The Book Of Skulls Part 5

"Don't hand me that melodramatic garbage. I'm a free agent. Look at it existentially, the way you're always asking us to do: we shape our own fates, Eli, we go our own paths. Why should I be bound to you three?"

"You took a voluntary oath."

"I can renounce it."

"All right," he said. "Renounce it. Pack up and clear out." He was lying sprawled out naked on his cot, staring me down; I had never seen Eli look this determined, this formidable, before. Suddenly he was tremendously together. Or else he had a demon inside him. He said, "Well, Timothy? You're a free agent. n.o.body's stopping you. You can be in Phoenix by sundown."

"I'm not in that much of a rush. I wanted to discuss this with the three of you, come to some kind of rational understanding, n.o.body bludgeoning anybody else but all of us agreeing that-"

"We agreed to come here," Eli said, "and we agreed to give it a chance. Further discussion's not necessary. You can pull out whenever you please, bearing in mind, of course, that by doing so you'll expose us to certain risks."

"That's blackmail."

"I know." His eyes flashed. "What are you afraid of, Timothy? The Ninth Mystery? Does that scare you? Or is it the possibility of really getting to live forever that you're worried about? Are you bowed down under existential terror, man? Seeing yourself going on and on through the centuries, tied to the wheel of karma, unable to get free? Which frightens you more, Timothy-living or dying?"

"You little c.o.c.ksucker."

"Wrong room," he said. "Go out to the left, two doors up the hall, ask for Ned."

"I came in here with something serious on my mind. I didn't ask for jokes and I didn't ask for threats and I didn't ask for personal smears. I just want to know how long you and Oliver and Ned plan to stay here."

"We've only just arrived. It's too soon to talk about leaving. Will you excuse me now?"

I went out. I was getting nowhere, and we both knew it. And Eli had stung me, a few times, in places where I hadn't realized I was so vulnerable.

At dinner, he acted as though I hadn't said a thing to him.

And now? Do I just sit and wait and wonder? Jesus, I can't put up with much more of this, honestly. I simply wasn't designed for the monastic life-completely leaving out of the question the matter of the Book of Skulls and all it may offer. You have to be bred for this sort of thing; you have to have renunciation in your genes, a touch of masochism. I've got to make them realize that, Eli and Oliver. The two madmen, the two immortality-crazed lunatics. They'd stay here ten or twenty years, pulling weeds, breaking their backs with these exercises, staring at the sun till they're half blind, breathing deep, eating peppered mush, and convincing themselves that this was the right way to get to live forever. Eli, who always struck me as freaky and neurotic but fundamentally pretty rational, seems definitely to have flipped. His eyes are strange now, gla.s.sy and fierce, like Oliver's: psychotic eyes, terrible eyes. Things are stirring inside Eli. He's gaining strength day by day, adding not just muscles but a sort of moral strength, a fervor, a dynamism: he's bound on his course and he lets you know that he isn't going to allow anything to come between him and what he wants. For Eli that's something brand new. Sometimes I think he's turning into Oliver-a short, dark, hairy Yiddish edition of Oliver. Oliver, of course, keeps his mouth shut and does enough ch.o.r.es for six and at exercise time bends himself into a pretzel trying to out-frater the frater. And even Ned is catching the faith. No wisecracks from him now, no little snotty quips. In the morning we sit there listening to Frater Miklos spin long driveling skeins of senile gibberish, with maybe one intelligible sentence out of every six, and there's Ned, like a six-year-old being told about Santa Claus, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up his face in excitement, sweating, chewing his nails, nodding, gulping it all down. Right on, Frater Miklos! Atlantis, yes, and Cro-Magnon Man, sure, and the Aztecs, and all the rest, I believe, I believe! And then we eat our lunch, and then we meditate on the cold stone floor of our rooms, each by himself, and then we go out and sweat for the fraters in the f.u.c.king fields. Enough. I can't take very much more. I m.u.f.fed my chance today, but I'll go back to Eli again in a day or two and see if I can't get him to be reasonable. Though I don't have much hope of that.

Eli frightens me a little, now.

And I wish he hadn't said that bit about what I'm afraid of, whether the Ninth Mystery or living forever. I very much wish he hadn't said that to me.

30. Oliver.

A small accident while we were working in the fields before breakfast. I was pa.s.sing between two rows of chili-plants and I put my bare left foot down on a sharp slab of stone that somehow had worked its way up to the surface and was sticking out, edge-on. I felt the stone starting to cut into my sole, and I shifted weight quickly, too quickly. My other foot wasn't ready to take the burden. My right ankle began to buckle. There was nothing I could do but let myself fall, the way they teach you to fall on the basketball court when you've been faked badly out of position and are faced with a quick choice between toppling and tearing a bunch of ligaments. Down I went, catabloop, smack on my a.s.s. I didn't hurt myself in any way, but this section of the fields had been heavily irrigated the night before and still was muddy; I landed in a sticky, soggy patch, and there was a squooshy sucking sound as I pulled myself up. My shorts were a mess-the whole seat mudstained and wet. Well, nothing serious about that, though I didn't like the feel of the damp dirt as it soaked through the fabric to my skin. Frater Franz came trotting over to see if I had hurt myself, and I showed him that I was all right, all except my shorts. I asked if I should go back to the house and change, but he grinned and shook his head and told me there wasn't any need of that. I could just take the shorts off and hang them on a tree and the sun would dry them in half an hour. Okay, why not? I'm not uptight about going around without clothes on, and anyway how much more privacy did I need than out here in the middle of the desert? So I wriggled out of the shorts and draped them on a branch and brushed the mud off my rump and began pulling weeds again.

It was only about twenty minutes since daybreak but the sun was already climbing fast and getting hot, and the temperature, which must have dipped into the forties or fifties during the night, was rapidly heading through the seventies toward the higher regions of the thermometer. I felt the warmth on my bare skin, the sweat beginning to burst from me in rivers, running down my back, my b.u.t.tocks, my legs, and I told myself that this was the way it always ought to be when men went out to work in the fields on a hot day, that it was clean and good to be naked under the bright sun, that it made no sense at all to have to wrap a strip of rough dirty cloth around your middle when you could strip down all the way like this. The more I thought about it, the less sense it made to me to wear clothes at all: so long as the weather is warm and your body doesn't offend the eye, why must you cover yourself? Of course a lot of people aren't so pretty to look at; they're better off clothed, I guess, or at least we are if they are. But I was glad to be out of my muddy shorts. Out here among other men, what the h.e.l.l.

