The Book Of Skulls Part 2

"Would you care to make a profession of belief, Dr. Marshall?"

Oliver seemed to be midway in a journey to another galaxy. He said, "I give Eli the benefit of the doubt."

"You believe in the Skulls, then?" Timothy asked.

"I believe."

"Although we know the whole thing's absurd?"

"Yes," said Oliver. "Even though it's absurd."

"That was Tertullian's position, too," Eli put in. "Credo quia absurdum est. I believe because it's absurd. A different context of belief, of course, but the psychology's right."

"Yes, yes, my position exactly!" I said. "I believe because it's absurd. Good old Tertullian. He says precisely what I feel. My position exactly."

"Not mine." Oliver.

"No?" Eli asked.

Oliver said, "No. I believe despite the absurdity."

"Why?" Eli said.

"Why, Oliver?" I said, a long moment later. "You know it's absurd, and yet you believe. Why?"

"Because I have to," he said. "Because it's my only hope."

He stared straight at me. His eyes held a peculiarly devastated expression as though he had looked into the face of Death with them and had come away still alive, but with every option blasted, every possibility shriveled. He had heard the drums and fifes of the dead-march, at the edge of the universe. Those frosty eyes withered me. Those strangled words impaled me. I believe, he said. Despite the absurdity. Because I have to. Because it's my only hope. A communique from some other planet. I could feel the chilly presence of Death there in the room with us, brus.h.i.+ng silently past our rosy boyish cheeks.

14. Timothy.

We're a heavy mixture, we four. How did we ever get together? What tangling of lifelines dumped us all into the same dormitory suite, anyway?

In the beginning it was just me and Oliver, two freshmen who'd been computer-a.s.signed to a double room overlooking the quadrangle. I was straight out of Andover and very full of my own importance. I don't mean that I was impressed by the family money. I took that for granted, always had: everybody I grew up with was rich, so I had no real sense of how rich we were, and anyway I had done nothing to earn the money (nor my father, nor my father's father, nor my father's father's father, et cetera, et cetera), so why should it puff me up? What swelled my head was a sense of ancestry, of knowing that I had the blood of Revolutionary War heroes in me, of senators and congressmen, of diplomats, of great nineteenth-century financiers. I was a walking slab of history. Also I enjoyed knowing that I was tall and strong and healthy-sound body, sound mind, all the natural advantages. Out beyond the campus was a world full of blacks and Jews and spastics and neurotics and h.o.m.os.e.xuals and other misfits, but I had come up three cherries on the great slot machine of life and I was proud of my luck. Also I had an allowance of one hundred dollars a week, which was convenient, and I may not actually have been aware that most eighteen-year-olds had to get along on somewhat less.

Then there was Oliver. I figured the computer had given me a lucky dip again, because I might have been a.s.signed somebody weird, somebody kinky, somebody with a squashed, envious, embittered soul, and Oliver seemed altogether normal. Good-looking corn-fed pre-med from the wilds of Kansas. He was my own height-an inch or so taller, in fact-and that was cool; I'm ill at ease with short men. Oliver had an uncomplicated exterior. Almost anything made him smile. An easygoing type. Both parents dead: he was here on a full scholars.h.i.+p. I realized right away that he had no money at all and was afraid for a minute that would cause resentment between us, but no, he was altogether levelheaded about it. Money didn't appear to interest him as long as he had enough to pay for food and shelter and clothing, and he had that-a small inheritance, the proceeds of selling the family farm. He was amused, not threatened, by the thick roll I always carried. He told me the first day that he was planning on going out for the basketball team, and I thought he had an athletic scholars.h.i.+p, but I was wrong about that: he liked basketball, he took it very seriously, but he was here to learn. That was the real difference between us, not the Kansas thing or the money thing, but his sense of dedication. I was going to college because all the men of my family go to college between prep school and adulthood; Oliver was here to transform himself into a ferocious intellectual machine. He had-still has-tremendous, incredible, overwhelming inner drive. Now and then, those first few weeks, I caught him with his mask down; the sunny farm-boy grin vanished and his face went rigid, the jaw muscles clamping, the eyes radiating a cold gleam. His intensity could be scary. He had to be perfect in everything. He had a straight-A average, close to the absolute top of our cla.s.s, and he made the freshman basketball team and broke the college scoring record in the opening game, and he was up half of every night studying, hardly sleeping at all. Still, he managed to seem human. He drank a lot of beer, he balled any number of girls (we used to trade with each other), and he could play a decent guitar. The only place where he revealed the other Oliver, the machine-Oliver, was when it came to drugs. Second week on campus I scored some groovy Moroccan hash and he absolutely wouldn't. Told me that he'd spent 171"2 years calibrating his head properly and he wasn't about to let it get messed up now. Nor has he blown so much as a single joint, as far as I'm aware, in the four years since. He tolerates our smoking dope but he won't have any.

The spring of our soph.o.m.ore year we acquired Ned. Oliver and I had signed up to room together again that year. Ned was in two of Oliver's cla.s.ses: physics, which Ned needed to fulfull his minimum science requirement, and comparative lit, which Oliver needed to fulfill his minimum humanities requirement. Oliver had a little trouble digging Joyce and Yeats, and Ned had a lot of trouble digging quantum theory and thermodynamics, so they worked out a reciprocal coaching arrangement. It was an attraction of opposites, the two of them. Ned was small, soft-spoken, skinny, with big gentle eyes and a delicate way of moving. Boston Irish, strong Catholic background, educated in parochial schools; he still wore a crucifix when we were sophs and sometimes even went to ma.s.s. He intended to be a poet and short-story writer. No, "intended" isn't the right word. As Ned explained it once, people with talent don't intend to be writers. Either you have it or you don't. Those who have it, write, and those who don't, intend. Ned was always writing. Still is. Carries a spiral-bound notebook, jots down everything he hears. Actually I think his short stories are c.r.a.p and his poetry is nonsense, but I recognize that the fault probably lies in my taste, not in his talent, since I feel the same way about a lot of writers much more famous than Ned. At least he works at his art.

