The Book of Skulls Read online

  We had taken a suite, two bedrooms, Ned and I in one, Timothy and Oliver in the other. I dumped my clothes and collapsed quickly into bed. Not enough sleep, too much food: ghastly, ghastly. Exhausted though I was, I remained awake, more or less, dozing, stupefied. The rich dinner lay like stones in my gut. A good puking, I decided some hours later, would be best for me. Purge-bound, I staggered naked toward the bathroom separating the two bedrooms. And encountered a terrifying apparition in the dark corridor. A naked girl, taller than I, with long heavy breasts, startlingly flaring hips, a corona of short curling brown hair. A succubus of the night! A phantom spawned by my overheated imagination! “Hi, handsome,” she said, and winked, and passed me in a miasma of perfume and lust-smells, leaving me to stare in astonishment at her opulent retreating buttocks until the bathroom door closed behind them. I shivered with fright and horniness. Not even on acid had I experienced such tangible hallucinations; could Escoffier achieve what LSD could not? How beautiful, how meaty, how elegant she was. I heard water running in the john. Peered into the far bedroom, my eyes fully adjusted to the darkness now. Frilly feminine clothes scattered everywhere. Timothy snoring in one bed; in the other, Oliver, and on Oliver’s pillow, a second head, female. No hallucinations, then. Where had they found these girls? The room next door? No. I understood. Call girls supplied by room service. The trusty credit card strikes again. Timothy comprehends the American way as I, poor cramped studious ghetto lad, never could hope to do. Want a woman? You have but to lift the phone and ask. My throat was dry; my mast was raised; I felt thunder in my chest. Timothy sleeps; very well, since she’s been hired for the night, I’ll borrow her awhile. When she comes out of the john I’ll swagger up to her, one hand on her tits, one to the rump, feel the silky satiny smoothness of her, give her the Bogart rumble deep down in the throat, invite her to my bed. Indeed. And the bathroom door opened. She glided forth, breasts swaying, ding-dong-ding-dong. Another wink. And past me, gone. I groped air. Her long, lean back, swelling into two astounding globular cheeks; the scent of cheap musky fragrance; the fluid, hip-wiggling stride; the bedroom door closing in my face. She is hired, but not for me. She is Timothy’s. I went into the john, knelt before the throne, spent eons upchucking. Then to my lonely bed for cold bad-trip dreams. In the morning, no girls visible. We were on the road before nine, Oliver at the wheel, St. Louis our next port of call. I sank into apocalyptic gloom. I would have shattered empires that morning, if my thumb had been on the right button. I would have unleashed Strangelove. I would have set free the Fenris wolf. I would have zapped the universe, had the chance been mine.

  twelve

  oliver

  I drove for five hours without a break. It was beautiful. They wanted to stop, to piss, to stretch their legs, to get hamburgers, to do this, to do that, but I didn’t pay any attention, I just went driving on. My foot glued to the accelerator, my fingers resting lightly on the steering wheel, my back absolutely straight, my head almost motionless, my eyes trained on a point twenty or thirty feet in front of the windshield. The rhythm of motion possessed me. It was almost a sexual thing: the long glossy car leaping forward, raping the highway, me in command. I took real pleasure from it. I actually got hard for a while. Last night, with those whores Timothy found, my heart wasn’t really in it. Oh, I went three rounds, but only because it was expected of me, and in my thrifty hayseed way I didn’t want to waste Timothy’s money. Three pops I had, the way the girl said it: “You want to work off another pop now, sweet?” But this, with the car, the long sustained unending thrust of the cylinders, this is practically a kind of intercourse, this is ecstasy. I think I understand now what the motorcycle freaks feel. On and on and on. The throbbing underneath you. We took Route 66, down through Joliet, through Bloomington, on towards Springfield. Not much traffic, lines of trucks in some places but otherwise hardly anything, and the telephone poles going flick-flick-flick past me all the time. A mile a minute, three hundred miles in five hours, even for me an excellent average for driving in the East. Bare, flat fields, some of them still covered with snow. Complaints from the peanut gallery, Eli calling me a goddamn driving machine, Ned nagging me to stop. I pretended I didn’t hear them. Eventually they left me alone. Timothy slept, mostly. I was king of the road. By noon it was apparent we’d be in St. Louis in another couple of hours. The plan had been to spend the night there, but that no longer made sense, and when Timothy woke up he got out his maps and tourist guides and started figuring the next lap of the trip. He and Eli had a fight over the way Timothy had planned things. I didn’t pay much attention. I think Eli’s point was that we should have headed for Kansas City, not St. Louis, coming out of Chicago. I could have told them that a long time ago, but I didn’t care what route they took; anyway I wasn’t keen on passing through Kansas again. Timothy hadn’t realized Chicago and St. Louis were so close together when he first sketched our route.