And as I worked my way down the row of chili, sweating the good sweat, my nakedness put me in mind of other times, years ago, when I was first discovering my body and the bodies of others. I suppose it was the heat that stirred a ferment of memory in me, images drifting freely in my head, a hazy easy formless cloud of recollection. Down by the creek, a scorching July afternoon, when I was-how old?-eleven, yes, eleven, it was the year my father died. I was with Jim and Karl, my friends, my only really close friends, Karl twelve, Jim my age, and we were looking for Karl's dog, the mutt, who ran away that morning. Following his spoor, we were, like Tarzan, trailing the dog upstream, finding a couple of t.u.r.ds here and a puddle of wet at the base of a treetrunk there, until we had gone a mile, two miles, out into nowhere, and the heat was on us and the sweat was drenching our clothes, and we hadn't found the dog at all, and we came to the deep part of the creek, beyond the Madden farm, where it's deep enough for swimming. Karl said, "Let's go swimming," and I said, "But we didn't bring our trunks," and they both laughed at me and started to take their clothes off. Well, of course, I had been naked in front of my father and my brothers, and I had even gone swimming naked now and then, but still I was so conventional, so tied to the right way of doing things, that the line about not having brought our trunks came out of me without thinking. But I stripped. We left our clothes on the bank and walked out on the wobbly flat rocks to the deep part of the stream, Karl first, then Jim, then me, and jumped in and splashed around for twenty minutes or so, and then when we came out we were wet, naturally, so we sat down on the bank to dry in the sun since we didn't have any towels. That part of it was new to me, just sitting around naked with naked people in the open, the water not hiding our bodies. And we looked at each other. Karl, a year older than Jim or me, had begun to develop already, his b.a.l.l.s were bigger, he had a dark patch of hair down there-I had a little hair, too, but because I was blond, it didn't show-and he was proud of what he had, he lay belly up showing it off. I saw him looking at me, too, and I wondered what he was thinking. Criticizing my c.o.c.k, maybe, because it was too small, it was a little boy's c.o.c.k and his was a man's? But it was good to be in the sun, anyway, the heat on my skin, drying me, tanning me around the middle where I was fishbelly white. And then suddenly Jim gave a sort of shriek and clapped his knees together with his hands over his groin, and I looked around and there was Sissy Madden, who I suppose must have been sixteen or seventeen years old. She was out giving her horse some exercise. The sight of her is printed on my mind: a plump teenage girl with long red hair, big freckles, tight brown shorts, a white polo shirt out of which her fat b.r.e.a.s.t.s were practically exploding, and she sat atop her swaybacked roan mare looking down at the three of us and laughing. We scrambled to our feet, Karl, me, Jim, one, two, three, and we started to run like wild men, zigzag, every which way, desperately trying to get someplace where Sissy Madden couldn't see our nakedness. I remember the urgency of it, the necessity of escaping that girl's gaze. There weren't any good places to hide, though. The only trees were behind us, down by the deep part of the creek where we had been swimming, but Sissy was there. Ahead lay only low shrubbery and tall gra.s.s, not tall enough. We couldn't think straight. I ran one, two hundred yards, getting my feet all cut up, running as hard as I could, my little c.o.c.k flapping against my body-I hadn't ever run naked before, and I was discovering the inconveniences of it-and finally I just threw myself face down in the gra.s.s, huddling into myself, hiding like an ostrich. The shame was that intense. I must have stayed crouched there for fifteen minutes, and finally I heard voices and realized Karl and Jim were looking for me. Cautiously I stood up. They had their clothes on and Sissy was nowhere in sight. I had to walk all the way back to the creek naked for my clothes-it seemed I was walking miles, and I even felt ashamed being with them, the two of them with clothes and me stripped bare-and I turned my back on them to get dressed. Four days later at the movie house I saw Sissy Madden standing in the lobby talking to Joe Falkner, and she grinned at me and winked and I wanted to crawl into the guts of the earth. Sissy Madden saw my thing, I told myself, and those five words must have gone through my head a million times during the movie, so that I couldn't pay attention to the story.

But the shame I felt when I was eleven, that embarra.s.sment over my half-formed manhood, soon disappeared. I filled out, I developed physically, I grew tall, and there was no reason after that for me to feel ashamed of my body. And so I remember a lot of swimming expeditions, and I never once came out with that line about bringing bathing suits. Sometimes there even were girls with us, a bunch of us skinny-dipping, four girls and five fellows, maybe, politely getting out of our clothes behind different trees, girls here, guys there, but then everybody running down to the creek together in one mad rush, c.o.c.ks and t.i.ts bouncing and jiggling. And in the water you could see everything pretty well, when they jumped around. And afterward sometimes we coupled off, when we got to be thirteen, fourteen years old, for our first fumbling experiments in s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g. I recall never quite getting over my amazement that the bodies of the girls looked the way they did, so blank at the crotch, so empty there. And their hips wider than ours, and their b.u.t.tocks bigger and softer, like round pink cushions. All the skinny-dipping I did in my middle teens made me look back on that time with Karl and Jim and Sissy Madden and laugh at my own stupid shyness. Especially the time once when Billie Madden came swimming with us; she was our age, but she looked just like her older sister, and somehow, standing there naked at the edge of the creek next to Billie, looking at the freckles running down into the valley between her fat b.r.e.a.s.t.s and the deep dimples puckering her big behind, I felt as if all the shame of that time with Sissy had now been canceled out, that the fact of Billie's nakedness evened the score between me and the Madden girls, that none of it mattered any longer in any important way.

