The Book Of Skulls Part 7

"It must have taken me all of five minutes to discover it."

"You knew?"

"It takes one to tell one, haven't you ever heard that line? I saw it in his face the first time I met him. I said, this man is gay whether he knows it or not, he's one of us, it's obvious. The gla.s.sy eyes, the tight jaw, the look of repressed longing, that barely concealed ferocity of a soul that's in pain because it's not allowed to do what it desperately wants to do. Everything about Oliver advertises it-the self-punishing academic load, the way he goes about his athletic commitments, even his compulsive studding. He's a cla.s.sic case of latent h.o.m.os.e.xuality, all right."

"Not latent," Eli said.

"What?"

"He's not just potentially gay. He's had a h.o.m.os.e.xual experience. Only one, true, but it made a profound impression on him, and it's colored all of his att.i.tudes since he was fourteen years old. Why do you think he asked you to room with him? It was to test his self-control-it's been an exercise in stoicism for him, all these years when he hasn't let himself touch you-but you're what he wants, Ned, did you realize that? It's not just latent. It's conscious, it's just below the surface."

I looked strangely at Eli. What he was saying was something I might perhaps turn to my own great advantage; and aside from the hope of personal gain from Eli's revelation, I was fascinated and astonished by it, as one always is by intimate gossip of that sort. But it gave me a queasy feeling. I was reminded of something that had happened during my summer in Southampton, at a drunken, b.i.t.c.hy party where two men who had been living together for about twenty years got into an exceptionally vicious quarrel, and one of them suddenly ripped the terrycloth robe from the other, showing him naked to all of us, revealing a fat jiggling belly and an almost hairless crotch and the undeveloped genitals of a ten-year-old boy, and screaming that this was what he'd had to put up with all those years. That moment of exposure, that catastrophic unmasking, had been a source of delicious c.o.c.ktail-party chatter for weeks afterward, but it left me sickened, because I and everyone else in that room had been made involuntary witness to someone else's private agony, and I knew that what had been stripped bare that day was not merely someone's body. I had not needed to know what I learned then. Now Eli had told me something that might be useful to me in one way but which in another had transformed me without my bidding into an intruder in another man's soul.

I said, "Where'd you find all this out?"

"Oliver told me the other night."

"In his confes-"

"In his confession, yes. It happened back in Kansas. He went hunting in the woods with a friend of his, a kid a year older than he was, and they stopped for a swim, and when they came out of the water the other fellow seduced him, and it turned Oliver on. And he's never forgotten it, the intensity of the situation, the sheer physical delight, although he's taken care never to repeat the experience. So you're absolutely correct when you say that it's possible to explain a lot of Oliver's rigidity, his obsessive character, in terms of his constant efforts to repress his-"

"Eli?"

"Yes, Ned?"

"Eli, these confessions are supposed to be confidential."

He nibbled his lower lip. "I know."

"You're violating Oliver's privacy by telling me all this. Me, of all people."

"I know I am."

"Then why are you doing it?"

"I thought you'd be interested."

"No, Eli, I won't buy that. A man of your moral perception, of your general existential awareness-b.a.l.l.s, man, you don't just have gossip-peddling on your mind. You came in here intending to betray Oliver to me. Why? Are you trying to get something started between Oliver and me?"

"Not really."

"Then why'd you tell me about him?"

"Because I knew it was wrong."

"What kind of half-a.s.sed reason is that?"

He gave me a funny chuckle and an embarra.s.sed grin. "It provides me with something to confess," Eli said. "I regard this breach of confidence as the most odious thing I've ever done. To reveal Oliver's secret to the one person most capable of taking advantage of his vulnerability. Okay, I've done it, and now I formally confess that I've done it. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. The sin has been committed right before your eyes, and give me absolution, will you?" He rattled the words out so fast that for an instant I couldn't follow the Byzantine convolutions of his reasoning. Even after I understood, I wasn't able to believe that he was serious.

Finally I said, "That's a cop-out, Eli!"

"Is it?"

"It's cynical s.h.i.t that wouldn't even be worthy of Timothy. It violates the spirit and maybe the letter of Frater Javier's instructions. Frater Javier didn't intend us to commit sins on the spot and then instantly repent of them. You have to confess something real, something out of your past, something that's been burning your guts for years, something deep and poisonous."

"What if I have nothing of that kind to confess?"

"Nothing, Eli?"

"Nothing."

"You never wished your grandmother would drop dead because she made you put on a clean suit? You never peeked into the girls' shower room? You never pulled the wings off a fly? Can you honestly say you have no buried guilts at all, Eli?"

"None that matter."

"Can you be the judge of that?"

"Who else?" He was fidgeting now. "Look, I would have told you something else if I had anything to tell. But I don't. What's the use of making a big scene out of pulling the wings off flies? I've led a piddling little life full of piddling little sins that I wouldn't dream of boring you with. I didn't see any way I could possibly fulfill Frater Javier's instructions. Then at the last moment I thought of this business of violating Oliver's confidence, which I've now done. I think that's sufficient. If you don't mind I'd like to leave now."

