Book of Skulls Read online

  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 assumed 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 sexual one, Buddha save me, a heterosexual 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 sex.

  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 sexual 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 sex, holy cunts, who serve the needs of the fraters and who, by playing the part of receptacles for the Receptacle, now indoctrinate us into the sacred vaginal mysteries. What used to be the rest period after afternoon chores 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 breasts. 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 sexual passions. 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 sexual impulse, but rather we must dominate it and turn it to our service. Hence intercourse is praiseworthy but ejaculation 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, cunt and cock, is harmonious and necessary to the welfare of the universe, but expenditure of ching, semen, 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 faggot that I am, I was still capable of pronouncing esthetic judgment: they were impressive girls. Heavy breasts 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 fag, an invert, a deviate, a pansy, a queer; I am not particularly attracted by cunt; my addiction, I must reveal, is to buggery. But I said none of this, and Frater Leon beckoned again, less amiably. What the devil, the truth is that I have always been bisexual 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 cockiness 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 orgasm 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, assuming the receiving position. Very well, the master stud will oblige. In. Out. In. Out. Gasp. Grunt. Moan. With a surgeon’s precision I coolly stitched 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. God 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 fucking 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 sex 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 God, never in my bummest 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 sexual 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 attitude. 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 cock, 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 sexual 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 passion, and passion 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 passports 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 assorted 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 assumed 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 anticipated 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 substitutes, 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 hell 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 fag 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 assistant 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.