Thinking of these things as I plucked weeds in the fraters' chili patch, my bare a.s.s warmed by the climbing sun, I was aware also of other things floating in the deep places of my memory, old events, dark and unpleasant and half-forgotten, that I had no wish to remember. A whole curdled ma.s.s of memories. Myself naked on other days, with other people. Boyhood games, some of them not so innocent. Unwanted images came roaring like a spring flood out of my past. I stood still, swept by waves of fear. Muscle tensing against muscle, body gleaming with sweat. And something shameful happened to me. I felt a familiar throbbing down below, felt it starting to stiffen and rise, and I looked, and yes, yes, there it was, coming up hard. I could have died. I wanted to fling myself face down to the ground. It was like that time after Sissy Madden had seen us swimming, when I had had to walk naked back to the creek when Karl and Jim already had their clothes on, and I had experienced a real sense of what it is to be naked and ashamed among those who are clothed. Again, now: Ned and Eli and Timothy and the fraters all had their shorts on, and I was bare, and I hadn't cared a d.a.m.n about it, until suddenly this had started to happen and now I felt as exposed as though I was on network television. They would all be staring at me, seeing me aroused, wondering what had turned me on, what nasty thoughts had pa.s.sed through my mind.

Where could I hide? How could I cover myself? Were any of them watching me?

Actually no one seemed to be. Eli and the fraters were far up the row. Timothy, ambling lazily along, was almost out of sight behind me. The only one close to me was Ned, perhaps fifteen feet to my rear. Standing as I was with my back to him, my shame was screened. Already I could feel myself beginning to sag; in another moment I'd be back to normal and I could saunter down the row to the tree where my shorts were hanging. Yes. It was down, now. All clear. I turned.

Ned gave a guilty start, practically jumped as my eyes met his. His face went crimson. He looked away. And I understood. I didn't need to inspect the front of his shorts for bulges to know what was going on in his head. For fifteen or twenty minutes now he'd been treating himself to a little fantasy trip, studying my body, contemplating my b.u.t.tocks, s.n.a.t.c.hing little glimpses of other goodies now and then. Dreaming his tricksy h.o.m.o dreams about me. Well, there's nothing surprising in that. Ned is a f.a.g. Ned has always wanted me, even if he's never dared to make a pa.s.s. And I was on display right in front of him, all of me, a temptation, a provocation. Still, I was taken aback by that look of desire, so obvious on his face, so raw; that shook me. To be wanted like that by another man. To be the object of his yearnings. And he seemed so stunned and abashed as I walked past him to get my shorts. As if he'd been caught off guard, with his real intentions showing. And what, pray tell, what sort of intentions had I been showing? My intentions had been sticking out six inches in front of me. We're into something very deep here, deep and nasty and complicated. It frightens me. Were Ned's gay vibes getting into my head by some sort of telepathy and stirring old shames? It's strange, isn't it, that I would get hard just then. Christ. I thought I understood myself. But I keep finding out that I don't know a d.a.m.ned thing for certain. Not even who I am. What kind of person I want to be. An existential dilemma, right, Eli, right, right? To choose one's own destiny. We express our ident.i.ties through our s.e.xual selves, is that right? I don't think so. I don't want to think so. And yet I'm not sure. The sun was hot on my back. I was so stiff down there for a couple of minutes that it hurt. And Ned breathing hard behind me. And the past churning in me. Where's Sissy Madden now? Where's Jim? And Karl? Where's Oliver? Where's Oliver? Oh, Christ, I think Oliver's a very very sick boy.

31. Eli.

The meditation, I'm convinced, is the core of the process. Being able to turn inward. You absolutely have to do that if you hope to accomplish anything here. The rest-the gymnastics, the diet, the baths, the field-labor-all that is just a series of techniques for achieving self-discipline, for lifting the balky ego toward the degree of control on which real longevity depends. Of course, if you want to live a long time it helps to get plenty of exercise, keep your body in trim, avoid unhealthy foods, etc., etc. But I think it's a mistake to place much emphasis on those aspects of the Brotherhood's routine. Hygiene and gymnastics may be useful in extending the average life-span to eighty or eighty-five, but something more transcendental is required if you want to live to eight hundred or eight hundred and fifty. (Or eighty-five hundred? Eighty-five thousand?) Complete control of bodily function is needed. And meditation's the key.

At this stage they're stressing the development of inner awareness. We're supposed to stare at the setting sun, say, and convey its heat and power to different parts of our bodies-the heart, first, then the t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, the lungs, the spleen, and so forth. I maintain that it isn't the solar radiance they're interested in-that part is just metaphor, just symbol-but rather the idea of putting us in contact with heart, t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, lungs, spleen, etc., so that in case of problems in those organs we can go to them with our minds and fix whatever has to be fixed. This whole business of skulls, around which so much of the meditation revolves: more metaphor, which I'm sure is intended solely to give us a convenient focus of attention. So that we can pick up off the image of the skull and use it as a springboard for the inward leap. Any other symbol would have worked just as well, probably-a sunflower, a cl.u.s.ter of acorns, a four-leaf clover. Once invested with the proper psychic clout, the mana, anything could serve. The Brotherhood just happened to fasten on the symbology of skulls. Which was quite good enough, really; there's mystery in a skull, there's romance, there's wonder. So we sit and stare at Frater Antony's little jade skull-pendant, and we're told to perform various metaphorical absorptions and engulfments having to do with the relation of death to life, but what they really want us to do is learn how to focus all our mental energy on a single object. Having mastered concentration, we can apply our new skill to the tasks of perpetual self-repair. That's the whole secret. Longevity drugs, health foods, sunshine cults, prayer, and such things are peripheral; meditation is all. It's a kind of yoga, I guess-mind over matter-although, if the Brotherhood is as ancient as Frater Miklos implies, perhaps it's more accurate to say that yoga is an offshoot of the skullhouse.

