The Book Of Skulls Part 1

The Book of Skulls.

Robert Silverberg.

for Saul Diskin.

1. Eli.

Coming into New York City from the north, off the New England Thruway, Oliver driving as usual. Tireless, relaxed, his window half open, long blond hair whipping in the chilly breeze. Timothy slouched beside him, asleep. The second day of our Easter vacation; the trees still bare, ugly driblets of blackened snow banked in dirty heaps by the roadside. In Arizona there wouldn't be any dead snow around. Ned sat next to me in the back seat, scribbling notes, filling up page after page of his ragged spiral-bound book with his left-handed scrawl. Demonic glitter in his dark little eyes. Our penny-ante pansy Dostoevsky. A truck roared up behind us in the left-hand lane, pa.s.sed us, abruptly cut across into our lane. Hardly any clearance at all. We nearly got racked up. Oliver hit the brakes, cursing, really made them screech; we jolted forward in our seats. A moment later he swung us into the empty right-hand lane to avoid getting smashed by a car to our rear. Timothy woke up. "What the c.r.a.p," he said. "Can't you let a guy get some sleep?"

"We almost got killed just then," Ned told him fiercely, leaning forward, spitting the words into Timothy's big pink ear. "How would that be for irony, eh? Four sterling young men heading west to win eternal life, wiped out by a truck driver on the New England Thruway. Our lithe young limbs scattered all over the embankment."

"Eternal life," Timothy said. Belching. Oliver laughed.

"It's a fifty-fifty chance," I observed, not for the first time. "An existential gamble. Two to live forever, two to die."

"Existential s.h.i.t," Timothy said. "Man, you amaze me, Eli. How you do that existential number with a straight face. You really believe, don't you?"

"Don't you?"

"In the Book of Skulls? In your Arizona Shangri-la?"

"If you don't believe, why are you going with us?"

"Because it's warm in Arizona in March." Using on me the airy, casual, John-O'Hara-country-club-goy tone that he handled so well, that I despised so much. Eight generations of the best blue chips standing behind him. "I can use a change of scenery, man."

"That's all?" I asked. "That's the entire depth of your philosophical and emotional commitment to this trip, Timothy? You're putting me on. G.o.d knows why you feel you have to act blase and cool even when something like this is involved. That Main Line drawl of yours. The aristocratic implication that commitment, any sort of commitment, is somehow grubby and unseemly, that it-"

"Please don't harangue me now," Timothy said. "I'm not in the mood for ethnic a.n.a.lysis. Rather weary, in fact." He said it politely, disengaging from the conversation with the tiresomely intense Jewboy in his most amiably Waspish way. I hated Timothy worst of all when he started flaunting his genes at me, telling me with his easy upper-cla.s.s inflections that his ancestors had founded this great country while mine were digging for potatoes in the forests of Lithuania. He said, "I'm going to go back to sleep." To Oliver he said, "Watch the f.u.c.king road a little better, will you? And wake me up when we get to Sixty-seventh Street." A subtle change in his voice now that he was no longer talking to me-to that complex and irritating member of an alien, repugnant, but perhaps superior species. Now he was the country squire addressing the simple farm boy, a relationship free of intricacies. Not that Oliver was all that simple, of course. But that was Timothy's existential image of him, and the image functioned to define their relationship regardless of the realities. Timothy yawned and flaked out again. Oliver stomped the gas hard and sent us shooting forward to catch up with the truck that had caused the trouble. He pa.s.sed it, changed lanes, and took up a position just in front of it, daring the truckie to play games a second time. Uneasily I glanced back; the truck, a red and green monster, was nibbling at our rear b.u.mper. High above us loomed the face of the driver, glowering, sullen, rigid: jowly stubbled cheeks, cold slitted eyes, clamped lips. He'd run us off the road if he could. Vibrations of hatred rolling out of him. Hating us for being young, for being good-looking (me! good-looking!), for having the leisure and gelt to go to college and have useless things stuffed into our skulls. The know-nothing perched up there, the flag-waver. Flat head under his greasy cloth cap. More patriotic, more moral, than us, a hardworking American. Feeling sorry for himself because he was stuck behind four kids on a lark. I wanted to ask Oliver to move over before he rammed us. But Oliver hung in the lane, keeping the needle at fifty, penning the truck. Oliver could be very stubborn.

