Book of Skulls Read online

  He asked us, as we left, to stop by at his house on our way back through town and tell him what we had discovered up there. “Like to keep my files up to date,” he said. “Been meaning to have a look at the place myself, only, you know how it is, lot of things to do and so little time for doing them.”

  Sure, we told him. We’ll give you the whole story.

  Into the car. Oliver driving, Eli navigating, the map spread out wide in his lap. Westward to Black Canyon Highway. A broad super-highway, frying in the midmorning heat. No traffic other than a few huge trucks. We headed north. All our questions would shortly be answered; doubtless some new ones would be asked. Our faith, or perhaps merely our naivete, would be repaid. I felt a chill in the midst of the torrid zone. I heard a brawling, surging overture rising from the pit, ominous, Wagnerian, tubas and trombones making a dark, throbbing music. The curtain was going up, though I was not sure if we were entering the last act or the first. No longer did I doubt that the skullhouse would be there. Gilson had been too matter-of-fact about it; it was no myth, just another manifestation of the urge to spirituality that this desert seemed to awaken in mankind. We would find the monastery, and it would be the right one, the lineal descendant of the one described in the Book of Skulls. Another delicious shiver: what if we came face to face with the very author of that ancient manuscript, millennial, timeless? Anything is possible, if ye have faith.

  Faith. How much of my life has been shaped by that five-letter Anglo-Saxon word? Portrait of the artist as a young snot. The parochial school, its leaky roof, wind whistling through the windows so sorely in need of puttying, the pale sisters steely in their severe eyeglasses scowling at us in the hall. The catechism. The well-scrubbed little boys, white shirts, red ties. Father Burke instructing us. Plump, young, pink-faced, always beads of sweat on his upper lip, a bulge of soft flesh hanging over his clerical collar. He must have been, oh, twenty-five, twenty-six years old, a young priest, itchy in his celibacy, dong not yet withered, wondering in the dark hours whether it all was worth it. To Ned, age seven, he was the embodiment of Holy Writ, fierce, immense. Always a yardstick in his hand, and he used it, too: he’d read his Joyce, he played the role, wielding the pandybat. Asking me now to stand. I rise, trembling, wanting to shit in my pants and run. My nose running. (My nose dripped constantly until I was twelve; my image of my child-self is marred by a dark smudge, a sticky dirt-mustache. Puberty shut off the tap.) My wrist goes now to my snout: a quick wipe. “Don’t be disgusting!” from Father Burke, watery blue eyes flashing. God is love, God is love; what then is Father Burke? The yardstick whooshing through the air. The lightnings of his terrible swift sword. He gestures irritably at me. “The Apostles’ Creed, now, out with it!”

  I say, stammering, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ—and in Jesus Christ—”

  Faltering. From behind me, a hoarse whisper, Sandy Dolan: “His only son, our Lord.” My knees shake. My soul quakes. Last Sunday, after mass, Sandy Dolan and I went peering into windows and saw his sister changing her clothes, fifteen years old, little pink-tipped breasts, dark hair below. Dark hair. We’ll grow hair too, Sandy whispered. Did God see us spying on her? The Lord’s Day, and such a sin! Now the yardstick flicks warningly.

  “—his only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born from the Virgin Mary—” Yes. Now I’m into the heart of it, the melodramatic part that I love so much. I speak more confidently, loudly, my voice a clear fluting soprano. “—suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, descended to Hell, on the third day rose again from the dead, ascended to the heavens—ascended to the heavens—”

  I am lost again. Sandy, help me! But Father Burke is too close. Sandy does not dare speak.

  “—ascended to the heavens—”

  “He’s up there already, boy,” the priest snaps. “Get on with it! Ascended to the heavens—”

  My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth. They all stare at me. Can’t I sit down? Can’t Sandy continue? Seven years old, Lord, must I know the whole creed?

