The Book of Skulls Page 3

  “It’s warm in Florida, too.”

  “No cactus,” I said.

  seven

  timothy

  It took me an hour to find the right girl and arrange things. Her name was Bess; she was a busty kid from Oregon; she and four other Barnard juniors shared an immense apartment on Riverside Drive. Three of the four girls had gone home for the holiday; the fourth was sitting in the corner, letting a sideburned twenty-fivish advertising-man type make his pitch. Perfect. I explained that I and my three roommates were passing through the city tonight en route to Arizona and hoped to crash someplace groovy. “We should be able to manage it,” she said. Perfect. Now I just had to get it together. Oliver was talking in a bored way with a skinny, too-bright-eyed chick in a black jumpsuit, maybe a speedhead; I pried him loose, spelled out the scene, and turned him on to Bess’s roommate Judy. A Nebraska lass, no less; quickly the Mad Ave delegate was in the can and Judy and Oliver were discussing the price of hogfeed, or whatever. Next I rounded up Ned. The freaky little fucker had picked up a girl, of all strange objects; he does shticks like that occasionally, I suppose for the sake of thumbing his nose at the straights. This one was a downer—giant nostrils, giant tits, a mound of meat. “We’re splitting,” I told him. “Bring her along, if you like.” Then I found Eli. This must have been National Heterosexuality Week; even Eli was scoring. Thin, dark sort, no flesh on her, a quick nervous smile. She was flabbergasted to discover that her Eli was rooming with a galumphing shegitz like me. “There’s room at the inn,” I said to him. “Come on.” He almost kissed my boots.

  The eight of us piled into my car—nine, counting Ned’s catch as the double she was. I drove. Introductions went on forever. Judy, Mickey, Mary, Bess; Eli, Timothy, Oliver, Ned; Judy, Timothy; Mickey, Ned; Mary, Oliver; Bess, Eli; Mickey, Judy; Mary, Bess; Oliver, Judy; Eli, Mary—oh, Jesus. It began to rain, a cold drizzle just above the freezing point. As we entered Central Park, a decrepit car about a hundred yards ahead of us went into a skid, did a wild sideways slalom off the road, and smashed into a colossal tree; the car split open and at least a dozen people flew out, rocketing off in all directions. I braked in a hurry, for some of the victims were practically in my path. Heads were cracked, necks were broken, people were moaning in Spanish. I stopped the car and said to Oliver, “We better get out and see if there’s anything we can do.” Oliver looked stunned. He has this thing about death: it guts him just to run over a squirrel. Coping with a carload of damaged Puerto Ricans was enough to send our sterling pre-med into a state of shock. As he began to mumble something, Judy from Nebraska peered around his shoulder and said with real frenzy, “No! Keep going, Tim!”

  “People are hurt,” I said.

  “There’ll be cops here any minute. They see eight kids in a car, they’ll search us before they bother with them. And I’m holding, Tim, I’m holding! We’ll all get busted!”

  She was on the edge of panic. What the crap, we couldn’t afford to waste half our vacation being arraigned because one dumb cunt felt she had to carry her stash around with her, so I nudged the pedal and steered my way carefully through the dead and dying. Would the fuzzies really have paused to hunt for dope while the ground was strewn with bodies? I couldn’t believe that, but maybe it’s because I’m conditioned to think that the police are on my side; Judy might just have been right. Paranoia is contagious these days. Anyway, I drove on, and it wasn’t until we emerged onto Central Park West that Oliver opined it had been wrong to leave the scene of the accident. Morality after the fact, said Eli from the rear, is worse than no morality at all. And Ned cried bravo. What a routine, those two.

  Bess and Judy lived up around 100th Street, in a huge, decaying apartment house that must have been a palace in 1920. Their apartment was an endless flat, room after room after room, high ceilings, gingerbread moldings, cracked lumpy plaster that had been patched and patched down through the centuries. Fifteenth floor or so: a magnificent view of New Jersey’s squalor. Bess put on a stack of records—Segovia, Stones, Sergeant Pepper, Beethoven, you name it—and fetched a jug of Ripple. Judy produced the dope that had panicked her in the park: a lump of hash as big as my nose. “You keep it on you for a good luck charm?” I asked, but it turned out she’d had it laid on her at The Plastic Cave. The pipe passed. Oliver, as usual, let it go by; I think he thinks drugs of any sort will pollute his precious bodily fluids. Ned’s Irish washerwoman also abstained—that much with-it she wasn’t prepared to be. “Come on,” I heard Ned telling her, “it’ll help you lose weight.” She looked terrified. Expecting Jesus to stride through the window any moment and rip the immortal soul out of her throbbing sinful body. The rest of us got pleasantly stoned and drifted off to various bedrooms.