We were entering New York City now, via some highway that cut across the Bronx. Unfamiliar territory for me. I am a Manhattan boy; I know only the subways. Can't even drive a car. Highways, autos, gas stations, tollbooths-artifacts out of a civilization with which I've had only the most peripheral contact. In high school, watching the kids from the suburbs pouring into the city on weekend dates, all of them driving, with golden-haired shikses next to them on the seat: not my world, not my world at all. Yet they were only sixteen, seventeen years old, the same as I. They seemed like demiG.o.ds to me. They cruised the Strip from nine o'clock to half past one, then drove back to Larchmont, to Lawrence, to Upper Montclair, parking on some tranquil leafy street, scrambling with their dates into the back seat, white thighs flashing in the moonlight, the panties coming down, the zipper opening, the quick thrust, the grunts and groans. Whereas I was riding the subways, West Side I.R.T. That makes a difference in your s.e.xual development. You can't ball a girl in the subway. What about doing it standing up in an elevator, rising to the fifteenth floor on Riverside Drive? What about making it on the tarry roof of an apartment house, 250 feet above West End Avenue, bulling your way to climax while pigeons strut around you, criticizing your technique and clucking about the pimple on your a.s.s? It's another kind of life, growing up in Manhattan. Full of shortcomings and inconve-niences that wreck your adolescence. Whereas the lanky lads with the cars can frolic in four-wheeled motels. Of course, we who put up with the urban drawbacks develop compensating complexities. We have richer, more interesting souls, force-fed by adversity. I always separate the drivers from the nondrivers in drawing up my categories of people. The Olivers and the Timothys on the one hand, the Elis on the other. By rights Ned belongs with me, among the nondrivers, the thinkers, the bookish introverted tormented deprived subway riders. But he has a driver's license. Yet one more example of his perverted nature.

Anyway, I was glad to be back in New York, even just pa.s.sing through as we were, en route to the Golden West. This was my turf. Would be, once we got past the unfamiliar Bronx into Manhattan. The paperback bookstores, the frankfurter-and-papaya-juice stands, the museums, the art movies (we don't call them art movies in New York, but they do), the crowds. The texture, the density. Welcome to Kosher Country. A warming sight after months in captivity in the pastoral wilds of New England, stately trees, broad avenues, white Congregationalist churches, blue-eyed people. How good it was to escape from the Ivy League simplicities of our campus and breathe foul air again. A night in Manhattan; then westward. Toward the desert. Into the clutches of the Keepers of the Skulls. I thought of that embellished page in the old ma.n.u.script, the archaic lettering, the ornamental border with the eight grinning skulls (seven missing their lower jaws, yet they manage to grin), each in its little columned cubicle. Life eternal we offer thee. How unreal the whole immortality thing seemed to me now, with the jeweled cables of the George Washington Bridge gleaming far to the southwest, and the soaring bourgeois towers of Riverdale hemming us on the right, and the garlicky realities of Manhattan straight ahead. A moment of sudden doubt. This crazy hegira. We're fools to take it seriously, fools to invest so much as a dime of psychological capital in a freaky fantasy. Let's skip Arizona and drive to Florida instead, Fort Lau-derdale, Daytona Beach. Think of all the willing suntanned nookie waiting there for the sophisticated northern lads to harvest. And, as had happened on other occasions, Ned seemed to be reading my thoughts. He threw me a sharp quizzical look and said softly, "Never to die. Far out! But can there be anything at all to it, really?"

2. Ned.

The fascinating part, the challenging part, what is for me the esthetically rewarding part, is that two of us must perish if the other two are to be exempted from mortality. Such are the terms offered by the Keepers of the Skulls, always a.s.suming, first, that Eli's translation of the ma.n.u.script is accurate, and, second, that there's any substance to what he's told us. I think the translation must be correct-he's terribly precise in philological matters-but one must always allow for the possibility of a hoax, perhaps engineered by Eli himself. Or that it is all nonsense. Is Eli playing some baroque game with us? He's capable of anything, of course, a wily Hebrew, full of tricky ghetto lore, concocting an elaborate fiction so that he might inveigle three hapless goyim to their dooms, a ritual bloodbath in the desert. Do the skinny one first, the gay one, thrust the blazing sword up his unG.o.dly a.s.shole! More probably I'm giving Eli credit for more deviousness than he has, projecting into him some of my own feverish warped androgynous instability. He seems sincere, a nice Jewish boy. In any group of four candidates who present themselves for the Trial, one must submit voluntarily to death, and one must become the victim of the surviving two. Sic dixit liber calvariarum. The Book of Skulls so tells us. See, me spikka da Caesarish too! Two die, two live; a lovely balance, a four-cornered mandala. I tremble in the terrible tension between extinction and infinity. For Eli the philosopher this adventure is a dark version of Pascal's gamble, an existentialist all-or-nothing trip. For Ned the would-be artist it is an esthetic matter, a problem of form and fulfillment. Which of us shall meet what fate? Oliver with his ferocious midwestern hunger for life: he'll s.n.a.t.c.h at the flask of eternity, he'll have to, never for an instant admitting the possibility that he might be among the ones who must exit so that the others may live. And Timothy, naturally, will come out of Arizona intact and undying, cheerfully waving his platinum spoon. His kind is bred to prevail. How can he let himself die when he has his trust fund to look forward to? Imagine, interest compounding at 6 percent per annum for, say, 18 million years. He'll own the universe! Far out! So those two are our obvious candidates for immortality. Eli and I therefore must yield, willingly or otherwise. Quickly the remaining roles designate their players. Eli will be the one they kill, of course; the Jew is always the victim, isn't he? They'll honey him along, grateful to him for having found the gateway to life everlasting lying in the musty archives, and at the proper ritual moment, wham, they seize him and give it to him, a quick whiff of Cyklon-B. The final solution to the Eli problem. That leaves me to be the one who volunteers for self-immolation. The decision, says Eli, citing appropriate chapter and verse from the Book of Skulls, must be genuinely voluntary, arising out of a pure wish for self-sacrifice, or it will not release the proper vibrations. Very well, gentlemen, I'm at your service. Say the word and I'll do my far, far better thing. A pure wish, perhaps the first one I've ever had. Two conditions, however, two strings are attached. Timothy, you must dip into your Wall Street millions and subsidize a decent edition of my poems, nicely bound, good paper, with a critical foreword by someone who knows his stuff, Trilling, Auden, Lowell, someone of that caliber. If I die for you, Timothy, if I shed my blood that you may live forever, will you do that? And Oliver: I require a service from you as well, sir. The quid pro quo is a sine qua non, as Eli would say. On the last day of life I would have an hour in private with you, my dear and handsome friend. I wish to plough your virgin soil. Be mine at last, beloved Ol! I promise to be generous with the Vaseline. Your smooth glowing almost hairless body, your taut athletic b.u.t.tocks, your sweet unviolated rosebud. For me, Oliver. For me, for me, for me, all for me. I'll give my life for you if you'll lend me your b.u.m a single afternoon. Am I not romantic? Is your dilemma not a delicious one? Come across, Oliver, or else no deal. You will, too. You aren't any puritan, and you're a practical man, a me-firster. You'll see the advantages of surrender. You'd better. Humor the little f.a.ggot, Oliver. Or else no deal.

