The Book Of Skulls Part 4

They seemed all to have been stamped from one mold: if not in literal truth brothers, they must at least be cousins. Not one of them was taller than five-feet-seven, and some were five-feet-four or less. Bald. Deep-chested. Tanned. Durable-looking. Naked except for those shorts. One, who I thought I recognized to be Frater Antony-he was-wore a small green pendant on his breast; three of the others had similar pendants, but of a darker stone, perhaps onyx. The woman who had crossed my path was not in the room.

Frater Antony indicated that I should stand with my companions. I took up a position next to Ned. Silence. Tension. An impulse to burst out laughing, which I barely choked back. How absurd all this was! Who did these pompous little men think they were? Why this rigmarole of skulls, this ritual of confrontations? Solemnly Frater Antony studied us, as if judging us. There was no sound but that of our breathing and the merry dribble of the fountain. A little serious music in the background, please, maestro. Mors stupebit et natura, c.u.m resurget creatura, judicanti responsura. Death and Nature stand amazed, when all Creation rises again, to answer the Judge. To answer the Judge. And are you our Judge, Frater Antony? Quando Judex est venturus, cuncta stricte discussurus! Will he never speak? Must we remain eternally suspended between birth and death, womb and grave? Ah! They're following the script! One of the lesser fraters, pendantless, goes to a niche in the wall and takes out a slender book, elaborately bound in glittering red morocco, which he hands to Frater Antony. Without needing to be told, I know what the book must be. Liber scriptus proferetur, in quo totum continetur. The written book will be brought forth, in which all is contained. Unde mundus judicetur. Whence the world is to be judged. What can I say? King of tremendous majesty, who saves freely those to be saved, save me, O fount of mercy! Frater Antony now was looking directly at me. "The Book of Skulls," he said, gently, quietly, resonantly, "has few readers these days. How did it come to pa.s.s that you encountered it?"

"An old ma.n.u.script," I said. "Hidden and forgotten in a university library. My studies-an accidental discovery-curiosity led me to translate-"

The frater nodded. "And then to come to us? How was this?"

"A newspaper account," I replied. "Something about the imagery, the symbolism-we chanced it, we were on holiday and we thought we'd come to see if-if-"

"Yes," said Frater Antony. No question implied. A serene smile. He faced me squarely, obviously waiting for me to say what came next. There were four of us. We had read the Book of Skulls, and there were four of us. A formal application seemingly was now in order. Exaudi orationem meam, ad te omnis caro veniet. I could not speak. I stood mute in the infinite blast of silence, hoping that Ned would utter the words that would not pa.s.s my lips, that Oliver would say them, even Timothy. Frater Antony waited. He was waiting for me, he would wait to the last trump if need be, to the clamor of the final music. Speak. Speak. Speak.

I said, hearing my own voice from outside my body as though I were listening to the playback of a tape, "We four-having read and comprehended the Book of Skulls-having read and comprehended-wish to submit-wish to undergo the Trial. We four-we four offer ourselves-as candidates-we four offer ourselves as-" I faltered. Was my translation correct? Would he understand my choice of language? "As a Receptacle," I said.

"As a Receptacle," said Frater Antony.

"A Receptacle. A Receptacle. A Receptacle," said the fraters in chorus.

How very operatic the scene had become! Yes, suddenly I was singing tenor in Turandot, crying out to be asked the fatal riddles. It seemed preposterously stagy, a fatuous and overblown bit of histrionics, taking place against all reason in a world in which signals bounced off orbiting satellites, long-haired boys foraged for pot, and the billyclubs of the staatspolizei shattered the heads of demonstrators in fifty American cities. How could we be standing here chanting of skulls and receptacles? But stranger strangenesses lay ahead. Portentously Frater Antony beckoned to the one who had brought him the book, and again the other frater went to the niche. From it now he took a ma.s.sive, carefully polished stone mask; he gave it to Frater Antony, who clapped it over his face, as one of the other fraters with pendants came forward to fasten a thong in the rear. The mask covered Frater Antony from the upper lip to the top of his head. It gave him the aspect of a living skull; his cool bright eyes glistened at me through deep stony sockets. Of course.

He said, "You four are aware of the conditions imposed under the Ninth Mystery?"

"Yes," I said. Frater Antony waited: he got a yes apiece from Ned, Oliver, and, distantly, Timothy.

"You undertake this Trial in no frivolous spirit, then, cognizant of the perils as well as of the rewards. You offer yourselves fully and without inner reservations. You have come here to partake of a sacrament, not to play a game. You yield yourselves fully to the Brotherhood and especially to the Keepers. Are these things understood?"

Yes, yes, yes, and-eventually-yes.

"Come to me. Your hands to my mask." We touched it, delicately, as if fearing electricity from the cold gray stone. "Not in many years has a Receptacle entered our company," Frater Antony said. "We value your presence and extend to you our grat.i.tude for your coming among us. But I must tell you now, if your motives in coming to us were trifling ones, that you may not leave this House until the completion of your candidacy. Our rule is one of secrecy. Once the Trial commences, your lives are ours, and we forbid any departure from these grounds. This is the Nineteenth Mystery, of which you cannot have read: if one of you leaves, the three who remain are forfeit to us. Is this fully understood? We can permit no second thoughts, and you will be each other's guardians, knowing that if there is one renegade among you, the rest perish without exception. This is the moment for withdrawal. If the terms are too stringent, take your hands from my mask, and we will let the four of you go in peace."

I wavered. This was something I hadn't expected: death the penalty for pulling out in mid-Trial! Were they serious? What if we found, after a couple of days, that they had nothing of value to give us? Were we bound, then, to remain here, month upon month upon month, until they told us at last that our Trial was ended and we were again free? Those terms seemed impossible; I nearly pulled my hand away. But I remembered that I had come here to make an act of faith, that I was surrendering a meaningless life in the hope of gaining a meaningful one. Yes. I am yours, Frater Antony, no matter what. I kept my hand to his mask. In any case, how could these little men harm us if we decided to walk out? This was merely more stage-ritual, like the mask, like the choral chanting. Thus I reconciled myself. Ned, too, seemed to have his doubts; warily I watched him and saw his fingers flicker momentarily, but they stayed. Oliver's hand never budged from the rim of the mask. Timothy seemed the most hesitant; he scowled, glared at us and at the frater, burst into a sweat, actually lifted his fingers for perhaps three seconds, and then, with a what-the-h.e.l.l gesture, clamped them to the mask so vehemently that Frater Antony nearly stumbled from the impact. Done. We were pledged. Frater Antony removed his mask. "You will dine with us now," he said, "and in the morning it will begin."

