The Book of Skulls Read online

  Ned was the first one Eli told. I saw them huddling and whispering a lot. Ned was laughing. “Don’t put me on, man,” he kept saying, and Eli got red in the face. Ned and Eli are very close, I suppose because they’re both scrawny and weak and belong to oppressed minorities. It’s been clear from the beginning that in any grouping of the four of us, it’s the two of them against Oliver and me. The two intellectuals versus the two jocks, to put it in the crudest way. The two queers against the two—well, no, Eli isn’t queer, despite Uncle Clark who insists that all Jews are fundamentally homosexual whether they know it or not. But Eli seems queer, with his lisp and his way of walking. Seems queerer than Ned, as a matter of fact. Does Eli chase girls so hard because he wants to camouflage something? Anyway, Eli and Ned, shuffling papers and whispering. And then they brought Oliver into it. “Do you mind telling me,” I asked, “what the crap you’re discussing among yourselves?” I think they enjoyed excluding me, giving me a taste of what it’s like to be a second-class citizen. Or maybe they just figured I’d laugh in their faces. But at last they broke it to me. Oliver serving as their ambassador. “What are you doing over Easter?” he asked.

  “Bermuda, maybe. Florida. Nassau.” Actually I hadn’t thought about it much.

  “What about Arizona?” he asked.

  “What’s there?”

  He took a deep breath. “Eli was examining some rare manuscripts in the library,” he said, looking sheepish and uneasy, “and came upon something called the Book of Skulls, which apparently has been here for fifty years and nobody’s translated it, and he’s done some further research now and he thinks—”

  That the Keepers of the Skulls actually exist and will let us in on what they’ve got. Eli and Ned and Oliver are willing to go out there and look around, anyway. And I’m invited. Why? For my money? For my charm? Well, matter of fact, it’s because candidates are accepted only in groups of four, and since we’re all roommates anyway, it seemed logical that—

  And so on. I said I would, for the hell of it. When Dad was my age, he went searching for uranium mines in the Belgian Congo. Didn’t find them, but he had a ball. I’m entitled to some wild geese too. I’ll go, I said. And put the whole matter out of my mind until after exams. It wasn’t until later on that Eli filled me in on some of the rules of the game. Out of every four candidates, two at best get to live forever, and two have to die. A neat little touch of melodrama. He looked me straight in the eyes. “Now that you know the risks,” he said, “you can back out if you like.” Putting me on the spot, searching for the yellow streaks in the blue blood. I laughed at him. “Those aren’t bad odds,” I said.

  four

  ned

  Quick impressions, before this trip changes us forever, for it will change us. Wednesday night the ? of March, approaching New York City.

  TIMOTHY. Pink and gold. A two-inch layer of firm fat coating thick slabs of muscle. Big, massive, a fullback if he’d bothered to try. Blue Episcopalian eyes, always laughing at you. He puts you down with a friendly smile. The mannerisms of the American aristocracy. He wears a crew cut in this era: by way of telling the world that he’s his own man. Goes out of his way to seem lazy and coarse. A big cat, a sleepy lion. Watch out. Lions are smarter than they look, and faster on their feet than their victims tend to think.

  ELI. Black and white. Slender, fragile. Beady eyes. An inch taller than I am, but still short. Thin sensual lips, strong chin, curling mop of Assyrian ringlets. The skin so white, so white: he’s never been in the sun. An hour after he’s shaved he needs a shave. Dense mat of hair on chest and thighs; he’d look virile if he weren’t so flimsy. He has bad luck with girls. I could get somewhere with him but he’s not my type—too much like me. A general impression of vulnerability. Quick, clever mind, not as deep as he thinks it is, but no fool. Basically a medieval scholastic.

  ME. Yellow and green. Agile little fairy with a core of clumsiness within his agility. Soft tangled golden brown hair standing up like a halo. Forehead high and getting higher all the time, damn it. You look like a figure out of Fra Angelico, two different girls said to me in a single week; I guess they’re in the same art appreciation class. I have a definitely priestly look. So my mother always said; she envisaged me as a gentle monsignor comforting the heartsore. Sorry, Ma. The pope won’t want my sort. Girls do; they know intuitively I’m gay and offer themselves anyway, I suppose for the challenge of it. A pity, a waste. I am a fair poet and a feeble short-story writer. If I had the balls for it I’d try a novel. I expect to die young. I feel that romanticism demands it of me. For consistency of pose I must constantly contemplate suicide.