  In the middle of the night I felt a certain pressure of the bladder and went searching for a john in that maze of hallways and doorways. I opened a few wrong doors. Heaps of humanity everywhere. Out of one room, sounds of passion, the regular, rhythmic bouncing of bedsprings. No need to peek: that had to be Oliver the Bull, giving his Judy her sixth or seventh ride of the night. She’d walk bowlegged for a week by the time he got through with her. Out of another room, snores and whistles: begorrah, kinky Ned’s sweet sow at her slumbers. Ned was sleeping in the hall. Enough was enough, I guess. At last I found a john, only it was occupied by Eli and Mickey, taking a shower together. I didn’t mean to intrude, but what the crap. Mickey struck a delicate Grecian pose, right hand over the black bush, left arm flung across the very minimal jugs. I would have believed she was fourteen or younger. “Excuse,” I said, backing out. Eli, dripping, naked, came out after me. I said, “Don’t make a hassle, I didn’t intend to intrude on your privacy,” but that wasn’t what was on his mind at all. He asked me if we could swing a fifth passenger for the rest of the trip. “Her?” He nodded. Love at first sight; they had clicked, they had found real happiness in each other. Now he wanted to bring her along. “Christ,” I said, coming close to waking everybody up, “have you told her about—”

  “No. Just that we’re going to Arizona.”

  “And what happens when we get there? Do you bring her to the skullhouse with us?”

  He hadn’t thought it through that far. Dazzled by her modest charms, he could see only as far as his next fuck, our brilliant Eli. Of course it was impossible. If this had been planned as an erotica trip, I’d have brought Margo and Oliver would have brought LuAnn. We were stagging it, though, excepting only such stuff as we foraged along the way, and Eli would have to abide by that. At his insistence we were a closed foursome, hermetically sealed. Now Eli wouldn’t abide. “I can drop her off in a Phoenix motel while we’re in the desert,” he argued. “She doesn’t have to know what we’re going there for.”

  “No.”

  “And anyway, does it have to be such a fucking secret, Timothy?”

  “Are you out of your tree? Aren’t you the very one who practically made us take a blood oath never to reveal a single syllable of the Book of Skulls to—”

  “You’re shouting. They’ll hear everything.”

  “Right on. Let them hear. You don’t want that, do you? To have these chicks here find out about your Fu Manchu project. And yet you’re ready to let her in on the whole thing. You aren’t thinking, Eli.”

  “Maybe I’ll forget about Arizona, then,” he said.

  I wanted to take him and shake him. Forget about Arizona? He organized it. He lured the necessary three other males into it. He went on for hours and hours to us about the importance of opening your soul to the inexplicable and the implausible and the fantastic. He goaded us to set aside mere pragmaticism and empiricism and perform an act of faith, et cetera, et cetera. Now a winsome daughter of Israel spreads her legs for him and he’s willing in a flash to give the whole thing up, just to be able to spend Easter holding hands with her at the Cloisters and the Guggenheim and other metropolitan cultural shrines. Well, crap on that. He got us into this, and, entirely leaving out of the picture the question of how muc
h faith we really had in his weirdo immortality cult, he wasn’t going to shuck us that simply. The Book of Skulls says that candidates have to present themselves in fours. I told him that we wouldn’t let him drop out. He was silent a long while. Much gulping of the Adam’s apple: sign of Great Internal Conflict. True love versus eternal life. “You can look her up when we come back east,” I reminded him. “Assuming that you’re one of those who comes back.” He was pronged on one of his own existential dilemmas. The bathroom door opened and Mickey peered chastely out, bath-toweled. “Go on,” I said. “Your lady’s waiting. I’ll see you in the morning.” Finding another john somewhere beyond the kitchen, I relieved myself and groped through the darkness back to Bess, who greeted me with little snorting sighs. Caught me by the ears, pulled me down between her bouncy, rubbery knockers. Large breasts, my father told me when I was fifteen, are rather vulgar; a gentleman chooses his women by other criteria. Yes, Dad, but they make groovy pillows. Bess and I celebrated the rites of spring one final time. I slept. At six in the morning Oliver, fully dressed, woke me. Ned and Eli were up and dressed already, too. All the girls were asleep. We breakfasted silently, rolls and coffee, and were on the road before seven, the four of us, up Riverside Drive to the George Washington Bridge, across into Jersey, westward on Interstate 80. Oliver did the driving. Old Iron Man.

