The Apocalypse Reader (51 page)

JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author, most recently, of
Black Girl / White Girl
(Ecco HarperCollins).

COLETTE PHAIR used to think that people would just keep getting taller-that mom and grandma would be giants by the time she grew up, till she figured out that people die. Her book
Nightmare in Silicon
, winner of the Chiasmus Press First Book Competition, is about a woman who gets turned into a robot, and will be published this year. Photographs to accompany "The End of the Future" can be found at her Web site, Apocolis.com.

EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849) was the author of numerous poems, including "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven," short stories, including "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Masque of the Red Death," and the novel
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
.

TERESE SVOBODA has published nine books of prose and poetry, including
Tin God
(University of Nebraska Press, 2006). Geoffry O'Brien named her
Cannibal
one of the best books in print. She won an O. Henry Prize for this short story, grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Bobst Prize.

JUST I N TAYLOR is a graduate of the University of Florida and The New School. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. http://www.justindtaylor.net/.

LYNN ETILLMAN is a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Her fifth novel,
American Genius, A Comedy
, was published by Soft Skull Press in October 2006.

DEB OLIN UNFERTH's fiction has appeared in
Harper's
,
Conjunctions
,
Fence
,
Noon
, and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. Her first book is forthcoming from McSweeney's.

H. G. WELLS (1866-1946) was the author of
The War of the Worlds
, and other novels, as well as the science fiction classics "The Time Machine" and "The Invisible Man." "The Star" was first published in
The Graphic
(1897).

ALLISON WHITTENBERG is the author of
Sweet Thang
(Random House, 2006) and
Life Is Fine
(Random House, 2007). She is a native of Philadelphia.

DIANE WILLIAMS is the author of five books of fiction. A new book-
It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature
-is due out from FC2 in the fall of 2007. She is the founding editor of
Noon
.

PERMISSIONS

"Gigantic" © Steve Aylett, 1998.

"Square of the Sun" © Robert Bradley, 2006.

"The Ash Gray Proclamation" © Dennis Cooper, 2005.

"Sixteen Small Apocalypses" © Lucy Corin, 2006. Portions of "Sixteen Small Apocalypses" appeared in the online journal The Diagram (http://thediagram.com).

"So We Are Very Concerned" © Elliott David, 2006.

"KrafrMark" © Matthew Derby, 2006.

"After All" © Carol Emshwiller, 2002. This story was first published in Report to the Men's Club and Other Stories (Small Beer, 2002).

"An Accounting" © Brian Evenson. This story first appeared in Paraspheres.

"When We Went to See the End of the World by Dawnie Morningside, age 11 %" © Neil Gaiman, 1998.

"These Zombies Are Not a Metaphor" © Jeff Goldberg, 2006.

"The Rapid Advance of Sorrow" © Theodora Goss, 2002. First published in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet 11 (November 2002).

"Fraise, Menthe, et Poivre 1978" © Jared Hohl, 2006.

"The Hook" © Shelley Jackson, 2006.

"Some Approaches to the Problem of the Shortage of Time" © 1979, 2007 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Omni under the title "Where Does the Time Go?"; from The Wind's Twelve Quarters-, reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agents, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

"Sweethearts" © Stacey Levine, 2006.

"i am `i don't know what i am' and you are afraid of me and so am i" Tao Lin, 2006. This story was published as a poem in you are a little bit happier than i am (Action Books, 2006).

"Miss Kansas on Judgment Day" by Kelly Link © 1999. First published in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet.

"Nyarlathotep" by H. P. Lovecraft, reprinted by permission of Arkham House Publisher's, Inc. and Arkham's agents, JABberwocky Literary Agency.

"I Always Go to Particular Places" © Gary Lutz & Deb Olin Unferth, 2006.

"The Apocalypse Commentary of Bob Paisner" from The Ring ofBright- est Angels Around Heaven by Rick Moody. © 1995 by Rick Moody. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Co., Inc. and Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC.

"Crossing into Cambodia" © Michael Moorcock, 1979. This story first appeared in Twenty Houses of the Zodiac, edited by Maxim Jakubowski.

"The Last Man" © Adam Nemett, 2006.