  The yardstick—the yardstick—

  Incredibly, the father himself prompts me. “Sits at the right hand—”

  Blessed clue. I seize on it. “Sits on the right hand—”

  “At the right hand!” And my left hand gets the pandybat. A hot burning stinging tingling blow like the loud crack of a broken stick makes my trembling hand crumple together like a leaf in the fire: and at the sound and the pain scalding tears are driven into my eyes. May I sit down, now? No, I must go on. They expect so much of me. Old Sister Mary Joseph, face a mass of wrinkles, reading one of my poems aloud in the auditorium, my ode on Easter Sunday, telling me afterward I have great gifts. Go on, now. The creed, the creed, the creed! It isn’t fair. You hit me, now I ought to be allowed to sit. “Continue,” says the inexorable father. “Sits at the right hand—”

  I nod. “Sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, thence will come to judge the living and the dead.” The worst is over. Heart pounding, I rush through the rest. “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the remission of sins, the resurrection of the flesh, and eternal life.” A mumbled torrent of words. “Amen.” Should one finish with amen? I am so confused I don’t know. Father Burke smiles sourly; I tumble into my seat, drained. There’s faith for you. Faith. The Christ Child in the manger and the yardstick descending toward your knuckles. Cold hallways; scowling faces; the dry, powdery smell of the holy. One day Cardinal Cushing paid us a visit. The whole school was in terror; it couldn’t have been more frightening if the Savior Himself had stepped out of a textbook closet. The angry glances, the furious whispered warnings: stay in line, sing in tune, keep your mouth shut, show your respect. God is love, God is love. And the beads, the crucifixes, the pastel portraits of the Virgin, the Friday fish, the nightmare of first communion, the terror of stepping into the confessional—all the apparatus of faith, the debris of centuries—well, of course, I had to junk all that. Escaping from the Jesuits, from my mother, from the apostles and martyrs, St. Patrick, St. Brendan, St. Dionysius, St. Ignatius, St. Anthony, St. Theresa, St. Thais the penitent harlot, St. Kevin, St. Ned. I became a stinking accursed apostate, not the first of my family to fall away from truth. When I go to damnation I’ll meet uncles and cousins galore, turning on their spits. And now Eli Steinfeld demands new faith of me. As we all know, says Eli, God is irrelevant, an embarrassment; to admit in our modern age that you have faith in His existence is something like admitting you have pimples on your ass. We sophisticates, we who have seen everything and know it for the shuck it is, can’t bring ourselves to surrender to Him, much as we’d like to let the obsolete old bastard make all the hard decisions for us. But wait, crieth Eli! Give up your cynicism, give up your shallow mistrust of the invisible! Einstein, Bohr, and Thomas Edison have destroyed our capacity to embrace the Hereafter, but would you not gladly embrace the Here-and-Now? Believe, says Eli. Believe in the impossible. Believe because it is impossible. Believe that the received history of the world is a myth and that myth is what survives of the true history. Believe in the Skulls, believe in their Keepers. Believe. Believe. Believe. Make an act of faith, and life eternal shall be your reward. Thus speaketh Eli. We go north, east, north, east again, zigzagging into the thorny wilderness, and we must have faith.

  21. Timothy

  I try to be cheerful, I try not to complain, but sometimes I get pushed too far. This trek through the desert at high noon, for example. You have to be a masochist to impose something like this on yourself, even for the sake of living ten thousand years. That part of it is crap, of course: unreal, idiotic. What is real is the heat. My guess is that it’s 95, 100, even 105 degrees out here. Not even April yet, and we’re in a furnace. The famous dry heat of Arizona that they keep telling you about; sure, it’s hot, but it’s dry heat, you don’t feel it. Crap. I feel it. My jacket is off and my shirt is open an
d I’m roasting. If I didn’t have this crappy fair skin of mine I’d take the shirt off altogether, but then I’d fry. Oliver already has his shirt off, and he’s blonder than I am; maybe his skin doesn’t burn, peasant skin, Kansas skin. Every step is a struggle. And how much farther do we have to go, anyway? Five miles? Ten?

