The End of the World Book: A Novel

by Alistair McCartney

  DREAMS, BAD

  Technically speaking there is no such thing as a bad dream (and there is of course nothing nicer than hearing a really cute guy tell you last night's nightmare in detail). In my mother's dream ledgers, good dreams went on the left side (credit), bad dreams on the right (debit). With a few notable exceptions, all her dreams ended up in the left column. Any dream by definition is a good dream, a credit to your being, even if you wake from it, your nightgown dripping, screaming.

  DREAMS, DEATH AND

  I recently heard from a highly reliable source that when you die all you do is sleep, but you never dream. Every now and then you wake up, and feel sleepy, and yawn a bit, and miss the world, but only for a few minutes, until you fall back into your dreamless sleep.

  With this in mind, I now try to be awake as little as possible. I try to sleep as long as I can and to dream as much as—or perhaps even more than—is humanly conceivable. All this in an effort to cram in as many dreams as I can.

  DREAMS, DEATH OF

  When we got out of the car and peered over the edge of the chasm, we saw all our dead dreams lying at the bottom, rotting away. And we saw other things: a skeleton of a boy, a mattress covered in tea stains and sex stains, and a discarded sofa upholstered in green fabric with a pattern of roses.

  DREAMS, FUTURE OF

  On those days when I am trying to avoid writing, or to avoid living, I like to go and stare at all my dream journals, stacked there quietly.

  They strike me as a kind of stockpile, a supply of materials stored for future use. Yet what a curious stockpile it is, for ultimately there is no future for the dreamer, and no one will require the use of his materials. Unused, my dream journals have already gone rancid. A stench seems to emanate from them.

  By the end of this century, all dreaming will have ceased; most people have ceased dreaming already. People may come across my journals, but they will not understand a word of them. They will see nothing but scratches, strange night scratches.

  DREAMS, MY FATHER'S

  Once a week my father did the rounds, like a garbage collector, collecting all our dreams, sifting through them, and then, like a garbage truck, carefully compacting them.

  More than anything, I would like to meet my father in Motherwell, Scotland, and go with him to the pub that his brother Davy, who wears the toupee, owns, and then go with him to the little two-up two-down red brick house where he grew up, and sit down with him at the kitchen table, and share some whisky, and listen intently, as he tells me in complete detail every one of his dreams.

  DREAMS, PREVIOUSLY DREAMT

  Where do dreams go, after they've been dreamt? Perhaps they have nowhere to go, and, like plastic, they don't break down; they just accumulate silently in the body. Perhaps science, in the investigation of what causes cancer, needs to look toward dreams.

  DREAMS, WAKING UP FROM

  Last night I woke up from a dream. As I tried to go back to sleep, I found myself thinking about those Dracula moneyboxes that were popular in the late 1970s. When you placed a coin in them, Dracula would sit up very erectly from his miniature coffin and cackle and grasp the coin, before taking it back with him into his coffin. Like Dracula, I had popped out of my dream, to grasp at something. The memory of this toy, which I had forgotten, and the thought of my resemblance to it, somehow calmed me. I withdrew from the world, into the dream, back where I belong.

  DREAMS, WET

  How wonderful that brief period of life was, when, during early adolescence, we had sex in our dreams, sex that was so real—perhaps more real than the waking sex we would come to have—that our bodies spontaneously shuddered, emitting strange, milky fluid onto our flannel or cotton sheets. Life was never so thrilling than during that period; since then, if the truth be told, life has been somewhat of a disappointment.

  A wet dream is the only accurate record of a dream. All those thousands of dreams I have written down in my so-called dream journals, in an attempt to recapture the essence of each dream, are not only somewhat tedious but also utterly inaccurate.

  DRIVING

  I'm thirty-six and have yet to acquire my driver's license. Living in Los Angeles, you might think this puts me at a disadvantage, but you would be wrong.

  You haven't lived until you've taken the number 33 bus from Venice Beach, all the way down Venice Boulevard—the Champs Elysées of this city—to Union Station in downtown L.A. The ride is especially beautiful during the summer, early in the morning, when the glare is so great that I start to think I'm in heaven and it makes me feel sick. It seems as if I'm not alone in this feeling; men carefully pull the edge of their hoodies over their shaved heads, concealing their faces.

