The Book of Skulls Read online

  twenty-six

  oliver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Where does the flame go?

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

  twenty-seven

  eli

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

  And if the rite of the Skulls is genuine?

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

  twenty-eight

  ned

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

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

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