We have a long way to go. These are still the preliminary stages of the series of training routines that the Brothers term the Trial. What lies ahead, I suspect, is largely psychological or even psychoa.n.a.lytic: a purging of excess baggage from the soul. The ugly business of the Ninth Mystery is part of that. I still don't know whether to interpret that pa.s.sage of the Book of Skulls literally or metaphorically, but in either event I'm sure it deals with the banishing of bad vibes from the Receptacle; we kill one scapegoat, actually or otherwise, and the other scapegoat removes himself, actually or otherwise, and the net effect of this is to leave two fledgling fraters who are without the jangling death-jitters borne by the defective duo. Besides purging the group as a whole, we must purge our individual inner selves. Last night after dinner Frater Javier visited me in my room, and I a.s.sume visited each of the others; he told me that I must prepare myself for the confessional rites. I was asked to review my entire life, giving special attention to episodes of guilt and shame, and to be ready to discuss those episodes in depth when asked to do so. I suppose some kind of primordial encounter group will be organized shortly, with Frater Javier in charge. A formidable man, that one. Gray eyes, thin lips, chiseled face. As accessible as a slab of granite. When he moves through the halls I imagine that I hear an accompaniment of dark groaning music. Enter the Grand Inquisitor! Yes. Frater Javier: the Grand Inquisitor. Night and chill; fog and pain. When begins the Inquisition? What shall I say? Which of my guilts shall I place on the altar, which of my shames?

I gather that the purpose of this unburdening will be to simplify our souls through a yielding up of-what term shall I use?-neuroses, sins, mental blocks, hangups, engrams, deposits of bad karma? We must pare ourselves down, pare ourselves down. Bone and flesh, these we retain, but the spirit must be whittled. We must strive toward a kind of quietism, in which there are no conflicts, in which there is no stress. Avoid everything that goes against the grain, and, if necessary, redirect the grain. Effortless action, that's the key. No energy rip-offs allowed; struggles shorten lives. Well, we'll see. I'm carrying plenty of inner dross, and so are we all. A psychic enema might not be such a bad thing.

What shall I tell you, Frater Javier?

32. Ned.

Review your life, declares the mysterious and vaguely reptilian Frater Javier, entering my monastic cell unannounced, bringing with him the faint hissing rustle of scales against stone. Review your life, rehea.r.s.e the sins of your past, make yourself ready for confession. Right on, cries Ned the depraved choirboy! Right on, Frater Javier, chortles the fallen Papist! This is up his well-greased alley. The ritual of the confessional is certainly something he comprehends: it is encoded in his very genes, it is imprinted in his bones and b.a.l.l.s, it is utterly natural to him. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Whereas those other three are strangers to the closet of truth, the uptight Israelite and the two Protestant bullocks. Oh, oh, I suppose the Episcopalians have the custom of the confessional too, crypto-Romans that they are, but they always tell lies to their priests. I have that on the authority of my mother, who feels that the flesh of Anglicans isn't fit to feed to pigs. But mother, I say, pigs don't eat meat. If they did, she says, they wouldn't touch the tripes of an Anglican! They break every commandment and lie to their priests, she says, and crosses herself, four vigorous thumps, om mani padme hum!

Ned is obedient. Ned is a good little fairy. Frater Javier gives him The Word, and Ned instantly commences reviewing his misspent past, so that he can gush it all forth at the appropriate occasion. What have been my sins? Where have I transgressed? Tell me, Neddy-boy, have you had any other G.o.ds before Him? No, sir, in truth I can't say that I have. Have you made unto yourself any graven images? Well, I've doodled a bit, I admit, but we don't apply that commandment so rigorously, do we, sir? We're not b.l.o.o.d.y Moslems, eh, sir? Thank you, sir. Next: have you taken the name of the Lord in vain? G.o.d help me, Father, would I do a thing like that? Very well, Ned, and have you remembered the Sabbath Day and kept it holy? Abashed, the honest boy replies that he has occasionally been guilty of dishonoring the Sabbath. Occasionally? s.h.i.t, he's polluted more Sundays than a Turk! A venial sin, though, a venial sin. Ego absolvo te, my child. And have you honored thy father and thy mother? I have indeed, sir, honored them in my way. Hast thou killed? I have not killed. Hast thou committed adultery? To the best of my knowledge, Father, I have not. Hast thou stolen? I have not stolen, at least, nothing important, sir. Nor have I borne false witness against my neighbor. And hast thou coveted thy neighbor's house, or thy neighbor's wife, or thy neighbor's manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his a.s.s, or anything that is thy neighbor's? Well, sir, there's that part about my neighbor's a.s.s; I admit I'm on shaky grounds there, but otherwise-but otherwise-I do my best, sir, considering that I came into this world tainted, considering the odds against us all from the start, bearing in mind that in Adam's fall we sinned all, nevertheless I regard myself as relatively pure and good. Not perfect, of course. Tut, my child, what would you confess? Well, Father-confiteor, confiteor, the fist striking the boy's chest with admirable zeal, thump, thump, thump, thump, Om! Mani! Padme! Hum!-my fault, my most grievous fault-well, I did go one Sunday after ma.s.s with Sandy Dolan to spy on his sister changing her clothes, and I saw her bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s, Father, they were small and round with little pink tips, and at the base of her belly, Father, she had this hairy black mound, something I had never seen before, and then she turned her back to the window and I saw her a.s.s, Father, the two most beautiful sweet plump white cheeks that I had ever seen, with these lovely deep dimples just at the top of them, and down the center this delicious shadowy cleft that-what's that, Father? I can go on to something else? All right, then, I confess that I did lead Sandy astray in other ways, that I engaged in sins of the body with him, sins against G.o.d and Nature, that when we were eleven years old and spending the night together in the same bed, his mother being occupied in childbirth and there being no one at his house to look after him, I did fetch from under my bed a bottle of Vaseline and did scoop from it a good-sized glob and wantonly apply it to his s.e.xual organ, telling him not to be afraid, that G.o.d wasn't able to see us here in the dark with the covers over us, and then I-and then he-and then we-and then we- And so, at Frater Javier's behest, I plumbed my degenerate past and dredged up much mucky detritus, the better to shine at the sessions of confessions that I a.s.sumed would be commencing. But the fraters are less linear-minded than that. A variation in our daily routine was about to be introduced, yes, but it involved neither Frater Javier nor any confessional aspects. That must lie still further in the future. The new rite is a s.e.xual one, Buddha save me, a heteros.e.xual one. These fraters, I now realize, are Chinamen of some sort beneath their deceptive Caucasian skins, for they are instructing us now in nothing less than the tao of s.e.x.

