The End of the World Book: A Novel

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E <= E, T Thomas Eakins strived for realism, particularly when painting men’s asses; see The Swimming Hole. He sought to depict the male ass with scientific accuracy and painstaking detail, without losing feeling, by applying the paint like a dog applies its saliva. In his paintings the asses seem to be illuminated from within, violently , rising out of the dark glaze like voluptuous lampshades. ,  The ear is a listening abyss. E B,  Every now and then, when life gets too difficult, I find myself wishing that there was still an Eastern Bloc, and that I lived in it. This way, I could go to stadiums whenever I wanted and watch mass demonstrations of men performing perfectly synchronized gymnastics. I could be an informer and spy on everyone I love, and therefore have a concrete ideological reason for betraying them. Inevitably, I would be suspected of counter-revolutionary tendencies; instead of dreading myself, I could dread and fear the secret police, while secretly admiring them in those nice black leather trench coats they tend to wear. I’d try to scurry by them as < 70 = < 71 = discreetly as possible, praying that they don’t notice me, whilst simultaneously hoping that they will notice me and come for me in the middle of the night and drag me away in my flannel pajamas , not even giving me time to put on a coat. In the meantime, while I waited for the inevitable knock on my door—this fate would at least be clearer than the fate that currently awaits me— I could go down to the open air bookstall on the state farm where I’d live, and buy communist propaganda, lots of it. I could flirt with the man who sells it and ask him to point out the passages he felt were most ideologically uplifting, which would give me something to look forward to, particularly when the days were dreary, as these days tend to be, more and more lately.  In a plague economy, demand refers to the kind of boy that other boys want at any given price. Demand for a boy in fact increases as the price rises. Demand continues to increase until the supply has melted away, and, in effect, what we have on our hands is the total disappearance of boys. E In 1997 six terrorists disguised as policemen opened fire on a group of tourists who were visiting the Temple of Hatshepsut at Luxor. Afterwards, the terrorists slit open the bodies of some of their sixty-four victims and stuffed letters containing their demands into the bodies, as if the bodies were envelopes. More than forty years earlier, my mother visited this site. She wrote to her fiancé, James McCartney, about the temple. Within a pale blue aerogramme, just like those he sent her, she described to him how grand the temple was, columns upon columns . She said that she tried to imagine what it was like when sphinxes and myrrh trees lined the walkways. When the man who would become her husband, and my father, received this aerogramme, he read it slowly. He folded the letter and then placed it into the inside pocket of his tweed jacket. E, A To be honest, I’m not that interested in Einstein and don’t really understand any of his theories. Though, if I think a little bit longer, surely there are certain things about him that interest me. Like his hair. Within the history of ideas, he clearly had the best haircut. It was so unruly, giving him the look of someone who had just stuck his finger into an electric socket or who had just seen a ghost. He looked either very startled or very frightened. Though perhaps he found his hair too unruly—everyone hates something about himself. Being such a genius, he probably rationalized it by acknowledging that he was simply ahead of his time, just as he was in every other sphere of life. More than likely, he was fully aware that his hair would have been far more manageable if only he had been born into the epoch of the Afro, the Mohawk, or the beehive. I’m also interested in the fact that Einstein smoked a pipe, just because my father also smokes a pipe; when I was little and no one was around I would sneak into my parents’ bedroom and suck on my father’s pipe. Coincidentally, when Einstein was five, his father showed him a compass: Einstein was so weirded out by the compass needle, always pointing in the same direction , that he took the compass, put it in his mouth, and proceeded to suck on it. Later, he would claim that this was what got him interested in science. It seems everything begins with fathers and mouths. At the academy, the great scientist would stand for hours in front of blackboards, doing his equations in green or blue chalk, but never white. Apparently, whenever he made a mistake, he didn’t use blackboard erasers, which he believed posed an obstacle to his thought. He used the palms of his hands, to caress the problem, as it were. < 72 = < 73 = Speaking of black, what about black holes? Like everyone else, I have a ghoulish fascination with them. Even more interesting is that although Albert came up with the whole ghoulish idea, he didn’t really believe in black holes and didn’t like to think about them too much. (Maybe he saw one once, and that explains his crazy hair.) On a more historical note, Einstein left Europe in 1933. He escaped the Holocaust, which