The End of the World Book: A Novel

V

V <=  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. V’ D 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. < 262 = < 263 =   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.  ,  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.  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.  Vanishing is just as important.   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 < 264 = < 265 = 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.  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. VCR 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.  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. V ,  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 < 266 = < 267 = 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. V 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.  There is no evidence that the nerves of boys were ever used to string violins.  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. < 268 = < 269 = 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. ,  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 bloody 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. ,   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 dis-invented, or replaced by a better invention. Historically, we are approaching the end of the voice.  G, W 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.  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.  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 < 270 = < 271 = 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. ...