He moved toward the door.

"Wait," I said. "I reject your confession, Eli. You're trying to make me go along with an ad hoc sin, with willed guilt. Nothing doing. I want something real."

"What I told you about Oliver is real."

"You know what I mean."

"I have nothing to give you."

"This isn't for me, Eli. It's for you, your own rite of purification. I've been through it, Oliver has, even Timothy, and here you stand, putting down your own sins, pretending that nothing you've ever done is worth feeling guilty about-" I shrugged. "All right. It's your own immortality you're s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up, not mine. Go on. Go. Go."

He threw me a terrible look, a look of fear and resentment and anguish, and hurried from the room. I realized, after he was gone, that my nerves were stretched taut: my hands were shaking and a muscle in my left thigh was jumping. What had strung me out this way? Eli's cowardly self-concealment or his revelation of Oliver's availability? Both, I decided. Both. But the second more than the first. I wondered what would happen if I went to Oliver now. Staring straight into those icy blue eyes of his. I know the truth about you, I'd say in a calm voice, a quiet voice. I know all about how you were seduced by your pal when you were fourteen. Only don't try to tell me it was a seduction, Ol, because I don't believe in seductions, and I have some knowledge of the subject. Being seduced isn't what brings you out, if you're gay. You come out because you want to, isn't that so? It's in you from the start, it's programmed into your genes, your bones, your b.a.l.l.s, it's just waiting for the right occasion to show itself, and somebody gives you that occasion and that's when you come out. All right, Ol, you got your chance, and you loved it, and then you spent seven years fighting against it, and now you're going to do it with me. Not because my wiles are irresistible. Not because I've stupefied you with drugs or booze. It won't be a seduction. No, you'll do it because you want to, Ol, because you've always wanted to. You haven't had the courage to let yourself do it. Well, I'd tell him, here's your chance. Here I am. And I'd go to him, and I'd touch him, and he'd shake his head and make a rattling, coughing noise deep in his throat, still fighting it, and then something would snap in him, a seven-year tension would break, and he'd stop fighting. He'd surrender, and we'd make it at last. And afterward we'd lie close together in an exhausted sweaty heap, but his fervor would cool as it always does just afterward, and the guilt and shame would rise up in him, and-I could see it so vividly!-he would beat me to death, clubbing me down, smashing me against the stone floor, staining it with my blood. He'd stand above me while I twitched in pain, and he'd howl at me in rage because I had shown him to himself, face to face, and he couldn't bear the knowledge of what he had seen in his own eyes. All right, Ol, if you have to destroy me, then destroy me. That's cool, because I love you, and so whatever you do to me is cool. And it fulfills the Ninth Mystery, doesn't it? I came here to have you and die, and I've had you, and now at the proper mystic moment I'm going to die, and it's cool, beloved Ol, everything's cool. And his tremendous fists crush my bones. And my broken frame twists and writhes. And is finally still. And the ecstatic voice of Frater Antony is heard on high, intoning the text of the Ninth Mystery as an invisible bell tolls, dong, dong, dong, Ned is dead, Ned is dead, Ned is dead.

The fantasy was so intensely real that I began to shiver and quake; I could feel the force of that vision in every molecule of my body. It seemed to me that I had already been to Oliver, had already grappled with him in pa.s.sion, had already perished beneath his flaming wrath. Thus there was no need for me to do these things now. They were over, accomplished, encapsulated in the sealed past. I savored my memories of him. The touch of his smooth skin against me. The granite of his muscles unyielding to my probing fingertips. The taste of him on my lips. The flavor of my own blood, trickling into my mouth as he began to pummel me. The sense of surrendering my body. The ecstasy. The bells. The voice on high. The fraters singing a requiem for me. I lost myself in visionary reverie.

Then I became aware that someone had entered my room. The door, opening, closing. Footsteps. This, too, I accepted as part of the fantasy. Without looking around, I decided that Oliver must have come to me, and in a dreamy acid-high way I became convinced that it was Oliver, it necessarily had to be Oliver, so that I was thrown into confusion for an instant when eventually I turned and saw Eli. He was sitting quietly against the far wall. He had merely appeared depressed on his earlier visit, but now-ten minutes later? half an hour?-he seemed utterly disintegrated. Downcast eyes, slumping shoulders. "I don't understand," he said hollowly, "how this confessional thing can have any value, real, symbolic, metaphorical, or otherwise. I thought I understood it when Frater Javier first spoke to us, but now I can't dig it. Is this what we must do in order to deliver ourselves from death? Why? Why?"

"Because they ask it," I said.

"What of that?"

"It's a matter of obedience. Out of obedience grows discipline, out of discipline grows control, out of control grows the power to conquer the forces of decay. Obedience is anti-entropic. Entropy is our enemy."

"How glib you are," he said.

"Glibness isn't a sin."