would turn Europe into one big black hole, and which would make black holes an everyday occurrence , as common as moth holes. Perhaps this explains Einstein ’s hair: he not only escaped but also anticipated the Holocaust , he saw it and was terribly frightened by what he saw. Upon his arrival in the United States, on his first day out and about in New York, he ate four hot dogs in a row (probably to repress the Holocaust). None of this, however, is that interesting compared to what happened in 1905, long, but not that long, before the Holocaust, when Einstein’s so-called three papers of 1905 appeared . There was actually a fourth, but everyone only refers to the three papers, because whereas each of the first three established a new branch of physics, the fourth only proved the atomic theory of matter; supposedly this is less important. Einstein, who at the time was only twenty-six years old, sent his work to the Annalen der Physik, tying around each of the papers a flat silk ribbon. - Somehow, when I am, as they say, doing e-mail, I feel like Jane Austen, but without the irony. Although people go on and on about the so-called global aspect of e-mail and how amazing it is to be able to connect so easily with someone on the other side of the so-called world, I cannot shake the feeling that, through e-mail, life has become very small, as compressed and stifling as it was in Austen’s day. Once again, humans rarely leave the confines of their neighborhoods or even their homes, just as it was common in Austen’s time for people to be born and to die in the same village, and to rarely leave the village, like Austen herself, who was born in Steventon, didn’t get out much, and then died in Winchester, right near her birthplace. On the other hand, maybe Austen would have loved e-mail and would have in many ways felt emancipated by it, lifted out of the dreariness of polite society. Perhaps she would have been on it all day, sending arch little e-mails and struggling to convey subtle witticisms through instant messages. Often she would have been forced to resort to the usual online symbols like ;) and :0 to express exactly what she wished to say. Yet it would have been so good for the novels, which would have been filled with heroines puzzling and fretting over the true meaning of e-mails sent by gentlemen admirers. ,    The first encyclopedia was created by Aristotle in 322 BC; it was an attempt to bring together all the ideas of the time, but he also made things up. After that, in terms of encyclopedias, there was a long dry spell. In fact, there were none, that is, until the publication of the End of the World Book in 2008, and the announcement of a policy of continuous and simultaneous revision and destruction: everything in the world is marked fragile; destroy with great care. Here at the End of the World Book we firmly believe that we must keep categorizing and that this is the only thing keeping the world, and us, from ending. We also believe, firmly, that each category destroys the thing it describes; with each category we move that little bit closer to the end. ,  Leonardo da Vinci had it easy. It must have been so much simpler making something enigmatic in the early sixteenth century. All < 74 = < 75 = he had to do to create an ambiguity that would stretch out across history was to paint La Giaconda, otherwise known as the Mona Lisa: a nice picture of a woman with a smile creasing her face. In the twenty-first century, to make something puzzling and inexplicable is far more difficult. We no longer need to wonder what is going on behind someone’s face. Plastic surgeons can cut open any face, peel it back, take a good look around, and sew it up. If da Vinci were around today, he couldn’t get away with a mere portrait of the wife of a Florentine merchant. He’d have to do a miniature reproduction of the Mona Lisa, measuring five inches by five inches, quite alarming in its accuracy. Then he’d need to place his tiny painting in an aquarium, and have it tortured by a tiny stingray, the painting steadfastly refusing to offer a confession. But even this would seem too obvious, too decipherable. And maybe I’m being too hard on him. Maybe, as soon as he had finished painting the Mona Lisa, he looked at it and immediately began to worry that although it was sort of enigmatic, it wasn’t nearly enigmatic enough. Perhaps he saw that compared to the heart of a boy, which extends into infinity, nothing is enigmatic. E,  One morning in the eighteenth century, Denis Diderot, sick to death of working on his Encyclopédie, and totally bored with the task of categorizing, went out for a spot of hunting. N is for nature G is for gun C is for crow. The black bird landed a short distance from his feet. Sunlight poured through the perfect hole in the bird’s glossy body, giving the philosopher the idea for the Enlightenment. Everyone had finally gotten used to the Dark Ages and had even begun to enjoy them, so when the Enlightenment arrived, people began to notice the side effects almost immediately, the main one being terrible headaches. In his own encyclopedia, Diderot deescribed the Enlightenment as a sort of giant photocopier, but one whose lid is always open. The invention of aspirin, he went on, is the direct result of the Enlightenment