26. Oliver.

So we're here and it's real and we're inside it and they'll take us on as candidates. Life eternal we offer thee. That much is established. It's real. But is it? If you go to church faithfully every Sunday and say your prayers and lead a blameless life and put two bucks in the tray, you'll go to heaven and live forever among the angels and apostles, so they say, but do you really go? Is there a heaven? Are there angels and apostles? What good is all that diligent churchgoing if none of the rest of the deal is real? And so there really is a House of Skulls, there really is a Brotherhood of the Skulls, there are Keepers-Frater Antony is a Keeper-and we are a Receptacle, there is to be a Trial, but is it real? Is any of it real? Life eternal we offer thee, but do they? Or is it all just a pipe dream, like the stories of how you'll go to live among the angels and apostles?

Eli thinks it's real. Ned seems to think it's real. Timothy is amused by the whole thing, or perhaps irritated by it; hard to tell. And I? And I? I feel like a sleepwalker. This is a waking dream.

I constantly wonder, not just here but wherever I go, whether things are real, whether I'm experiencing anything genuine. Am I truly connected, am I plugged in to things? What if I'm not? What if the sensations I feel are just the dimmest faintest echoes of what others feel? How can I tell? When I drink wine, do I taste all that there is to taste in it, what they taste? Or do I get only the ghost of the flavor? When I read a book, do I understand the words on the page, or do I only think I do? When I touch a girl's body, do I truly feel the texture of her flesh? Sometimes I think all my perceptions are too weak. Sometimes I believe that I'm the only one in the world who isn't feeling things in full, but I have no way of telling that, any more than a color-blind man is able to tell if the colors he sees are the true ones. Sometimes I think I'm living a motion picture. I'm just a shadow on a screen, drifting from episode to meaningless episode in a script somebody else has written, some moron has written, some chimpanzee, some berserk computer, and I have no depth, no texture, no tangibility, no reality. Nothing matters; nothing is real. It's all a big picture-show. And this is how it has to be for me, forever. A kind of desperation comes over me at times like that. I can't believe in anything, then. Words themselves lose their meanings and become empty sounds. Everything becomes abstract, not just cloudy words like love and hope and death, but even the concrete ones, words like tree, street, sour, hot, soft, horse, window. I can't trust anything to be what it's supposed to be, because its name is only a noise. All content gets washed out of nouns. Life. Death. Everything. Nothing. They're all the same, aren't they? So what's real and what's unreal, and does it make any difference? Isn't the whole universe just a bundle of atoms, which we arrange into meaningful patterns by means of our abilities to perceive? And can't the packets of perception that we a.s.semble be disa.s.sembled just as easily, by our ceasing to believe in the whole process? I simply have to withdraw my acceptance of the abstract notion that what I see, what I think I see, really is there. So that I could walk through the wall of this room, once I succeeded in denying that wall. So that I could live forever, once I denied death. So that I could die yesterday, once I denied today. I get into a mood like this and I go spiraling down and down on the whirlpool of my own thoughts, until I'm lost, I'm lost, I'm lost forever.

But we're here. It's real. We're inside it. They'll take us on as candidates.

That's all established. That's all real. But "real" is just a noise. "Real" isn't real. I don't think I'm connected any more. I don't think I'm plugged in. The other three, they could go to a restaurant and they'd think they were biting into a rare juicy broiled steak; I'd know I'm biting into a bundle of atoms, an abstract percept that we've labeled "steak," and you can't get nourishment from abstract percepts. I deny the steakness of the steak. I deny the reality of the steak. I deny the reality of the House of Skulls. I deny the reality of Oliver Marshall. I deny the reality of reality.

I must have been out in the sun too long today.

I'm scared. I'm coming apart. I'm not plugged in. And I can't tell any of them about it. Because I deny them, too. I've denied everything. G.o.d help me, I've denied G.o.d! I've denied death and I've denied life. What do the Zen people ask? What's the sound of one hand clapping, eh? Where does the flame of the candle go when it's been snuffed?

Where does the flame go?

I think I'm going to go there too, soon.

27. Eli.

So it begins. The rituals, the diet, the gymnastics, the spiritual exercises, and the rest. Doubtless we have seen only the tip of the iceberg. Much else remains to be revealed; and, for example, we still do not know when the terms of the Ninth Mystery must be carried out. Tomorrow, next Friday, Christmas, when? Already we eye one another in a sinister fashion, peering through the face to the skull beneath. You, Ned, will you kill yourself for us? You, Timothy, are you planning to kill me so you may live? We haven't speculated on that aspect of it aloud at all, not once; it seems too terrible and too absurd to bear discussing or even thinking about. Perhaps the requirements are symbolic ones, metaphorical ones. Perhaps not. I worry about that. I've sensed since the beginning of this project certain unvoiced a.s.sumptions about who is to go, if any of us must go: me to die at their hands, Ned to perish at his own. Of course I'll reject that. I came here to gain life eternal. I don't know if any of them really did. Ned, freaky Ned, he's capable of seeing suicide as his finest poem. Timothy doesn't seem really to care about life-extension, though I suppose he'll take it if it comes along without much effort. Oliver insists that he absolutely refuses to die, ever, and he gets quite impa.s.sioned on the subject; but Oliver's a lot less stable than he appears on the surface, and there's no accounting for his motives. With the right philosophical prompting he could get as enamored of dying as he claims to be of living. So I can't say who lives, who succ.u.mbs to the Ninth Mystery. Except that I'm watching my step, and I'll go on watching it for however long we stay here. (How long is that supposed to be? We never gave any thought to that, really. Easter holiday is over in six, seven more days, I imagine. Certainly the Trial won't be finished by then. I get the feeling it lasts months or even years. Will we leave next week, regardless? We swore not to, but of course there isn't much the fraters can do to us if we all slip away in the middle of the night. Except that I want to stay. Weeks, if necessary. Years, if necessary. They'll report us missing in the outer world. The registrars, the draft boards, our parents, they'll all wonder about us. As long as they don't trace us here, though. The fraters have brought our baggage from the car. The car itself remains parked by the edge of the desert path. Will the state troopers notice it, eventually? Will they send a man down the path looking for the owner of that glossy sedan? We dangle loose ends by the score. But here we stay for the duration of the Trial. Here I stay, at any rate.) And if the rite of the Skulls is genuine?