He laughed and made no reply. I could see that he was on the thin edge, walking the razor-sharp line between sanity and madness, and I, who had teetered on that edge all my life, was not going to be the one to nudge him. Time pa.s.sed. My vision of myself and Oliver receded and became unreal. I bore no grudge against Eli for that; this night belonged to him. Ultimately he started to tell me about an essay he had written when he was sixteen, in his senior year in high school, an essay on the moral collapse of the Western Roman Empire as reflected in the degeneration of Latin into the various Romance languages. He remembered a good deal of what he had written even now, quoting lengthy chunks of it, and I listened with half an ear, giving him the polite pretense of attention but nothing more, for although the essay sounded brilliant to me, a remarkable performance for a scholar of any age and certainly astonishing for a boy of sixteen to have written, I did not at that particular moment have any vast desire to hear about the subtle ethical implications to be found in the patterns of evolution of French, Spanish, and Italian. But gradually I comprehended Eli's motives for telling me this story and paid closer heed: he was, in fact, making confession to me. For he had written that essay for submission to a contest sponsored by some prestigious learned society and had won, receiving thereby a valuable scholarship that had underwritten his college tuition. Indeed, he had built his entire academic career on that piece, for it had been reprinted in a major philological journal and had made him a celebrity in that small scholastic realm. Though only a freshman, he was mentioned admiringly in the footnotes of other scholars; the gates of all libraries were open to him; he would not have had the opportunity to find the very ma.n.u.script that had led us to the House of Skulls had he not written the masterly essay on which his fame depended. And-so he told me in the same expressionless tone with which, moments before, he had been expounding on irregular verbs-the essential concept of that thesis had not been his own work. He had stolen it.

Aha! The sin of Eli Steinfeld! No trifling s.e.xual peccadillo, no boyhood adventure in b.u.g.g.e.ry or mutual masturbation, no incestuous snuggling with his mildly protesting mother, but rather an intellectual crime, the most d.a.m.ning of all. Little wonder he had held back from admitting it. Now, though, he poured forth the incriminating truth. His father, he said, lunching one afternoon in an Automat on Sixth Avenue, had happened to notice a small, gray, faded man sitting by himself, exploring a thick, unwieldy book. It was an arcane volume on linguistic a.n.a.lysis, Sommerfelt's Diachronic and Synchronic Aspects of Language, a t.i.tle that would have meant nothing whatever to the elder Steinfeld had he not just a short while before forked out $16.50, no trivial sum in that family, to buy a copy for Eli, who felt he could not live much longer without it. The shock of recognition, then, at the sight of that bulky quarto. Upwelling of parental pride: my son the philologist. An introduction follows. Conversation. Immediate rapport; one middle-aged refugee in an Automat has nothing to fear from another. "My son," says Mr. Stein-feld, "he's reading that same book!" Expressions of delight. The other is a native of Rumania, formerly professor of linguistics at the University of Cluj; he had fled that land in 1939, hoping to enter Palestine but arriving instead, by a roundabout route through the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Canada, in the United States. Unable to secure an academic appointment anywhere, he lives in quiet poverty on Manhattan's Upper West Side, holding whatever jobs he can find: dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant, proofreader for a short-lived Rumanian newspaper, mimeograph operator for a displaced-persons information service, and so on. All the while he is diligently preparing his life's work, a structural and philosophical a.n.a.lysis of the decay of Latin in early medieval times. The ma.n.u.script now is virtually complete in Rumanian, he tells Eli's father, and he has begun the necessary translation into English, but the work goes very slowly for him, since even now he is not at home in English, his head being so thoroughly stuffed with other languages. He dreams of finishing the book, finding a publisher for it, and retiring to Israel on the proceeds. "I should like to meet your boy," the Rumanian says abruptly. Instant emanations of suspicion from Eli's father. Is this some kind of pervert? A molester, a fondler? No! This is a decent Jewish man, a scholar, a melamed, a member of the international fellowship of victims; how could he mean any harm to Eli? Telephone numbers are exchanged. A meeting is negotiated. Eli goes to the Rumanian's apartment: one tiny room, crammed with books, ma.n.u.scripts, learned periodicals in a dozen languages. Here, read this, the worthy man says, this and this and this, my essays, my theories; and he thrusts papers into Eli's hands, onionskin sheets closely typed, single s.p.a.ced, no margins. Eli goes home, he reads, his mind expands. Far out! This little old man has it all together! Inflamed, Eli vows to learn Rumanian, to be his new friend's amanuensis, to help him translate his masterwork as quickly as possible. Feverishly the two, the boy and the old man, plan collaborations. They build castles in Rumania. Eli, out of his own money, has the ma.n.u.scripts Xeroxed, so that some goy in the next apartment, falling asleep over a cigarette, does not wipe out this lifetime of scholarship in a mindless conflagration. Every day after school Eli hurries to the little cluttered room. Then one afternoon no one answers his knock. Calamity! The janitor is summoned, grumbling, whiskey-breathed; he uses his master key to open the door; within lies the Rumanian, yellow-faced, stiff. A society of refugees pays for the funeral. A nephew, mysteriously unmentioned previously, materializes and carts off every book, every ma.n.u.script, to a fate unknown. Eli is left with the Xeroxes. What now? How can he be the vehicle through which this work is made known to mankind? Ah! The essay contest for the scholarship! He sits possessed at his typewriter, hour after hour. The distinction in his own mind between himself and his departed acquaintance becomes uncertain. They are collaborators now; through me, Eli thinks, this great man speaks from the grave. The essay is finished and there is no doubt in Eli's mind of its worth; it is plainly a masterpiece. Moreover he has the special pleasure of knowing that he has salvaged the life's work of an unjustly neglected scholar. He submits the required six copies to the contest committee; in the spring the registered letter comes, notifying him he has won; he is summoned into marble halls to receive a scroll, a check for more money than he can imagine, and the excited congratulations of a panel of distinguished academics. Shortly afterward comes the first request from a professional journal for a contribution. His career is launched. Only later does Eli realize that in his triumphant essay he has, somehow, forgotten entirely to credit the author of the work on which his ideas are based. Not an acknowledgment, not a footnote, not a single citation anywhere.