  As we pass by the thousands upon thousands of wonderfully anonymous pastel apartment buildings and houses and motels, I think about the thousands of men hidden behind those stucco walls, lying on their beds, probably in white boxers, dreaming or daydreaming.

  Due to my driving defect, not only am I granted the intense pleasure of taking the MTA buses in this city, I also get to ride about on my red bicycle. You may have seen me. I ride my bike very slowly and sit very upright as I ride, with a straight back, like Miss Gulch in The Wizard of Oz, though, as I recall, she rode her bicycle with a certain urgency.

  I suspect I will get my driver's license very soon, but it is common knowledge that my mother never got her license. Maybe I will take after her; maybe I am genetically predisposed not to drive. Sometimes it is simply not possible to overcome heredity; I'll be fused to my bicycle forever.

  In that case, I'll have to be content with dreaming. At night, my mum and I drive around in a red sports car, just like the one Princess Grace of Monaco died in. Taking turns at the wheel, we speed along an endless road that is comprised wholly of sharp corners, each corner sharper than the one before. We are excellent, if somewhat reckless, drivers. In this dream, although both of us are still without our licenses, a license is not required, for in dream there are no laws.

  DUNCE'S CAPS

  Some of my best memories of childhood involve standing in the corner of a classroom, between two blackboards, wearing a dunce's cap. These caps were made out of white construction paper, which was thick but relatively fragile. You had to be careful not to knock the conical tip of your hat against the plaster wall. The hat only stayed on your head because of the elastic, which bit into your chin, leaving a nice pink mark. The D, written on the side of the hat in Magic Marker, was thick, black, and glossy. Although it was clear what the D stood for, it could have stood for all sorts of good things, like death, doom, danger, decay, decadence, destruction, dissolution, dissipation. Over time the D faded until it was barely discernible. There was something very intimate about the relationship each wearer had with his hat. I would never advocate a return to childhood—the second time around we'd die, or at the very least go insane—but I really would strongly advocate that we bring dunce's caps back.

  DVDS

  What would we do without DVDs or DVD players? One thing's for certain: we would find ourselves at an extremely loose end, like teenage boys in the summer holidays, bored out of their skulls. Actually, without the technological support of DVDs, all humanity would go mad, everyone would slit their wrists on the count of three—DVD players were invented in 1996 to stop humanity from doing so. The only thing keeping civilization from descending into complete madness and obliterating itself entirely, the only way we are keeping it somewhat together, is because of a thin little DVD (probably of an old Luis Buñuel flick). If it were not for the consolation of DVDs, things would get particularly dicey at the end of the day as the sun begins to set and nighttime envelops us in its navy blue sludge. After five o'clock there would be nothing to look forward to but an evening of bones.

  DYLAN, BOB

  The other day, sick to death of speaking, and thoroughly dissatisfied with the limits of my tongue, I decided to cut it out. To get myself in the mood, I put on Bob Dylan's “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”—which cove
rs one whole side of Tim's vinyl copy of Blonde on Blonde—grabbed a knife, and began working away on the tough old thing. I felt determined yet slightly ludicrous, like one of those colonial explorers in a safari suit and a pith helmet, hacking his way through dense undergrowth.

  Halfway through, I lost my nerve. Perhaps, I thought, a tongue would still come in handy, if only for French-kissing my boyfriend and maliciously gossiping.

  So Tim wouldn't know I had attempted to cut off my tongue, I washed the blood off the knife and dried it with a tea towel. Then I applied some iodine and Kleenex tissues to my tongue, the poor red thing. Dylan hadn't even gotten to his harmonica solo yet, so I sat on the couch, waiting for the bleeding to stop, and listened to the rest of his lovely, interminable song.

  E

  EAKINS, THOMAS

  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.

  EAR, THE

  The ear is a listening abyss.

  EASTERN BLOC, THE

  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 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.

  ECONOMICS

  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.

  EGYPT

  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.

  EINSTEIN, ALBERT

  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.

  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.

  E-MAIL

  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.

  ENCYCLOPEDIA, HISTORY OF THE

  The first encycl
opedia 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.

  ENIGMATIC, THE

  Leonardo da Vinci had it easy. It must have been so much simpler making something enigmatic in the early sixteenth century. All 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.