The Book of Skulls Read online

  The chance exists.

  nine

  ned

  We have driven four or five or six hundred miles so far today, and hardly a word has been spoken since early morning. Patterns of tension rivet us and hold us apart. Eli angry at Timothy; myself angry at Timothy; Timothy annoyed with Eli and me; Oliver bothered by all of us. Eli is angry at Timothy for not permitting him to bring with us that little dark-haired girl he picked up last night. My sympathies are with Eli; I know how hard it is for him to find women who are simpatico, and what anguish he must have felt at having to part with her. Yet Timothy was right: to take her along was unthinkable. I have my own grudge with Timothy for his interference in my sex life at the singles bar; he could just as easily have let me go with that boy to his pad and picked me up there in the morning. But no, Timothy was afraid I’d get beaten to death in the night—you know how it is, Ned, they always beat queers to death sooner or later—and so he wouldn’t let me out of his sight. What is it to him if I’m beaten to death while pursuing my dirty pleasures? It would shatter the mandala, is what. The four-cornered framework, the holy diamond. Three could not present themselves to the Keepers of the Skulls; I am the necessary fourth. So Timothy, who makes it very clear that he believes scarcely a shred of the skullhouse mythos, nevertheless is sternly determined to shepherd the group intact to the shrine. I like that determination of his: it has the proper contradictory resonances, the appropriate ring of clashing absurdities. This is a half-assed trip, says Timothy, but I’m going to go through with it and by crap you guys are going to go through with it too!

  There are other tensions this morning. Timothy is sullen and withdrawn, I suppose because he dislikes the paternal/schoolmasterly role he had to play last night and resents our having forced it on him. (He surely thinks we deliberately set him up for it.) Also, I suspect Timothy is subliminally peeved at me for having bestowed my favors on sad bestial Mary: gay is gay, in Tim’s book, and he believes, probably correctly, that I’m simply jeering at straights when I dabble in ugly-girl heterosex.

  And Oliver is even more quiet than usual. I guess we seem frivolous to him and he detests us for it. Poor purposeful Oliver! A self-made man, as he reminds us now and then by implicit rather than explicit disapproval of our attitudes—a consciously Lincolnesque figure who has pulled himself up out of the corny wastelands of Kansas to attain the lofty status of a pre-med student at the nation’s most tradition-encrusted college, bar one or two, and who through some fluke of fate has found himself sharing an apartment and a destiny with: (1) a poetic pansy, (2) a member of the idle rich, (3) a neurotic Jewish scholastic. While Oliver dedicates himself to preserving lives through the rites of Asklepios, I am content to scribble contemporary incomprehensibilities, Eli is content to translate and elucidate ancient and forgotten incomprehensibilities, and Timothy is content to clip coupons and play polo. You alone, Oliver, have social relevance, you who have vowed to be a healer of mankind. Ha! What if Eli’s temple really does exist and we are granted what we seek? Where’s your healing art then, Oliver? Why be a doctor if mumbo jumbo can let you live forever? Ah, then! Farewell! Oliver’s occupation’s gone!

  We are in western Pennsylvania, now, or else eastern Ohio, I forget which. Tonight’s destination is Chicago. The miles click by; one turnpike looks like another. We are flanked by barren wintry hills. A pale sun. A bleached sky. Occasionally a filling station, a restaurant, the hint of a drab, soulless town behind the woods. Oliver drove for two silent hours and tossed the keys to Timothy; Timothy drove half an hour, grew bored, asked me to take over. I am the Richard Nixon of the automobile—tense, overeager, bumptious, forever miscalculating and apologizing, ultimately incompetent. Despite his handicaps of the soul, Nixon became president; despite my lapses of coordination and attention, I have a driver’s license. Eli has a theory that all American males can be divided into two moieties, those capable of driving and those who cannot drive, the former being suitable only for breeding and manual labor, the latter embodying the true genius of the race. He regards me as a traitor to the clerisy because I know which foot to put on the brake and which on the accelerator, but I think after experiencing an hour of my driving he’s begun to revise his harsh placement of me. I am no driver, I merely masquerade. Timothy’s Lincoln Continental is like a bus to me; I oversteer, I wobble. Give me a VW and I’ll show my stuff. Oliver, never a good passenger, eventually lost his nerve and told me he’d take over the wheel again. There he sits now, our golden charioteer, flogging us toward sundown.