I won't stay here, as the fraters seem to do, after I've won what I seek. Oh, I might hang around for five or ten years, out of a sense of propriety, a sense of grat.i.tude. But then I take off. It's a big world; why spend eternity in a desert retreat? I have my vision of the life to come. In a way, it's like Oliver's: I mean to feed my hunger for experience. I'll live a sequence of lives, draining the utmost out of each. Say, I'll spend ten years on Wall Street, piling up a fortune. If my father's right, and I'm sure he is, any reasonably clever sort can beat the market, just by doing the opposite of what all the supposedly smart ones are doing. They're all sheep, cattle, a bunch of goyishe kops. Dumb, greedy, following this fad and that one. So I'll play the other side of the game and come away with two or three million, which I'll invest in the right blue chips, good dividends, nothing fancy, steady income-producers. After all, I mean to live off those dividends for the next five or ten thousand years. Now I'm financially independent. What next? Why, ten years in debauchery. Why not? With enough money and self-confidence, you can have any woman in the world, right? I'll have Margo and a dozen like her every week. I'm ent.i.tled. A little l.u.s.t, sure: it's not intellectual, it's not Significant, but f.u.c.king has its place in a well-rounded existence. All right. Gold and l.u.s.t. Then I look after my spiritual welfare. Fifteen years in a Trappist monastery. I say not a word to anyone; I meditate, I write poetry, I try to reach G.o.d, I break through to the itness of the universe. Make that twenty years. Purify the soul, purge it, lift it to heights. Then I come forth and devote myself to bodybuilding. Eight years of full-time exercise. Eli the beach boy. No longer a ninety-seven-pound weakling. I surf, I ski, I win the East Village Indian Wrestling Championship. Next? Music. I've never gotten as far into music as I'd like. I'll enroll at Juilliard, four years, the full schtick, penetrating the innerness of the musical art, going deep into Beethoven's late quartets, the Bach forty-eight, Berg, Schoenberg, Xenakis, all the toughest stuff, and I'll use the techniques I learned in the monastery in order to enter the heart of the universe of sound. Perhaps I'll compose. Perhaps I'll do critical essays. Perform, even. Eli Steinfeld in a Bach series at Carnegie Hall. Fifteen years for music, right? That takes care of the first sixty-odd years of my immortality. What next? We're well into the twenty-first century by now. Let's see the world. Go traveling like the Buddha, wander from land to land on foot, let my hair grow, wear yellow robes, carry a begging-bowl, pick up my checks once a month at American Express in Rangoon, Katmandu, Djakarta, Singapore. Experiencing humanity at the gut level, eating every food, curried ants, fried b.a.l.l.s, sleeping with women of all races and creeds, living in leaky huts, in igloos, in tents, in houseboats. Twenty years for that and I should have a good idea of humanity's cultural complexity. Then, I think, I'll return to my original specialty, linguistics, philology, and allow myself the career I'm presently abandoning. In thirty years I might produce the definitive treatise on irregular verbs in Indo-European languages, or crack the secret of Etruscan, or translate the complete corpus of Ugaritic verse. Whatever field strikes my fancy. Next I'll become a h.o.m.os.e.xual. With life eternal at your disposal, you have to try everything at least once, don't you, and Ned insists that the gay life is the good life. Personally I've always preferred girls, intuitively, instinctively-they're softer, smoother, nicer to touch-but somewhere along the line I ought to see what the other gender has to offer. Sub specie aeternitatis, why should it matter whether I plug this hole or that one? When I'm back in a heteros.e.xual phase I'll go to Mars. It'll be about the year 2100 by then; we'll have colonized Mars, I'm sure. Twelve years on Mars. I'll do manual labor, pioneer stuff. Then twenty years for literature, ten for reading everything worthwhile that's ever been written, ten for producing a novel that will rank with the best of Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Proust. Why shouldn't I be able to equal them? I won't be a snotty kid any more; I'll have had 150 years of engagement with life, the deepest and broadest self-education any human being ever enjoyed, and I'll still be in full youthful vigor. So if I apply myself to the task, a page a day, a page a week, five years to plan the architectonics of the book before I write word one, I should be able to produce, well, an immortal masterpiece. Under a pseudonym, of course. That's going to be a special problem, shifting my ident.i.ty every eighty or ninety years. Even in the shiny futuristic future, people are likely to be suspicious of someone who simply won't die. Longevity is one thing, immortality something else again. I'll have to transfer my investments to myself somehow, name my new ident.i.ty as my old one's heir. I'll have to keep disappearing and resurfacing. Dye my hair, beards on and off, mustaches, wigs, contact lenses. Be careful not to come too close to the machinery of government: once my fingerprints get into the master computer, I'll have troubles. What will I use for birth certificates each time I reappear? I'll think of something. If you're smart enough to live forever, you're smart enough to be able to cope with the bureaucracy. What if I fall in love? Marry, have kids, watch my wife wither and grow old, watch my kids slide into old age too, while I remain ever fresh and young? Probably I shouldn't marry at all, or else do it just for the experience, ten, fifteen years at most, then get a divorce even if I still love her, to avoid all the later complications. We'll see. Where was I? On into the 2100s, parceling out the decades with a free hand. Ten years as a lama in Tibet. Ten years as an Irish fisherman, if they still have any fish left by then. Twelve years as a distinguished member of the United States Senate. Then I should take up science, the great neglected area of my life. I'll be able to handle it, given the proper amount of patience and application-physics, math, whatever I need to learn. I'll allot forty years for science. I intend to get right up there with Einstein and Newton, a full career in which I function at the highest level of intellect. And then? I could return to the skullhouse, I guess, to see how Frater Antony and the rest of his crowd have been getting along. Five years in the desert. Out, out into the world again. What a world it'll be! They'll have whole new careers available, things that haven't begun to be invented yet: I can spend twenty years as a dematerialization expert, fifteen in poly-valent levitation, a dozen as a symptom-peddler. And then? And then? On and on and on. The possibilities will be infinite. But I'd better keep close watch on Timothy and Oliver, and maybe even Ned too, because of the accursed thrice-f.u.c.ked Ninth Mystery. That's something big to worry about. If a couple of my pals kill me next Tuesday, say, it's going to spoil some awfully elaborate long-term plans.