  The car is a long way behind us. It’s half past twelve now, and we’ve been walking since noon, quarter of, something like that. The pathway is about eighteen inches wide, and in places it’s narrower than that. In places, actually, there isn’t any pathway at all, and we have to hop and scramble over tangles of underbrush. We plod single file like four freaked-out Navahos stalking Custer’s army. Even the lizards laugh at us. Jesus, I don’t know how anything manages to stay alive here, the lizards, the plants, baked to pieces like this. The ground isn’t really soil and it isn’t really sand; it’s something dry and crumbly that makes a soft crunching sound as we step on it. The silence here magnifies the sound. The silence is scary. We haven’t been talking. Eli plods ahead as though he’s rushing toward the Holy Grail. Ned huffs and puffs: he isn’t strong and this hike is using him up. Oliver, bringing up the rear, is, as usual, completely sealed into himself. He could be an astronaut marching across the moon. Occasionally Ned cuts in to tell us something about the plant life. I never realized he was such a botany freak. There are very few of the tremendous vertical cacti here, the saguaros, though I see a few, fifty or sixty feet tall, some way back from the path. What we have instead, thousands of them, is a weird thing about six feet high, with a gnarled gray woody trunk and a lot of long dangling clusters of spines and green bumpy things. The chainfruit cholla, Ned calls it, and warns us to keep far away from it. The spines are sharp. So we avoid it; but there’s another cholla here, the teddybear cholla, that’s not so easy to avoid. The teddybear is a bummer. Little stubby plants a foot or two high, covered with thousands of fuzzy straw-colored spines: you look at a teddybear the wrong way, and the spines jump up and bite you. I swear they do. My boots are covered with prickles. The teddybear breaks easily and chunks come loose and roll away; they lie scattered everywhere, a lot of them right in the path. Ned says that each chunk will take root eventually and become a whole new plant. We have to watch our steps all the time for fear of coming down on one. You can’t just kick a teddybear chunk aside if it’s in your way, either. I tried that and the cactus stuck to my boot, and I reached down to pull it off, only to get it stuck to my fingertips next. A hundred needles jabbing me at once. Like fire. I yelled. Most uncool screams. Ned had to pry it away, using two twigs as handles. My fingers still burn. Dark, tiny points are buried in the flesh. I wonder if they’ll get infected. There’s plenty of other cactus here, too—barrel cactus, prickly pear, six or seven more that not even Ned can put names to. And leafy trees with thorns, mesquite, acacia. All the plants here are hostile. Don’t touch me, they say, don’t touch me or you’ll be sorry. I wish I was anywhere else. But we walk on, on, on. I’d trade Arizona for the Sahara, even up, throwing in half of New Mexico to sweeten the deal. How much longer? How much hotter? Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap.

  “Hey, look here!” Eli, pointing. To the left of the path, half hidden in a yellow tangle of cholla: a big round boulder, as big as a man’s torso, dark rough stone different in texture and composition from the local chocolate-colored sandstone. This is black volcanic rock, basalt, granite, diabase, one of those. Eli crouches by it and, picking up a piece of wood, begins to push the cactus away from it. “See?” he says. “The eyes? The nose?” He’s right. Great deep eyesockets are visible. A tremendous triangular gouge of a nose-hole. And down at ground level, a row of immense teeth, an upper jaw, the teeth biting into the sandy soil.

  A skull.

  It looks a thousand years old. We can see traces of more delicate carving, indicating cheekbones, brow ridges, and other features; but most of this has been obliterated by time. A skull, though. Unmistakably a skull. It’s a road marker, telling us that that which we seek is not much farther down the road—or perhaps warning us that we ought to turn back now. Eli stands a long time, studying the skull. Ned. Oliver. They’re fascinated by it. A cloud passes over us, shadowing the boulder, changing our view of its contours, and it seems to me now that the empty eyes have turned and are staring at us. The heat’s getting me. Eli says, “It’s probably pre-Columbian. They brought it with them from Mexico, I’d imagine.” We peer ahead, into the heat haze. Three great saguaros, like columns, block our view. We must pass between them. And beyond? The skullhouse itself? No doubt. Suddenly I wonder what I’m doing here, how I ever let myself into this craziness. What had seemed like a joke, a lark, now seems all too real.

