The Book of Skulls

chapter 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 Innl 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 well 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:

1. Why have we bothered to make this trip?

2. What do we really expect to gain?

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

4. 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, no 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.”

“Plenty of people still go to church,” Timothy pointed out. “Even to synagogue, I suppose.”

“Out of habit. Out of fear. Out of social necessity. Do they open their souls to God? When did you last open your soul to God, Timothy? Oliver? Ned? When did I? When did we even think of doing anything like that? It sounds absurd. God’s been so polluted by the evangelists and the archaeologists and the theologists and the fake-devout that it’s no wonder He’s dead. Suicide. But where does that leave us? Are we all going to be scientists and explain everything in terms of neutrons and protons and DNA? Where’s mystery? Where’s depth? We have to do it all ourselves,” Eli said. “There’s a lack of mystery in modern life. All right, then, it becomes the intelligent man’s task to create an atmosphere in which surrender to the implausible is possible. A closed mind is a dead mind.” He was warming up, now. Fervor taking hold of him. The Billy Graham of the Stoned Age. “For the last eight, ten years, we’ve all been trying to stumble toward some kind of workable synthesis, some structural correlative that’ll hold the world together for us in the middle of all the chaos. The pot, the acid, the communes, the rock, the whole transcendentalist thing, the astrology, the macrobiotics, the Zen — we’re searching, right, we’re always searching? And sometimes finding. Not often. We look in a lot of dumb places, because basically we’re mostly dumb, even the best of us, and also because we can’t know the answers until we’ve worked out more of the questions. So we chase after flying saucers. We put on Scuba suits and look for Atlantis. We’re into mythology, fantasy, paranoia, Middle Earth, freakiness, a thousand kinds of irrationality. Whatever they’ve rejected, we buy, often for no better reason than that they turned it down. The flight from reason. I don’t entirely defend it. I just say it’s necessary, it’s a stage we all have to pass through, the fire, the annealing. Reason wasn’t sufficient. Western man escaped from superstitious ignorance into materialistic emptiness: now we’ve got to continue on, sometimes down blind alleys and false trails, until we learn how to accept the universe again in all its mysterious inexplicable tremendousness, until we find the right thing, the synthesis, the getting together that lets us live the way we ought to be living. And then we can live forever. Or so close to forever as doesn’t make any difference.”

Timothy said, “And you want us to believe that the Book of Skulls shows the way, huh?”

“It’s a possibility. It gives us a finite chance to enter the infinite. Isn’t that good enough? Isn’t that worth trying? Where did sneering get us? Where did doubt get us? Where did skepticism get us? Can’t we try? Can’t we look?” Eli had found his faith again. He was shouting, sweating, standing up stark naked and waving his arms around. His whole body was on fire. He was actually beautiful, just for that moment. Eli, beautiful!

I said, “I’m into this all the way, and at the same time I don’t buy it for half an inch. Do you follow me? I dig the dialectic of the myth. Its implausibility batters against my skepticism and drives me onward. Tensions and contradictions are my fuel.”

Timothy, devil’s advocate, shook his head — a heavy taurine gesture, his big beefy frame moving like a slow pendulum. “Come on, man. What do you really believe? The Skulls, yes or no, salvation or crap, fact or fantasy. Which?”

“Both,” I said.

“Both? You can’t have it both.”

“Yes I can!” I cried. “Both! Both! Yes and no! Can you follow me to where I live, Timothy? In the place where the tension’s greatest, where the yes is drawn tight against the no. Where you simultaneously reject the existence of the inexplicable ^ind accept the existence of the inexplicable. Life eternal! That’s crap, isn’t it, a load of wishful thinking, the old hogwash dream? And yet it’s real, too. We can live a thousand years, if we want to. But it’s impossible. I affirm. I deny. I applaud. I jeer.”

“You don’t make sense,” Timothy grumbled.

“You make too much sense. I shit on your sense! Eli’s right: we need mystery, we need unreason, we need the unknown, we need the impossible. A whole generation’s been teaching itself to believe the unbelievable, Timothy. And there you stand with your crew cut on, saying it doesn’t make sense.”

Timothy shrugged. “Right. What do you want from me? I’m just a dumb jock.”

“That’s your pose,” Eli said. “Your persona, your mask. Big dumb jock. It insulates you. It spares you from having to make any commitment whatsoever, emotional, political, ideological, metaphysical. You say you don’t understand, and you shrug, and you step back and laugh. Why, do you want to be a zombie, Timothy? Why do you want to disconnect yourself?”

“He can’t help it, Eli,” I said. “He was bred to be a gentleman. He’s disconnected by definition.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Timothy said, in his most gentlemanly way. “What do you know, either of you? And what am I doing here? Dragged halfway across the Western Hemisphere by a Jew and a queer to check out a thousand-year-old fairy tale!”

I made a little curtsy. “Hey, well done, Timothy! The mark of the true gentleman: he never gives offense unintentionally.”

“You asked it,” said Eli, “so you answer it. What are you doing here?”

“And don’t blame me for dragging you here,” I said. “This is Eli’s trip. I’m as skeptical as you are, maybe even more so.”

Timothy snorted. I think he felt outnumbered. He said, very quietly, “I just came along for the ride.”

“For the ride! For the ride!” Eli.

“You asked me to come. What the crap, you needed four guys, you said, and I had nothing better to do for Easter. My buddies. My pals. I said I’d go. My car, my money. I can play along with a gag. Margo’s into astrology, you know, it’s Libra this and Pisces that, and Mars transits the solar tenth house, and Saturn’s on the cusp, and she won’t fuck without first checking the stars, which can sometimes be quite inconvenient. And do I make fun of her? Do I laugh at her the way her father does?”

“Only inside,” Eli said.

“That’s my business. I accept what I can accept, and I have no use for the rest. But I’m good-hearted about it. I tolerate her witch doctors. I tolerate yours, too, Eli. That’s another mark of the gentleman, Ned: he’s amiable, he doesn’t proselytize, he never pushes his thing at the expense of someone else’s thing.”

“He doesn’t have to,” I said.

“He doesn’t have to, no. All right: I’m here, yes? I’m paying for this room, yes? I’m cooperating 400 percent. Must I be a True Believer, too? Must I get your religion?”

“What will you do,” Eli said, “when we’re actually in the skullhouse and the Keepers are offering us the Trial? Will you still be a skeptic then? Will your habit of not believing be such a hassle for you that you won’t be able to surrender?”

“I’ll evaluate that,” Timothy answered slowly, “when I have something to base my evaluation on.” Suddenly he turned to Oliver. “You’ve been pretty quiet, All-American.”

“What do you want me to say?” Oliver asked. His long lean body stretched out in front of the television set. Every muscle outlined against his skin: a walking anatomy textbook. His lengthy pink apparatus, drooping out of a golden forest inspiring me with improper thoughts. Retro me, Sathanas. This way lies Gomorrah, if not Sodom.

“Don’t you have anything to contribute to the discussion?”

“I really wasn’t paying close attention.”

“We were talking about this trip. The Book of Skulls and the degree of faith we have in it,” said Timothy.

“I see.”

“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 the 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 its my only hope. A communique from some other planet. I could feel the chilly presence of Death there in the room with us, brushing silently past our rosy boyish cheeks.