28. Ned.

The fraters are in love with us. No other term applies. They try to be poker-faced, solemn, hieratic, aloof, but they cannot conceal the simple joy our presence brings them. We rejuvenate them. We have rescued them from an eternity of repet.i.tious toil. Not for an eon and a half have they had novices here, have they had new young blood on the premises; just the same closed society of fraters, fifteen of them in all, going about their devotions, working in the fields, doing the ch.o.r.es. And now we are here to be led through the rituals of initiation, and it is something novel for them, and they love us for having come.

They all partic.i.p.ate in our enlightenment. Frater Antony presides over our meditations, our spiritual exercises. Frater Bernard leads us in the physical exercises. Frater Claude, the kitchen-frater, supervises our diet. Frater Miklos instructs us circ.u.mvolutely in the history of the order, providing us in his ambiguous way with the proper background information. Frater Javier is the father-confessor who will guide us, some days hence, through the psychotherapy that seems to be a central part of the entire process. Frater Franz, the work-frater, shows us our responsibilities as hewers of wood and drawers of water. Each of the other fraters has his special role to play, but we have not yet had occasion to meet with them. Also there are women here, an unknown number of them, perhaps only three or four, perhaps a dozen. We see them peripherally, a glance now, a glance then. Always they move across our field of vision at a distance, going from room to room on mysterious private errands, never pausing, never looking at us. Like the fraters, the women all are garbed alike, in brief white frocks rather than ragged blue shorts. Those that I've seen have long dark hair and full b.r.e.a.s.t.s, nor have Timothy, Eli, and Oliver noticed any willowy blondes or redheads. They bear close resemblance to one another, which is why I'm uncertain of their number; I never can tell whether the women I see are different ones each time, or the same few. The second day here, Timothy asked Frater Antony about them, but he was told gently that it was forbidden to ask a direct procedural question of any member of the Brotherhood; all will be made manifest to us at the proper time, Frater Antony promised. With that we must be content.

Our day is fully programed. We rise with the sun; lacking windows, we depend on Frater Franz, who goes at dawn down the dormitory wing hammering on doors. A bath is the mandatory first deed. Then we go into the fields for an hour of labor. The fraters raise all their food themselves, in a garden about two hundred yards behind the building. An elaborate irrigation system pumps water from some deep spring; it must have cost a fortune to install, just as the House of Skulls must have cost a fortune and a half to build, but I suspect the Brotherhood is enormously wealthy. As Eli has pointed out, any self-perpetuating organization that can compound its a.s.sets at 5 or 6 percent for three or four centuries would end up owning whole continents. The fraters grow wheat, herbs, and an a.s.sortment of edible fruits, berries, roots, and nuts; I have no idea yet what most of the crops are that we weed and tend so lovingly, and I suspect that many of them are exotic plants. Rice, beans, corn, and "strong" vegetables such as onions are forbidden here. Wheat, I gather, is tolerated only grudgingly, deemed spiritually unworthy but somehow necessary: it undergoes a rigorous fivefold sifting and tenfold milling, accompanied by special meditations, before it is made into bread. The fraters eat no meat, nor shall we as long as we remain here. Meat, apparently, is a source of destructive vibes. Salt is banished. Pepper is outlawed. Black pepper, that is; chili pepper is within the pale, and the fraters dote on it, consuming it as the Mexicans do in any number of ways-fresh peppers, dried pods, chili powder, pickled peppers, etc., etc., etc. The stuff they grow here is fiery. Eli and I are spice freaks, and we use it liberally even though it sometimes brings tears to our eyes, but Timothy and Oliver, reared on blander diets, can't handle it at all. Another favorite food here is eggs. There's a hatchery out back full of busy hens, and eggs in some form appear on the menu three times a day. The fraters also produce certain mildly alcoholic herb-liqueurs, under the supervision of Frater Maurice, the distiller-frater.

When we have done our hour of service in the fields a gong summons us; we go to our rooms to bathe again, and then it is breakfast time. Meals are served in one of the public rooms, at an elegant stone bench. The menus are calculated according to arcane principles not yet disclosed to us; it seems as if the color and texture of what we eat has as much to do with the planning of meals as the nutritional value. We eat eggs, soups, bread, vegetable mashes, and so forth, copiously seasoned with chili; for beverages we have water, a kind of wheat-beer, and, in the evening, the herb-liqueurs, but nothing else. Oliver, a steak-eater, complains a good deal about the lack of meat. I missed it at first but by now have completely adapted to this odd regimen, as has Eli. Timothy grumbles to himself and swills the liqueurs. At lunch the third day he had too much beer and threw up on the marvelous slate floor; Frater Franz waited until he was finished, then handed him a cloth and wordlessly ordered him to clean up his own mess. The fraters plainly dislike Timothy, and perhaps fear him, for he's half a foot taller than any of them and must outweigh the heaviest by ninety pounds. The rest of us, as I say, they love, and in the abstract they love Timothy too.

