The End of the World Book: A Novel

T

T < 241 = ,  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 humans 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.  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.  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. ,     The leaked report concerning the war on global terror clarified for me not only the fact that we can expect more (global terror) and that the war (on global terror) is, how to put it—failing—it also clarified some things that I had been wondering about in regards to myself, namely that the status of the war in Iraq is exactly the same as my own status; both of us are progressing toward a result that is unspecified and uncertain. < 242 = < 243 =  I’m not sure where we pick up this bad habit, but we acquire it very early on, like one acquires a sexually transmitted disease that is extremely difficult to shake. It’s as if we go through our lives wearing weird thoughthats that are very unflattering and secured to our skulls in such a way—perhaps with superglue or a staple gun—that they are almost impossible to take off. Each day becomes a concerted effort to not-think. We go to great lengths, we do everything we can, to avoid thought. Either way, we are utterly absorbed. ,  If one is to think with any sense of originality, one must think sodomitically, that is to say, one must go through thought’s back door . . . T, J Just as pop singer Justin Timberlake recently claimed that he is bringing sexy back, I intend to bring melancholy back, depression back, pessimism back: I’m interested in reviving a form of futility you can dance to. But as my boyfriend, Tim, pointed out, the notion of sexiness has never left culture, so the idea of bringing it back doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. There is nothing to be brought back. In this light, Justin Timberlake and I are one and the same. I am Justin Timberlake. Our claims are equally sexy, yet equally futile.   When we were children, time capsules were all the rage. I wonder whether kids still do time capsules, or perhaps we’ve just given up on time. The capsules were shaped like giant pills. We placed useless yet precious objects inside of them and buried the capsules on the school grounds. It was always exciting, the idea of communicating with people in the future, and we’d get very giddy, though this giddiness was due to something else, something unacknowledged : the fact that by the time people cracked open the capsule, we’d be long gone. In a way, it was a bit like attending your own burial. In this sense, the real purpose of the time capsule was an attempt to hide ourselves from the deep and devouring monotony of time. TIME, IN SEARCH OF LOST In Swann’s Way, the first volume of Proust’s six-volume masterpiece , my favorite part is when young Marcel checks out Monsieur Legrandin’s behind. Up until then we believe that Proust’s primary fetish is memory—it’s the fetish that gets him the wettest , the one that he submits to, nightly—naturally memory is a 100 percent top—and it’s the fetish that most blissfully erases the inevitability of decay. But in this moment we come to realize that, actually, it’s the ass that is the main fetish here: young Marcel is a budding butt man, with a thing for big, bourgeois rumps. As Legrandin bends over—I forget what he is doing, I think he might be getting into a carriage, or just fiddling with something—Marcel’s eyes go all googly; he’s veritably hypnotized by what he sees. The power of Legrandin’s ass, like the power of all asses, almost (but not quite) puts a stop to all the remembering. Yet memory, and more importantly, time, marches on; time somehow gets around (or over) the ass. T, L Although we go on and on about the end of the world, and although at times it seems that we are secretly looking forward to it, when it actually happens, we will be taken aback and extremely annoyed. In our defense, we will say that everything we did, and everything we said, was meant to be taken rhetorically. Of course this won’t make much sense, because we will have found ourselves in a space beyond rhetoric. < 244 = < 245 = As a result, we will have no idea what to do with ourselves. I suppose we can expect a lot of fidgeting and pacing. Surely the only thing more boring than the world is the end of it. Let’s hope we have a book with us. Let’s hope we have a choice, because then we will bring Anna Karenina, which we love, and which will certainly take our mind off things. Though maybe it would be better to bring War and Peace, which we have been meaning to read forever . No, best to stick with something we know, something safer. Though inevitably, at some point we’ll get tired of reading and realize that we are terribly hungry. To keep our place, we’ll fold the page of Anna Karenina, just like we did before the world ended. Let’s hope we also happen to have a stick of lipstick with us. That way, we can bury the novel beneath some rubble and write a big red T on the rubble, so when we come back from scavenging for food, if we come back, we will know where to find it and can resume our reading.  After leaving one gigantic bruise upon the entire surface of the so-called New World, Hernán Cortés sailed back to Europe. His cargo included seven tomatls or tomatoes. The Europeans did not know what to make of these voluptuous red things, like blood bruises that had escaped their surface to become three-dimensional. They did not trust these bruises you could hold in your hand. Tomatoes made the old world nervous. What to do with them? Some believed tomatoes glowed in the dark and could therefore be used as lanterns. Botanists thought they were poisonous , naming them solanum lycopersicum: solanum for nightshade , lycopersicum meaning wolf’s peach. For two centuries botanists planted tomatoes and crouched behind bushes, waiting for the wolves to come and eat the sinister red things. The wolves always came. The botanists then had to explain the dirt stains on their breeches to their wives and boy-lovers. Eventually, science became tired of crouching and grew jealous of the wolves: by the eighteenth century humans were eating tomatoes, now named lycopersicum esculentum: edible wolf’s peach. We cannot blame humans for their envy. After all, who would not want to eat what the wolves eat? Who doesn’t want their mouth stained red? Who doesn’t crave a little bit of nightshade?  