  I tuned out their squabbling and spent some time thinking about something Eli had said last night while we were running around sightseeing in Chicago. They hadn’t been moving fast enough for me, and I tried to nag them into hustling some, and Eli said, “You’re really devouring this city, aren’t you? Like a tourist doing Paris.”

  “I haven’t ever seen Chicago before,” I told him. “I want to get in as much of it as I can.”

  “Okay, that’s cool,” he said. But I wanted to know why he was so surprised that I was curious about strange cities. He looked uncomfortable and seemed eager to change the subject. I prodded him. Finally he said, with the little laugh he uses to tell you that he’s going to say something with insulting implications but you mustn’t think he’s serious, “I just wondered why someone who seems so normal, so well-adjusted, is all that interested in sightseeing so intensely.” He amplified, unwillingly: to Eli, the hunger for experience, the quest for knowledge, the eagerness to see what’s over the next hill are all traits that pertain primarily to those who are underprivileged in some way—members of minority groups, people who have physical blemishes or handicaps, those troubled by social hang-ups, and so forth. A big good-looking muscular clod like me isn’t supposed to have the neuroses that engender intellectual curiosity; he’s supposed to be relaxed and easygoing, like Timothy. My little display of intensity was out of character, according to Eli’s reading of what my character ought to be. Because he’s so far into the ethnic thing, I was ready to have him tell me that the desire to learn is fundamentally a trait found in his people, with a few honorable exceptions. But he didn’t quite come out with that, though he was probably thinking it. I wondered then, and still do, why he thinks I’m so well adjusted. Must you be five feet seven, with one shoulder a little higher than the other, in order to have the obsessions and compulsions that Eli equates with intelligence? Eli underestimates me. He’s got me stereotyped: big dumb handsome goy. I’d like to let him look inside my Gentile skull for five minutes.

  We were approaching St. Louis, now. Racing along an empty interstate highway through open farmland; then into something dank and dismal calling itself East St. Louis; and finally the gleaming Gateway Arch, looming up on the far side of the river. We came to a bridge. The idea of crossing the Mississippi absolutely left Eli stoned; he stuck his head and shoulders out of the car, staring out, as though he were crossing the Jordan. When we were on the St. Louis side, I stopped the car in front of a shiny circular motel. The three of them rushed out and scampered around like lunatics. I didn’t leave the driver’s seat. Wheels were going round in my head. Five unbroken hours of driving. Ecstasy! At last I got up. My right leg was numb. I had to limp for the first few minutes. But it was worth it for those five beautiful hours, those private hours, alone with the car and the highway. I was sorry we had to stop at all.

