters to a box containing 1,000 cans of dog food—is perceived to be the ideal of beauty. When compared to the box boy, all other young men are seen as ugly, deformed, and so hideous that they are executed in states that permit capital punishment. Some boys who can’t bear the fact that they are not box boys do the work for the state and take box cutters to themselves. In states that operate from a more liberal perspective, boys who are not box boys are incarcerated, potentially even rehabilitated. < 26 = < 27 = ,  Once, on the front page of the newspaper, there was a photograph of a boy who, whilst climbing over a metal fence, slipped and found himself impaled on one of the fence’s big spikes. This was years ago, when I was nine or ten; the boy appeared to be my own age. The sharp black tip of the spike had gone right through his face, which bore a look of astonishment and deep surprise. The caption claimed that he had been trying to get into the yard of a house that he believed to be haunted. It seemed the boy was rescued and survived. Once a week or so, I still think of this boy and wonder what became of him. Surely he went on to do great things.  Can you believe Louis Braille was only fifteen when he invented braille, the alphabet of small raised dots that can be read with the tips of the fingers? Apparently he got the idea from a dot-dash code punched on cardboard that some captain used to send important messages to his soldiers at night. I wonder what Homer would have thought of braille? It’s said that Homer liked being blind. You can see his point—that it might have been far richer and more exciting being blind in antiquity than being able to see everything perfectly well in modernity. Apparently Homer wandered around from village to village, telling stories, led about by a boy. At night, when Homer made love to his boy, who was probably around the same age as the young Louis Braille—you know what they were like in antiquity—tracing the tips of his fingers over his boy’s acned face and shoulders, he must have gotten a glimpse of what it would be like to read The Odyssey, or any epic, for that matter, in braille. B  E, P When we recall childhood, it would be nice if our memory of said childhood was as complicated and intricate as that painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder titled Children’s Games, in which we see hundreds of small children in a village playground, engaged in violent action, participating in an alarming array of games: it is the two boys in the foreground of the painting, spinning hula hoops, that most capture our attention—one of the boys has a swollen head, though he could also be wearing a mask—as well as the boy who is slightly behind them, just to the right, strung over a wooden bench, each limb held tight by another child. Each game is utterly unique, yet despite this variety, all the games share in common a decidedly menacing, in fact, deeply sadistic, undertone, a quality all childhood games tend to take on; in fact, many of the games Bruegel depicts have a positively inquisitorial look about them, as if a little trial is taking place, a miniature inquisition—some of the children are even wearing pointy hats, just like those worn by the heretics, or was it the inquisitors?— but as I was saying, our recollection of our own childhood is not nearly so intricate. What we recall is sinister, just like in the painting, no doubt about it, sinister with a capital S, but it is there the similarity ends. Our memory of childhood is much more blurry and indistinct , far more vague. It takes place in soft focus, as if Vaseline, normally reserved for penetration, had been placed over the screen of our memory, resulting in a paradoxical failure to penetrate childhood. Our childhood, or our recollection of it—one and the same thing—has more in common with the work of Pieter’s son Jan Bruegel the Elder, a minor artist, who has gone down in history known as “Velvet Bruegel,” due to the fact that he painted many people dressed in velvet. We remember our childhood—and the accompanying proceedings—as if it were all one long, violent length of velvet. ,  I am already looking forward to being buried. How infinitely cozier death will be, all snug in our coffins. I expect that in death < 28 = < 29 = my libido will be just as strong, if not stronger than it is in life. Just as now, whenever I’m feeling a bit frisky, I’ll reach over to you, though I will have to crack open the lid of my coffin— which hopefully won’t be too heavy—and then tap on the side of your coffin. Dare I say it, but I think that our passion for one another will deepen in the afterlife. The feeling in my heart for you, or the feeling where my heart used to be, will cause the sides of my coffin to quiver and shake like the hips of Elvis. Every now and then I’ll flirt with the choicest earthworms as they wriggle their way into my orifices, and with the cute corpses with particularly exquisite skeletal structure. I’ll probably develop a huge crush on the first handsome grave robber who ravages my grave, though this grave robber will be emotionally unavailable, in the strictest sense of the word, and this crush won’t go anywhere, anywhere.  ,  When I was a kid I would often wake up in the morning while it was still dark and feel like I was buried alive; I could taste the soft, black dirt that was falling steadily into my mouth. Each night my mother would tuck me tenderly into my grave, which was extremely well made, each corner tight. The bedside lamp gave off its bleak glow. ,  When I’d walk to the local shops with my mum, my favorite destination was the butcher’s. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier than when I was there at the butcher’s with my mother. I don’t remember much about the butcher himself, except for his apron, which had thick blue and white vertical stripes. His assistant, who was still a boy, wore an apron that was virtually identical but a number of sizes smaller. Sometimes I’d dream, not so much of the butcher, but of his apron, that I was hiding beneath its folds. At other times I’d dream of a butcher’s apron that had not only stripes but also little pink and yellow flowers in the white spaces, just like the flowers on my mother’s apron. These aprons were worn by someone who was both the butcher and my mother. As my mother inspected the meat, I’d stand there and daydream that I was the butcher’s assistant, working there beside him, and that at night he’d take me out in a red-meat dress to a ball whose proceeds were all going to charity. I imagined him sticking little bits of the reddest meat in my mouth. As my mum pondered her decision, I’d breathe in the strange, sweet smell of the antiseptic, which didn’t quite cover up the real odor. All the various kinds of meat were arranged in the butcher ’s glass display case, just like my mother’s Hummel figurines and Royal Doulton figurines in the display case in our living room. Whereas the contents of the case at home were set out somewhat haphazardly, the butcher had a real flair for arrangement . The meat was arrayed extremely artfully, carefully classi fied and categorized. How orderly death could be!  During the Holocaust, whenever Gertrude Stein began to think about what was happening to the Jews, it frightened her terribly. She’d take long walks, but out in the air one could not deny that Europe had gone rancid. So she would return to her work, yet even then she’d catch glimpses of the Holocaust, waiting there for her behind her endless sentences: a void so great it could not be covered up by any amount of repetition, one so vast it threatened to swallow all her things. She would put down her pen and set her mind to more pressing matters, like where to find eggs, sugar, butter. < 30 = ...