He became a kind of mascot for us. He was always much closer to Oliver than he was to me, but I didn't mind having him around; he was somebody different, somebody with a whole other outlook on life. His husky voice, his sad-dog eyes, his freaky clothes (he wore robes a lot, I suppose by way of pretending he had gone into the priesthood after all), his poetry, his peculiar brand of sarcasm, his complicated head (he always took two or three sides of every issue and managed to believe in everything and nothing simultaneously)-they all fascinated me. We must have seemed just as foreign to him as he to us. He spent so much time around our place that we invited him to room with us for our junior year. I don't remember whose idea that was, Oliver's or mine. (Ned's?) I didn't know he was queer, at the time. Or rather, that he was gay, to use the term he prefers. The problem with leading a sheltered Wasp life is that you see only a narrow slice of humanity, and you don't come to expect the unexpected. I knew such things as f.a.gs existed, of course. We had them at Andover. They walked with their elbows out and combed their hair a lot and talked with a special accent, the universal f.a.ggot accent that you hear from Maine to California. They read Proust and Gide all the time and some of them wore bra.s.sieres under their T-s.h.i.+rts. Ned wasn't outwardly swishy, though. And I wasn't the sort of meatball who automatically a.s.sumed that anyone who wrote (or read!) poetry had to be queer. He was arty, yes, he was hip, he was nonjock all the way, but you don't expect a man who weighs 115 pounds to have much interest in football. (He did go swimming almost every day. We swim bare-a.s.s at the college pool, of course, so for Ned it was like a free beaver flick, but I didn't think of that then.) One thing, he didn't go around with girls that I noticed. Still, that in itself isn't a condemnation. The week before finals, two years ago, Oliver and I and a few other guys had what I guess you'd call an orgy in our room, and Ned was there, and he didn't seem turned off by the idea. I saw him balling a chick, a pimply waitress in from town. It was a long time afterward that I realized: one, that Ned might find an orgy useful to him as material to write about, and two, that he doesn't really despise c.u.n.t, he just doesn't care for it as much as he does for boys.

Ned brought us Eli. No, they weren't lovers, just buddies. That was practically the first thing Eli said to me: "In case you're wondering, I'm hetero. Ned doesn't go for my type and I don't go for his." I'll never forget it. It was the first hint I had had that Ned was that way, and I don't think Oliver had realized it either, though you never really know what's going on in Oliver's mind. Eli had spotted Ned right away, of course. A city boy, a Manhattan intellectual, he could put everybody into the proper category with one glance. He didn't like his roommate and wanted out, and we had a huge suite, so he said something to Ned and Ned asked if he could transfer in with us, the November of our junior year. My first Jew. I didn't know that, either-oh, Winchester, you naive p.r.i.c.k, you! Eli Steinfeld from West Eighty-third Street, and you can't guess he's a Hebe! Honestly, I thought it was just a German name: Jews are called Cohen or Katz or Goldberg. I wasn't really captivated by Eli's personality, you might say, but once I found out he was Jewish I felt I had to let him room with us. For the sake of broadening myself through diversity, yes, and also because I had been raised to dislike Jews and I had to rebel against that. My grandfather on my father's side had had some bad experiences with clever Jews around 1923; some Wall Street Abies suckered him into investing heavily in a radio company they were organizing, and they were crooks and he lost about five million, so it became a family tradition to mistrust Jews. They were vulgar, pushy, sly, et cetera, et cetera, always trying to do an honest Protestant millionaire out of his hard-inherited wealth, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, my Uncle Clark once admitted to me that Grandfather would have doubled his money if he'd sold out within eight months, which is what his Jewish partners secretly did, but no, he hung on waiting for still fatter profits, and got clobbered. Anyway I don't uphold all the family traditions. Eli moved in. Short, somewhat swarthy, a lot of body hair, quick nervous bright little eyes, big nose. A brilliant mind. An expert on medieval languages; already recognized as an important scholar in his field and still an undergraduate. On the other side of the ledger, he was pretty pathetic-tongue-tied, neurotic, hyper-tense, worried about his masculinity. Forever prowling after girls, usually getting nowhere. Doggish girls, too. Not the spectacularly ugly broads that Ned prefers, G.o.d knows why; Eli went after a different sort of female loser-shy, scrawny, inconspicuous girls, thick gla.s.ses, flat chests, you know the bit. Naturally, they're as neurotic as he is, terrified of s.e.x, and they wouldn't come across for him, which only made his problems worse. He seemed absolutely afraid to approach a normal, attractive, sensual chick. One day last fall as an act of Christian charity I turned Margo on to him and he screwed things up something unimaginable.

Quite a foursome. I doubt that I'll ever forget the first (and probably only) time all of our parents got together, in the spring of our junior year, at the big Carnival weekend. Up till then I don't think any of the parents had visualized their son's roommates in any clear way. I had Oliver home to meet my father a couple of Christmases, but not Ned or Eli, and I hadn't seen their folks either. So here we all were. No family for Oliver, of course. And Ned's father was dead. His mother was a gaunt hollow-eyed bony woman nearly six feet tall, in black clothes, speaking with a brogue. I couldn't connect her with Ned at all. Eli's mother was plump, short, a waddler, very much overdressed; his father was almost invisible, a tiny sad-faced man who sighed a lot. They both looked much older than Eli. They must have had him when they were thirty-five or forty. Then there was my father, who looks the way I imagine I'll look twenty-five years from now-smooth pink cheeks, thick hair shading from blond to gray, a moneyed look about the eyes. A big man, a handsome man, the board-of-directors type. With him was Saybrook, his wife, who I guess is thirty-eight and could pa.s.s for ten years younger, tall, well-scrubbed, long straight yellow hair, big-boned athletic body, very much the fox-and-hounds sort of woman. Imagine this group sitting under a parasol at a table in the quadrangle, trying to make conversation. Mrs. Steinfeld trying to mother Oliver, the poor dear orphan. Mr. Steinfeld eyeing my father's $450 Italian silk suit in horror. Ned's mother completely out of it, understanding neither her son, her son's friends, their parents, nor any other aspect of the twentieth century. Saybrook coming on all hearty and horsey, talking blithely about charity teas and her stepdaughter's imminent debut. ("Is she an actress?" Mrs. Steinfeld asked, baffled. "I mean her coming-out party," said Saybrook, just as baffled.) My father studying his fingernails a lot, staring hard at the Steinfelds and at Eli, not wanting to believe any of this. Mr. Steinfeld, to make conversation, talking about the stock market to my father. Mr. Steinfeld doesn't have investments but he reads the Times very carefully. My father knows nothing about the market; so long as the dividends come on time, he's happy; besides, it's part of his religion never to talk about money. He flashes a signal to Saybrook, who deftly changes the subject, starts telling us about how she's chairman of a committee to raise funds for Palestinian Arab refugees, you know, she says, the ones who were driven out by the Jews when Israel got started. Mrs. Steinfeld gasps. Such a thing to say in front of a Hada.s.sah member! My father then points across the quadrangle to a particularly long-haired cla.s.smate who had just turned around and says, "I could have sworn that fellow was a girl, until he looked this way." Oliver, who has let his hair grow to his shoulders, I suppose to show what he thinks of Kansas, gives my father his coldest, coldest smile. Undaunted, or unnoticing, my father continues, "Perhaps I'm wrong about this, but I can't help suspecting that many of those young men with flowing locks are, you know, a trifle h.o.m.os.e.xual." Ned laughs out loud at this. Ned's mother turns red and coughs-not because she knows her boy is gay (she doesn't-the idea would be incredible to her) but because that fine-looking Mr. Winchester has said a nasty word at the table. The Steinfelds, who are quick on the uptake, look at Ned, then at Eli, then at each other-a very complex bit of reaction. Is their boy safe with such a roommate? My father can't comprehend what his casual remark has started and doesn't know who to apologize to for what. He frowns and Saybrook whispers something to him-tsk, Saybrook, whispering in public, what would Emily Post say?-and he responds with a magnificent blush extending far into the infrared. "Perhaps we can order some wine," he says, loudly, to cover his confusion, and imperiously summons a student-waiter. "Do you have Cha.s.sagne-Montrachet '69?" he asks. "Sir?" the waiter replies blankly. An ice bucket is fetched, containing a bottle of three-buck Liebfraumilch, the best they can offer, and my father pays for it with a brand-new fifty. Ned's mother stares at the bill in disbelief; the Steinfelds scowl at my father, thinking he's trying to put them down. A beautiful, beautiful episode, this whole lunch. Afterward Saybrook draws me aside and says, "Your father feels very embarra.s.sed. If he had known Eli was, well, attracted to other boys, he would never have made that remark."