  OLIVER. Pink and gold, like Timothy, but otherwise how different! Timothy is a solid, brutal pillar; Oliver tapers. Improbable movie-star body and face: six foot three, wide shoulders, slim hips. Perfect proportions. Strong, silent type. Beautiful and knows it and doesn’t give a damn. Kansas farm boy, features open and guileless. Long hair so blond it’s almost white. From the back he looks like a huge girl, except that the waist is wrong. His muscles don’t bulge like Timothy’s, they’re flat and long. Oliver deceives no one with his hayseed stolidity. Behind the bland, cool blue eyes a hungry spirit. He lives in a seething New York City of the mind, hatching ambitious plans. Yet a kind of noble radiance comes from him. If I could only cleanse myself in that brilliant glow. If I could only.

  OUR AGES. Timothy, 22 last month. Me, 21½. Oliver, 21 in January. Eli, 20½.

  Timothy: Aquarius

  Me: Scorpio

  Oliver: Capricorn

  Eli: Virgo

  five

  oliver

  I’d rather drive than be driven. I’ve held the wheel ten and twelve hours at a stretch. The way I see it, I’m safer when I’m driving than when somebody else is, because nobody else is quite as interested in preserving my life as I am. Some drivers, I think, actually court death—for the thrill of it, or, as Ned might say, for the esthetics of it. To hell with that. There’s nothing more sacred to me in all the universe than the life of Oliver Marshall, and I want as much control over life-or-death situations as I can get. So I intend to do most of the driving. Thus far this trip I’ve done all of it, though it’s Timothy’s car. Timothy’s the opposite; he’d rather be driven than drive. I suppose it’s a manifestation of class consciousness. Eli doesn’t know how to drive. So it comes down to me and Ned. Ned and me, all the way to Arizona, with Timothy taking a turn once in a while. Frankly, the thought of entrusting my neck to Ned terrifies me. Suppose I just stay where I am, foot on the gas, driving on and on through the night? We could be in Chicago by tomorrow afternoon. St. Louis late tomorrow night. Arizona the day after next. And start hunting for Eli’s skullhouse. I want to volunteer for immortality. I’m ready; I’m fully psyched up; I believe Eli implicitly. God, I believe! I want to believe. The whole future opens before me. I’ll see the stars. I’ll zoom from world to world. Captain Future from Kansas. And these bonzos want to stop in New York first for a night on the town, a night in the singles bars! Eternity is waiting, and they can’t pass up Maxwell’s Plum. I’d like to tell them what hicks I think they are. But I have to be patient. I don’t want them to laugh at me. I don’t want them to think I’m losing my cool over Arizona and the skulls. First Avenue, here we come.

  six

  eli

  We went to a place on Sixty-seventh that had opened last Christmas; one of Timothy’s fraternity brothers had been there and had reported the action was groovy, so Timothy insisted on going. We humored him. The name of the place was The Raunch House, which tells you the whole dull story in three syllables. The decor was Early Jockstrap and the clientele ran heavily toward suburban high school football players, with girls outnumbered approximately three to one. High noise level, much moronic laughter. The four of us entered as a phalanx, but our formation shattered the moment we were past the entrance. Timothy, all eager, went plunging toward the bar like a musk-ox in rut, his burly body slowing as he realized by his fifth step that
the ambiance wasn’t what he was looking for. Oliver, who in some ways is the most fastidious of us all, never even went in; he sensed at once that the place was inadequate and planted himself just inside the doorway to wait for us to leave. I ventured halfway into the room, was hit by a blast of raucousness that jangled every nerve, and, totally turned off, retreated to the relative tranquility of the checkroom alcove. Ned made straight for the washroom. I was naive enough to think he was simply in a hurry to take a piss. A moment later Timothy came up to me, a bumper of beer in his hand, and said, “Let’s get the crap out of here. Where’s Ned?”

  “In the john,” I told him.