  A book I was reading not long ago drew a structural metaphor of society from an ethnographical film about some African bushmen out hunting a giraffe. They had wounded one of the big beasts with their poisoned arrows, but now they had to follow their prey across the bleak Kalahari, chasing him until he dropped, which would take a week or more. There were four of them, bound in tight alliance. The Headman, the leader of the hunting unit. The Shaman, the craftsman and magician, who invoked supernatural aid when needed and otherwise served as the conduit between the divine charisma and the realities of the desert. The Hunter or Beautiful One, famous for his grace, speed, and physical strength, who bore the hardest burdens of the hunt. Lastly, the Clown, small and freaky, who mocked the mysteries of the Shaman, the beauty and strength of the Hunter, the self-importance of the Headman. These four constituted a single organism, each essential to the whole of the chase. From this the writer developed the polarities of the group, invoking a couple of Yeatsian counterrotating gyres: Shaman and Clown are the left gyre, the Ideational; and Hunter and Headman are the right gyre, the Operational. Each gyre realizes possibilities inaccessible to the other; each is useless without the other, but together they form a stable group in which all the skills are balanced. Onward from there to develop the ultimate metaphor, rising from the tribal to the national: the Headman becomes the State, the Hunter becomes the Military, the Shaman becomes the Church, the Clown becomes Art. We carry the macrocosm in this car. Timothy, our Headman; Eli, our Shaman; Oliver, our Beautiful One, our Hunter. And I, the Clown. And I, the Clown.

  ten

  oliver

  Eli saved the nasty part for last, after we were hooked on the idea of going. Leafing through the papers of his translation, frowning, nodding, pretending to have trouble finding the passage he wanted, though you bet he knew all the time where it was. And then reading to us:

  “The Ninth Mystery is this: that the price of a life must always be a life. Know, O Nobly-Born, that eternities must be balanced by extinctions, and therefore we ask of thee that the ordained balance be gladly sustained. Two of thee we undertake to admit to our fold. Two must go into darkness. As by living we daily die, so then by dying we shall forever live. Is there one among thee who will relinquish eternity for his brothers of the four-sided figure, so that they may come to comprehend the meaning of self-denial? And is there one among thee whom his comrades are prepared to sacrifice, so that they may come to comprehend the meaning of exclusion? Let the victims choose themselves. Let them define the quality of their lives by the quality of their departures.”

  Cloudy stuff. We poked and prodded at it for hours, Ned exercising all his Jesuitical muscles on it, and even so we could only pull one meaning from it, an ugly one, the obvious one. There had to be a volunteer for suicide. And two of the remaining three had to murder the third. Those are the terms of the deal. Are they for real? Maybe it’s all metaphorical. Meant to be interpreted in a symbolic way. Instead of actual deaths, say, one of the four simply has to volunteer to give up taking part in the ritual and goes away still mortal. Then two of the others have to gang up on the third and force him to leave the shrine. Could that be it? Eli believes literal deaths are involved. Of course, Eli is very literal-minded about this mysticism; he takes the irrational things of life extremely seriously and doesn’t seem to care much about the rational things at all. Ned, who doesn’t take anything seriously, agrees with Eli. I don’t think Ned has much faith in the Book of Skulls, but
his position is that if any of it is true, then the Ninth Mystery must be interpreted as demanding two deaths. Timothy also doesn’t take anything seriously, though his way of laughing at the world is altogether different from Ned’s: Ned’s a conscious cynic, Timothy just doesn’t give a damn. It’s a deliberately demonic pose for Ned and a matter of having too much family money for Timothy. So Timothy doesn’t fret much about the Ninth Mystery; to him it’s bullshit, like all the rest of the Book of Skulls.

  What about Oliver?

  Oliver doesn’t know. I have faith in the Book of Skulls, yes, because I have faith in it, and so I suppose I accept the literal interpretation of the Ninth Mystery, too. But I’ve gone into this in order to live, not to die, and so I haven’t really thought much about the chances of my drawing the short straw. Assuming the Ninth Mystery is what we think it is, who, then, will the victims be? Ned has already let it be known that he doesn’t care much whether he lives or dies; one night in February when he was stoned he delivered a two-hour speech on the esthetics of suicide. Red in the face, sweating and puffing, waving his arms, Lenin on a soapbox; we tuned in now and then and got his drift. Okay, we apply the usual Ned discount and conclude that his death talk is nine-tenths a romantic gesture; that will still leave him the outstanding candidate for voluntary exit. And the murder victim? Eli, of course. It couldn’t be me; I’d fight too hard, I’d take at least one of the bastards with me, and they all know it. And Timothy, he’s built like a mountain, you couldn’t kill him with hammers. Whereas Timothy and I could polish off Eli in two minutes or less.