"The End" © Josip Novakovich, 1998. This story first appeared in New Letters (1996), and was part of the collection Salvation and Other Disasters (Graywolf Press, 1998).

"Apoc ca lyp se" by Joyce Carol Oates, © 1996, Ontario Review, Inc.

"The End of the Future" © Colette Phair, 2006.

"80s Lilies" © Terese Svoboda, 2006. This story first appeared in Indiana Review and won an O. Henry Prize.

"Pole Shift" © Justin Taylor, 2006. This story first appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, July/August 2006.

"Save Me From the Pious and the Vengeful" © Lynne Tillman, 2002. This story first appeared in 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11 (NYU Press, 2002).

"Think Warm Thoughts" © Allison Whittenberg. This story first appeared in Quick Fiction 9.

"What Is It When God Speaks?" © Diane Williams. This story first appeared in This is About the Body the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Grove Weidenfeld, 1990) and then in Excitability: Selected Stories (Dalkey Archive Press, 1998).

"The Escape-A Tale of 1755" by Grace Aguilar, "Earth's Holocaust" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" by Edgar Allan Poe, and "The Star" by H. G. Wells are all works in the public domain.

1. For this stuff about John on Patmos and other information on the book of Revelation and all its commentators, I'm really indebted to David Burr, Olivis Peaceable Kingdom: A Reading of the Apocalypse Commentary (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1974).

2. Joachim of Fiore in his
Exposito in apocalypsim
(manuscript in the Vatican someplace) believed that there was an exact concordance between the events of the O.T. and the N.T. To him I owe this concordance idea. And I'm aware, if my life is mapped onto Revelation, that there must also be a concordance between my life and the O.T, and between your life and mine, and between the Bible and the Koran, etc.

4. Note also that there are
books within the book
called Revelation. There's the book with the seven seals "next to the one who sits on the throne" (5:6), and there's the book "which is opened in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth" (10:8).

3. Likewise, Jacques Derrida, when writing of Jean Genet's method of composition, found traces of the Apocalypse: "Why not search there for the remains of John (Jean)? The Gospel and the Apocalypse, violently selected, fragmented, redistributed, with blanks, shifts of accent, lines skipped or moved out of place."
Glas
. Paris: Editions Galilee, 1974. Trans. by Robert B. Paisner.

5. Some more information on my dad appears in my Deviant Personality final, December 6, 1980. 1 received a C-minus-partly because I had stayed up till 4:00 A.M. buying drinks for Annie Parsons. Later she used her hand on me, in the hall of her dorm, as revelers stumbled by. The exam was a few hours later.

6. My close friend Shusaku C. Sunami (who is Asian) dropped out of school just about the time this story takes place, just before exams last fall. After a long, expensive cocaine binge, he skipped his exams and took the first train home to NYC.

7. I've considered the possibility that John suffered with some kind of alcoholic or druginspired vision, maybe toxic withdrawal. This would account for the "four beasts full of eyes before and behind" (4:6) and like imagery.

8. On the other hand, Olivi's posthumous condemnation by the Pope wasn't completed until 1328, which would slide the whole thing back to the early 1990s.

9. Their names were as follows: Susan Ward (in fourth grade); Lisa Burns; Debby Madden (in eighth grade), who replied to my request to go steady, "Lisa Burns says you are a fag and I agree"; Liz Overton; Laura Drummond; Liza Benedict, whose dad caught us trying to do
it
(my first time) in the basement.

10. My mother, who has been pretty sick for a long time, was, over the holidays, readmitted to a private psychiatric hospital in Concord. We spent Xmas morning with her in the visiting room. She was disoriented. I brought her gourmet cheeses. I held her in my arms while she slept.

11. Another song I liked by The Egyptians was based on a painting by Hieronymous Bosch:
Cure of Folly
.

12. Some of my thinking about the number of the beast derives from a fine Gregory Peck vehicle entitled
The Omen
.

13. See, e.g., Ferdinand de Saussure's
Course in General Linguistics
. In his later years, Saussure became obsessed with anagrams, word games, with systems, with codes, with the worlds that he felt were hidden behind our words, with all the life that was beyond his reach.