This error of omission abashes him, but he feels it is too late to remedy the oversight, nor does the giving of proper credit become any easier for him as the months pa.s.s, as his essay gets into print, as the scholarly discussion of it begins. He lives in terror of the moment when some elderly Rumanian will arise, clutching a parcel of obscure journals published in prewar Bucharest, and cry out that this impudent young man has shamelessly rifled the thought of his late and distinguished colleague, the unfortunate Dr. Nicolescu. But no accusing Rumanian arises. Years have gone by; the essay is universally accepted as Eli's own; as the end of his undergraduate days approaches, several major universities vie for the honor of having him do advanced study on their faculty.

And this sordid episode, Eli said in conclusion, could serve as metaphor of his whole intellectual life-all of it fake, no depth, the key ideas borrowed. He had gone a long way on a knack for making synthesis masquerade as originality, plus a certain undeniable skill in a.s.similating the syntax of archaic languages, but he had made no real contribution to mankind's store of knowledge, none, which at his age would be pardonable had he not fraudulently gained a premature reputation as the most penetrating thinker to enter the field of linguistics since Benjamin Whorf. And what was he, in truth? A golem, a construct, a walking Potemkin Village of philology. Miracles of insight now were expected of him, and what could he give? He had nothing left to offer, he told me bitterly. He had long ago used up the last of the Rumanian's ma.n.u.scripts.

A monstrous silence descended. I could not bear to look at him. This had been more than a confession; it had been hara-kiri. Eli had destroyed himself in front of me. I had always been a little suspicious, yes, of Eli's supposed profundity, for though he undoubtedly had a fine mind his perceptions all struck me in an odd way as having come to him at second hand; yet I had never imagined this of him, this theft, this imposture. What could I say to him now? Cluck my tongue, priestlike, and tell him, Yes, my child, you have sinned grievously? He knew that. Tell him that G.o.d would forgive him, for G.o.d is love? I didn't believe that myself. Perhaps I might try a dose of Goethe, saying, Redemption from sin through good works is still available, Eli, go forth and drain marshes and build hospitals and write some brilliant essays that aren't stolen and all will be well for you. He sat there, waiting for absolution, waiting for The Word that would lift the yoke from him. His face was blank, his eyes devastated. I wished he had confessed some meaningless fleshly sin. Oliver had plugged his playmate, nothing more, a sin that to me was no sin at all, only jolly good fun; Oliver's anguish thus was unreal, a product of the conflict between his body's natural desires and the conditioning society had imposed. In the Athens of Pericles he would have had nothing to confess. Timothy's sin, whatever it was, had surely been something equally shallow, sprouting not from moral absolutes but from local tribal taboos: perhaps he had slept with a serving wench, perhaps he had spied on his parents' copulations. My own was a more complex transgression, for I had taken joy in the doom of others, I perhaps had even engineered the doom of others, but even that was a subtle Jamesian sort of thing, in the last a.n.a.lysis fairly insubstantial. Not this. If plagiarism lay at the core of Eli's glittering scholastic attainments, then nothing lay at the core of Eli: he was hollow, he was empty, and what absolution could anyone offer him for that? Well, Eli had had his cop-out earlier in the evening, and now I had mine. I rose, I went to him, I took his hands in mine and lifted him to his feet, and I said magic words to him: contrition, atonement, forgiveness, redemption. Strive ever toward the light, Eli. No soul is d.a.m.ned for all eternity. Work hard, apply yourself, persevere, seek self-understanding, and there will be divine mercy for you, because your weakness comes from Him and He will not chastise you for it if you show Him you are able to transcend it. He nodded remotely and left me. I thought of the Ninth Mystery and wondered if I would ever see him again.

I paced my room a long while, brooding. Then Satan inflamed me and I went to call on Oliver.