3. Timothy.

Eli takes all this much more seriously than the rest of us. I suppose that's fair; he was the one who found out about it and organized the whole operation. And anyway he's got the half-mystic quality, that smouldering Eastern European wildness, that permits a man to get worked up really big over something that in the last a.n.a.lysis you know is imaginary. I suppose it's a Jewish trait, tied in with the kabbala and whatnot. At least I think of it as a Jewish trait, along with high intelligence, physical cowardice, and a love of making money, but what the c.r.a.p do I know about Jews, anyway? Look at us in this car. Oliver's got the highest intelligence, no doubt about that. Ned's the physical coward; you just look at him and he cringes. I'm the one with the money, although Christ knows I had nothing to do with the making of it. There are your so-called Jewish traits. And the mysticism? Is Eli a mystic? Maybe he just doesn't want to die. Is there anything so mystic about that?

No, not about that. But when it comes to believing that there's this cult of exiled Babylonian or Egyptian or whatever immortals living in the desert, believing that if you go to them and say the right words they'll confer the privilege of immortality on you-oh, lordy! Who could buy that? Eli can. Oliver too, maybe. Ned? No, not Ned. Ned doesn't believe in anything, not even himself. And not me. You bet your a.s.s, not me.

Why am I going, then?

Like I told Eli: it's warmer in Arizona this time of year. And I like to travel. Also I think it might be an amusing experience, watching all this unfold, watching my roommates scrabbling around looking for their destiny on the mesas. Why go to college at all if not to have interesting experiences and increase your knowledge of human nature, along with having a good time? I didn't go there to learn astronomy and geology. But to watch other human beings making p.r.i.c.ks of themselves-now, there's education, there's entertainment! As my father said when he sent me off as a freshman, after reminding me that I represented the eighth generation of male Winchesters to attend our grand old school, "Never forget one thing, Timothy: the proper study of mankind is man. Socrates said that three thousand years ago, and it's never lost its eternal truth." As a matter of fact it was Pope who said it in the eighteenth century, as I discovered in soph.o.m.ore English, but let that pa.s.s. You learn by watching others, especially if you've forfeited your own chance to build character through adversity by having picked your great-great-great-grandparents a little too well. The old man should see me now, driving around with a queer, a Jew, and a farm boy. I suppose he'd approve, so long as I remember I'm better than they are.

Ned was the first one Eli told. I saw them huddling and whispering a lot. Ned was laughing. "Don't put me on, man," he kept saying, and Eli got red in the face. Ned and Eli are very close, I suppose because they're both scrawny and weak and belong to oppressed minorities. It's been clear from the beginning that in any grouping of the four of us, it's the two of them against Oliver and me. The two intellectuals versus the two jocks, to put it in the crudest way. The two queers against the two-well, no, Eli isn't queer, despite Uncle Clark who insists that all Jews are fundamentally h.o.m.os.e.xual whether they know it or not. But Eli seems queer, with his lisp and his way of walking. Seems queerer than Ned, as a matter of fact. Does Eli chase girls so hard because he wants to camouflage something? Anyway, Eli and Ned, shuffling papers and whispering. And then they brought Oliver into it. "Do you mind telling me," I asked, "what the c.r.a.p you're discussing among yourselves?" I think they enjoyed excluding me, giving me a taste of what it's like to be a second-cla.s.s citizen. Or maybe they just figured I'd laugh in their faces. But at last they broke it to me. Oliver serving as their amba.s.sador. "What are you doing over Easter?" he asked.

"Bermuda, maybe. Florida. Na.s.sau." Actually I hadn't thought about it much.

"What about Arizona?" he asked.

"What's there?"