After breakfast comes morning meditations with Frater Antony. He says little, merely provides a spiritual context for us with a minimum of words. We meet in the other long rear wing of the building, opposite the dormitory wing; this is entirely given over to the monastic functions. Instead of bedrooms, there are chapels, eighteen of them, I suppose corresponding to the Eighteen Mysteries; they are as spa.r.s.ely furnished and as powerfully austere as the other rooms, and contain a series of overwhelming artistic masterpieces. Most of these are pre-Columbian, but some of the chalices and carvings have a medieval European look, and there are certain abstract objects (of ivory? bone? stone?) that are completely un-familiar to me. This side of the building also has a large library, crammed with books, rarities, by the looks of the shelves; we are forbidden at present to enter that room, though its door is never locked. Frater Antony meets with us in the chapel closest to the public wing. It is empty except for the ubiquitous skull-mask on the wall. He kneels; we kneel; he removes from his breast his tiny jade pendant, which unsurprisingly is carved in the shape of a skull, and places it on the floor before us as a focus for our meditations. As frater-superior, Frater Antony has the only jade pendant, but Frater Miklos, Frater Javier, and Frater Franz are ent.i.tled to wear similar pendants of polished brown stone-obsidian, I imagine, or onyx. These four are the Keepers of the Skulls, an elite group within the fraternity. What Frater Antony urges us to contemplate is a paradox: the skull beneath the face, the presence of the death-symbol hidden under our living masks. Through an exercise of "interior vision," we are supposed to purge ourselves of the death-impulse by absorbing, fully comprehending, and ultimately destroying the power of the skull. I don't know how successful any of us has been at achieving this: another thing we are forbidden to do is compare notes on our progress. I doubt that Timothy is much good at meditation. Oliver evidently is; he stares at the jade skull with lunatic intensity, engulfing it, surrounding it, and I think his spirit goes forth and enters it. But is he moving in the correct direction? Eli, in the past, has complained to me of the difficulties he's had in reaching the highest levels of mystic experience on drugs; his mind is too agile, too jumpy, and he's spoiled several acid trips for himself by darting hither and thither instead of settling down and gliding into the All. Out here, too, I think he's having trouble getting it together; he looks tense and impatient during the meditation sessions and seems to be forcing it, trying to push himself into a region he can't really attain. As for me, I rather enjoy the daily hour with Frater Antony; the paradox of the skull is, of course, precisely my line of irrationality, and I think I'm grooving properly with it, though I recognize the possibility that I'm deceiving myself. I'd like to discuss the degree of my progress, if any, with Frater Antony, but all such self-conscious inquiries are prohibited for now. So I kneel and stare at the little green skull each day, and cast forth my soul, and conduct my perpetual internal struggle between corrosive cynicism and abject faith.

When we finish our hour with Frater Antony we go back to the fields. We pull weeds, spread fertilizer-it's all organic, naturally-and plant seedlings. Here Oliver is at his best. He's always tried to repudiate his farm-boy upbringing, but now suddenly he's flaunting it, the way Eli flaunts his Yiddish vocabulary despite not having been inside a synagogue since his bar mitzvah. The more-ethnic-than-thou syndrome, and Oliver's ethnos is rural-agricultural, so he goes at his hoeing and spading with formidable vim. The fraters try to slow him down: I think his energy appalls them, but also they worry about his chances of heatstroke; Frater Leon, the physician-frater, has spoken to Oliver several times, pointing out that the midmorning temperatures are in the low nineties and will soon be much higher than that. Still Oliver chugs furiously on. I find all this grubbing in the soil agreeably strange and strangely agreeable, myself. It appeals to the back-to-nature romanticism that I suppose lurks in the hearts of all excessively urbanized intellectuals. I've never done any manual labor more strenuous than masturbation before this, so the field ch.o.r.es are back-breaking as well as mindblowing for me, but I haul myself eagerly through the work. So far. Eli's relationship to the farm stuff is very similar to mine, though if anything more intense, more romantic; he talks about drawing physical renewal from Mother Earth. And Timothy, who of course had never had to do so much as tie his own shoelaces, takes a lordly gentleman farmer att.i.tude: n.o.blesse oblige, he says with every languid gesture, doing as the fraters tell him but making it quite plain that he deigns to dirty his hands only because he finds it amusing to play their little game. Well, we all dig, each in his own way.

By ten or half past ten in the morning it becomes unpleasantly hot, and we leave the fields, all except three farmer-fraters whose names I do not yet know. They spend ten or twelve hours outdoors each day: as a penance, perhaps? The rest of us, both fraters and the Receptacle, go to our rooms and bathe again. Then we four convene over in the far wing for our daily session with Frater Miklos, the history-frater.

Miklos is a compact, powerfully built little man, with forearms like thighs and thighs like logs. He gives the impression of being older than the other fraters, though I admit there's something paradoxical about applying a comparative like "older" to a group of ageless men. He speaks with a faint and indefinable accent, and his thought processes are distinctly nonlinear: he rambles, he wanders, he slides unexpectedly from theme to theme. I believe it's deliberate, that his mind is subtle and unfathomable rather than senile and undisciplined. Perhaps over the centuries he's grown bored with mere consecutive discourse; I know I would.