39. Oliver.

"I know the story," Ned said. "I know the whole bit." Smiling shyly at me. Soft eyes, cow eyes, looking into mine. "You don't need to be afraid of being what you are, Oliver. You mustn't ever be afraid of what you are. Can't you see how important it is to get to know yourself, to get into your head as far as you can go, and then to act on what you find in there? But instead so many people set up dumb walls between themselves and themselves, walls made out of useless abstractions. A lot of Thou Shalt Nots and Thou Dost Not Dares. Why? What good is any of that?" His face was glowing. A tempter, a devil. Eli must have told him everything. Karl and me, me and Karl. I wanted to smash Eli's head for him. Ned circled around me, grinning, moving like a cat, like a wrestler about to spring. He kept his voice low, almost a crooning tone. "Come on, Ol. Loosen up. LuAnn won't find out. I don't play kiss and tell. Let's go, Ol, let's do it, let's do it. We're not strangers. We've kept apart long enough. This is you, Oliver, this is the real you in there who wants to get out, and this is the moment for you to let him come out. Will you, Ol? Will you? Now? Here's your chance. Here I am." And he came close to me. Looked up at me. Short little Ned, chest-high to me. His fingers lightly running along my forearm. "No," I said, shaking my head. "Don't touch me, Ned." He continued to smile. To stroke me. "Don't refuse me," he whispered. "Don't deny me. Because if you do, you'll be denying yourself, you'll be refusing to accept the reality of your own existence, and you can't do that, Oliver, can you? Not if you want to live forever. I'm a station you've got to pa.s.s through on your journey. We've both known that for years, down deep. Now it surfaces, Ol. Now everything surfaces, everything converges, all time runs to now, Ol, this place, this room, this night. Yes? Yes? Say yes. Oliver. Say yes!"

40. Eli.

I no longer knew who I was or where I was. I was in a trance, a daze, a coma. Like my own ghost I haunted the halls of the House of Skulls, drifting through the chilly night-darkened corridors. The stone images of skulls looked out from the walls, grinning at me. I grinned at them. I winked, I blew them kisses. I stared at the row of ma.s.sive oaken doors receding toward infinity, every door tightly shut, and mysterious names crossed my consciousness: this is Timothy's room, this is Ned's, this is Oliver's. Who are they? And this is the room of Eli Steinfeld. Who? Eli Steinfeld. Who? E. Li. Stein. Feld. A series of incomprehensible sounds. An agglomeration of dead syllables. E. Li. Stein. Feld. Let us proceed. This room belongs to Frater Antony, and in here one may find Frater Bernard, and here Frater Javier, and here Frater Claude, and Frater Miklos, and Frater Maurice, and Frater Leon, and Frater This and Frater That, and who are these fraters, what do their names mean? Here are more doors. The women must sleep here. I opened a door at random. Four cots, four fleshy women, naked, sprawling in a tangle of rumpled sheets. Nothing hidden. Thighs, b.u.t.tocks, b.r.e.a.s.t.s, loins. The slack-mouthed faces of sleepers. I could go to them, I could enter their bodies, I could possess them, all four of them, each in turn. But no. Onward, to a place where there is no roof, where the glistening stars shine through the bare beams. Colder, here. Skulls on the walls. A fountain, bubbling. I pa.s.sed through the public rooms. Here we take instruction in the Eighteen Mysteries. Here we perform the sacred gymnastics. This is where we eat our special foods. And here-this opening in the floor, this omphalos, the navel of the universe is here, the gateway to the Pit. I must go down. Down, then. A musty smell. No light here. The angle of descent flattens; this is no abyss, but only a tunnel, and I remember it. I have been through here before, coming the other way. A barrier now, a stone slab. It yields, it yields! The tunnel continues. Forward, forward, forward. Trombones and ba.s.set horns, a chorus of ba.s.ses, the words of the Requiem trembling in the air: Rex tremendae majestatis, qui salvandos salvas gratis, salva me, fons pietatis. Out! I emerged into the clearing through which I had first entered the House of Skulls. Before me, barren wastes, a p.r.i.c.kly desert. Behind me, the House of Skulls. Above me the stars, the full moon, the vault of the heavens. What now? I made my way uncertainly across the clearing, past the row of basketball-sized stone skulls that bordered it, and down the narrow path running into the desert. I had no goal in mind. My feet took me. I walked for hours or days or weeks. Then, on my right, I saw a huge chunky boulder, coa.r.s.e in texture, dark in color, the road marker, the giant stone skull. By moonlight the deep-set features were stark and sharp, black recesses holding pools of night. Brothers, let us meditate here. Let us contemplate the skull beneath the face. And so I knelt. And so, using the techniques taught me by the pious Frater Antony, I sent forth my soul and engulfed the great stone skull, and purged myself of all vulnerability to death. Skull, I know you! Skull, I fear you not! Skull, I carry your brother behind my skin! And I laughed at the skull, and I amused myself by transforming it, first into a smooth white egg, then into a globe of pink alabaster streaked and veined with yellow, then into a crystal sphere, the depths of which I explored. The sphere showed me the golden towers of lost Atlantis. It showed me s.h.a.ggy men in woolly furs, capering by torchlight before painted bulls on the walls of a smoky cave. It showed me Oliver lying numb and exhausted in Ned's arms. I transformed the sphere into a rough skull rudely carved of black rock, and, satisfied, went back up the th.o.r.n.y path toward the House of Skulls. I did not enter the subterranean pa.s.sage but instead walked around the side of the building and along the face of the lengthy wing in which we took instruction from the fraters, until I came to the building's end, where the path began that gave access to the cultivated fields. By moonlight I searched for weeds and found none. I caressed the little pepper plants. I blessed the berries and the roots. This is the holy food, this is the pure food, this is the food of life eternal. I knelt between the rows, on the cold wet muddy ground, and prayed that forgiveness be extended to me for my sins. I went next to the hillock west of the skullhouse. I ascended it and removed my shorts and, naked to the night, performed the sacred breathing exercises, squatting, sucking in the darkness, mingling it with the inner breath, drawing power from it, diverting that power to my vital organs. My body dissolved. I was without ma.s.s or weight. I floated, dancing, on a column of air. I held my breath for centuries. I soared for eons. I approached the true state of grace. Now it was proper to perform the rite of the gymnastics, which I then did, moving with grace and an agility I had never attained before. I bent, I pivoted, I twisted, I leaped. I flung myself aloft; I clapped hands; I tested every muscle. I tested myself to my limits.