  Never to die. Oh, crap! How can such things be? We’ll waste days here, finding out. An adventure in lunacy. Skulls in the road. Cactus. Heat. Thirst. Two must die if two are to live. All the mystical garbage Eli’s been spouting now is summed up for me in that globe of rough black stone, so solid, so undeniable. I’ve committed myself to something that’s altogether beyond my understanding, and there may well be danger in it for me. But there’s no turning back now.

  22. Eli

  And if there had been no skullhouse here? And if we had come to the end of the path, only to find a wall of impenetrable thorns and spines? I confess I was expecting that. This whole expedition just one more failure, one more fiasco of Eli the schmeggege. The skull by the road turning out to be a false clue, the manuscript a dreamy fable, the newspaper article a hoax, the X on our map a mere pointless prank. Nothing before us but cactus and mesquite, a scraggly wasteland, an armpit of a desert where not even pigs would deign to shit, and then what would I have done? I would have turned with great dignity to my three weary companions and said, “Gentlemen, I have been deceived, and you have been misled. We have chased the wild goose.” With an apologetic half-smile playing about the corners of my lips. And then they seize me calmly, without malice, having known all along that it was bound to come to this in the end, and they strip me, they thrust the wooden stake into my heart, they nail me to a towering saguaro, they press me to death beneath flat rocks, they rub chollas into my eyes, they burn me alive, they bury me chest-deep in an anthill, they castrate me with their fingernails, all the while solemnly chanting, Schmeggege, schlemihl, schlemazel, schmendrick, schlep! Patiently I accept my well-earned punishment. I am no stranger to humiliation. I am never surprised by disaster.

  Humiliation? Disaster? As in the Margo fiasco? My most recent major debacle. It still stings. Last October, early in the semester, a rainy, foggy night. We had some first-rate pot, alleged Panama Red that had come to Ned through the alleged homosexual underground, and we passed the pipe, Timothy, Ned, and I, with Oliver, of course, abstaining, piously sipping some cheap red wine. One of the Rasoumovsky quartets played in the background, rising eloquently above the drumbeats of the rain: as we soared high, Beethoven gave us a mystic noise, a second cellist unaccountably seeming to join the group, even an oboe at odd moments, a transcendental bassoon below the strings. The berserk five-dimensional musicology of the stoned. Ned hadn’t hyped us: the dope was superb. And somehow I found myself drifting, getting into a talking trip, a confessional trip, unloading everything, saying suddenly to Timothy that what I regretted most of all was that I have never in my life made it even once with what I’d consider a really beautiful girl.

  Timothy, sympathetic, concerned, asked me who I’d consider a really beautiful girl. I was silent, contemplating my options. Ned, being helpful, suggested Raquel Welch, Catherine Deneuve, Lainie Kazan. At last, coming on with marvelous ingenuousness, I blurted, “I consider Margo a really beautiful girl.” Timothy’s Margo. Timothy’s goyishe goddess, the golden shikse. Having said it, I felt a swiftly sketched series of quick interchanges of dialogue resonating through my cannabis-ridden mind, a lengthy passage of words, and then time, as it will do when it is under the influence of pot, inverted itself so that I heard my entire scenario being performed, each line arriving strictly on cue. Timothy was
asking me, quite earnestly, if Margo turned me on. I assured him, just as earnestly, that she did. He wanted to know, then, if I’d feel less inadequate, more fulfilled, if I were to make it with her. Hesitantly now, wondering what his game was, I answered in vague circumlocutions, only to hear him say, astoundingly, that he would arrange everything for tomorrow night. Arrange what, I asked? Margo, he said. He would set me up with Margo, as an act of Christian charity.