  “For crap’s sake.” Timothy went off to fetch him. Emerging a moment later with a sulky Ned, Ned accompanied by a six-foot-six version of Oliver, maybe sixteen years old, a young Apollo with shoulder-length tresses and a lavender headband. A quick worker, Ned. Five seconds to size things up, thirty seconds more to locate the head and scout up a little rough trade. Timothy now cramping his style, ruining dreams of an exquisite beating in some East Village pad. Of course we had no time now to let Ned indulge his whims. Timothy said something curt to Ned’s find and Ned said something sourly to Timothy; the Apollo went hulking off and we four cleared out. Up the block to supposedly more reliable haunts, The Plastic Cave, where Timothy had gone with Oliver several times last year. Futuristic decor, undulating sheets of thick, shimmering gray plastic all over, waiters togged out in garish science-fiction costumes, periodic outbursts of strobe lights, every ten minutes or so a numbing hammering blare of hard rock smashing out of fifty speakers. More of a discotheque than a singles bar, really, but functioning as both. Much favored by Columbia and Barnard swingers, also utilized by girls from Hunter; high-schoolies are made to feel unwanted. To me it was an alien environment. I have no sense of contemporary chic; I’d rather sit around coffeehouses, swill cappuccino, and talk Big Thinks than do the singles/discotheque number. Rilke instead of rock, Plotinus instead of plastic. “Man, you’re straight out of 1957!” Timothy once told me. Timothy with the Republican brush-fuzz haircut.

  The main project for tonight was to find a place to sleep, that is, to acquire girls with a flat capable of accommodating four male guests. Timothy would take care of that, and if he found the pickings slim we could always unleash Oliver. This was their kind of world. I would feel less out of place at high mass at St. Patrick’s. This was Zanzibar to me, and I suppose Timbuctoo to Ned, although with his chameleon adaptability he was able to fit right in. Thwarted in his natural desires by Timothy, he now chose to fly the hetero flag, and in his usual perverse fashion he had picked out the ugliest girl in sight, a pasty-faced heavy with sprawling cannonball breasts under a sagging red sweater. He was giving her the high-voltage seduction treatment, most likely coming on like a gay Raskolnikov looking to her to save him from a tormented life of buggery. As he purred in her ear she kept moistening her lips and blushing, and batting her eyes, and fingering the crucifix, yes, the crucifix, that hung between her jumbo bazooms. Some Sally McNally fresh out of Mother Cabrini High and not long parted from her cherry, and what a job that was getting rid of it, and now, praise all the saints, someone was actually trying to make her! Doubtless Ned was going into the spoiled-priest routine, the failed-Jesuit number, donning his aura of decadence and romantic Catholic angst. Would he really follow through? Yes, he would. As a poet in quest of Experience he frequently went slumming in the other sex, seducing always the dogs and creeps, the debris of the gender, a one-armed girl, a girl with half a jawbone, a stork twice his height, etc., etc. Ned’s idea of black humor. In truth he got laid more often than I did, gay as he was, though his conquests were no prizes except booby prizes. He claimed to take no pleasure in the act, only in the cruel game of the chase itself. See, he said, tonight you will not let me have Alcibiades, therefore I choose Xantippe. He mocked the whole straight world with his pursuit of the deformed and the undesired.

  I studied his technique awhile. I spend too much time watching things. I should have been out and prowling instead. If intensity and intellectualism were currently fashionable commodities here, why did I not peddle mine for a little tail? Are you above the merely physical, Eli? Come off it; you’re just clumsy with girls. I bought myself a whiskey sour (creeping 1957ism again! Who drinks mixed drinks now?) and turned away from the bar. Clumsy is as clumsy does. I collided with a short, dark-haired girl and spilled half my drink. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” we both said at once. She looked terrified, a frightened fawn. Slender, bird-boned, hardly five feet tall, shining solemn eyes, a prominent nose (shayneh maideleh! A member of the tribe!). A turquoise semi-see-through blouse revealing a pink brassiere beneath, indicating some ambivalence about contemporary mores. Our shynesses kindled a spark; I felt heat at my crotch, heat in my cheeks, and picked up from her the bright warmth of reciprocal combustion. Sometimes it hits you so unmistakably that you wonder why everyone around doesn’t start to cheer. We found a minuscule table and mumbled husky introductions. Mickey Bernstein, meet Eli Steinfeld. Eli, Mickey. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?

  She was a Hunter sophomore, government major, family from Kew Gardens; she shared an apartment with four other girls at Third and Seventieth. I thought I had found us our lodgings for the night—imagine, Eli the schmendrick scoring a crash!—but quickly I got the impression that the apartment was really two bedrooms and a kitchenette and wasn’t set up for that much company. She was quick to tell me that she didn’t often go to singles places, in fact almost never, but her roommate had dragged her out tonight to celebrate the beginning of the Easter recess—indicating the roommate, tall, skinny, acne-pocked gawk conferring earnestly with a gangling shaggy-bearded type dressed in 1968 floral mod—and so here she was, ill at ease, deafened by the noise, and would I please get her a cherry Coke? Suave man-of-the-world Steinfeld nailed a passing Martian and placed the order. One buck, please. Ouch. Mickey asked me what I was studying. Trapped. All right, pedant, reveal yourself. “Early medieval philology,” I said. “The disintegration of Latin into the Romance languages. I could sing you obscene ballads in Provençal, if I could sing.” She laughed, too loudly. “Oh, I have a terrible voice, too!” she cried. “But you can recite one, if you like.” Shyly taking my hand, since I had been too scholarly to think of taking hers. I said, half shouting the words into the din,

  Can vei la luzeta mover

  De joi sas alas contral rai,

  Que s.oblid.es laissa chazer

  Per la doussor c.al cor li vai—

  And so forth. Utterly snowed her. “Was that awfully dirty?” she asked at the end.