He has two subjects: the origin and development of the Brotherhood and the history of the concept of human longevity. On the first of these he is at his most elusive, as if determined never to give us a straightforward outline. We are very old, he keeps saying, very old, very old, and I have no way of knowing whether he means the fraters or the Brotherhood itself, though I think perhaps both; perhaps some of the fraters have been in it from the beginning, their lives spanning not merely decades or centuries but entire millennia. He hints at prehistoric origins, the caves of the Pyrenees, the Dordogne, Lascaux, Altamira, a secret confraternity of shamans that has endured out of mankind's dawn, but how much of this is true and how much is fable I cannot say, any more than I know if the Rosicrucians really do trace their genesis to Amenhotep IV. But as Frater Miklos speaks I have visions of smoky caverns, flickering torches, half-naked artists clad in the skins of woolly mammoths and daubing bright pigments on walls, medicine men conducting the ritual slaughter of aurochs and rhinoceros. And the shamans whispering, huddling, whispering, saying to one another, We shall not die, brothers, we will live on, we will watch Egypt rise out of the swamps of the Nile, we will see Sumer born, we will live to behold Socrates and Caesar and Jesus and Constantine, and yes! we will still be here when the fiery mushroom flares sun-bright over Hiroshima and when the men from the metal ship descend the ladder to walk the face of the moon. But did Miklos tell me this, or did I dream it in the haze of noonday desert heat? Everything is obscure; everything shifts and melts and runs as his mazy words circle round themselves, circle round themselves, twist, dance, tangle. Also he tells us, in riddles and periphrasis, of a lost continent, of a vanished civilization, from which the wisdom of the Brotherhood is derived. And we stare, wide-eyed, exchanging little covert glances of astonishment, not knowing whether to snicker in skeptical scorn or gasp in awe. Atlantis! How did Miklos do it, conjuring in our minds those images of a glittering land of gold and crystal, broad leafy avenues, towering white-walled buildings, shining chariots, dignified philosophers in flowing robes, the bra.s.sy instruments of forgotten science, the aura of beneficent karma, the tw.a.n.ging sound of strange music echoing through the halls of vast temples dedicated to unknown G.o.ds. Atlantis? How narrow a line we tread between fantasy and foolishness! I have never heard him utter the name, but he put Atlantis into my mind the first day, and now my conviction grows that I am correct, that he indeed claims for the Brotherhood an Atlantean heritage. What are these emblems of skulls on the temple facade? What are these jeweled skulls worn as rings and pendants in the great city? Who are these missionaries in auburn fabric, crossing to the mainland, making their way to the mountain settlements, dazzling the mammoth-hunters with their flashlights and pistols, holding high the sacred Skull and calling upon the cave-dwellers to drop down, give knee. And the shamans in the painted caves, crouched by their sputtering fires, whispering, conniving, at length rendering homage to the splendid strangers, bowing, kissing the Skull, burying their own idols, the fat-thighed Venuses and the carved slivers of bone. Life eternal we offer thee, say the newcomers, and they show a shimmering screen within which swim images of their city, towers, chariots, temples, jewels, and the shamans nod, they crack their knuckles and pa.s.s water on the holy fires, they dance, they clap hands, they submit, they submit, they stare into the shimmering screen, they kill the fatted mastodon, they offer their guests a feast of fellowship. And so it commences, that alliance between mountain-men and island-men, in that chilly dawn, so it starts, the flow of karma to the icebound mainland, the awakening, the transfer of knowledge. So that when the earthquake comes, when the veil is rent asunder and the pillars tremble and a black pall hangs over the world, when the avenues and the towers are swallowed by the angry sea, something lives on, something survives in the caves, the secrets, the rituals, the faith, the Skull, the Skull, the Skull! Is that how it was, Miklos? And is that how it has been, across ten, fifteen, twenty thousand years, out of a past that we choose to deny? Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive! And you are still here, Frater Miklos? You have come down to us out of Altamira, out of Lascaux, out of doomed Atlantis itself, you and Frater Antony and Frater Bernard and the rest, outlasting Egypt, outlasting the Caesars, giving knee to the Skull, enduring all things, h.o.a.rding wealth, tilling the soil, moving from land to land, from the blessed caves to the newborn neolithic villages, from the mountains to the rivers, across the earth, to Persia, to Rome, to Palestine, to Catalonia, learning the languages as they evolve, speaking to the people, posing as men of their G.o.ds, building your temples and monasteries, nodding to Isis, to Mithra, to Jehovah, to Jesus, this G.o.d and that, absorbing everything, withstanding everything, putting the Cross over the Skull when the Cross was in fashion, mastering the arts of survival, replenishing yourselves now and then by taking in a Receptacle, demanding always new blood though your own grew never thin. And then? Moving on to Mexico after Cortes broke her people for you. Here was a land that understood the power of death, here was a place where the Skull had always reigned, perhaps brought there as well as to your own land by the island-folk, eh, Atlantean missionaries in Cholula and Tenocht.i.tlan also, showing the way of the death mask? Fertile ground, for a few centuries. But you insist on constant renewal, and so you went onward, taking your loot with you, your masks, your skulls, your statues, your paleolithic treasures, north, into the new country, the empty country, the desert heart of the United States, into the bomb-land, into the pain-land, and with the compound interest of the ages you built your newest House of Skulls, eh, Miklos, and here you sit, and here sit we. Is that how it was? Or have I hallucinated it all, b.u.m-tripping your vague and muddy words into a gaudy self-deceptive dream? How can I tell? How will I ever know? All I have is what you tell me, which blurs and trembles and flees my mind. And I see what is around me, this contamination of your primordial imagery by Aztec visions, by Christian visions, by Atlantean visions, and I can only wonder, Miklos, how is it you are still here when the mammoth has shuffled off the stage, and am I a fool or a prophet?

The other part of what Frater Miklos has to impart to us is less elliptical, more readily grasped and held in place. It const.i.tutes a seminar on life-extension, in which he shuttles coolly across time and s.p.a.ce in search of ideas that may well have entered the world long after he had. To begin with, why resist death at all, he asks us? Is it not a natural termination, a desirable release from toil, a consummation devoutly to be wished? The skull beneath the face reminds us that all creatures perish in their time, none is exempt: why then defy the universal will? Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return, eh? All flesh shall perish together; we pa.s.s away out of the world as gra.s.shoppers, and it is a poor thing for anyone to fear that which is inevitable. Ah, but can we be such philosophers? If it is our destiny to go, is it not also our desire to delay the moment of exit? His questions are rhetorical ones. Sitting cross-legged before that thick-thewed tower of years, we do not dare intrude on the rhythms of his thought. He looks at us without seeing us. What, he asks, what if one could indeed postpone death indefinitely, or at least thrust it far into the time to come? Of course, preserving one's health and strength is necessary to the bargain: there is no merit in becoming a struldbrug, is there, old and drooling, babbling and rheumy-eyed, a perambulatory ma.s.s of decay? Consider t.i.thonus, who pet.i.tioned the G.o.ds for exemption from death and was granted immortality but not eternal youth; gray, withered, he lies yet in a sealed room, forever growing older, locked within the constrictions of his corruptible and corrupt flesh. No, we must seek vigor as well as longevity.

There have been those, observes Frater Miklos, who scorn such quests and argue a pa.s.sive acceptance of death. He reminds us of Gilgamesh, who strode from Tigris to Euphrates in search of the th.o.r.n.y plant of eternity and lost it to a hungry serpent. Gilgamesh, whither runnest thou? The life which thou seekest thou wilt not find, for when the G.o.ds created mankind, they allotted death to mankind, but life they retained in their keeping. Consider Lucretius, he says, Lucretius who observes that it is pointless to strive to extend one's life, for however many years we may gain through such activities, it is nothing to the eternities we must spend in death. By prolonging life, we cannot subtract or whittle away one jot from the duration of our death. . . . We may struggle to remain, but in time we must go, and no matter how many generations we have added to our span, there waits for us nonetheless the same eternal death. And Marcus Aurelius: Though thou shouldst be going to live three thousand years, and as many times ten thousand years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives. . . . The longest and shortest are thus brought to the same . . . all things from eternity are of like forms and come round in a circle . . . it makes no difference whether a man shall see the same things during a hundred years or two hundred, or an infinite time. And from Aristotle, a snippet I take to heart: Hence all things on earth are at all times in a state of transition and are coming into being and pa.s.sing away . . . never are they eternal when they contain contrary qualities.