They don't call it that. They don't speak of yin and yang, either. But I know my Oriental erotica, and I know the ancient spiritual significances of these s.e.xual exercises, which are close kin to the various gymnastic and contemplatory exercises we've been practicing. Control, control, control over every bodily function, that's the aim here.

The dark-haired women in short white robes who we've been seeing flitting about the skullhouse are, in fact, priestesses of s.e.x, holy c.u.n.ts, who serve the needs of the fraters and who, by playing the part of receptacles for the Receptacle, now indoctrinate us into the sacred v.a.g.i.n.al mysteries. What used to be the rest period after afternoon ch.o.r.es has now become the hour of transcendental copulation. We were given no warning. The day it began, I had come back from the fields and had had my bath and was sprawled out on my cot when in the usual no-knock manner of this place my door opened and Frater Leon, the physician-frater, entered my room, followed by three of the girls in white. I was naked, but I figured it was no obligation of mine to conceal my vital organs from those who barged in on them, and quickly I was made to realize that there was no point whatever in covering myself.

The women arranged themselves against one of the walls. This was the first time I had ever had a chance to look closely at them. They could have been sisters: all of them short, slender, nicely stacked, with swarthy skins, prominent noses, large liquid dark eyes, full lips. In a way they reminded me of the girls in Minoan murals, although they might also have been American Indians; in any case they were definitely exotic. Midnight hair, heavy b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Anywhere between twenty and forty years in age. They stood like statues. Frater Leon delivered a brief oration. It is essential, he said, for candidates to learn the arts of mastering the s.e.xual pa.s.sions. To expend the seminal fluid is to die a little. Right on, Frater Leon! Old Elizabethan idiom: to come = to die. We must not, he continued, repress the s.e.xual impulse, but rather we must dominate it and turn it to our service. Hence intercourse is praiseworthy but e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n is to be deplored. I recalled having encountered all this stuff before, and eventually I remembered where: it's pure Taoism, is what. Union of yin and yang, c.u.n.t and c.o.c.k, is harmonious and necessary to the welfare of the universe, but expenditure of ching, s.e.m.e.n, is self-destructive. One must strive to conserve the ching, to increase one's supply of it, and so forth. Funny, Frater Leon, you don't look Chinese! Who, I wonder, is stealing theories from whom? Or did the Taoists and the Brotherhood hit independently on the same principles?

Frater Leon finished his little prologue and said something to the girls in a language I didn't understand. (I checked with Eli afterward, but he couldn't identify it either. Aztec or Mayan, he supposed.) Instantly off came the short white robes, and three mother-naked mounds of yin stood there at my service. Sniveling f.a.ggot that I am, I was still capable of p.r.o.nouncing esthetic judgment: they were impressive girls. Heavy b.r.e.a.s.t.s with no more than a moderate amount of sag, flat bellies, firm rumps, outstanding thighs. No scars of appendectomy, no traces of pregnancy. Frater Leon barked a quick unintelligible command and the priestess closest to the door promptly stretched out on the cold stone floor, knees flexed and slightly parted. Turning now to me, Frater Leon allowed himself a slight smile and gestured with the tips of the fingers of one hand. Go to it, lad, he seemed to be saying. Angelic Ned was nonplussed. He gaped and clutched for words. Here, now is that it? You don't understand, Frater Leon, the bitter truth is that I am what they call an urning, a fairy, a f.a.g, an invert, a deviate, a pansy, a queer; I am not particularly attracted by c.u.n.t; my addiction, I must reveal, is to b.u.g.g.e.ry. But I said none of this, and Frater Leon beckoned again, less amiably. What the devil, the truth is that I have always been bis.e.xual with gay leanings, and on occasion I have been willing to fill the clerically approved vacancy. Since life everlasting appears to depend on it, I will undergo the ordeal. And I advanced toward the parted thighs. With fraudulent hetero c.o.c.kiness I sank my sword into the waiting wench. What now? Conserve your ching, I told myself, conserve your ching. I moved in slow stately thrusts while Frater Leon coached me from the sidelines, advising me that the rhythms of the universe demanded that I bring my partner to o.r.g.a.s.m although I myself should endeavor not to get there. Very well. Admiring my own performance every inch of the way, I induced the proper spasms and grunts in my spiritual concubine, myself remaining aloof, apart, wholly divorced from the adventures of my tool. When the divine moment was over, my satisfied partner evicted me with a deft and expert flip of her pelvis, and I discovered that priestess number two was settling to the floor, a.s.suming the receiving position. Very well, the master stud will oblige. In. Out. In. Out. Gasp. Grunt. Moan. With a surgeon's precision I coolly st.i.tched her off to ecstasy, Frater Leon providing an approving commentary from a point above my left shoulder. Again the pelvic flip, again the change of partners; one more dark yawning yoni awaited my glistening rigid rod. G.o.d help me. I was beginning to feel like a rabbi whose doctor has told him that he'll drop dead unless he eats a pound of pork a day. But old devil-may-care Ned slammed home the bolt. This time, said Frater Leon, I could allow myself the self-indulgence of coming. By now I was very much pushed to my limits anyway, and it was with some relief that I relaxed my iron self-control.

And so our Trial moves into a new and raunchier phase. The priestesses call upon us every afternoon. I suppose for studs like Timothy and Oliver this is an unexpected bonus, an unalloyed delight, though perhaps not; what's being offered here is nothing so simple as the kind of good, hearty f.u.c.king they enjoy, but rather an arduous, highly demanding exercise in extreme self-control, which to them may seem to drain all the joy out of the act. That's their problem. Mine is different. Poor old Ned, he's had more hetero s.e.x this week than in the previous five years. Give him credit, though: he's doing all that they ask of him and nary a complaint. But it's a struggle. Mother of G.o.d, never in my b.u.mmest trips did I imagine that the road to immortality would take me through so many heaving female bellies!