The dawn was coming now.

The first gleam of sunlight tumbled upon me out of the eastern hills. I a.s.sumed the sunset squat and stared at that point of rosy light growing on the horizon, and I drank the sun's breath. My eyes were twin conduits; the holy flame leaped through them and into the labyrinth of my body. I was in total control, directing that wondrous blaze at will, shunting the warmth as I pleased into my left lung, into my spleen, into my liver, into my right kneecap. The sun broke the line of the horizon and sailed into full view, a perfect globe, dawn's red swiftly declining into morning's gold, and I took my fill of its radiance.

At length, ecstatic, I returned to the House of Skulls. As I neared the entrance a figure emerged from the tunnel: Timothy. He had found his city clothes somehow. His face was harsh and tense, jaws clamped, eyes tormented. When he saw me he scowled and spat. Acknowledging my presence in no other way, he walked quickly on, across the clearing, toward the desert path.

"Timothy?"

He did not halt.

"Timothy, where are you going? Answer me, Timothy."

He turned. Giving me a look of frosty contempt, he said, "I'm splitting, man. Why the c.r.a.p do you have to be skulking around this early in the morning?"

"You can't go."

"I can't?"

"It'll shatter the Receptacle," I said.

"f.u.c.k the Receptacle. You think I'm going to spend the rest of my life in this castle for idiots?" He shook his head. Then his expression softened, and he said less coa.r.s.ely, "Eli, look, come to your senses, will you? You're trying to live a fantasy. It won't work. We've got to get back to the real world."

"No."

"Those two are hopeless, but you still can think rationally, maybe. We can have breakfast in Phoenix and make the first plane for New York."

"No."

"Last chance."

"No, Timothy."

He shrugged and turned away from me. "All right. Stay with your crazy friends, then. I've had it, man! I've had it."

I stood frozen as he crossed the clearing, stepped between two of the small stone skulls set in the sand, and approached the beginning of the path. There was no way I could convince him to stay. This moment had been inevitable from the beginning; Timothy was not like us, he lacked our traumas and our motives, he could never have been made to submit to the full course of the Trial. Through a long instant I considered my options and sought communion with the forces guiding the destiny of this Receptacle. I asked whether the right time had come, and I was told, Yes, the time has come. And I ran after him. As I came to the row of skulls I knelt briefly and scooped one of them from the ground-I needed both hands to carry it, and I suppose it weighed twenty or thirty pounds-and, running again, I came up behind Timothy just at the place where the path began. In a single graceful motion I lifted the stone skull and brought it forward against the back of his head with all my strength, and there was transmitted by my fingers through that basalt sphere the sensation of collapsing bone. He fell without a cry. The stone skull was b.l.o.o.d.y; I dropped it and it remained where it landed. Timothy's golden hair was tinged with red, and that red stain spread with surprising swiftness. It is necessary for me now to secure witnesses, I told myself, and to request the appropriate rites. I looked back toward the skullhouse. My witnesses were already there. Ned, naked, and Frater Antony, in his faded blue shorts, stood before the facade of the building. I went to them. Ned nodded; he had seen the whole thing. I dropped to my knees in front of Frater Antony, and he put his cool hand to my fevered forehead and said gently, "The Ninth Mystery is this: that the price of a life must always be a life. Know, O n.o.bly-Born, that eternities must be balanced by extinctions." And he said, "As by living we daily die, so then by dying we shall forever live."