Such bleakness. Such pessimism. Accept, submit, yield, die, die, die, die!

What saith the Judaeo-Christian tradition? Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not. Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pa.s.s. The funereal wisdom of Job, earned in the hardest way. What news from St. Paul? For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If it is to be life in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But, Frater Miklos demands, must we accept such teachings? (He implies that Paul, Job, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, Gilgamesh, all are johnny-come-latelies, wet behind the ears, hopelessly post-paleolithic; he gives us once again a glimpse of the dark caves as he winds back on his theme into the aurochs-infested past.) Now he emerges suddenly from that valley of despond and by a commodius vicus of recirculation we are back to a recitation of the annals of longevity, all the thundering names Eli dinned into our ears in the snowy months, as we sailed onward into this adventure, a way a lone a last a loved a long the river run, past Eve and Adam's from swerve of sh.o.r.e to bend of bay, and Miklos shows us the Isles of the Blest, the Land of the Hyperboreans, the Keltic Land of Youth, the Persian Land of Yima, oh, even Shangri-la (see, the old fox cries, I am contemporary, I am aware!), and gives us Ponce de Leon's leaky fountain, gives us Glaukus the fisherman, nibbling the herbs beside the sea and turning green with immortality, gives us fables out of Herodotus, gives us the Uttarakurus and the Jambu tree, dangles a hundred gleaming myths before our bedazzled ears, so that we want to cry out, Here! Come, Eternity! and kneel to the Skull, and then he twists again, leading us on a Mobius-dance, hauling us back into the caves, letting us feel the gusts of glacial winds, the frigid kiss of the Pleistocene, and taking us by the ears, turning us westward, letting us see that hot sun blazing over Atlantis, shoving us on our way, stumbling, shuffling, toward the sea, toward the sunset lands, toward the drowned wonders and past them, to Mexico and her demon-G.o.ds, her skull-G.o.ds, toward leering Huitzilopochtli and terrible snaky Coatlicue, toward the red altars of Tenocht.i.tlan, toward the flayed G.o.d, toward all the paradoxes of life-in-death and death-in-life, and the feathered serpent laughs and shakes his rattling tail, click-click, and we are before the Skull, before the Skull, before the Skull, with a great gong tolling through our brains out of the labyrinths of the Pyrenees, we drink the blood of the bulls of Altamira, we waltz with the mammoths of Lascaux, we hear the tambourines of the shamans, we kneel, we touch stone with our foreheads, we pa.s.s water, we weep, we shiver in the reverberations of the Atlantean drums hammering three thousand miles of ocean in the fury of irretrievable loss, and the sun rises and the light warms us and the Skull smiles and the arms open and the flesh takes wing and the defeat of death is at hand, but then the hour has ended and Frater Miklos has departed, leaving us blinking and stumbling in sudden disarray, alone, alone, alone, alone. Until tomorrow.

We go from our history lesson to lunch. Eggs, mashed chilis, beer, thick dark bread. After lunch, an hour of private meditations, each to his own room, as we struggle to make sense of all that has been poured into our heads. Then the gong sounds, calling us again to the fields. Now the full heat of afternoon has descended, and even Oliver shows some restraint: we move slowly, cleaning the hen house, staking the seedlings, providing extra hands for the tireless farmer-fraters who have labored most of the day. Two hours of this; the entire Brotherhood is side by side, all but Frater Antony, who stays alone in the House of Skulls. (It was at such a time that we first arrived here.) At last we are released from servitude. Sweaty, sun-annealed, we shamble to our rooms, bathe yet once again, and rest, each by himself, until the time of dinner.

Another meal, then. The usual fare. After dinner, we serve on cleanup detail. As the time of sunset approaches we go with Frater Antony and, most nights, with four or five of the other fraters, to a low hill just west of the skullhouse; there we perform the rite of drinking the sun's breath. This is done by a.s.suming a peculiar and uncomfortable cross-legged squat-a combination of the lotus position and a sprinter's crouch-and gazing directly into the red globe of the descending sun. Just at the moment when we think we're beginning to burn holes in our retinas, we must close our eyes and meditate on the spectrum of colors flowing from the sun's disk to us. We are instructed to concentrate on bringing that spectrum into our bodies, entering through the eyelids and spreading by way of the sinuses and nasal pa.s.sages into the throat and chest. Ultimately the solar radiance is supposed to settle in the heart and generate life-giving warmth and light. When we are true adepts, we're allegedly going to be able to shunt the indrawn radiance to any part of the body that happens to be in special need of invigoration-the kidneys, say, or the genitals, or the pancreas, or whatever. The fraters who squat beside us on the hilltop presumably are doing such shunting now. How much value this routine has is beyond my capacity to judge; I can't see how it can be worth a d.a.m.n, scientifically, but as Eli kept insisting from the beginning there's more to life than what science says, and if the longevity techniques here rely on metaphorical and symbolic reorientations of the metabolism, leading to empirical changes in body mechanism, then perhaps it's of major importance for us to drink the sun's breath. The fraters don't show us their birth certificates; we must take this entire operation, as we knew, purely on faith.

When the sun is down we repair to one of the larger public rooms to fulfill the last obligation of our day: the gymnastics session, with Frater Bernard. According to the Book of Skulls, keeping the body supple is essential to the prolongation of life. Well, that's not news, but of course a special mystical-cosmological aspect informs the Brotherhood's technique of keeping the body supple. We begin with breathing exercises, the significance of which Frater Bernard has explained to us in his usual laconic way; it has something to do with rearranging one's relationship to the universe of phenomena so that the macrocosm is inside one and the microcosm is outside, I think, but I hope to get further clarifications of this as we go along. Also there is much esoteric stuff involving development of the "inner breath," but apparently it's not considered important for us to comprehend this yet. Anyway, we squat and vigorously hyperventilate, dumping all impurities out of our lungs and sucking in good clean spiritually approved night air; after an extended period of exhaling and inhaling, we move on to breath-retention drills that leave us giddy and exalted, and then to strange breath-transportation maneuvers, in which we must learn to direct our inhalations to various parts of our bodies much as we did previously with the sunlight. All this is hard work, but the hyperventilation produces a satisfactory euphoria: we become light-headed and optimistic and convince ourselves easily that we are well along the road to life eternal. Perhaps we are, if oxygen = life and carbon dioxide = death.