"Not Eli," I said. "Eli's straight. Ned."

Saybrook is fl.u.s.tered. She thinks I may be putting her on. She wants to say that she and my father hope I'm not f.u.c.king around with either of them, whichever one may be queer, but she's much too well bred to tell me that. Instead she slides into neutral chitchat for the prescribed three minutes, gracefully breaks free, goes back to explain to my father the latest twist. I see the Steinfelds conferring in anguish with Eli, no doubt giving him h.e.l.l for rooming with a snotty Gentile and warning him sternly to keep away from that little faygeleh, too, if it isn't (oy! veh!) already too late. Ned and his mother are generation-gapping also, not far away. I pick up stray phrases: "The sisters are praying for you . . . transfer to Holy Cross . . . novena . . . rosary . . . your angel father . . . novitiate . . . Jesuit . . . Jesuit . . . Jesuit. . . ." To one side, alone, is Oliver. Watching. Smiling his Venusian smile. Just a visitor on Earth, he is, is Oliver, the man from the flying saucer.

I'd rate Oliver as the deepest mind of the group. He doesn't know as much as Eli, he doesn't give the same appearance of brilliance, but he has a more powerful intelligence, I'm sure. He's also the strangest of us, because on the surface he appears so wholesome and normal, and he really isn't. Eli has the quickest wits among us, and he's also the most tormented, the most troubled. Ned poses as our weakling, our fairy, but don't underestimate him: he knows what he wants all the time, and he sees that he gets it. And me? What's there to say about me? Good old Joe College. The right family connections, the right fraternity, the right clubs. In June I graduate and begin to live happily ever after. An Air Force commission, yes, but no combat duty-it's all arranged, our genes are deemed too good to waste-and then I find an appropriate Episcopalian debutante, certified virgin and belonging to one of the Hundred Families, and settle down to be a gentleman. Jesus! Thank G.o.d Eli's Book of Skulls is nothing but superst.i.tious c.r.a.p. If I had to live forever I'd bore myself to death in twenty years.

15. Oliver.

When I was sixteen I gave a great deal of thought to killing myself. Honestly. It wasn't a pretense, a romantic adolescent drama, an expression of what Eli would call a willed persona. It was a genuine philosophical position, if I can use so impressive-sounding a term, which I arrived at logically and rigorously.

What led me to the contemplation of suicide was, above all, my father's dying at thirty-six. That seemed like such an unbearable tragedy to me. Not that my father was in any way a special human being, except to me. He was just a Kansas farmer, after all. Up at five in the morning, in bed by nine at night. No education to speak of. All he read was the county newspaper, and sometimes the Bible, though most of that was over his head. But he worked hard all his short life. He was a good man, a dedicated man. It was his father's land first, and my father worked it from the age of ten, with a few years out for the army; he brought in his crops, he retired his debt, he made a living, more or less, he even was able to buy forty acres more and think of expanding beyond that. Meanwhile he married, he gave pleasure to a woman, he sired children. He was a simple man-he would never have understood anything that's happened in this country in the ten years since he died-but he was a decent man, in his way, and he had earned the right to a happy old age. Sitting on the porch, puffing his pipe, going hunting in the fall, letting his sons do the really back-breaking work, watching his grandchildren grow up. He didn't get a happy old age. He didn't even get a middle age. Cancer sprouted in his guts and he died fast, he died in agony but fast.

That started me thinking. If you can be cut off like that, if you must live under a sentence of death all your days and never know when it will be carried out, why live at all? Why give Death the satisfaction of coming to claim you when you're least ready for it? Get out, get out early. Avoid the irony of being chopped down as punishment for having made something of your life.

My father's goal in life, as I understood it, was to keep to the way of the Lord and pay off the mortgage on his land. He succeeded with the first and came pretty close with the second. My goal was more ambitious: to get an education, to rise above the dirt of the fields, to become a doctor, a scientist. Doesn't that sound grand? The n.o.bel Prize in Medicine to Dr. Oliver Marshall, who climbed out of the tobacco-chewing ignorance of the Corn Belt to become an inspiration for us all. But did my goal differ in anything but degree from my father's? What it boiled down to, for both of us, was a life of hard work, honest toil.

I couldn't face it. Saving money, taking tests, applying for the scholars.h.i.+p, learning Latin and German, anatomy, physics, chemistry, biology, breaking my skull with labors tougher than anything my father had known-and then to die? To die at forty-five, or fifty-five, or sixty-five, or maybe, like my father, at thirty-six? Just when you're ready to start to live, it's time to go. Why bother to make the effort? Why submit to the irony? Look at President Kennedy: all that outlay of energy and skill to get himself into the White House, and then the bullet in his skull. Life is a waste. The more you succeed in making out of yourself, the more bitter a thing it is to have to die. Me, with my ambitions, my drives, I was only setting myself up for a bigger downfall than most. Inasmuch as I would have to die eventually, I resolved to cheat Death by doing away with myself before I began forcing myself toward the inevitable sick joke that was waiting for me.