  thirteen

  ned

  A cold blue Ozark evening. Exhaustion, anoxia, nausea: the dividends of auto-fatigue. Enough is enough; here we halt. Four red-eyed robots stagger out of the car. Did we really drive more than a thousand
miles today? Yes, a thousand and some, clear across Illinois and Missouri into Oklahoma, long stretches at seventy or eighty miles per, and if Oliver had had his way we’d have driven five hundred more before knocking off. But we couldn’t have gone on. Oliver himself admits the quality of his performance began to decline after his six-hundredth mile of the day. He nearly totaled us outside of Joplin, glassy-faced and groggy, wrists failing to deal with the curve his eyes registered. Timothy drove perhaps a hundred miles today, a hundred fifty; I must have done the rest, several stints amounting to three or four hours’ worth, sheer terror all the way. But now we must stop. The psychic toll is too great. Doubt, despair, depression, dejection have seeped into our sturdy band. Dejected, disheartened, discouraged, disillusioned, dismayed, we slither into our chosen motel, wondering in our various ways how we could have persuaded ourselves to undertake this expedition. Aha! The Moment-of-Truth Motor Lodge, Nowhere, Oklahoma! The Edge of Reality Motel! Skepticism Inn! Twenty units, fake Colonial, plastic red-brick facing and white wooden columns flanking the entrance. We are the only guests, it seems. Gum-chewing female night clerk, about seventeen years old, her hair teased up into a fantastic 1962 beehive and held in place with embalming fluid. She looks at us languidly, no flicker of interest. Heavy eye makeup, turquoise with black edging. A doxy, a drab, too dumb-whorish even to be a successful whore. “Coffee shop closes at ten,” she tells us. Bizarre twanging drawl. Timothy is thinking about inviting her to his room for some fucking, that’s obvious to us all; I think he wants to add her to some collection he’s making of all-American types. Actually—let me say it in my capacity as objective observer, subspecies polymorphous perverse—she wouldn’t really be bad-looking, given a good scrubbing to get rid of all that makeup and hair spray. Fine high breasts jutting against her green uniform; outstanding cheekbones and nose. But the dull eyes, the slack pouting lips, can’t be washed away. Oliver gives Timothy a fiery scowl, warning him not to start anything with her. For once Timothy yields: the prevailing mood of depression has him down, too. She assigns us to adjoining double rooms, thirteen dollars apiece, and Timothy offers her his omnipotent slice of plastic. “Room’s around to the left,” she says, doing her thing with the credit-card machine, and, having done it, disconnects completely from our presence, returning her attention to a Japanese television set with a five-inch screen perched on her counter. We go out to the left, past the drained swimming pool, and let ourselves into our rooms. We must hurry or we’ll miss dinner. Drop the luggage, splash water in the faces, out to the coffee shop. One waitress, slouch-backed, gum-chewing; could be the sister of the desk clerk. She too has had a long day; there is an acrid cunty smell about her that hits us hard as she bends over us to plunk silverware on the Formica tabletop. “What’ll it be, boys?” No escalopes de veau tonight, no caneton aux cerises. Dead hamburgers, oily coffee. We eat in silence and silently shuffle back to our lodgings. Off with the sweaty clothes. Into the shower, Eli first, then me. The door connecting our room to theirs can be opened. It is opened. Dull boomings from beyond: Oliver, naked, is kneeling before the television set, twiddling dials. I survey him, his taut rear, broad back, the dangling genitals visible below his muscle-bunched thighs. I repress my warped lustful thoughts. These three humanitarians have coped quite well with the problem of living with a bisexual roommate; they pretend that my “sickness,” my “condition,” does not exist, and carry on from there. The prime liberal rule: don’t patronize the handicapped. Pretend that the blind man can see, that the black man is white, that the gay man feels no stirrings at the sight of Oliver’s smooth firm ass. Not that I have ever overtly offered at him. But he knows. He knows. Oliver’s no fool.

  Why are we so depressed tonight? Why this loss of faith?

  It must have come from Eli. He was bleak all day, lost in realms of existential despondency. I think it was a purely personal gloom, born of Eli’s difficulties in relating to the immediate environment and to the cosmos at large, but it subtly, surreptitiously generalized itself and infected us all. It takes the form of grinding doubts:

  Why have we bothered to make this trip?

  What do we really expect to gain?

  Can we really hope to find what we’re looking for?

  If we find it, do we want it?