He took a deep breath. "Eli was examining some rare ma.n.u.scripts in the library," he said, looking sheepish and uneasy, "and came upon something called the Book of Skulls, which apparently has been here for fifty years and n.o.body's translated it, and he's done some further research now and he thinks-"

That the Keepers of the Skulls actually exist and will let us in on what they've got. Eli and Ned and Oliver are willing to go out there and look around, anyway. And I'm invited. Why? For my money? For my charm? Well, matter of fact, it's because candidates are accepted only in groups of four, and since we're all roommates anyway, it seemed logical that- And so on. I said I would, for the h.e.l.l of it. When Dad was my age, he went searching for uranium mines in the Belgian Congo. Didn't find them, but he had a ball. I'm ent.i.tled to some wild geese too. I'll go, I said. And put the whole matter out of my mind until after exams. It wasn't until later on that Eli filled me in on some of the rules of the game. Out of every four candidates, two at best get to live forever, and two have to die. A neat little touch of melodrama. He looked me straight in the eyes. "Now that you know the risks," he said, "you can back out if you like." Putting me on the spot, searching for the yellow streaks in the blue blood. I laughed at him. "Those aren't bad odds," I said.

4. Ned.

Quick impressions, before this trip changes us forever, for it will change us. Wednesday night the ? of March, approaching New York City.

TIMOTHY. Pink and gold. A two-inch layer of firm fat coating thick slabs of muscle. Big, ma.s.sive, a fullback if he'd bothered to try. Blue Episcopalian eyes, always laughing at you. He puts you down with a friendly smile. The mannerisms of the American aristocracy. He wears a crew cut in this era: by way of telling the world that he's his own man. Goes out of his way to seem lazy and coa.r.s.e. A big cat, a sleepy lion. Watch out. Lions are smarter than they look, and faster on their feet than their victims tend to think.

ELI. Black and white. Slender, fragile. Beady eyes. An inch taller than I am, but still short. Thin sensual lips, strong chin, curling mop of a.s.syrian ringlets. The skin so white, so white: he's never been in the sun. An hour after he's shaved he needs a shave. Dense mat of hair on chest and thighs; he'd look virile if he weren't so flimsy. He has bad luck with girls. I could get somewhere with him but he's not my type-too much like me. A general impression of vulnerability. Quick, clever mind, not as deep as he thinks it is, but no fool. Basically a medieval scholastic.

ME. Yellow and green. Agile little fairy with a core of clumsiness within his agility. Soft tangled golden brown hair standing up like a halo. Forehead high and getting higher all the time, d.a.m.n it. You look like a figure out of Fra Angelico, two different girls said to me in a single week; I guess they're in the same art appreciation cla.s.s. I have a definitely priestly look. So my mother always said; she envisaged me as a gentle monsignor comforting the heartsore. Sorry, Ma. The pope won't want my sort. Girls do; they know intuitively I'm gay and offer themselves anyway, I suppose for the challenge of it. A pity, a waste. I am a fair poet and a feeble short-story writer. If I had the b.a.l.l.s for it I'd try a novel. I expect to die young. I feel that romanticism demands it of me. For consistency of pose I must constantly contemplate suicide.

OLIVER. Pink and gold, like Timothy, but otherwise how different! Timothy is a solid, brutal pillar; Oliver tapers. Improbable movie-star body and face: six foot three, wide shoulders, slim hips. Perfect proportions. Strong, silent type. Beautiful and knows it and doesn't give a d.a.m.n. Kansas farm boy, features open and guileless. Long hair so blond it's almost white. From the back he looks like a huge girl, except that the waist is wrong. His muscles don't bulge like Timothy's, they're flat and long. Oliver deceives no one with his hayseed stolidity. Behind the bland, cool blue eyes a hungry spirit. He lives in a seething New York City of the mind, hatching ambitious plans. Yet a kind of n.o.ble radiance comes from him. If I could only cleanse myself in that brilliant glow. If I could only.

OUR AGES. Timothy, 22 last month. Me, 211"2. Oliver, 21 in January. Eli, 201"2.

Timothy: Aquarius.

Me: Scorpio.

Oliver: Capricorn.

Eli: Virgo.

5. Oliver.

I'd rather drive than be driven. I've held the wheel ten and twelve hours at a stretch. The way I see it, I'm safer when I'm driving than when somebody else is, because n.o.body else is quite as interested in preserving my life as I am. Some drivers, I think, actually court death-for the thrill of it, or, as Ned might say, for the esthetics of it. To h.e.l.l with that. There's nothing more sacred to me in all the universe than the life of Oliver Marshall, and I want as much control over life-or-death situations as I can get. So I intend to do most of the driving. Thus far this trip I've done all of it, though it's Timothy's car. Timothy's the opposite; he'd rather be driven than drive. I suppose it's a manifestation of cla.s.s consciousness. Eli doesn't know how to drive. So it comes down to me and Ned. Ned and me, all the way to Arizona, with Timothy taking a turn once in a while. Frankly, the thought of entrusting my neck to Ned terrifies me. Suppose I just stay where I am, foot on the gas, driving on and on through the night? We could be in Chicago by tomorrow afternoon. St. Louis late tomorrow night. Arizona the day after next. And start hunting for Eli's skullhouse. I want to volunteer for immortality. I'm ready; I'm fully psyched up; I believe Eli implicitly. G.o.d, I believe! I want to believe. The whole future opens before me. I'll see the stars. I'll zoom from world to world. Captain Future from Kansas. And these bonzos want to stop in New York first for a night on the town, a night in the singles bars! Eternity is waiting, and they can't pa.s.s up Maxwell's Plum. I'd like to tell them what hicks I think they are. But I have to be patient. I don't want them to laugh at me. I don't want them to think I'm losing my cool over Arizona and the skulls. First Avenue, here we come.