So I told myself, age sixteen. I made lists of possible ways to bug out. Cut my wrist? Turn on the gas? Plastic bag over my head? Rack up my car? Look for thin ice in January? I had fifty different plans. I arranged them in order of desirability. I rearranged them. I balanced quick painful deaths against slow easy ones. For half a year, maybe, I studied suicide the way Eli studies irregular verbs. Two of my grandparents died in those six months. My dog died. My older brother was killed in the war. My mother had her first bad heart attack, and the doctor privately told me she wouldn't last another year, which was correct. All this should have reinforced my decision: get out, Oliver, get out, get out now, before life's tragedies come even closer to you! You've got to die, just like the others, so why stall for time? Die now. Die now. Save yourself a load of trouble. Curiously, though, my interest in suicide rapidly waned, even though my philosophy didn't really change. I stopped making lists of ways to kill myself. I started planning ahead, instead of a.s.suming that I'd be gone within the next few months. I decided I would fight Death rather than surrender to him. I would go to college, I would become a scientist, I would learn all I could, and perhaps I'd push the border of Death's country back a little. Now I know that I'll never kill myself. I'm just not going to do it, ever. I'll go on fighting to the end, and if Death comes to laugh in my face, why, I'll laugh in his. And, after all, suppose the Book of Skulls is authentic! Suppose an escape from him really exists! The joke would have been on me, then, if I'd cut my wrists five years ago.

I must have driven four hundred miles already today, and it isn't even noon yet. The roads here are great-wide, straight, empty. Amarillo is just ahead. And then Albuquerque. And then Phoenix. And then, at last, we start to find out a lot of things.

16. Eli.

How strange the world looks here. Texas; New Mexico. A lunar landscape. Why did anyone ever want to settle in this kind of country? The broad brown plateaus, no gra.s.s, only twisted scrubby greasy gray-green plants. The bare purple mountains, jagged, sharp, r.i.m.m.i.n.g the harsh blue horizon like eroded teeth. I thought the mountains out west were bigger than these. Timothy, who's been everywhere, says that the really big mountains are in Colorado, Utah, California; these are just hills, five or six thousand feet high. I was shaken by that. The biggest mountain east of the Mississippi is Mount Mitch.e.l.l, North Carolina, something like sixty-seven hundred feet. I lost a bet about that when I was ten and never forgot it. The biggest mountain I had ever seen before this trip was Mount Was.h.i.+ngton, sixty-three hundred feet or so, New Hamps.h.i.+re, where my parents took me the one year we didn't go to the Catskills. (I was betting on Mount Was.h.i.+ngton. I was wrong.) And here all around me are mountains the size of those, and they're just hills. They probably don't even have names. Mount Was.h.i.+ngton hung in the sky like a giant tree, about to fall and crush me. Of course, here the view is broader, the landscape is wide open; even a mountain is dwarfed by the immense perspective.

The air is crisp and cold. The sky is improbably blue and clear. This is apocalyptic country: I keep expecting to hear the crack of trumpet calls resounding out of the "hills." Wondrous sound the trumpet flingeth, through earth's sepulchres it ringeth, all before the throne it bringeth. Yes. And death will be stupefied. We go thirty, forty miles between towns, seeing only jackrabbits, deer, squirrels. The towns themselves seem new: filling stations, a row of motels, small square aluminum houses that look as though they can be attached to an automobile and driven off to some other place. (Probably they can be.) On the other hand, we have pa.s.sed two pueblos, six or seven hundred years old, and there will be more. The idea that there are actually Indians, live Indians, walking around all over the place, blows my Manhattanized mind. There were Indians galore in the technicolor movies I saw every Sat.u.r.day afternoon for years on Seventy-third Street and Broadway, but I was never taken in, I knew with my cool small-boy wisdom that they were just Puerto Ricans or maybe Mexicans togged out in fancy feathers. Real Indians were nineteenth-century stuff, they had died out long ago, none of them left except on the nickel with the buffalo on the other side, and when did you last see one of those? (When did you last see a buffalo?) Indians were archaic, Indians were extinct, Indians, to me, were in a cla.s.s with the mastodon, the tyrannosaurus, the Sumerians, the Carthaginians. But no, here I am in the Wild West for the first time in my life, and the flat-faced, leather-colored man who sold us our lunchtime beer in the grocery store was an Indian, and the roly-poly kid who filled our gas tank was an Indian, and those mud huts on the far side of the Rio Grande there are inhabited by Indians, even though I can see a forest of television aerials rising above the adobe rooftops. See the Indians, d.i.c.k! See the giant cactus plants! Look, Jane, look, the Indian drives a Volkswagen! Watch Ned cut the Indian off! Listen to the Indian honk his horn!

I think our commitment to this adventure has deepened since we reached the desert's edge. Certainly mine has. That terrible day of doubt, while we were driving across Missouri, now seems as far in the past as the dinosaurs. I know now (how do I know? how can I say?) that what I have read in the Book of Skulls is real, and what we have come to find in the wastes of Arizona is real, and that if we persevere we will be granted that which we seek. Oliver knows it, too. A weird freaky intensity has surfaced in him these last few days. Oh, it was always there, that tendency toward monomania, but he did a better job of concealing it. Now, sitting behind the wheel ten or twelve hours a day, needing virtually to be forced to stop driving, he makes it altogether clear that nothing is more urgent for him than to reach our destination and submit himself to the disciplines of the Keepers of the Skulls. Even our two unbelievers are catching the faith. Ned oscillates between absolute acceptance and absolute rejection, as ever, and often holds both positions simultaneously; he mocks us, he needles us, and yet he studies maps and mileage charts as though he, too, is seized by impatience. Ned is the only man I know capable of attending a ma.s.s at sunrise and a black ma.s.s at midnight, all the while feeling no sense of incongruity, devoting himself with equal fervor to each rite. Timothy still remains aloof, a genial scoffer, protesting that he's merely humoring his far-out roommates by undertaking this pilgrimage-but how much of that is just a front, a show of proper aristocratic coolness? More than a little, I suspect. Timothy has less reason than the rest of us to hunger after metaphysical life-extensions, because his own life as presently const.i.tuted offers him such an infinity of possibilities-his financial resources being what they are. But money isn't everything, and you can do only so much in the standard threescore and ten, even if you've inherited Fort Knox. He's tempted by the vision of the skullhouse, I believe. He's tempted.

By the time we reach our goal, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, I think we'll have drawn together into that cohesive four-sided unit that the Book of Skulls calls a Receptacle: that is, a group of candidates. Let's hope so. It was last year, wasn't it, that so much fuss was made over those midwestern students who carried out a suicide pact? Yes. A Receptacle can be considered to be the philosophical ant.i.thesis of a suicide pact. Both represent manifestations of alienation from present-day society. I reject your loathsome world entirely, says the member of a suicide pact; therefore I choose to die. I reject your loathsome world entirely, says the member of a Receptacle; therefore I choose never to die, in the hope that I will live to see better days.