  Christ, how I hate this kind of speculation!

  I don’t want to kill anybody. I don’t want anyone to die. I only want to go on living, myself, as long as I possibly can.

  But if those are the terms? If the price of a life is a life?

  Christ. Christ. Christ.

  eleven

  eli

  We came into Chicago at twilight, after a long day of driving. Sixty, seventy miles an hour, hour after hour after hour broken only by infrequent rest stops. The last four hours we didn’t even stop, Oliver hurtling like a madman down the turnpike. Cramped legs. Stiff ass. Glazed eyes. My brain fuggy, blurred by excessive traveling. Highway hypnosis. As the sun sank, all color seemed to leave the world; an all-pervading blue engulfed everything—blue sky, blue fields, blue pavement, the whole spectrum draining toward the ultraviolet. It was like being on the ocean, unable to distinguish what lies above the horizon from what lies below. I had very little sleep last night. Two hours at the very most, probably less. When we weren’t actually talking or making love, we lay side by side in a groggy doze. Mickey! Ah, Mickey! The scent of you is on my fingertips. I inhale. Three tumbles between midnight and dawn. How shy you were at first, in the narrow bedroom, flaking pale green paint, psychedelic posters, John Lennon and saggy-cheeked Yoko looking down on us as we stripped, and you huddled your shoulders together, you tried to hide your breasts from me, you slipped into bed quickly, seeking the safety of the sheets. Why? Do you think your body’s so deficient? All right, you’re thin, your elbows are sharp, your breasts are small. You’re not Aphrodite. Do you need to be? Am I Apollo? At least you didn’t shrink from my touch. I wonder if you came. I can never tell if they come. Where are the great wailing, shrieking, whooping spasms I read about? Other girls, I suppose. Mine are too polite for such volcanic orgasmic eruptions. I should become a monk. Leave screwing for the screwers and channel my energies into the pursuit of the profound. I’m probably not much good at fuckery anyway. Let Origen be my guide: in a moment of exaltation I’ll perform an autoorchidectomy and deposit my balls on the holy altar as an offering. Thereafter no longer to feel the distractions of passion. Alas, no, I enjoy it too much. Grant me chastity, God, but, please, not just yet. I have Mickey’s phone number. When I come back from Arizona I’ll give her a ring. (When I come back. If I come back! And when and if, what will I be?) Mickey’s the right sort of girl for me, indeed. I must set modest sexual goals. Not for me the blond sex bomb, not for me the cheerleader, not for me the sophisticated society-girl contralto. For me the sweet shy mice. Oliver’s LuAnn would bore me flaccid in fifteen minutes, though I imagine I could tolerate her once for the sake of her breasts. And Timothy’s Margo? Let’s not think about her, shall we? Mickey for me. Mickey: bright, pale, retiring, available. Eight hundred miles east of me at the moment. I wonder what she’s telling her friends about me. Let her magnify me. Let her romanticize me. I can use it.

  So we are in Chicago. Why Chicago? Does it not lie somewhat off the direct route between New York and Phoenix? I think it does. If I were navigating, I’d have plotted a course that sagged from one corner of the continent to the other, through Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, but maybe the fastest highways don’t take the most direct line, and in any event here we are up in Chicago, apparently on Timothy’s whim. He has a sentimental fondness for the city. He grew up here; at least, that part of his childhood that he didn’t spend on his father’s Pennsylvania estate he spent in his mother’s penthouse on Lake Shore Drive. Are there any Episcopalians who don’t get divorced every sixteen years? Are there any who don’t have two full sets of mothers and fathers, as a bare minimum? I see the wedding announcements in the Sunday newspapers. “Miss Rowan Demarest Hemple, daughter of Mrs. Charles Holt Wilmerding of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and Mr. Dayton Belknap Hemple of Bedford Hills, New York, and Montego Bay, Jamaica, were married here this afternoon in All Saints Episcopal Chapel to Dr. Forrester Chiswell Birdsall the 4th, son of Mrs. Elliot Moulton Peck of Bar Harbor, Maine, and Mr. Forrester Chiswell Birdsall the 3rd of East Islip, Long Island.” Et cetera ad infinitum. What a conclave such a wedding must be, with the multiple couples gathering round to jubilate, everybody cousin to everyone else, all of them married two or three times apiece. The names, the triple names, sanctified by time, girls named Rowan and Choate and Palmer, boys named Amory and McGeorge and Harcourt. I grew up with Barbaras and Loises and Claires, Mikes and Dicks and Sheldons. McGeorge becomes “Mac,” but what do you call young Harcourt when you’re playing ring-a-levio? What about a girl named Palmer or Choate? A different world, these Wasps, a different world. Divorce! The mother (Mrs. X.Y.Z.) lives in Chicago, the father (Mr. A.B.C. the 3rd) lives just outside Philadelphia. My parents, who are going to observe their thirtieth anniversary come August, screamed at each other all through my boyhood: divorce, divorce, divorce, I’ve had enough, I’m going to walk out and never come back! The normal middle-class incompatibility. But divorce? Call a lawyer? My father would have himself uncircumcised first. My mother would walk naked into Gimbels first. In every Jewish family there’s an aunt who got divorced once, a long time ago, we don’t talk about it now. (You always find out by overhearing two of your elderly relatives in their cups, reminiscing.) But never anyone with children. You never have these clusters of parents, requiring such intricate introductions: I’d like you to meet my mother and her husband, I’d like you to meet my father and his wife.