6. Eli.

We went to a place on Sixty-seventh that had opened last Christmas; one of Timothy's fraternity brothers had been there and had reported the action was groovy, so Timothy insisted on going. We humored him. The name of the place was The Raunch House, which tells you the whole dull story in three syllables. The decor was Early Jockstrap and the clientele ran heavily toward suburban high school football players, with girls outnumbered approximately three to one. High noise level, much moronic laughter. The four of us entered as a phalanx, but our formation shattered the moment we were past the entrance. Timothy, all eager, went plunging toward the bar like a musk-ox in rut, his burly body slowing as he realized by his fifth step that the ambiance wasn't what he was looking for. Oliver, who in some ways is the most fastidious of us all, never even went in; he sensed at once that the place was inadequate and planted himself just inside the doorway to wait for us to leave. I ventured halfway into the room, was. .h.i.t by a blast of raucousness that jangled every nerve, and, totally turned off, retreated to the relative tranquility of the checkroom alcove. Ned made straight for the washroom. I was naive enough to think he was simply in a hurry to take a p.i.s.s. A moment later Timothy came up to me, a b.u.mper of beer in his hand, and said, "Let's get the c.r.a.p out of here. Where's Ned?"

"In the john," I told him.

"For c.r.a.p's sake." Timothy went off to fetch him. Emerging a moment later with a sulky Ned, Ned accompanied by a six-foot-six version of Oliver, maybe sixteen years old, a young Apollo with shoulder-length tresses and a lavender headband. A quick worker, Ned. Five seconds to size things up, thirty seconds more to locate the head and scout up a little rough trade. Timothy now cramping his style, ruining dreams of an exquisite beating in some East Village pad. Of course we had no time now to let Ned indulge his whims. Timothy said something curt to Ned's find and Ned said something sourly to Timothy; the Apollo went hulking off and we four cleared out. Up the block to supposedly more reliable haunts, The Plastic Cave, where Timothy had gone with Oliver several times last year. Futuristic decor, undulating sheets of thick, shimmering gray plastic all over, waiters togged out in garish science-fiction costumes, periodic outbursts of strobe lights, every ten minutes or so a numbing hammering blare of hard rock smashing out of fifty speakers. More of a discotheque than a singles bar, really, but functioning as both. Much favored by Columbia and Barnard swingers, also utilized by girls from Hunter; high-schoolies are made to feel unwanted. To me it was an alien environment. I have no sense of contemporary chic; I'd rather sit around coffeehouses, swill cappuccino, and talk Big Thinks than do the singles/discotheque number. Rilke instead of rock, Plotinus instead of plastic. "Man, you're straight out of 1957!" Timothy once told me. Timothy with the Republican brush-fuzz haircut.

The main project for tonight was to find a place to sleep, that is, to acquire girls with a flat capable of accommodating four male guests. Timothy would take care of that, and if he found the pickings slim we could always unleash Oliver. This was their kind of world. I would feel less out of place at high ma.s.s at St. Patrick's. This was Zanzibar to me, and I suppose Timbuctoo to Ned, although with his chameleon adaptability he was able to fit right in. Thwarted in his natural desires by Timothy, he now chose to fly the hetero flag, and in his usual perverse fashion he had picked out the ugliest girl in sight, a pasty-faced heavy with sprawling cannonball b.r.e.a.s.t.s under a sagging red sweater. He was giving her the high-voltage seduction treatment, most likely coming on like a gay Raskolnikov looking to her to save him from a tormented life of b.u.g.g.e.ry. As he purred in her ear she kept moistening her lips and blushing, and batting her eyes, and fingering the crucifix, yes, the crucifix, that hung between her jumbo bazooms. Some Sally McNally fresh out of Mother Cabrini High and not long parted from her cherry, and what a job that was getting rid of it, and now, praise all the saints, someone was actually trying to make her! Doubtless Ned was going into the spoiled-priest routine, the failed-Jesuit number, donning his aura of decadence and romantic Catholic angst. Would he really follow through? Yes, he would. As a poet in quest of Experience he frequently went slumming in the other s.e.x, seducing always the dogs and creeps, the debris of the gender, a one-armed girl, a girl with half a jawbone, a stork twice his height, etc., etc. Ned's idea of black humor. In truth he got laid more often than I did, gay as he was, though his conquests were no prizes except b.o.o.by prizes. He claimed to take no pleasure in the act, only in the cruel game of the chase itself. See, he said, tonight you will not let me have Alcibiades, therefore I choose Xantippe. He mocked the whole straight world with his pursuit of the deformed and the undesired.