  eight

  oliver

  Don’t go, LuAnn said, whatever it is, don’t go, don’t get involved, I don’t like the sound of it. And I hadn’t told her much at all, really. Just the externals of it: a religious group in Arizona, see, a sort of monastery, in fact, and Eli thinks it could be of great spiritual value for the four of us to pay it a visit. We might gain a whole lot from going, I told LuAnn. And her immediate response was one of fear. The housewife syndrome: if you don’t know what it is, don’t go near it. Frightened, in-drawing. She’s a sweet kid but she’s too predictable. Perhaps if I had told her about the never-dying aspect she might have reacted differently. But of course I’d sworn not to breathe a word. And in any case, even immortality would scare LuAnn. Don’t, she’d say, there’s a catch in it, something awful will come out of it, it’s strange and mysterious and frightening, it isn’t God’s will that such things should be. Each of us owes God a death. Beethoven died. Jesus died. President Eisenhower died. Do you think you should be excused from dying, Oliver, if they had to go? Please don’t get mixed up in this.

  Death. What does poor simpleheaded LuAnn know about death? She even has her grandparents still alive. Death is an abstraction for her, something that happened to Beethoven and Jesus. I know death better, LuAnn. I see his grinning skullface every night. And I have to fight him. I have to spit at him. Eli comes to me, he says, I know where you can get excused from dying, Oliver, it’s just out yonder in Arizona. Visit the Brotherhood and play their little game, and they’ll release you from the wheel of fire. Do not pass Go, do not descend into the grave, do not put on corruption. They can pluck his sting. How can I pass up the chance?

  Death, LuAnn. Think about the death of LuAnn Chambers, say, next Thursday morning. Not in 1997, but next Thursday morning. You’re walking down Elm Street on your way to visit your grandparents, and a car comes flying out of control at you the way the car of those poor Puerto Ricans went out of control last night, and—no, I take that back. I don’t think even the Brotherhood can protect you against accidental death, violent death; whatever process they have, it doesn’t work miracles, only retards physical decay. We start again, LuAnn. You’re walking down Elm Street on your way to visit your grandparents and a blood vessel treacherously bursts in your temple. Cerebral hemorrhage. Why not? It can happen to nineteen-year-olds once in a while, I suppose. The blood bubbles through your skull and your legs fold up and you hit the sidewalk, wriggling and kicking, and you know something bad is happening to you but you can’t even scream, and in ten seconds you’re dead. You have been subtracted from the universe, LuAnn. No, the universe has been subtracted from you. Forget what’s going to happen to your body now, the worms in your gut, the pretty blue eyes turning to muck, and just think about all you’ve lost. You’ve lost it all, sunrise and sunset, the smell of broiling steak, the feel of a cashmere sweater, the touch of my lips that you like so much against your little hard nipples. You’ve lost the Grand Canyon and Shakespeare and London and Paris and champagne and your big church wedding and Paul McCartney and Peter Fonda and the Mississippi River and the moon and the stars. You’ll never have babies and you’ll never taste real caviar, because you’re dead on the sidewalk and the juices are already going sour in you. Why should that be, LuAnn? Why should we be put into such a wonderful world and then have everything taken away from us? God’s will? No, LuAnn, God is love, and God wouldn’t have done such a cruel thing to us, so therefore there is no God, there’s only death, Death, whom we must reject. Not everyone dies at nineteen? That’s true, LuAnn. I loaded the dice a little there. What if you hung on until 1997, yes, you had your church wedding and your babies, you saw Paris and Tokyo, too, you tasted champagne and caviar, and you went to the moon for a Christmas trip with your husband the rich doctor? And then Death came to you and said, Okay, LuAnn, it was a good trip, wasn’t it, baby, only it’s over now. Zap and you have cancer of the cervix, rotting ovaries, one of those female things, and it metastasizes overnight and you come apart, turning into a puddle of stinking fluids in the county hospital. Does the fact that you lived a full life for forty or fifty years make you any more willing to check out? Doesn’t that just make the joke sicker, to find out how groovy life can be and then to be cut off? You’ve never thought about these things, LuAnn, but I have. And I tell you: the longer you live, the longer you want to live. Unless, of course, you’re in pain or deformed or alone in the world and it’s all become a terrible burden. But if you love life, you’ll never have enough of it. Even you, you sweet placid nothinghead, you won’t want to go. And I don’t want to go. I’ve thought about the death of Oliver Marshall, believe you me, and I reject the concept entirely. Why did I go into the pre-med program? Not so I could make a fortune prescribing pills for suburban ladies, but so I could do research in geriatrics, in senility phenomena, in life extension. So I could stick my finger in Death’s eye. That was my big dream, still is; but Eli tells me of the Keepers of the Skulls, and I listen to him. I listen. At sixty miles an hour we roll westward. The death of Oliver Marshall could happen eight seconds from now—whiz, crash, smash!—and it could happen ninety years from now and perhaps it will never happen. Perhaps it will never happen.