17. Ned.

Albuquerque. A dreary city, miles of suburbs, an endless string of gaudy motels along Route 66, a pathetic, schlocky, touristy Old Town down at the far end of things. If I have to have tourist-west, let me have Santa Fe, at least, with its adobe shops, its pretty hilltop streets, its few genuine remnants of the Spanish colonial past. But we aren't going that way. Here we part from U.S. 66, finally, and roll southward on 85 and 25 almost to the Mexican border, down to Las Cruces, where we pick up Route 70 that shoots us toward Phoenix. How long have we been driving now? Two days, three, four? I've lost all track of time. I sit here hour after hour watching Oliver drive, and occasionally I do some of the driving myself, or Timothy does, and the wheels impinge on my soul, the carburetor fires in my gut, the interface between pa.s.senger and vehicle dissolves. We are all part of this snorting monster rolling westward. America lies sprawling, ga.s.sed, behind us. Chicago is only a memory now. St. Louis is only a bad dream. Joplin, Springfield, Tulsa, Amarillo-unreal, lacking in substance. A continent of pinched faces and small souls back there. Fifty million cases of severe menstrual cramps erupt to the east, and we couldn't care less. A plague of premature e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n spreads through the great urban metropolises. All heteros.e.xual males over the age of seventeen in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Tennessee have been smitten by an outbreak of hemorrhaging hemorrhoids, and Oliver drives on, giving no d.a.m.ns.

I like this part of the country. It's open, uncluttered, vaguely Wagnerian, with a good campy westernness about it: you see the men in their string ties and ten-gallon hats, you see the Indians sleeping in the doorways, you see the sagebrush swarming up the hillsides, and you know it's right, it's all the way it's supposed to be. I was here the summer I was eighteen, mostly in Santa Fe, bunking with an agreeable weather-beaten suntanned fortyish dealer in Indian artifacts. A member of the Homintern, he. A card-carrying official of the International Pervo-Devo Conspiracy. They say it takes one to tell one, but in his case it took no great amount of telling: he did the lisp thing, the accent thing, he was plainly a squaw. He taught me, among much else, how to drive a car. All during August I made his collecting rounds for him, visiting his suppliers; he buys old pots for five bucks, sells them to antiquity-minded tourists for fifty. Low overhead, quick turnover. I undertook solitary terrifying voyages, hardly knowing my clutch from my elbow, driving down to Bernalillo, up to Farmington, over to the Rio Puerco country, even making a vast expedition out to Hopi, going to all sorts of places where, in violation of local archaeological ordinances, the farmers raid unexcavated ruined pueblos and winkle out salable merchandise. Also I met a number of Indians, many of them (surprise!) gay. I remember fondly a certain groovy Navaho. And a swaggering buck from Taos who, once he was sure of my credentials, took me down into a kiva and initiated me into some of the tribal mysteries, giving me access to ethnographical data for which many scholars no doubt would sell their foreskins. A profound experience. A mind-blower. I mean to tell the world that it's not just your a.s.shole that gets broadened, when you're gay.

Trouble with Oliver this afternoon. I was driving, rocketing down 25 somewhere between Belen and Socorro, feeling b.a.l.l.sy and light, for once the master of the car and not just something caught in the machinery. Half a mile ahead I spotted a figure, walking on our side of the road, evidently a hitchhiker. On impulse, I slowed. A hitcher, right: more than that, a hippie, the genuine 1967 article, long scruffy hair, sheepskin vest over bare chest, stars-and-stripes patch on the seat of his tie-dyed jeans, knapsack, no shoes. I suppose heading toward one of the desert communes, trudging alone from nowhere to nowhere. Well, in a sense we were heading toward a commune, too, and I felt we could accommodate him. I braked the car almost to a halt. He looked up, maybe flas.h.i.+ng quickly on paranoia, saw Easy Rider once too often and was expecting a blast of good Amurrican gunfire, but the fear went out of his face when he saw we were kids. He grinned, gap-toothed, and I could almost hear the mumbled little courtesies, like I mean, wow, sure is cool of you to pick me up, man, like I mean, you know, it's a long walk, the straights around here won't help you nohow, man, when Oliver said, simply, "No."

"No?"

"Keep on driving."

"We've got room in the car," I said.

"I don't want to take the time."

"Christ, Oliver, the guy's harmless! And he gets maybe one car an hour out here. If you were in his position-"

"How do you know he's harmless?" Oliver asked. By now the hippie was less than a hundred feet to the rear of where I'd stopped. "Maybe he's part of Charles Manson's family," Oliver went on quietly. "Maybe his thing is knifing guys who sentimentalize hippies."

"Oh, wow! How sick can you get, Oliver?"

"Start the car," he said, in his ominous flat prairie voice, his tornado's-a-comin' voice, his out-of-this-town-by-nightfall-n.i.g.g.e.r voice. "I don't like him. I can smell him from here. I don't want him in the car."

"I'm driving now," I answered. "I'll make the decisions about-"

"Start the car," Timothy said.

"You, too?"

"Oliver doesn't want him, Ned. You aren't going to impose him on Oliver against his wishes, are you?"

"Jesus, Timothy-"

"Besides, it's my car, and I don't want him either. Put the foot on the gas, Ned."

Out of the back came Eli's voice, soft, perplexed. "Wait a second, guys, I think we have a moral issue to consider here. If Ned wants-"

"Will you drive?" Oliver said, in as close to a shout as I've ever heard from him. I glanced at him in my rear-view mirror. His face was red and sweat-beaded, and a vein stood out terrifyingly on his forehead. A manic face, a psychotic face. He might do anything. I couldn't risk a blowup over one hitchhiking hippie. Shaking my head sadly, I put my foot to the accelerator, and, just as the hippie was reaching to open the door on Oliver's side in back, we blasted off with a roar, leaving him standing alone and astonished in a cloud of exhaust fumes. To his credit, he didn't shake his fist at us, he didn't even spit at us, he just let his shoulders slump and went on walking. Maybe he was expecting a rip-off all the time. When I could no longer see the hippie, I looked at Oliver again. His face was more calm now; the vein had receded, the color had ebbed. But there was still a weird chilling fixity about it. Rigid eyes, a muscle flickering in his pretty-boy cheek. We were twenty miles down the highway before the electricity had stopped crackling in the car.

Finally I said, "Why'd you do that, Oliver?"

"Do what?"

"Force me to screw that hippie."