and is the Enlightenment’s greatest achievement. E,    When we think about the men of the Enlightenment, we do not think about their faith in objective reason, in the natural goodness of men, and in the value of scientific knowledge; nor do we reflect upon their distrust of orthodoxy and intolerance, their hatred of tyranny and social institutions, or their love of skepticism , freedom, satire and wit. Whenever our thoughts turn backwards, toward the Enlightenment , we think of Rousseau and his persecution complex. We think of Diderot and his obsession with stains, particularly the grass stains on the knees of his breeches, and his numerous failed attempts to create an entry for stains in his Encylopédie. Most of all, we think of Voltaire and his chamber pot, his recurring dream that a realistic likeness of his face was painted on the side of his chamber pot. We ponder the fact that all his life’s work ultimately led to the incident toward the end of his life, during which he ate the contents of his own chamber pot.  When we were children we noticed that our erasers, which were pink and gray, were rounded at either end like the tops of tombstones . The best thing about childhood was the erasers. We erased everything. We’d crouch down behind our erasers, peer over the tops, and watch the priests soberly fucking.  There are conflicting reports regarding eternity. Some say that it’s full of fountains and peaches blue as bruises, and that there’s a very, very long clothesline, on which hangs nothing but rows and < 76 = < 77 = rows of sober black satin waistcoats and pearl-gray silk trousers, dripping on into infinity. They claim that upon arriving in eternity , everyone is greeted by Emily Dickinson, and she shakes your hand, and her hand is just as you would expect—very cold, and very lovely, like ice blocks wrapped in a handkerchief to reduce a fever—but her forehead is not as prominent as it appears in photographs. Others state quite the opposite. They maintain that eternity is nothing but a big factory, run on a forty-hour workweek. With a half-hour lunch break. You have to wear a hairnet. You have to earn your keep. ,   Within these conflicting reports, both schools of thought agree on one thing. Taking measurements of any sort is strictly forbidden in eternity. Anyone caught measuring anything is subject to the death penalty (they used to behead people, but now they use lethal injection, because they want to act humanely). As a result, a large percentage of eternity’s inhabitants find themselves becoming deeply nostalgic for instruments of measurement . They miss terribly those measuring tapes forward tailors used to measure their inner thighs when fitting their school trousers. More than anything, they yearn for those silver measuring cups that they filled with flour and sugar when they helped their mothers bake cakes on those endless rainy days. To discourage this pining, the authorities organize routine bonfires at which wooden rulers (the kind the nuns rapped on your fingers) are burnt to cinders. Everyone is required to attend.  Whenever I feel a little bleak around the edges, I try and remind myself that I’m just an experiment, an event that can happen again, and that I’m mainly attracted to men who can happen again. This scientific attitude toward myself really helps, it really cheers me up, and although I still feel grim, I begin to feel almost elated, simultaneously heavy and light. It’s as if there’s a balloon seller in my head who follows me everywhere and wears a heavy gray coat, even in the summer. He sells only gray balloons in differing shades of gray—dove gray, lead-pencil gray, nerve-tissue gray—and whenever he sees how I’m feeling he gives me a balloon for free, and I feel considerably less bleak.  The end of the world will not be very pleasant, but it will be extremely straightforward. Just as we had been led to believe, it will be horrific, like the best horror movie you’ve ever seen, or the most real nightmare you’ve ever dreamt. Yet you will be able to take comfort in the fact that it will also be very orderly. There will be no incongruity between how we expected it to happen and how it actually goes down. God will simply strip us of all our irony. Without it, at best, we will be very, very skinny; at worst, we will be like skeletons. Unable to bear the literal, we will die almost immediately from exposure to the world’s day-glo elements, its harsh beauty.  Sometimes when I look in the mirror on the medicine cabinet in our bathroom, I am reminded of the time my mother took me to the Museum of Natural History. We saw a tiny fossil of a small, strange, winged creature. The pattern of its wings was so delicate. It was as if the ancient bird was hurtling toward us, flying through the slate-gray rock. As I looked, my face pressed up to the glass case, some joy in me snapped. Thought took us to the brink of extinction, but on further reflection, we have decided to come back. ,  I like boys with bloodshot eyes. The whites of their eyes are full of red popes’ hats, magnificent, violent sunsets. It’s like there’s a < 78 = < 79 = murder going on in their eyes, a tiny murder, done with tiny knives. Boys with bloodshot eyes are royalty, whereas boys with clear eyes are their lowly subjects. ...