When Frater Bernard judges that we have breathed ourselves into a state of grace, we begin the reeling and writhing. The exercises have been different each night, as though he draws on a repertoire of infinite variety developed over a thousand centuries. Sit with legs crossed and heels on floor, clasp hands over head, touch elbows five times rapidly to floor. (Ouch!) Touch left hand to left knee, raise right hand over head, breathe deeply ten times. Repeat with right hand to right knee, left hand aloft. Now both hands high overhead, bob head vociferously until stars sparkle behind closed eyelids. Stand, put hands to hips, twist violently to the side until trunk is bent at a ninety-degree angle, first toward left, then toward right. Stand on one leg, clutch other knee to chin. Hop like madman. And so on, including many things we are not yet limber enough to do-foot wrapped around head, or arms flexed in inverted position, or rising and sitting with legs crossed, and so forth. We do our best, which is never quite good enough to satisfy Frater Bernard; wordlessly he reminds us, through the suppleness of his own movements, of the great goal toward which we strive. I'm prepared to learn, any day now, that in order to attain life eternal it will be absolutely necessary to master the art of sticking one's elbow in one's mouth; if you can't do it, it's tough, baby, but you're doomed to wither by the wayside.

Frater Bernard works us close to the point of exhaustion. He himself goes through every routine he demands of us, never missing a single bending or flexing, and showing no particular signs of strain as he cavorts. The best of us at these calisthenics is Oliver, the worst Eli; yet Eli goes about them with a weird clumsy enthusiasm that must be admired.

Finally we are dismissed, usually after about ninety minutes of work. The rest of the evening is free time, but we take no advantage of our freedom; at that point we're ready to topple into bed, and do, for all too soon will come the dawn and Frater Franz's cheery rat-tat-tat on my door. And so to sleep. I've been sleeping soundly, more soundly than ever before.

Thus our daily routine. What does it all mean? Are we growing younger here? Are we growing older? Will the shining promise of the Book of Skulls be fulfilled for any of us? Does any of what we do each day make sense? The skulls on the walls give me no answers. The smiles of the fraters are impenetrable. We discuss nothing with one another. Pacing my ascetic room, I hear the paleolithic gong tolling in my own skull, clang, clang, clang, wait and see, wait and see, wait and see. And the Ninth Mystery hangs over us all like a dangling sword.

29. Timothy.

This afternoon, while we were sc.r.a.ping up barrels of hen s.h.i.t in ninety-degree heat, I decided that I'd had it. The joke had gone on long enough. Vacation was just about over, anyway; I wanted out. I had felt that way the first day we were here, of course, but for Eli's sake I suppressed my feelings. Now I couldn't keep it in any longer. I decided that I'd speak to him before dinner, during the rest period.

When we came in from the fields I took a quick bath and went down the hall to Eli's room. He was still in the tub; I heard the water running, heard him singing in his deep monotone voice. Eventually he came out, toweling himself. Life here was agreeing with him: he looked stronger, more muscular. He gave me a frosty look.

"Why are you here, Timothy?"

"Just a visit."

"It's the rest period. We're supposed to be alone."

"We're always supposed to be alone," I said, "except when we're with them. We never get a chance to talk privately to each other any more."

"That's evidently part of the ritual."

"Part of the game," I said, "part of the c.r.a.ppy game they're playing with us. Look, Eli, you're practically like a brother to me. There isn't anyone can tell me when I can talk to you and when I can't."

"My brother the goy," he said. Quick smile, on-off. "We've had plenty of time for talking. We're under instructions now to keep apart from one another. You ought to go, Timothy. Really, you ought to go, before the fraters catch you in here."

"What is this, a G.o.dd.a.m.n jail?"

"It's a monastery. A monastery has rules, and by coming here we've made ourselves subject to those rules." He sighed. "Will you please go, Timothy?"

"It's those rules that I want to talk about, Eli."

"I don't make them. I can't excuse you from any of them."

"Let me talk," I said. "You know, the clock keeps ticking while we stay here being a Receptacle. We'll be missed, soon. Our families will notice they haven't heard from us. Somebody'll discover we didn't go back to school after Easter."

"So?"

"How long are we going to stay here, Eli?"

"Until we have what we want."

"You believe all the c.r.a.p they've been telling us?"

"You still think it's c.r.a.p, Timothy?"

"I haven't seen or heard anything to make me change my original opinion."

"What about the fraters? How old do you think they are?"

I shrugged. "Sixty. Seventy. Some of them may be in their eighties. They lead a good life, plenty of fresh air and exercise, careful diets. So they keep themselves in shape."

"I believe Frater Antony is at least a thousand years old," Eli said. His tone was cold, aggressive, defiant: he was daring me to laugh at him, and I couldn't. "Possibly he's much older than that," Eli went on. "The same for Frater Miklos and Frater Franz. I don't think there's one of them who's less than a hundred fifty or so."

"Wonderful."

"What do you want, Timothy? Do you want to leave?"

"I've been considering it."

"By yourself or with us?"

"Preferably with you. By myself if necessary."

"Oliver and I aren't leaving, Timothy. And I don't think Ned is either."

"I guess that puts me on my own, then."

"Is that a threat?" he asked.

"It's an implication."

"You know what'll happen to the rest of us if you pull out."

"Are you seriously afraid that the fraters will enforce that oath?" I asked.

"We swore not to leave," Eli said. "They named the penalty and we agreed to abide by it. I wouldn't underestimate their ability to impose it if one of us gave them cause."

"c.r.a.p. They're just a bunch of little old men. If any of them came after me, I'd break them in half. With one hand."

"Perhaps you would. Perhaps we wouldn't. Do you want to be responsible for our deaths, Timothy?"