"I want to get where I'm going," Oliver said. "Have you seen me pick up any hitchhikers so far? Hitchhikers mean trouble. They mean delay. You would have taken him down some side road to his commune, an hour, two hours off the schedule."

"I wouldn't have. Besides, you complained about his smell. You worried about getting knifed. What was that all about, Oliver? Haven't you picked up enough paranoid s.h.i.+t yourself on account of your long hair?"

"Perhaps I wasn't thinking clearly," said Oliver, who had never thought any other way but clearly in his life. "Perhaps I'm in such a rush to get a move on that I say things I don't mean," said Oliver, who never spoke except from a prepared script. "I don't know. I just had this gut feeling that we shouldn't pick him up," said Oliver, who last gave way to a gut feeling when he was being toilet-trained. "I'm sorry I leaned on you, Ned," said Oliver.

Ten minutes of silence later he said, "I think we ought to agree on one thing, though. From here to the end of the trip, no hitchhikers. Okay? No hitchhikers."

18. Eli.

They were right to choose this cruel and shriveled terrain as the site of the skullhouse. Ancient cults need a setting of mystery and romantic remoteness if they are to maintain themselves against the clas.h.i.+ng, tw.a.n.ging resonances of the skeptical, materialistic twentieth century. A desert is ideal. Here the air is painfully blue, the soil is a thin burnt crust over a rocky s.h.i.+eld, the plants and trees are twisted, th.o.r.n.y, bizarre. Time stands still in a place like this. The modern world can neither intrude nor defile. The old G.o.ds can thrive. The old chants rise skyward, undamped by the roar of traffic and the clatter of machines. When I told this to Ned he disagreed; the desert is stagy and obvious, he said, even a little campy, and the proper place for such survivors of antiquity as the Keepers of the Skulls is the heart of the busy city, where the contrast between their texture and ours would be greatest. Say, a brownstone on East 63rd Street, where the priests could go complacently about their rites cheek by jowl with art galleries and poodle parlors. Another possibility, he suggested, would be a one-story brick-and-plate-gla.s.s factory building in a suburban industrial park devoted to the manufacture of air-conditioners and office equipment. Contrast is everything, Ned said. Incongruity is essential. The secret of art lies in attaining a sense of proper juxtapositions, and what is religion if not a category of art? But I think Ned was putting me on, as usual. In any case I can't buy his theories of contrast and juxtaposition. This desert, this dry wasteland, is the perfect place for the headquarters of those who will not die.

Crossing from New Mexico into southern Arizona we left the last traces of winter behind. Up by Albuquerque the air had been cool, even cold, but the elevation is greater there. The land dipped as we drove toward the Mexican border and made our Phoenixward turn. The temperature rose sharply, from the fifties into the seventies, or even higher. The mountains were lower and seemed to be made of particles of reddish-brown soil compressed into molds and sprayed with glue; I imagined I could rub a deep hole in such rock with a fingertip. Soft, vulnerable, sloping hills, practically naked. Martian-looking. Different vegetation here, too. Instead of dark sweeps of sagebrush and gnarled little pines, we now traveled through forests of widely s.p.a.ced giant cacti surging ithyphallically out of the brown, scaly earth. Ned botanized for us. Those are saguaros, he said, those big-armed cacti taller than telephone poles, and these, the shrubby spiky-branched blue-green leafless trees that might have been native to some other planet, these are palo verde, and those, the k.n.o.bby upthrust cl.u.s.ters of jointed woody branches, they call that ocotillo. Ned knows the Southwest well. Feels quite at home here, having spent some time in New Mexico a couple of summers ago. Feels quite at home everywhere, Ned. Likes to speak of the international fraternity of the gay; wherever he goes, he's sure of finding lodging and companions.h.i.+p among His Own Kind. I envy him sometimes. It might be worth all the peripheral traumas of being gay in a straight society to know that there are places where you're always welcome, for no other reason than that you're a child of the tribe. My own tribe isn't quite as hospitable.

We crossed the state border and zoomed westward toward Phoenix, the land becoming more mountainous again for a while, the terrain less forbidding. Indian country here-Pimas. We caught a glimpse of Coolidge Dam: memories of third-grade geography lessons. When we were still a hundred miles east of Phoenix, we began to see billboards inviting, no, commanding, us to stay at a downtown motel: HAVE A HAPPY HOLIDAY IN THE VALLEY OF THE SUN. The sun already impinged on us, here in late afternoon, hanging suspended over the winds.h.i.+eld and hurling bolts of red-gold fire into our eyes. Oliver, driving like a robot, produced glittering silvered wrap-around sungla.s.ses and kept right on going. We shot through a town called Miami. No beaches, no matrons in mink. The air was purple and pink from the fumes belching out of smokestacks; the odor of the atmosphere was sheer Auschwitz. What were they cremating here? Just before the central part of the town we saw the huge gray battles.h.i.+p-shaped mound of a copper mine's discards, the great heap of tailings flung up across many years. A gaudy giant motel was right across the highway from it, I suppose for the benefit of those who dig close-up views of environmental rape. What they cremate here is Mother Nature. Sickened, we hurried on, into uninhabited territory. Saguaro, palo verde, ocotillo. We swooped through a long mountain tunnel. Forlorn townless countryside. Lengthening shadows. Heat, heat, heat. And then, abruptly, the tentacles of urban life reaching out from still-distant Phoenix: suburbs, shopping centers, gas stations, trading posts selling Indian souvenirs, motels, neon lights, fast-food stands offering tacos, custard, hot dogs, fried chicken, roast beef sandwiches. Oliver was persuaded to stop and we had tacos under eerie yellow streetlamps. And onward. The gray slabs of immense windowless department stores flanking the road. This was money country, the home of the affluent. I was a stranger in a strange land, poor disorientated alienated Yidling from the Upper West Side whizzing through the cactus and the palm trees. So very far from home. These flat towns, these glistening one-story bank buildings of green gla.s.s with psychedelic plastic signs. Pastel houses, pink and green stucco. Land that has never known snow. American flags aflutter. Love it or leave it, Mac! Main Street, Mesa, Arizona. The University of Arizona Experimental Farm right up against the highway. Far-off mountains glooming in the blue dusk. Now we are on Apache Boulevard in the town of Tempe. Wheels screeching; road turns. And suddenly we are in the desert. No streets, no billboards, nothing: no-man's-land. Dark lumpy shapes on our left: hills, mountains. Headlights visible, far away. A few minutes more and the desolation ends; we have crossed from Tempe into Phoenix and now are on Van Buren Street. Shops, houses, motels. "Keep going till we're downtown," Timothy says. His family, it seems, has a major financial stake in one of the inner-city motels; we'll stay there. Ten minutes more, through a district of secondhand bookshops and five-dollar-a-night motor lodges, and we are downtown. Skysc.r.a.pers here, ten or twelve stories: bank buildings, a newspaper office, large hotels. The heat is fantastic, close to ninety degrees. This is late March; what is the weather like in August? Here is our motel. Statue of a camel out front. Big palm tree. Cramped, ungenerous lobby. Timothy registers. We'll have a suite. Second floor, in back. A swimming pool. "Who's for a swim?" Ned asks. "And then a Mexican dinner," says Oliver. Our spirits bubble. This is Phoenix, after all. We're actually here. We've almost reached our goal. Tomorrow we set out to the north in quest of the retreat of the Keepers of the Skulls.