I’m attached to the world, but tentatively, like a tongue is attached at its root to the hyoid bone. This leaves me free to move, but only in so many possible ways. ,  When my father received the good news of my homosexuality, he cut off my tongue. He did it in the kitchen, with the carving knife normally reserved for Sunday roasts. It didn’t hurt as much as you would expect, and it hardly bled at all, just dripped a trail of little red spots all over the linoleum. My mother went to the laundry where she washed my tongue (by hand) and then used two pale blue plastic pegs to attach it to the clothesline outside. She was humming a tune, which was distorted by the pegs that she held in her mouth. My tongue dripped gently and steadily, along with the bedsheets and all my mother’s under-things: her off-white slips, her peach-colored girdles, her flesh-tone stockings. A strong wind came up, and the clothesline began to creak. My mother assured me that everything would be dry in no time.  Up until the year 2000, or thereabouts, the imagination was a space of freedom—in fact, it was the last space of freedom available to what used to be known as human beings. < 246 = < 247 = Today, the imagination is not only no longer free, but it is actually less free than anywhere else; it resembles a totalitarian police state and is organized around a principle of pervasive paranoia.  God made sure that even the toys would have actual souls and real intestines. He did everything within his powers to guarantee that the toys would shit at the twist of a key and have nightmares and get headaches. The toys would develop all sorts of cancers and be very neurotic and take all sorts of pills that would work, temporarily. God invented psychoanalysis so the toys could talk through their woes, which would help, temporarily. God was so thorough he created a world where even the toys would suffer terribly.   In my white abjectness, I am not so much trailer trash; I am more like the actual decrepit space of the trailer.  There have been long stretches of my life where all I can think about is transcendence. During these periods, all my worldly efforts have been directed toward surpassing and exceeding; I’ve had no time or energy for anything but transcending. Like most things, transcendence used to be much easier when I was younger. As I get older, it’s gotten a little more difficult . With this in mind, I went onto eBay and bought myself a transcendence machine, circa 1945. It resembles a butter churner and whips you into a state not unlike that of butter. There are drawbacks: the individual transcending is attached to plenty of wires; not only can everyone see the wires and therefore know that you are using a machine to transcend, but these wires also cut deeply into your skin. Furthermore, someone must be churning, stuck in material existence, while you are busy transcending. This can create some tension. At first, my boyfriend worked the machine, but now I hire male whores who wear little white hats and aprons. However, these drawbacks are minor. Since I purchased the machine I have been transcending everything I don’t like about the twenty-first century, regularly. ,    What is the opposite of transcendence? The commonplace, the ordinary? Wouldn’t you know it, but I seem to have lost all interest in transcendence. I’ve stopped using my machine. It’s just sitting there, rusting. Going beyond is boring. This century makes me so tired that all I really want to do at the end of the day is not transcend it but just sit on the couch with my boyfriend and my dog, beneath a blanket, and watch the world destroy itself on TV, while receiving updates on global terror. This is an experience. Instead of desiring to rise above, or exist above the world, we need a horizontal form of transcendence. Or we need to go beneath transcendence.  The history of translation has always been a history of violence, centuries of forcing that which is foreign and inexplicable to become familiar, comprehensible. But it seems that in the twenty- first century this violence has reached new heights. It is said that recently in Iraq, a translator for the occupying forces was struggling with translating a particularly difficult document and decided to take a break. While on his break, he allegedly raped a teenage Iraqi boy. Afterwards, the translator, his mind cleared, immediately went back to finish his task. (Another account states that the translator brought his work with < 248 = < 249 = him and continued to work on the translation during the act of rape.) In the near future a symposium is to be held where the suggestion will be raised that, as a human race, we should cease translating altogether. Let the strange be strange, is the symposium’s motto. Let the strange be made stranger.  For a number of weeks after the tsunami of 2005, the human corpses kept appearing; the death toll mounted rapidly, reaching a grand total that was unimaginable. Yet I am told that the aid workers came across remarkably few corpses of other species. Sensing what was approaching, it seems all the other animals moved to higher ground Just days after the event, elephants, deer, boars, and leopards could be seen roaming around in the same numbers as prior to the tsunami. In fact, while some counted and calculated the number of humans who had died, others took to counting the animals who had survived; they speculated that this latter figure was somehow higher than it was prior to the wave, though they admitted this abundance could easily be a case of mere appearance , an illusion, or a simple matter of miscounting. All in all, this information merely confirms for me what I have long suspected: that in these early days of the twenty-first century, it is safer to be an animal than it is to be human. When faced with the infinite array of horrors the world has in store for us, to be without rational consciousness would be not only acceptable but also preferable. - ,  At some point during the twentieth century, while no one was looking—sometime between the end of the Holocaust and the invention of the VCR—the opposition between life and death was reversed. Now it is dying that precedes living; we do everything we can to forget the fact that one day we all must live. In these first breaths of the twenty-first century, what we inaccurately call humans are actually ghosts, who know their way around death.  