  So it must begin again, the task of self-hyping, of self-conversion. Eli has his papers out and studies them intently: the manuscript of his translation of the Book of Skulls, the Xeroxes of the newspaper clippings that led him to connect the place in Arizona with the antique and implausible cult whose scripture the book may have been, and his mass of peripheral documents and references. He looks up after some time and says, “‘All at present known in medicine is almost nothing in comparison of what remains to be discovered…we could free ourselves from an infinity of maladies of body as well as of mind, and perhaps also even from the debility of age, if we had sufficiently ample knowledge of their causes, and of all the remedies provided for us by nature.’ That’s Descartes, Discourse on Method. And Descartes again, age forty-two, writing to Huygens’s father: ‘I never took so much care to conserve myself as I do now, and, though I had thought formerly that death could not rob me of more than thirty or forty years, henceforth it cannot surprise me without depriving me of the hope of more than a century: since it seems to me evident that if we guard ourselves from certain errors which we customarily commit in our way of life, we will be able without other inventions to achieve an old age much longer and happier than now.’”

  Not the first time I’ve heard this. Eli presented all his data to us long before. The decision to go to Arizona ripened exceedingly slowly and was forced along to maturity by acres of pseudophilosophical palaver. Then I said, now I say, “Descartes died at fifty-four, didn’t he?”

  “An accident. A surprise. Besides, he hadn’t perfected his theories of longevity yet.”

  Timothy: “A pity he didn’t work faster.”

  “A pity, yes, for all of us,” Eli said. “But we have the Keepers of the Skulls to look forward to. They’ve perfected their techniques.”

  “So you say.”

  “So I believe,” said Eli, striving to make himself believe. And the familiar routines came forth once more. Eli, eroded by weariness, teetering on the brink of disbelief, trotting out his arguments to get his head together once more. His hands upraised, fingers outspread, the pedagogical gesture. “We agree,” he said, “that coolness is out, pragmatism is through, sophisticated skepticism is obsolete. We’ve tried that whole pack of attitudes and they don’t work. They cut us off from too much that’s important. They don’t answer enough of the real questions; they just leave us looking wise and cynical, but still ignorant. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.” Oliver, eyes rigid.

  “Agreed.” Timothy, yawning.

  “Agreed.” Even me. A grin.

  Eli, again: “There’s no mystery left in modern life. The scientific generation killed it all. The rationalist purge, driving out the unlikely and the inexplicable. Look how hollow religion has become in the last hundred years. God’s dead, they say. Sure he is: murdered, assassinated. Look, I’m a Jew, I took Hebrew lessons like a good little Yid, I read the Torah, I had a Bar Mitzvah, they gave me fountain pens—did anybody once mention God to me in any context worth listening to? God was somebody who talked to Moses. God was a pillar of fire four thousand years ago. Where’s God now? Don’t ask a Jew. We haven’t seen Him in a while. We worship rules, dietary laws, customs, the words of the Bible, the paper the Bible’s printed on, the bound book itself, but we don’t worship supernatural beings such as God. The old man in the whiskers, counting sins—no, no, that’s for the shvartzer, that’s for the goy. Only what about you three goyim? You’ve got empty religions, too. You, Timothy, high church, what do you have, clouds of incense, brocaded robes, the choir boys singing Vaughan Williams and Elgar. You, Oliver, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, I can’t even keep them straight, they’re nothing, nothing at all, no spiritual content, n
o mystery, no ecstasy. Like being a Reform Jew. And you, Ned, the papist, the priest who didn’t make it, what do you have? The Virgin? The saints? The Christ Child? You can’t believe that crap. It’s been burned out of your brain. It’s for peasants, it’s for the lumpenproletariat. The ikons and the holy water. The bread and the wine. You’d like to believe it—Jesus, I’d like to believe it myself, Catholicism’s the only complete religion in this civilization, the only one that even tries to do the mystery thing, the resonances with the supernatural, the awareness of higher powers. Only they’ve ruined it, they ruined us, you can’t accept a thing. It’s all Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman now, or the Berrigans writing manifestos, or Polacks warning against godless communism and X-rated movies. So religion’s gone. It’s over. And where does that leave us? Alone under an awful sky, waiting for the end. Waiting for the end.”