It seems like years since all this began. That pa.s.sing reference, offhand, casual, in the Sunday newspaper. A "monastery" in the desert, not far north of Phoenix, where twelve or fifteen "monks" practice some private brand of so-called Christianity. "They came up from Mexico about twenty years ago, and are believed to have gone to Mexico from Spain about the time of Cortes. Economically self-sufficient, they keep to themselves and do not encourage visitors, though they are cordial and civil to anyone who stumbles into their isolated, cactus-encircled retreat. The decor is strange, a combination of medieval Christian style and what seems to be Aztec motifs. A predominant symbol that gives the monastery a stark, even grotesque, appearance is the human skull. Skulls are everywhere, grinning, somber, in high relief or in three-dimensional representation. One long frieze of skull images seems patterned after designs to be seen at Chichen Itza, Yucatan. The monks are lean, intense men, their skins tanned and toughened by exposure to desert sun and wind. They seem, oddly enough, both old and young at once. The one I spoke to, who declined to give his name, might have been thirty years old or three hundred, it was impossible to tell. . . ."

Only an accident that I happened to notice that as I glanced randomly through the newspaper's travel supplement. Only an accident that bits of strange imagery-that frieze of skulls, those old-young faces-lodged in my mind. Only an accident that I should, a few days later, come upon the ma.n.u.script of the Book of Skulls in the university library.

Our library has a geniza, a storehouse of culls and curios, of sc.r.a.ps of ma.n.u.script, of apocrypha and oddities that n.o.body had bothered to translate, decipher, cla.s.sify, or even examine in any detail. I suppose every great university must have a similar repository, filled with a miscellanea of doc.u.ments acquired through bequest or unearthed on expeditions, awaiting an eventual (twenty years? fifty?) scrutiny of scholars. Ours is more copiously stocked than most, perhaps because for three generations our empire-building librarians have been hungrily acquisitive, piling up the treasures of antiquity faster than any battalion of scholars could cope with the accessions. In such a system certain items invariably are laid aside, inundated by the torrent of new acquisitions, and eventually are hidden, forgotten, orphaned. So we have cluttered shelves of Sumerian and Babylonian cuneiform doc.u.ments, most of them unearthed during our celebrated digs in southern Mesopotamia in 190205; we have whole barrels of untouched papyri of the later dynasties; we have pounds of material from Iraqi synagogues, not only Torah scrolls but also marriage contracts, court decisions, leases, poetry; we have inscribed sticks of tamarisk wood from the caves of Tun-huang, a neglected gift from Aurel Stein long ago; we have cases of parish records from the moldy muniment rooms of cold Yorks.h.i.+re castles; we have sc.r.a.ps and strips of pre-Columbian Mexican codices; we have stacks of hymns and ma.s.ses from fourteenth-century monasteries in the Pyrenees. For all anyone knows, our library may hold a Rosetta Stone to unlock the secrets of the Mohenjo-daro script, it may have the Emperor Claudius' textbook of Etruscan grammar, it may contain, uncatalogued, the memoirs of Moses or the diary of John the Baptist. Those discoveries, if they are to be made at all, will be made by other prowlers in the dim, dusty storage tunnels beneath the main library building. But I was the one who found the Book of Skulls.

Wasn't looking for it. Hadn't ever heard of it. w.a.n.gled permission to go into the storage vaults in quest of a collection of ma.n.u.scripts of Catalan mystic verse, thirteenth-century, supposedly obtained from the Barcelonian dealer in antiquities, Jaime Maura Gudiol, in 1893. Professor Vasquez Ocana, with whom I'm supposedly collaborating on a group of translations from the Catalan, had heard about the Maura h.o.a.rd from his professor, thirty or forty years ago, and had some vague memories of having handled a few of the actual ma.n.u.scripts. By checking faded accession cards in nineteenth-century sepia ink, I succeeded in learning where in the storage vaults the Maura collection was likely to be found, and went looking. Dark room; sealed boxes; an infinity of cardboard folders; no luck. Coughing, choking in the dust. My fingers blackened, my face grimy. We'll try one more box and call it quits. And then: a stiff red paper binder containing a handsome illuminated ma.n.u.script on sheets of fine vellum. Richly embellished t.i.tle: Liber Calvarium. The Book of Skulls. A fascinating t.i.tle, sinister, romantic. I turned a page. Elegant uncial lettering in a clear, bold hand of the tenth or eleventh century, the words not in Latin but in a heavily Latinate Catalan, which I automatically translated. Hear this, O n.o.bly-Born: life eternal we offer thee. The d.a.m.nedest incipit I had ever encountered. Had I made a mistake? No. Life eternal we offer thee. The page held a paragraph of text, the rest of it not so easy to decipher as the incipit; along the bottom of the page and up the left side were eight beautifully painted human skulls, each set off from the next by a border of columns and a little Romanesque vault. Only one skull still had its lower jaw. One was tipped on its side. But all were grinning, and there was mischief in their shadowy eyesockets: face after face saying, from beyond the grave, It would do you some good to learn the things we have come to know.

I sat down on a box of old parchments and leafed quickly through the ma.n.u.script. Twelve sheets or so, all embellished with grotesqueries of the grave-crossed thighbones, toppled tombstones, a disembodied pelvis or two, and skulls, skulls, skulls, skulls. Translating it on the spot was beyond me; much of the vocabulary was obscure, being neither Latin nor Catalan but some dreamy, flickering intermediate language. Yet the broad sense of what I had found quickly came clear. The text was addressed to some prince by the abbot of a monastery under his protection and was, essentially, an invitation to the prince to withdraw from the mundane world in order to partake of the "mysteries" of the monastic order. The disciplines of the monks, the abbot said, were aimed toward the defeat of Death, by which he meant not the triumph of the spirit in the next world but rather the triumph of the body in this one. Life eternal we offer thee. Contemplation, spiritual and physical exercises, proper diet, and so forth-these were the gateways to everlasting life.