  Timothy didn’t visit his mother while we were in Chicago. We stayed not very far south of her, in a lake-front motel opposite Grant Park (Timothy paid for the room, with a credit card, no less) but he didn’t even phone her. The warm, strong bonds of goyishe family life, yes, indeed. (Call up, have a fight, so why not?) Instead he took us on a nighttime tour of the city, behaving in part as though he were its sole proprietor and in part as if he were the guide on a Gray Line bus tour. Here we have the twin towers of Marina City, here we have the John Hancock Building, this is the Art Institute, this is the fabulous shopping district of Michigan Avenue. Actually, I was impressed, I who had never been west of Parsippany, New Jersey, but who had a clear and vivid impression of the probable nature of the great American heartland. I had expected Chicago to be grimy and cramped, the summit of midwestern dreariness, with nineteenth-century redbrick buildings seven stories high and a population made up entirely of Polish, Hungarian, and Irish workmen in overalls. Whereas this was a city of broad avenues an
d glowing towers. The architecture was stunning; there was nothing in New York to equal it. Of course, we stayed close to the lake. Go five blocks inland, you’ll see all the dreariness you want, Ned promised. The narrow strip of Chicago we saw was a wonderland. Timothy took us to dinner at a French restaurant, his favorite, opposite a curious monument of antiquity known as the Water Tower. One more reminder of the truth of Fitzgerald’s maxim about the very rich: they are different from you and me. I know from French restaurants the way you know from Tibetan or Martian ones. My parents never took me to Le Pavillon or Chambord for celebrations; I got the Brass Rail for my high school graduation, Schrafft’s the day I won my scholarship, dinner for three something under twelve dollars, and considered myself lucky at that. On those infrequent occasions when I take a girl out to dinner, the cuisine necessarily is no hauter than pizza or kung po chi ding. The menu at Timothy’s place, an extravaganza of engraved gold lettering on sheets of vellum somewhat larger than the Times, was a mystery to me. Yet here was Timothy, my classmate, my roommate, making his way easily through its arcana, suggesting to us that we try the quenelles aux huîtres, the crêpes farcies et roulées, the escalopes de veau à l’estragon, the tournedos sautés chasseur, the homard à l’américaine. Oliver, naturally, was as much adrift as I, but to my surprise, Ned, with a lower-middle-class background not much different from my own, proved knowledgeable, and learnedly discussed with Timothy the relative merits of the gratin de ris de veau, the rognons de veau à la bordelaise, the caneton aux cerises, the suprêmes de volaille aux champignons. (The summer he was sixteen, he explained afterward, he had served as catamite to a distinguished Southampton gourmet.) It was ultimately impossible for me to cope with the menu, and Ned selected a dinner for me, Timothy doing the same for Oliver. I remember oysters, turtle soup, white wine followed by red, a marvelous something of lamb, potatoes made mostly of air, broccoli in a thick yellow sauce. Snifters of cognac for everyone afterward. Legions of waiters hovered over us as solicitously as though we were four bankers out on a binge, not four shabbily dressed college boys. I caught a glimpse of the check and it stunned me: $112, exclusive of tip. With a grand flourish Timothy produced his credit card. I felt feverish, dizzy, overstuffed; I thought I might vomit at the table, there amid the crystal chandeliers, the red plush wallpaper, the elegant linens. The spasm passed without disgrace and once outside I felt better, though still queasy. I made a mental note to spend forty or fifty years of my immortality in a serious study of the culinary arts. Timothy spoke of forging onward to groovy coffeehouses farther to the north, but the rest of us were tired and we voted him down. Back to the hotel, a long walk, perhaps an hour through the cutting cold.