33. Eli.

Last night in the dark small hours the thought came to me for the first time that I should offer myself to fulfill the suicide requirement of the Ninth Mystery. A quick moment of evanescent despair, here and gone, but worth examination in bright light. Obviously it's the s.e.xual thing that's preying on me. My total failure to make a start at mastering the techniques. Fiasco after fiasco; how can I hold myself back? They give me beautiful women, they tell me to plough two or three in a row-oh, schmendrick, schmendrick, schmendrick! It's the Margo scene all over again. I get inflamed, I get carried away-the opposite of the proper Skullish att.i.tude. I haven't once succeeded in restraining myself long enough to handle all three. I don't think it's humanly possible, at least for me. But of course the kind of longevity we're talking about here isn't humanly possible either. It's necessary to transcend the merely human, to become literally inhuman, nonhuman, if one would defeat death. But if I can't even govern the treacherous twitches of my c.o.c.k, how can I hope to monitor my metabolism, reverse organic decay through mental effort, acquire the sort of cellular-level body control these fraters must have? I can't. I see failure looming. Frater Leon and Frater Bernard have said they'll give me special training, they'll show me some useful techniques for s.e.xual de-escalation, but I don't have much confidence in that. The problem is rooted too deeply in my essential Eli-ness, and it's too late to alter that; I am what I am. I mount these wenches, these silent supple Aztec priestesses, and though my mind is full of instructions about withholding my seed, my body goes at full gallop, running away, and I explode with pa.s.sion, and pa.s.sion is precisely what must be conquered if one is to survive the Trial. By failing this test, I fail everything; I fall by the wayside, immortality lost; let me therefore destroy my unworthy self now, since someone must, and thus I will open the path for the others. So I thought last night in the dark small hours, at any rate. Thinking, also, that Timothy is another who must certainly fail, for he is unable or unwilling to achieve the necessary innerness; he is the prisoner of his scorns, so contemptuous of the Brotherhood and its rites that he can barely contain his impatience. Thus he can never attain even the basic disciplines. We meditate; he merely watches. There is a real danger that he will simply walk out, in the next few days, which would, of course, wreck everything by unbalancing the Receptacle. I therefore privately nominate Timothy to fulfill the other part of the Ninth Mystery; he can't possibly win what the Brotherhood offers, so therefore let him lose, let him be slain for the others' sake. Last night, lying dismally awake, I thought I would bring matters immediately to their desired climax: steal a knife from the kitchen, nail Timothy as he sleeps, then skewer myself. The Ninth Mystery thereby would be obeyed, and Ned and Oliver would have their pa.s.sports to eternity. I actually sat up. But at the critical moment I paused to ask myself whether this was the right time for what I planned to do. Perhaps there is an appointed place in the unfolding ritual for the Ninth Mystery, at some later stage in the process. Perhaps I would be spoiling things by doing it now, arbitrarily, without a signal from the fraters. If a premature sacrifice would be worthless, I had better not act. So I remained in bed, and the impulse fled. This morning, though I'm still depressed, I find I have no wish at all to take my own life. I have grave misgivings about myself, I'm deeply dismayed by my a.s.sorted glaring inadequacies, yes, but all the same I want to live as long as possible. The prospects for attaining the longevity of the fraters suddenly seem quite bleak, though. I don't think any of us is going to make it. I think this Receptacle is falling to pieces.

34. Oliver.

At lunchtime, as we were coming from our session with Frater Miklos, Frater Javier intercepted us in the hall. "Please meet with me after lunch in the Room of Three Masks," he said, and went solemnly on about his business. There's something repellent about that man, something chilly; he's the only frater I prefer to avoid. Those zombie eyes, that zombie voice. Anyway, I a.s.sumed that the time had arrived for beginning the confession therapy that Frater Javier had told us about the week before. I was right, although the format wasn't what I'd been expecting. I antic.i.p.ated something like an encounter group: Ned, Eli, Timothy, and me and maybe two or three fraters sitting around a circle, and each candidate in turn rising and baring his soul to the entire gathering, after which we'd comment on what we had heard, try to interpret it in terms of our own life experience, and so on. Not so. Frater Javier told us that we were to be each other's confessors, in a series of private one-to-one confrontations.

"This week past," he said, "you have been examining your lives, reviewing your darkest secrets. Each of you holds locked in his soul at least one episode that he is certain he could never admit to another person. It is on that one crucial episode, and no other, that our work must focus."

What he was asking of us was to identify and isolate the ugliest, most shameful incident of our lives-and then to reveal it, in order to purge ourselves of that kind of bad-vibes baggage. He put his pendant on the floor and spun it to determine who would confess to whom. Timothy to me; me to Eli; Eli to Ned; Ned to Timothy. But the daisy chain was complete among the four of us, with no outsiders included. It wasn't Frater Javier's intention to turn our innermost horrors into common property. We were not supposed to tell him or anyone else about the things that we would learn from one another in these confessional sessions. Each member of the Receptacle was going to become the custodian of somebody else's secret, but what we confessed, said Frater Javier, was to go no further than one's own confessor. The purge was what counted, the unburdening, rather than the information revealed.

So that we wouldn't contaminate the pure atmosphere of the skullhouse by liberating too much negative emotion all at once, Frater Javier decreed that there would be only one confession per day. Again the spinning pendant decided the order of things. Tonight, just before bedtime, Ned would go to Timothy. Tomorrow Timothy would come to me; the day after that I would pay a call on Eli; and on the fourth day Eli would close the circuit by confessing to Ned.

That gave me almost two and a half days to decide what story I was going to tell Eli. Oh, of course I knew which one I ought to tell. That was obvious. But I threw up two or three feeble subst.i.tutes, screens for the real story, flimsy pretexts for hiding the one necessary choice. As fast as the possibilities arose, I shot them down. There was only one option open to me, only one true focus of shame and guilt. I didn't know how I was going to be able to face up to the pain of telling it, but that was what I had to tell, and I hoped that maybe in the moment of telling it the pain would go away, though I doubted that very much. I'll worry about that part of it, I told myself, when the time comes. And then I proceeded to banish the problem of the confession entirely from my mind. I suppose that's an example of repression. By evening I had managed to forget about Frater Javier's project altogether. But I woke, sweating, in the middle of the night, imagining that I had admitted everything to Eli.