We can all agree that the gruesome entity we so mildly call the self—personally I like to refer to it as the grimace—is terrible, horrible, hideous. And undoubtedly there is nothing more gruesome than the self—except perhaps for twins. (I am of course speaking of identical twins here; non-identical twins are of no interest to us.) Surely the only thing worse than having one self would be having two selves. The belief that having an identical twin might somehow lessen the burden of the self is a myth; studies show that it only makes things much worse, doubling every heartache, every headache, every failure, every loss. Having an identical twin must be like having a photocopy of one’s self—admittedly a very high-quality photocopy, like a color laser photocopy, though which is the original and which is the duplicate? In Disney comedies starring identical twins and in those gay porn movies featuring identical twins, no one can ever tell who is who. In the former, this is always meant to be the source of humor, and in the latter, the source of titillation, but this inability to distinguish one twin from the other is really the source of a barely concealed horror. By the very fact of their existence, twins taunt us. Like specters, they serve as a constant reminder of our own death, our own proximity to non-identity; for despite all the drawbacks of being a twin, at least when an identical twin dies, he dies secure in the knowledge that there is another version of him left; when it is our time to leave this earth, there will be nothing left of us. Conversely, the existence of twins raises the horrifying possibility that there is another one of us, hiding away in the back < 250 = < 251 = of a cupboard like a birthday gift bought far too early, another self full of even more self-hatred, and that just when we think this sorrowful business of living is finally over and done with, and we can welcome the sweet relief of death, this other self will emerge slowly from its hiding place. ,  B Although our feelings about identical twins are well known, as with almost everything, there are exceptions. In this case, it is the Czech gay porn stars and identical twins Jirka and Karel Bartok , whom we found charming in the movie Double Czech. Admittedly , their charm lies mainly in the fact that in this feature film the twins are repeatedly tied up and sexually ravaged by non-twins. The plot involves the Bartoks stumbling into a semienchanted forest—as if the enchanted nature of their replicated identity weren’t enough! On entering the enigmatic forest, the brothers are forced repeatedly (by feudal lords and elegantly regaled militia) into wonderfully submissive and degrading sexual acts. Surely even Franz Kafka would have approved of this film, though he probably would have thought that the movie had not gone far enough: under his shrewd directorial eye, the twins, after being tied to the tree and violently seduced, would have been summarily executed, most likely beheaded, a scimitar cleanly lopping off both heads simultaneously. In fact, I don’t think anyone could refuse the identical charms of Jirka and Karel, not even President Bush, not even his daughters, the so-called Bush twins, who are non-identical, not only to one another but also to themselves, in the depths of themselves ; for the Bartoks invite destruction so joyfully, hold hands so tenderly throughout every violation, and, inviting us to do our worst, wait patiently side by side for all of us, naked, in a forest, kneeling in the dark mulch. ,  K ́ Although there is something eerie and evil about all identical twins, and all identical twins have a touch of the Twin Towers about them, the eeriest and most evil identical twins in the world are easily Lech and Jaros¬aw Kaczyński, leaders of Poland’s farright parliamentary ruling party, the deeply conservative socalled Law and Justice party, which is itself like the identical twin of the equally conservative party it co-leads with, the ridiculously named League of Polish Families Party. We had always suspected that there was something intrinsically fascistic about identical twins, and the Kaczyńskis, who banned gay-pride parades in Poland and in their place promoted oppositional Parades of Normality, who do not wish for homosexuals to be teachers, and who have likened gay men to weeds infesting their lovely country, have only confirmed our deepest suspicions. Of all the Kaczyńskis’ retrograde platforms, one of the strangest is the slogan that brought them to power: One Day We Will All Have an Identical Twin. Interestingly enough, there is much gossip suggesting that Jaros¬aw (pronounced like coleslaw) Kaczyński is a deeply closeted gay man, or pedal (meaning fag in popular Polish lingo). This is the same man who has stated in print that he cannot accept homosexuality, as he believes it will lead to the destruction of civilization. Men claiming to be lovers of Jaros¬aw are constantly popping up. Many of them swear that he can only attain orgasm if you whisper to him in his ear about shipbuilding, which has become a leading industry in Poland since WWII, and which employs many Polish (non-Jewish) workers. These men say that at the moment of orgasm, Jaros¬aw always sees ships being built in the dark of his mind, large ocean-going vessels, and always in the shipyards of Gdańsk (formerly Danzig). < 252 = < 253 = There was even widespread speculation when the Law and Justice Party won Poland’s parliamentary elections in 2005 that the brothers—both 100 percent bottoms, naturally—celebrated privately by having an all-night session on a double-headed dildo, pink like marzipan, whilst discussing the beauty of their conservative ideologies. Perhaps dear Jaros¬aw 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. ...