An hour of sweaty toil gave me these pa.s.sages: "The First Mystery is this: that the skull lieth beneath the face, as death lieth alongside life. But, O n.o.bly-Born, there is no paradox in this, for death is the companion of life, life is the messenger of death. If one could but reach through the face to the underlying skull and befriend it, one might [unintelligible]. . .

"The Sixth Mystery is this: that our gift shall always be despised, that we shall ever be fugitives among men, so that we flee from place to place, from the caves of the north to the caves of the south, from the [uncertain] of the fields to the [uncertain] of the city, and so has it been in the hundreds of years of my life and the hundreds of years of my forebears. . . .

"The Ninth Mystery is this: that the price of a life must always be a life. Know, O n.o.bly-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. . . ."

There was more, eighteen Mysteries in all, plus a peroration in absolutely opaque verse. I was captured. It was the intrinsic fascination of the text that caught me, its somber beauty, its ominous embellishments, its gonglike rhythms, rather than any immediate connection with that Arizona monastery. Taking the ma.n.u.script from the library was impossible, of course, but I went upstairs, emerging from the vaults like Banquo's grimy ghost, and arranged for the use of a study cubicle deep in the recesses of the stacks. Then I went home and bathed, saying nothing to Ned about my discovery, though he saw I was preoccupied with something. And returned to the library armed with notepaper, pencils, my own dictionaries. The ma.n.u.script was already on my a.s.signed desk. Until ten that evening, until closing time, I wrestled with it in my badly lit cloister. Yes, no doubt of it: these Spaniards were claiming a technique for attaining immortality. The ma.n.u.script gave no actual clues to their processes, but merely insisted that they were successful. There was much symbology of the-skull-beneath-the-face; for a life-oriented cult, they were greatly attracted to the imagery of the grave. Perhaps that was the necessary discontinuity, the sense of jarring juxtapositions, that Ned makes so much of in his esthe-tic theories. The text made it plain that some of these skull-wors.h.i.+pping monks, if not all, had survived for centuries. (Even for thousands of years? An ambiguous pa.s.sage in the Sixteenth Mystery implied a lineage older than the pharaohs.) Their longevity evidently earned them the resentment of the mortals around them, the peasants and shepherds and barons; many times had they moved their headquarters, seeking always a place where they could practice their exercises in peace.

Three days of hard work gave me a reliable translation of perhaps 85 percent of the text and a working understanding of the rest. I did it mostly by myself, though I consulted Professor Vasquez Ocana about some of the more troublesome phrases, concealing from him, however, the nature of my project. (When he asked if I had found the Maura Gudiol cache I replied vaguely.) At this point I still thought of the whole thing as a charming fantasy. I had read Lost Horizon when I was a boy; I remembered Shangri-la, the secret monastery in the Himalayas, the monks practicing yoga and breathing pure air, that wonderful shocker of a line, "That you are still alive, Father Perrault." One didn't take such stuff seriously. I visualized myself publis.h.i.+ng my translation in, say, Speculum, with appropriate commentary on the medieval belief in immortality, references to the Prester John mythos, to Sir John Mandeville, to the Alexander romances. The Brotherhood of the Skulls, the Keepers of the Skulls who are its high priests, the Trial which must be undergone by four simultaneous candidates, only two of whom are permitted to survive, the hint of ancient mysteries pa.s.sed down across millennia-why, this might have been some tale told by Sheherazade, might it not? I went to the trouble of carefully checking Burton's version of the Thousand Nights and a Night, all sixteen volumes, thinking that the Moors might have brought this tale of skulls to Catalonia in the eighth or ninth century. No. Whatever I had found, it was no free-floating fragment of the Arabian Nights. Perhaps part of the Charlemagne cycle, then? Or some unattributed Romanesque yarn? I prowled through bulky indices of medieval mythological motifs. Nothing. I went further back. I became an expert on the whole literature of immortality and longevity, all in a single week. t.i.thonus, Methuselah, Gilgamesh, the Uttarakurus and the Jambu tree, the fisherman Glaukus, the Taoist immortals, yes, the whole bibliography. And then, the burst of insight, the pounding of the forehead, the wild shout that brought student couriers running from all corners of the stacks. Arizona! Monks who came from Mexico and before that went to Mexico from Spain! The frieze of skulls! I hunted for that article in the Sunday supplement again. Read it in a kind of delirium. Yes. "Skulls are everywhere, grinning, somber, in high relief or in three-dimensional representation. . . . The monks are lean, intense men. . . . The one I spoke to . . . might have been thirty years old or three hundred, it was impossible to tell." That you are still alive, Father Perrault. My astounded soul recoiled. Could I believe such things? I, skeptic, scoffer, materialist, pragmatist? Immortality? An age-old cult? Could such a thing be? The Keepers of the Skulls thriving among the cactus? The whole thing no myth of the medievals, no legend, but an actual continuing establishment that has penetrated even our automated world, one which I could visit whenever I chose to make the trip? Offering myself as candidate. Undergoing the Trial. Eli Steinfeld living to see the dawn of the thirty-sixth century. It was beyond all plausibility. I rejected the juxtaposition of ma.n.u.script and newspaper article as a wild coincidence; then, meditating, I succeeded in rejecting my rejection; and then I moved beyond that toward acceptance. It was necessary for me to make a formal act of faith, the first I had ever achieved, in order to begin to accept it. I compelled myself to agree that there could be powers outside the comprehension of contemporary science. I forced myself to shed a lifelong habit of dismissing the unknown until it has been made known by rigorous proofs. I allied myself willingly and gladly with the flying saucerites, with the Atlanteans, with the scientologists, with the flat-earthers, with the Forteans, with the macrobioticists, with the astrologers, with that whole legion of the credulous in whose company I had rarely felt comfortable before. At last I believed. I believed fully, though allowing for the possibility of error. I believed. Then I told Ned, and, after a while, Oliver and Timothy. Dangling the bait before them. Life eternal we offer thee. And here we are in Phoenix. Palm trees, cactus, the camel outside the motel: here we are. Tomorrow to commence the final phase of our quest for the House of Skulls.

19. Oliver.

Maybe I did make too much fuss over picking up that hitchhiker. I don't know. The whole episode puzzles me. Usually my motives for anything are clear, right out on the surface, but not this time. I was really shouting and rampaging at Ned. Why? Eli chewed me out for it afterward, saying that I had no business interfering with Ned's freely taken decision to offer help to another human being. Ned was driving; he was in charge. Even Timothy, who backed me up when it happened, told me later that he thought I'd overreacted to the situation. The only one who didn't say anything in the evening was Ned; but I knew Ned was burning about it.