35. Timothy.

Ned came prancing in, winking, smirking. He always puts on an exaggerated swish routine when he's really clutched about something. "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned," he said in a singsong tone. Doing a little soft-shoe number. Twitching. Grinning. Rolling his eyes. He was turned on, and, I realized, what was turning him on was this business of confessing. After all this time the old Jesuit was coming to life in him. He wanted to spill his beans, and I would be the target of the spill. Suddenly the thought of having to sit here listening to some slippery pansy story of his made me feel sick. Why the h.e.l.l should I have to accept his sweaty confidences? Who was I to hear Ned's confessions, anyway? I said, "Are you really going to tell me the big secret of your life?"

He looked surprised. "Of course I am."

"Do you have to?"

"Do I have to? Timothy, it's expected of us. And anyhow I want to." Yes, he certainly did want to. He was trembling, tingling, all flushed and charged up. "What's the matter with you, Timothy, don't you have any interest in my private life?"

"No."

"Tsk. Let nothing human be alien to you."

"I don't want it. I don't need it."

"Too bad, man. Because I have to tell it. Frater Javier says that unloading my guilts is necessary to the prolongation of my earthly stay, and so I'm going to ventilate, man. I'm going to ventilate."

"If you have to," I said, resigning myself.

"Make yourself comfortable, Timothy. Open wide the ears. You cannot choose but hear."

And hear I did. Ned's an exhibitionist at heart, like a lot of his kind. He wants to wallow in self-denunciation, in self-revelation. He told his story very professionally, sketching in the details like the short-story writer he claimed to be, underlining this, shading that. What he told me was about what I expected from him, something grimy, a f.a.g fantasia. "This happened," he said, "before you ever met me, in the spring of our freshman year, when I was not quite eighteen. I had an apartment off campus, sharing it with two other men." Naturally, they were both queers. It was actually their apartment; Ned had moved in with them after midterm intersession. They were eight or ten years older than Ned, and they'd been living together a long time in a sort of gay equivalent of marriage. One of them was gruff and masculine and dominant, an a.s.sistant professor of French literature who was also a rugged athlete-his hobby was mountain climbing-and the other was more of a stereotyped fairy, delicate and ethereal, almost feminine, a wispy, retiring poet who stayed at home most of the time, took care of the housework, watered the potted plants, and I suppose did knitting and crocheting too.

Anyway there were these two gay lads happily keeping house, and they met Ned in some pansy bar and found that he didn't like the place where he was living, so they invited him to move in with them. The arrangement was supposed to be strictly a matter of accommodation; Ned would have his own room, he'd pay rent and a share of the grocery bill, and there wasn't to be any s.e.xual involvement with either of the other two, who had quite a strong fidelity thing going. For a month or two the arrangement worked out. But fidelity among f.a.gs isn't any stronger, I guess, than it is among straights, and the presence of Ned in the household became a disturbing factor, the way the presence of a nicely stacked eighteen-year-old chick would disturb an ordinary marriage. "Consciously or otherwise," Ned said, "I fostered temptation. I walked around naked in the apartment, I flirted with them, I did a lot of casual fondling." Tensions rose, and the inevitable inevitably happened. One day the lovers quarreled about something-possibly about Ned, he wasn't sure-and the masculine one went storming out. The feminine one, all aflutter, came to Ned for consolation. He consoled "her" by taking "her" to bed. They both felt guilty afterward, but that didn't stop them from doing it again a few days later, and then from making a regular affair of it, Ned and this poet, whose name was Julian. Meanwhile the other one, Oliver-isn't that interesting, another Oliver?-who was apparently unaware of what was going on between Ned and Julian, started making pa.s.ses at Ned and soon they were bedding down, too. So for a couple of weeks Ned carried on simultaneous independent affairs with both of them. "It was fun," he said, "in a nervous-making way-all the clandestine appointments, all the little lies, the fears of having the other one walk in on us." Trouble was bound to come. Both of the older queers fell in love with Ned. Each one decided that he wanted to break up with his original partner and live just with Ned. Tug of war. Ned got propositions from both sides. "I just didn't know how to handle the situation," Ned said. "By this time Oliver knew I was up to something with Julian, and Julian knew I was up to something with Oliver, but no one had made any open charges yet. If it came down to a choice between them, I inclined slightly toward Julian, but I didn't intend to be the one who made any of the critical decisions."

The image of himself that Ned was painting for me was that of a naive, innocent kid, caught up in a triangle not of his own making. Helpless, inexperienced, buffeted by the stormy pa.s.sions of Oliver and Julian, etc., etc. But under the surface something else was coming through, conveyed to me not in words but in smirks, campy flicks of the eyebrows, and other nonverbal forms of commentary on the story. At any given time Ned functions on at least six levels, and whenever he starts telling you about how naive and innocent he is, you know he's putting you on. The under-the-surface story that I picked up showed me a sinister, scheming Ned, manipulating those two hapless f.a.gs for his own amus.e.m.e.nt-coming between them, tempting and seducing each in turn, forcing them toward a rivalry for his affections.

"The climax came one weekend in May," he said, "when Oliver invited me to go with him on a mountain climbing expedition in New Hampshire-leaving Julian behind. Oliver explained that there was much we needed to discuss, and the clear pure air of a mountaintop was the best place to discuss it." Ned agreed to go, which sent Julian into hysterics. "If you go," Julian sobbed, "I'll kill myself." Ned was turned off by that sort of emotional blackmail, and he simply told Julian to cool it-it was just for the weekend, it didn't matter all that much, he'd be back Sunday night. Julian continued to carry on, with much talk of suicide. Paying no attention, Ned and Oliver packed for the camping trip. "You'll never see me alive again," Julian shrieked. Ned, telling this to me, did a fine contemptuous imitation of Julian's panicky screeching. "I was afraid that Julian might be serious," he said. "On the other hand, I knew it was a mistake to play up to that kind of tantrum. And also-secretly, deep down-I was flattered by the thought that I was important enough for anybody to consider committing suicide over." Oliver told him not to worry about Julian-"She's just being melodramatic," he said-and that Friday they went off to New Hampshire.