I studied his technique awhile. I spend too much time watching things. I should have been out and prowling instead. If intensity and intellectualism were currently fashionable commodities here, why did I not peddle mine for a little tail? Are you above the merely physical, Eli? Come off it; you're just clumsy with girls. I bought myself a whiskey sour (creeping 1957ism again! Who drinks mixed drinks now?) and turned away from the bar. Clumsy is as clumsy does. I collided with a short, dark-haired girl and spilled half my drink. "Oh, I'm terribly sorry," we both said at once. She looked terrified, a frightened fawn. Slender, bird-boned, hardly five feet tall, shining solemn eyes, a prominent nose (shayneh maideleh! A member of the tribe!). A turquoise semi-see-through blouse revealing a pink bra.s.siere beneath, indicating some ambivalence about contemporary mores. Our shynesses kindled a spark; I felt heat at my crotch, heat in my cheeks, and picked up from her the bright warmth of reciprocal combustion. Sometimes it hits you so unmistakably that you wonder why everyone around doesn't start to cheer. We found a minuscule table and mumbled husky introductions. Mickey Bernstein, meet Eli Steinfeld. Eli, Mickey. What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?

She was a Hunter soph.o.m.ore, government major, family from Kew Gardens; she shared an apartment with four other girls at Third and Seventieth. I thought I had found us our lodgings for the night-imagine, Eli the schmendrick scoring a crash!-but quickly I got the impression that the apartment was really two bedrooms and a kitchenette and wasn't set up for that much company. She was quick to tell me that she didn't often go to singles places, in fact almost never, but her roommate had dragged her out tonight to celebrate the beginning of the Easter recess-indicating the roommate, tall, skinny, acne-pocked gawk conferring earnestly with a gangling s.h.a.ggy-bearded type dressed in 1968 floral mod-and so here she was, ill at ease, deafened by the noise, and would I please get her a cherry c.o.ke? Suave man-of-the-world Steinfeld nailed a pa.s.sing Martian and placed the order. One buck, please. Ouch. Mickey asked me what I was studying. Trapped. All right, pedant, reveal yourself. "Early medieval philology," I said. "The disintegration of Latin into the Romance languages. I could sing you obscene ballads in Provencal, if I could sing." She laughed, too loudly. "Oh, I have a terrible voice, too!" she cried. "But you can recite one, if you like." Shyly taking my hand, since I had been too scholarly to think of taking hers. I said, half shouting the words into the din, Can vei la luzeta mover De joi sas alas contral rai, Que s.oblid.es laissa chazer Per la doussor c.al cor li vai- And so forth. Utterly snowed her. "Was that awfully dirty?" she asked at the end.

"Not at all. It's a tender love song, Bernart de Ventadorn, twelfth century."

"You recited it so beautifully." I translated it and felt the waves of adulation coming at me. Take me, do me, she was telepathing. I calculated that she had had s.e.xual intercourse nine times with two different men and was still nervously searching for her first o.r.g.a.s.m, while worrying a good deal about whether she was becoming too promiscuous too soon. I was willing to do my best, blowing in her ear and whispering little treasures from the Provencal. But how could we get out of here? Where could we go? Wildly I looked around. Timothy had his arm around a frighteningly beautiful girl with sweeping cascades of glossy auburn hair. Oliver had snared two birds, brunette and blonde: the old farmboy charm at work. Ned still courted his pudgy paramour. Perhaps one of them would come up with something, a nearby apartment, bedrooms for everybody. I turned back to Mickey and she said, "We're having a little party Sat.u.r.day night. A few really groovy musicians are coming over, I mean, cla.s.sical, and perhaps if you're free you might-"

"By Sat.u.r.day night I'll be in Arizona."

"Arizona! Is that where you're from?"

"I'm from Manhattan."

"Then why-I mean, I never heard of going to Arizona for Easter. Is it something new?" A sheepish flicker of a smile. "I'm sorry. You have a girl out there?"

"Nothing like that."

She wriggled, not wanting to pry but not knowing how to halt the inquisition. The inevitable sentence tumbled out: "Why are you going, then?" And I was stopped. What could I say? For fifteen minutes I had been playing a conventional role, h.o.r.n.y college senior on the prowl, East Side singles bar, timid but available girl, hype her with a little esoteric poetry, the eyes meeting across the table, when can I see you again, a quick Easter romance, thank you for everything, good-bye. The familiar collegiate waltz. But her question opened a trapdoor beneath me and dropped me into that other, darker world, the fantasy world, the dreamworld, where solemn young men speculated on the possibility of being reprieved forever from death, where fledgling scholars noodled themselves into believing that they had come upon arcane ma.n.u.scripts revealing the secrets of ancient mystic cults. Yes, I could say, we're going on a quest for the secret headquarters of the Brotherhood of the Skulls, do you see, we hope to persuade the Keepers that we are worthy candidates for the Trial, and of course if we are accepted, one of us must give his life gladly for the others and one is going to have to be murdered, but we're prepared to face those eventualities because the two lucky ones will never die. Thank you, H. Rider Haggard: exactly. Again I felt the sense of harsh incongruity, of dislocation, as I contemplated the juxtaposition of our up-to-the-minute Manhattan surroundings and my implausible Arizona dream. Look, I could say, it's necessary to make an act of faith, of mystic acceptance, to tell yourself that life isn't entirely made up of discotheques and subways and boutiques and cla.s.srooms. You must believe that inexplicable forces exist. Are you into astrology? Of course you are; and you know what The New York Times thinks of that. So carry your acceptance a little further, as we have done. Put aside your self-conscious oh-so-very-modern rejection of the improbable and allow the possibility that there could be a Brotherhood, there could be a Trial, there could be life everlasting. How can you deny without first investigating? Can you afford to take the risk of being wrong? And so we're going to Arizona, the four of us, the big beefy one with the crew cut and the Greek G.o.d over there and the intense-looking fellow talking to the fat girl and me, and although some of us have more faith than others there isn't one of us who doesn't believe at least fractionally in the Book of Skulls. Pascal chose to have faith because the odds were stacked against the unbeliever, who might be tossing away Paradise through his refusal to submit to the Church; so too with us, who are willing to look foolish for a week because we have at least the hope of gaining something beyond all price and can at worst lose nothing more than the cost of gasoline. But I said none of this to Mickey Bernstein. The music was too loud, and, anyway, the four of us had sworn a terrible soph.o.m.oric oath to reveal nothing to n.o.body. Instead I said, "Why Arizona? I guess because we're cactus freaks. And it's warm there in March."