  Consider Kansas, LuAnn. You only know Georgia, but for a moment consider Kansas. Miles of corn, and the dusty wind whipping off the plains. Growing up in a town with 953 inhabitants. Give us this day our daily death, O Lord. The wind, the dust, the highway, the thin sharp faces. You want to see a movie? You drive half a day to Emporia. You want to buy a book? I guess you go to Topeka for that. Chinese food? Pizza? Enchiladas? Don’t be funny. Your school has eight grades and nineteen students. One teacher. He doesn’t know much, he grew up around here, too; too sickly to farm, he got a job teaching. The dust, LuAnn. The waving corn. The long summer afternoons. Sex. Sex isn’t a mystery there, LuAnn, it’s a necessity. Thirteen years old, you go behind the barn, you go to the far side of the creek. It’s the only game there is. We all played it. Christa pulls down her jeans; how strange she looks, she’s got nothing between her legs but yellow curls. Now you show me yours, she says. Here, get on top of me. Is it a thrill, LuAnn? It’s no thrill. You’re desperate, so you do it, and all the girls are pregnant by the time they’re sixteen, and the wheel keeps turning. It’s death, LuAnn, death in life. I couldn’t take it. I had to escape. Not to Wichita, not to Kansas City, but east, to the real world, the world on the TV. Do you know how hard I worked to get out of Kansas? Saving to buy books. Sixty miles twice a day to get to high school and back. The whole Abe Lincoln bit, yes, because I was living the one and irreplaceable life of Oliver Marshall, and I couldn’t afford to waste i
t raising corn. Fine, a scholarship to an Ivy League school. Fine, straight-A average in the pre-med program. I’m a climber, LuAnn, the devil’s burning my tail and I have to keep going higher. But for what? For what? For thirty or forty or fifty pretty decent years, and then the exit? No. No. I reject that. Death may have been good enough for Beethoven and Jesus and President Eisenhower, but, meaning no offense, I’m different, I can’t just lie down and go. Why is it all so short? Why does it come so soon? Why can’t we drink the universe? Death’s been hovering over me all my life. My father, he died at thirty-six, stomach cancer, he coughed blood one day and said, Hon, I think I’ve been losing a lot of weight lately, and ten days later he looked like a skeleton, and ten days after that he was a skeleton. They let him have thirty-six years. What kind of life is that? I was eleven when he died. I had a dog, the dog died, muzzle turning gray, ears going limp, tail hanging, good-bye. I had grandparents once, just like you, four of them, they died, one two three four, the leathery faces, the gravestones in the dust. Why? Why? Why? I want to see so much, LuAnn! Africa and Asia and the South Pole, and Mars, and the planets out by Alpha Centauri! I want to watch the sunrise the day the twenty-first century starts, and the twenty-second century, too. Am I greedy? Yes, I’m greedy. I have it now. I have it all. I’m scheduled to lose it all, just like everyone else, and I refuse to surrender. So I drive west with the morning sun at my back and Timothy snoring next to me and Ned writing poetry back there and Eli brooding about the girl Timothy wouldn’t let him keep, and I think all this to you, LuAnn, these things I couldn’t explain. Oliver Marshall’s Meditation on Death. Soon we’ll be in Arizona. Then will come the disappointment and the disillusionment, and we’ll have some beers and tell ourselves the whole thing was obviously a crock, and we’ll drive east to resume the process of dying. But maybe not, LuAnn, maybe not. The chance exists. The barest merest chance that Eli’s book is legitimate.