  “Not at all. It’s a tender love song, Bernart de Ventadorn, twelfth century.”

  “You recited it so beautifully.” I translated it and felt the waves of adulation coming at me. Take me, do me, she was telepathing. I calculated that she had had sexual intercourse nine times with two different men and was still nervously searching for her first orgasm, while worrying a good deal about whether she was becoming too promiscuous too soon. I was willing to do my best, blowing in her ear and whispering little treasures from the Provençal. But how could we get out of here? Where could we go? Wildly I looked around. Timothy had his arm around a frighteningly beautiful girl with sweeping cascades of glossy auburn hair. Oliver had snared two birds, brunette and blonde: the old farmboy charm at work. Ned still courted his pudgy paramour. Perhaps one of them would come up with something, a nearby apartment, bedrooms for everybody. I turned back to Mickey and she said, “We’re having a little party Saturday night. A few really groovy musicians are coming over, I mean, classical, and perhaps if you’re free you might—”

  “By Saturday night I’ll be in Arizona.”

  “Arizona! Is that where you’re from?”

  “I’m from Manhattan.”

  “Then why—I mean, I never heard of going to Arizona for Easter. Is it something new?” A sheepish flicker of a smile. “I’m sorry. You have a girl out there?�
�

  “Nothing like that.”

  She wriggled, not wanting to pry but not knowing how to halt the inquisition. The inevitable sentence tumbled out: “Why are you going, then?” And I was stopped. What could I say? For fifteen minutes I had been playing a conventional role, horny college senior on the prowl, East Side singles bar, timid but available girl, hype her with a little esoteric poetry, the eyes meeting across the table, when can I see you again, a quick Easter romance, thank you for everything, good-bye. The familiar collegiate waltz. But her question opened a trapdoor beneath me and dropped me into that other, darker world, the fantasy world, the dreamworld, where solemn young men speculated on the possibility of being reprieved forever from death, where fledgling scholars noodled themselves into believing that they had come upon arcane manuscripts revealing the secrets of ancient mystic cults. Yes, I could say, we’re going on a quest for the secret headquarters of the Brotherhood of the Skulls, do you see, we hope to persuade the Keepers that we are worthy candidates for the Trial, and of course if we are accepted, one of us must give his life gladly for the others and one is going to have to be murdered, but we’re prepared to face those eventualities because the two lucky ones will never die. Thank you, H. Rider Haggard: exactly. Again I felt the sense of harsh incongruity, of dislocation, as I contemplated the juxtaposition of our up-to-the-minute Manhattan surroundings and my implausible Arizona dream. Look, I could say, it’s necessary to make an act of faith, of mystic acceptance, to tell yourself that life isn’t entirely made up of discotheques and subways and boutiques and classrooms. You must believe that inexplicable forces exist. Are you into astrology? Of course you are; and you know what The New York Times thinks of that. So carry your acceptance a little further, as we have done. Put aside your self-conscious oh-so-very-modern rejection of the improbable and allow the possibility that there could be a Brotherhood, there could be a Trial, there could be life everlasting. How can you deny without first investigating? Can you afford to take the risk of being wrong? And so we’re going to Arizona, the four of us, the big beefy one with the crew cut and the Greek god over there and the intense-looking fellow talking to the fat girl and me, and although some of us have more faith than others there isn’t one of us who doesn’t believe at least fractionally in the Book of Skulls. Pascal chose to have faith because the odds were stacked against the unbeliever, who might be tossing away Paradise through his refusal to submit to the Church; so too with us, who are willing to look foolish for a week because we have at least the hope of gaining something beyond all price and can at worst lose nothing more than the cost of gasoline. But I said none of this to Mickey Bernstein. The music was too loud, and, anyway, the four of us had sworn a terrible sophomoric oath to reveal nothing to nobody. Instead I said, “Why Arizona? I guess because we’re cactus freaks. And it’s warm there in March.”