"It's warm in Florida, too."

"No cactus," I said.

7. Timothy.

It took me an hour to find the right girl and arrange things. Her name was Bess; she was a busty kid from Oregon; she and four other Barnard juniors shared an immense apartment on Riverside Drive. Three of the four girls had gone home for the holiday; the fourth was sitting in the corner, letting a sideburned twenty-fivish advertising-man type make his pitch. Perfect. I explained that I and my three roommates were pa.s.sing through the city tonight en route to Arizona and hoped to crash someplace groovy. "We should be able to manage it," she said. Perfect. Now I just had to get it together. Oliver was talking in a bored way with a skinny, too-bright-eyed chick in a black jumpsuit, maybe a speedhead; I pried him loose, spelled out the scene, and turned him on to Bess's roommate Judy. A Nebraska la.s.s, no less; quickly the Mad Ave delegate was in the can and Judy and Oliver were discussing the price of hogfeed, or whatever. Next I rounded up Ned. The freaky little f.u.c.ker had picked up a girl, of all strange objects; he does shticks like that occasionally, I suppose for the sake of thumbing his nose at the straights. This one was a downer-giant nostrils, giant t.i.ts, a mound of meat. "We're splitting," I told him. "Bring her along, if you like." Then I found Eli. This must have been National Heteros.e.xuality Week; even Eli was scoring. Thin, dark sort, no flesh on her, a quick nervous smile. She was flabbergasted to discover that her Eli was rooming with a galumphing shegitz like me. "There's room at the inn," I said to him. "Come on." He almost kissed my boots.

The eight of us piled into my car-nine, counting Ned's catch as the double she was. I drove. Introductions went on forever. Judy, Mickey, Mary, Bess; Eli, Timothy, Oliver, Ned; Judy, Timothy; Mickey, Ned; Mary, Oliver; Bess, Eli; Mickey, Judy; Mary, Bess; Oliver, Judy; Eli, Mary-oh, Jesus. It began to rain, a cold drizzle just above the freezing point. As we entered Central Park, a decrepit car about a hundred yards ahead of us went into a skid, did a wild sideways slalom off the road, and smashed into a colossal tree; the car split open and at least a dozen people flew out, rocketing off in all directions. I braked in a hurry, for some of the victims were practically in my path. Heads were cracked, necks were broken, people were moaning in Spanish. I stopped the car and said to Oliver, "We better get out and see if there's anything we can do." Oliver looked stunned. He has this thing about death: it guts him just to run over a squirrel. Coping with a carload of damaged Puerto Ricans was enough to send our sterling pre-med into a state of shock. As he began to mumble something, Judy from Nebraska peered around his shoulder and said with real frenzy, "No! Keep going, Tim!"

"People are hurt," I said.

"There'll be cops here any minute. They see eight kids in a car, they'll search us before they bother with them. And I'm holding, Tim, I'm holding! We'll all get busted!"

She was on the edge of panic. What the c.r.a.p, we couldn't afford to waste half our vacation being arraigned because one dumb c.u.n.t felt she had to carry her stash around with her, so I nudged the pedal and steered my way carefully through the dead and dying. Would the fuzzies really have paused to hunt for dope while the ground was strewn with bodies? I couldn't believe that, but maybe it's because I'm conditioned to think that the police are on my side; Judy might just have been right. Paranoia is contagious these days. Anyway, I drove on, and it wasn't until we emerged onto Central Park West that Oliver opined it had been wrong to leave the scene of the accident. Morality after the fact, said Eli from the rear, is worse than no morality at all. And Ned cried bravo. What a routine, those two.

