The Book of Skulls

chapter 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 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 pursuring 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 Timothy is sullen and withdrawn, I suppose because he dislikes the paternal/schoolmastery role he had to play last night and resents our having forced it on him. (He surely thinks we deliberately set him up to 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, over-eager, 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.