41. Ned.

I tried to get Oliver to help with the task of burying Timothy, but he sulked in his room like Achilles in his tent, so the job fell entirely to Eli and me. Oliver wouldn't open his door, he wouldn't even acknowledge my knock with a surly grunt from within. I left him and rejoined the group outside the building. Eli, standing beside fallen Timothy, wore a seraphic, transfigured look; he glowed. His face was flushed and his body glistened with a coating of sweat in the morning light. Surrounding him were four of the fraters, the four Keepers, Fraters Antony, Miklos, Javier, and Franz. They were calm and seemed gratified by what had occurred. Frater Franz had brought gravediggers' tools, picks and shovels. The burying ground, said Frater Antony, was a short distance into the desert.

Perhaps for reasons of ritual purity, the fraters would not touch the corpse. I doubted that Eli and I could carry Timothy as much as ten yards by ourselves, but Eli was not at all daunted. Kneeling, he knotted Timothy's feet around each other and put his shoulder under Timothy's calves, signaling to me to grab Timothy by the middle. Hup! and we heaved and hauled and lifted that inert 200-pound hulk from the ground, staggering a little. With Frater Antony leading us, Eli and I marched toward the burying ground, the other fraters somewhere to the rear. Though dawn was not far behind us, the sun was already remorseless, and the effort of bearing that terrible burden through the shimmering heat haze of the desert cast me into a quasi-hallucinatory state; my pores opened, my knees swayed, my eyes lost focus, I felt an invisible hand clutching my throat. I entered an instant-replay trip, seeing again the flashback shots of Eli's great moment in slow motion, the camera stopping at the critical intervals. I saw Eli running, Eli bending to s.n.a.t.c.h that heavy basalt globe, Eli in pursuit of Timothy again, Eli catching him, Eli winding up like a shot-putter, the muscles of his right side standing out in startling relief, Eli slowly extending his arm in a wonderfully fluid way, reaching forward as though he meant to rap Timothy on the back but instead gently and smoothly driving the stone skull against Timothy's more fragile one, Timothy crumpling, dropping, lying still. Again. Again. Again. The chase, the a.s.sault, the impact, in a magic newsreel of the mind. Intersecting these pictures came other familiar images of mortality, drifting like phantom overlays of gauze: the astonished face of Lee Harvey Oswald as Jack Ruby approaches him, the rumpled form of Bobby Kennedy on the kitchen floor, the severed heads of Mishima and his companion neatly resting back of the general's desk, the Roman soldier prodding the figure on the Cross with his spear, the gaudy mushroom unfolding over Hiroshima. And again Eli, again the trajectory of the antique blunt object, again the impact. Stop-time. The poetry of termination. I stumbled and nearly fell, and the beauty of those images sustained me, flooding my cracking joints and bursting muscles with new strength, so that I remained upright, a plodding diligent pallbearer, lurching over the crumbling alkaline earth. As by living we daily die, so then by dying we shall forever live.

"We have reached the place," said Frater Antony.

Was this a graveyard? I saw no tombstones, no markers of any kind. The low leathery-leaved gray plants of the thirsty wasteland grew in random splotches on an empty field. I looked more closely then, perceiving things with the strange tripped-out intensity of exhaustion, and noticed certain irregularities in the terrain, a patch here that seemed sunken by a few inches, a patch there that looked to be elevated above the rest, as though there had indeed been some disturbances of the surface. Carefully we lowered Timothy. When we put him down my body, relieved, seemed to float; I thought actually I would leave the ground. My limbs trembled and my arms, of their own accord, rose shoulder-high. It was a short respite. Frater Franz handed us the tools and we began to dig the grave. He alone a.s.sisted us; the other three Keepers stood apart, like votive statues, motionless, aloof. The soil was coa.r.s.e and soft, perhaps having had all the cohesion baked out of it by ten million years of Arizona sun. We dug like slaves, like ants, like machines, thrust and heave, thrust and heave, thrust and heave, each of us making his own little pit and then joining the three pits. Occasionally we intruded on someone else's work area; once Eli nearly speared my bare foot with his pick. But we got the job done. At length a rough trench, perhaps seven feet long, three feet wide, four feet deep, lay open before us. "It is sufficient," said Frater Franz. Gasping, sweat-shiny, dizzied, we threw down our tools and stepped back. I was at the edge of exhaustion and could barely remain standing. An attack of dry heaves threatened me; I fought it and converted it, absurdly, into hiccups. Frater Antony said, "Place the dead man in the ground." Just like that? No coffin, no covering at all? Dirt in the face? Dust to dust? It seemed that way. We found a final reservoir of energy and lifted Timothy, swung him out over our excavation, eased him down. He lay on his back, the ruined head cradled on soft earth, the eyes-did they show a look of surprise?-staring up at us. Eli reached in, closed the eyes, turned Timothy's head slightly to the side, a position more like that of sleep, a more comfortable way to spend one's eternal rest. The four Keepers now took up stations at the four corners of the grave. Fraters Miklos, Franz, and Javier put their hands to their pendants and bowed their heads. Frater Antony, staring straight ahead, recited a brief service in that liquid, unintelligible language that the fraters use when talking to the priestesses (Aztec? Atlantean? The Cro-Magnon muttersprach?), and, switching to Latin for the final phrases, spoke something which Eli told me later, confirming my own guess, was the text of the Ninth Mystery. Then he gestured to Eli and me to fill the grave. We seized our shovels and flung dirt. Farewell, Timothy! Golden scion of the Wasps, heir to eight generations of careful breeding! Who will have your trust funds, who will carry the family name onward? Dust to dust. A thin layer of Arizona sand now covering the burly frame. Like robots we toil, Timothy, and you disappear from view. As it was ordained in the beginning. As it was written in the Book of Skulls ten thousand years ago.