Bess and Judy lived up around 100th Street, in a huge, decaying apartment house that must have been a palace in 1920. Their apartment was an endless flat, room after room after room, high ceilings, gingerbread moldings, cracked lumpy plaster that had been patched and patched down through the centuries. Fifteenth floor or so: a magnificent view of New Jersey's squalor. Bess put on a stack of records-Segovia, Stones, Sergeant Pepper, Beethoven, you name it-and fetched a jug of Ripple. Judy produced the dope that had panicked her in the park: a lump of hash as big as my nose. "You keep it on you for a good luck charm?" I asked, but it turned out she'd had it laid on her at The Plastic Cave. The pipe pa.s.sed. Oliver, as usual, let it go by; I think he thinks drugs of any sort will pollute his precious bodily fluids. Ned's Irish washerwoman also abstained-that much with-it she wasn't prepared to be. "Come on," I heard Ned telling her, "it'll help you lose weight." She looked terrified. Expecting Jesus to stride through the window any moment and rip the immortal soul out of her throbbing sinful body. The rest of us got pleasantly stoned and drifted off to various bedrooms.

In the middle of the night I felt a certain pressure of the bladder and went searching for a john in that maze of hallways and doorways. I opened a few wrong doors. Heaps of humanity everywhere. Out of one room, sounds of pa.s.sion, the regular, rhythmic bouncing of bedsprings. No need to peek: that had to be Oliver the Bull, giving his Judy her sixth or seventh ride of the night. She'd walk bowlegged for a week by the time he got through with her. Out of another room, snores and whistles: begorrah, kinky Ned's sweet sow at her slumbers. Ned was sleeping in the hall. Enough was enough, I guess. At last I found a john, only it was occupied by Eli and Mickey, taking a shower together. I didn't mean to intrude, but what the c.r.a.p. Mickey struck a delicate Grecian pose, right hand over the black bush, left arm flung across the very minimal jugs. I would have believed she was fourteen or younger. "Excuse," I said, backing out. Eli, dripping, naked, came out after me. I said, "Don't make a ha.s.sle, I didn't intend to intrude on your privacy," but that wasn't what was on his mind at all. He asked me if we could swing a fifth pa.s.senger for the rest of the trip. "Her?" He nodded. Love at first sight; they had clicked, they had found real happiness in each other. Now he wanted to bring her along. "Christ," I said, coming close to waking everybody up, "have you told her about-"

"No. Just that we're going to Arizona."

"And what happens when we get there? Do you bring her to the skullhouse with us?"

He hadn't thought it through that far. Dazzled by her modest charms, he could see only as far as his next f.u.c.k, our brilliant Eli. Of course it was impossible. If this had been planned as an erotica trip, I'd have brought Margo and Oliver would have brought LuAnn. We were stagging it, though, excepting only such stuff as we foraged along the way, and Eli would have to abide by that. At his insistence we were a closed foursome, hermetically sealed. Now Eli wouldn't abide. "I can drop her off in a Phoenix motel while we're in the desert," he argued. "She doesn't have to know what we're going there for."

"No."

"And anyway, does it have to be such a f.u.c.king secret, Timothy?"

"Are you out of your tree? Aren't you the very one who practically made us take a blood oath never to reveal a single syllable of the Book of Skulls to-"

"You're shouting. They'll hear everything."

"Right on. Let them hear. You don't want that, do you? To have these chicks here find out about your Fu Manchu project. And yet you're ready to let her in on the whole thing. You aren't thinking, Eli."

"Maybe I'll forget about Arizona, then," he said.

I wanted to take him and shake him. Forget about Arizona? He organized it. He lured the necessary three other males into it. He went on for hours and hours to us about the importance of opening your soul to the inexplicable and the implausible and the fantastic. He goaded us to set aside mere pragmaticism and empiricism and perform an act of faith, et cetera, et cetera. Now a winsome daughter of Israel spreads her legs for him and he's willing in a flash to give the whole thing up, just to be able to spend Easter holding hands with her at the Cloisters and the Guggenheim and other metropolitan cultural shrines. Well, c.r.a.p on that. He got us into this, and, entirely leaving out of the picture the question of how much faith we really had in his weirdo immortality cult, he wasn't going to shuck us that simply. The Book of Skulls says that candidates have to present themselves in fours. I told him that we wouldn't let him drop out. He was silent a long while. Much gulping of the Adam's apple: sign of Great Internal Conflict. True love versus eternal life. "You can look her up when we come back east," I reminded him. "a.s.suming that you're one of those who comes back." He was p.r.o.nged on one of his own existential dilemmas. The bathroom door opened and Mickey peered chastely out, bath-toweled. "Go on," I said. "Your lady's waiting. I'll see you in the morning." Finding another john somewhere beyond the kitchen, I relieved myself and groped through the darkness back to Bess, who greeted me with little snorting sighs. Caught me by the ears, pulled me down between her bouncy, rubbery knockers. Large b.r.e.a.s.t.s, my father told me when I was fifteen, are rather vulgar; a gentleman chooses his women by other criteria. Yes, Dad, but they make groovy pillows. Bess and I celebrated the rites of spring one final time. I slept. At six in the morning Oliver, fully dressed, woke me. Ned and Eli were up and dressed already, too. All the girls were asleep. We breakfasted silently, rolls and coffee, and were on the road before seven, the four of us, up Riverside Drive to the George Washington Bridge, across into Jersey, westward on Interstate 80. Oliver did the driving. Old Iron Man.