By late Sat.u.r.day afternoon they were four thousand feet up the side of some big mountain. Oliver chose this moment to make his pitch. Come live with me and be my love, he said, and we will all the pleasures prove. The time of dillydallying was over; he wanted an immediate and final decision. Choose between Julian and me, he told Ned, and choose fast. "I had decided by this time that I didn't really care much for Oliver, who tended to be bl.u.s.tery and bullying a lot of the time, coming on as a sort of f.a.g Hemingway," Ned said. "And though I found Julian attractive, I also thought that 'she' was much too dependent and weak, a clinging vine. Besides, no matter which one of them I picked, I was certain to get all sorts of static from the other-flamboyant scenes, threats, fistfights, whatnot." So, Ned went on, he declared politely that he didn't want to be the cause of the breakup of Oliver and Julian, whose thing he respected in the utmost, and that rather than make any such impossible choice he'd simply move out of their apartment. Oliver then began to accuse Ned of preferring Julian, of conspiring secretly with Julian to oust him. The discussion got loud and irrational, with all sorts of shouted recriminations and denials, and finally Oliver said, "There's no way I can go on living without you, Ned. Promise you'll take me over Julian, promise me right now, or I'm going to jump."

As he came to this part of his story, Ned's eyes took on a freaky glow, a devilish kind of gleam. He was thoroughly enjoying himself. Spellbound by his own eloquence. In a way, so was I. He said, "I was tired of being whipsawed by these suicide threats. It was a drag, having every move dictated by somebody's insistence that he'd kill himself if I didn't cooperate. 'Oh, s.h.i.t,' I said to Oliver, 'are you going to pull that number too? Well, f.u.c.k you. Go ahead and jump, then. I don't give a d.a.m.n what you do.' I a.s.sumed Oliver was bluffing, the way people usually are when they say things like that. Oliver wasn't bluffing. He didn't answer me, he didn't even stop to think, he just stepped off the ledge. I saw him hanging in midair for what seemed like ten seconds, looking at me, his face very calm, peaceful. Then he fell two thousand feet, hit an outcropping, bounced like a dropped doll, and fell the rest of the way to the ground. It had all happened so quickly that I couldn't begin to comprehend it-the threat, my peevish, snappy response, the jump-one two three. Then it started to sink in. I began to shiver all over. I was screaming like a madman." For a few minutes, Ned said, he seriously considered jumping also. Then he got himself together some and headed down the mountain path, having a rough time of the descent without Oliver to help him. It took him hours to get down, and by the time he reached ground night had fallen. He had no idea where Oliver's body was, and there were no state troopers around or telephones or anything, so he hiked a mile and a half out to the main highway and started hitching his way back to school. (Because he didn't know how to drive then, he had to leave Oliver's car parked at the foot of the mountain.) "I was in a state of total panic all the way back," he said. "The people who gave me rides thought I was sick, and one of them wanted to take me to a hospital. The only thing running through my mind was a feeling of guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt for having killed Oliver. I felt as responsible for his death as if I had pushed him." As before, Ned's words told me one thing and his expressions were telling me another. "Guilt," he said out loud, and telepathically I was picking up satisfaction. "Responsible for Oliver's death," he said, and underneath he was saying, thrilled that someone would kill himself for love of me. "Panic," he said, and silently he was boasting, delighted at my success in manipulating people. He went on, "I tried to persuade myself that it hadn't been my fault, that there wasn't any reason to have thought Oliver was speaking seriously. But that didn't work. Oliver was gay, and gay people are by definition unstable, right? Right. And if Oliver said he'd jump, I shouldn't have virtually dared him to do it, because that was all he needed to make him go over the edge." On the verbal level Ned was saying, "I was innocent and foolish," and below that I received: I was a murderous b.i.t.c.h. He said, "And then I wondered what I was going to tell Julian. Here I had come into their household, I had flirted with them until I had what I wanted, I got between them, and now I had in effect caused Oliver's death. And here was Julian left all alone, and what was I supposed to do? Offer myself as Oliver's subst.i.tute? Take care of poor Julian forever? Oh, it was a mess, a fearful mess. I got back to the apartment about four in the morning and my hand was shaking so much I could hardly get my key in the lock. I had rehea.r.s.ed about eight different speeches to deliver to Julian, all kinds of explanations, self-justifications. But as it turned out I didn't need any of them."

"Julian had run away with the janitor," I suggested.

"Julian had cut his wrists right after we left on Friday," Ned said. "I found him in the bathtub. He'd been dead at least half a day. You see, Timothy, I killed them both? Do you see? They loved me and I destroyed them. And I've carried the guilt with me ever since."

"You feel guilty for not having taken them seriously enough when they threatened to commit suicide?"

"I feel guilty for getting such a charge out of it when they did," he said.

36. Oliver.

Timothy showed up as I was getting ready to go to sleep. He came slouching in, looking surly and sullen, and for an instant I didn't understand why he was there. "Okay," he said, flopping down against the wall. "Let's get it over with fast, huh?"

"You look angry."

"I am. I'm angry about this whole f.u.c.king pile of c.r.a.p I've been forced to wallow in."

"Don't take it out on me," I said.

"Am I?"

"That's not exactly a friendly expression on your face."

"I don't exactly feel friendly, Oliver. I feel like getting the h.e.l.l out of this place right after breakfast. How long have we been here, anyway? Two weeks, three weeks? Too f.u.c.king long, however long it is. Too f.u.c.king long."

"You knew it was going to take time when you agreed to go into it," I said. "There was no way that the Trial could have been a quickie deal, four days, in, out. If you pull out of it now you spoil it for the rest of us. And don't forget that we swore-"

"We swore, we swore, we swore, we swore! Oh, Christ, Oliver, you're starting to sound just like Eli now! Scolding me. Nagging me. Reminding me that I swore to something. Oh, Jesus, do I hate this whole c.r.a.ppy routine! It's like the three of you are holding me prisoner in a b.o.o.byhatch."