"All regular activities are canceled this day," said Frater Antony when the grave was filled and the earth had been tamped down. "We will spend today in meditation, taking no meals, devoting ourselves to a contemplation of the Mysteries." But there was more work for us before our contemplations could begin. We returned to the House of Skulls, intending first of all to bathe, and discovered Frater Leon and Frater Bernard in the hall outside Oliver's room. Their faces were masks. They pointed within. Oliver lay sprawled face-up across his cot. Evidently he had borrowed a kitchen knife, and, surgeon that he never lived to be, he had done an extraordinary job on himself with it, belly and throat, nor had he spared even the traitor between his thighs. The incisions were deep and had been cut by a steady hand: disciplined to the end, rigid Oliver had slaughtered himself with a characteristic adherence to methodology. I could no more have endured finishing such a project, once I had begun it, than I could walk on moonbeams, but Oliver always had had unusual powers of concentration. We studied the results in a curiously dispa.s.sionate way. I have many squeamish att.i.tudes, and so does Eli, but on this day of the Ninth Mystery's fulfillment all such weaknesses were purged from me. "There is one among thee," said Frater Antony, "who has relinquished eternity for his brothers of the four-sided figure, so that they may come to comprehend the meaning of self-denial." Yes. And so we staggered to the burial place a second time. And afterward, for my sins, I scrubbed the thick clotted stains from the room that had been Oliver's. And finally I bathed, and sat alone in my room, examining in my mind the Mysteries of the Skull.

42. Eli.

Summer lies heavy on the land. The sky throbs with stupefying heat. All seems predetermined and properly ordered. Timothy sleeps. Oliver sleeps. Ned and I remain. In these months we have grown quite strong and our skins are dark from the sun. We live in a kind of waking dream, floating placidly through our daily round of ch.o.r.es and rites. We are not quite full-fledged fraters yet, but our time of Trial is nearing its end. Two weeks after that day of gravedigging I mastered the ritual of the three women and since then I have had no difficulties in absorbing any lesson the fraters would teach me.

The days flow together. We stand outside time here. Was it April when we came first to the fraters? Of what year, and what year is this? A waking dream, a waking dream. I feel sometimes that Oliver and Timothy are figures in another dream, one that I had long ago. I have begun to forget the details of their faces. Blond hair, blue eyes, yes, but then what? How were their noses shaped, how prominent were their chins? Their faces fade. Timothy and Oliver are gone, and Ned and I remain. I still remember Timothy's voice, a warm supple ba.s.s, well controlled, beautifully modulated, with faintly nasal aristocratic inflections. And Oliver's, a strong clear tenor, the tones hard-edged and firm, the accent neutral, the accentless American of the prairies. To them my grat.i.tude. They died for me.

This morning my faith wavered, only for an instant, but it was a frightening instant; an abyss of uncertainty opened beneath me after so many months of wholehearted a.s.surance, and I saw devils with pitchforks and heard the shrill laughter of Satan. I was coming in from the fields, and I happened to look far across the flat scrubby land to the place where Timothy and Oliver lie, and unexpectedly a thin scratchy voice in my head asked me, Do you think you've gained anything here? How can you be sure? How certain are you that it's possible to have the thing that you seek? I knew a moment of awful fear, in which I imagined I stared with red-rimmed eyes into an icy future, seeing myself wither and shrivel and turn to dust in an empty, blasted world. The moment of doubt then left me, as suddenly as it had come. Perhaps it was just a vagrant gust of unfocused discontent, blowing idly across the continent toward the Pacific, that had paused briefly to unsettle me. I was shaken by what I had undergone, and I ran to the house, meaning to find Ned and tell him about it, but by the time I neared his room the episode seemed too ridiculous to share with him. Do you think you've gained anything here? How could I have doubted at all? A strange backsliding, Eli.

His door was open. I looked in and saw him sitting slumped, his head in his hands. Somehow he sensed my presence; he looked up quickly, rearranging his face, replacing a transient look of despair or dejection with a carefully bland expression. But his eyes were bright with strain and I thought I saw the glitter of incipient tears.