The Book of Skulls

chapter twenty-six Oliver

So we’re here and it’s real and we’re inside it and they’ll take us on as candidates. Life eternal we offer thee. That much is established. It’s real. But is it? If you go to church faithfully every Sunday and say your prayers and lead a blameless life and put two bucks in the tray, you’ll go to heaven and live forever among the angels and apostles, so they say, but do you really go? Is there a heaven? Are there angels and apostles? What good is all that diligent churchgoing if none of the rest of the deal is real? And so there really is a House of Skulls, there really is a Brotherhood of the Skulls, there are Keepers — Frater Antony is a Keeper — and we are a Receptacle, there is to be a Trial, but is it real? Is any of it real? Life eternal we offer thee, but do they? Or is it all just a pipe dream, like the stories of how you’ll go to live among the angels and apostles?

Eli thinks it’s real. Ned seems to think it’s real. Timothy is amused by the whole thing, or perhaps irritated by it; hard to tell. And I? And I? I feel like a sleepwalker. This is a waking dream.

I constantly wonder, not just here but wherever I go, whether things are real, whether I’m experiencing anything genuine. Am I truly connected, am I plugged in to things? What if I’m not? What if the sensations I feel are just the dimmest faintest echoes of what others feel? How can I tell? When I drink wine, do I taste all that there is to taste in it, what they taste? Or do I get only the ghost of the flavor? When I read a book, do I understand the words on the page, or do I only think I do? When I touch a girl’s body, do I truly feel the texture of her flesh? Sometimes I think all my perceptions are too weak. Sometimes I believe that I’m the only one in the world who isn’t feeling things in full, but I have no way of telling that, any more than a color-blind man is able to tell if the colors he sees are the true ones. Sometimes I think I’m living a motion picture. I’m just a shadow on a screen, drifting from episode to meaningless episode in a script somebody else has written, some moron has written, some chimpanzee, some berserk computer, and I have no depth, no texture, no tangibility, no reality. Nothing matters; nothing is real. It’s all a big picture-show. And this is how it has to be for me, forever. A kind of desperation comes over me at times like that. I can’t believe in anything, then. Words themselves lose their meanings and become empty sounds. Everything becomes abstract, not just cloudy words like love and hope and death, but even the concrete ones, words like tree, street, sour, hot, soft, horse, window. I can’t trust anything to be what it’s supposed to be, because its name is only a noise. All content gets washed out of nouns. Life. Death. Everything. Nothing. They’re all the same, aren’t they? So what’s real and what’s unreal, and does it make any difference? Isn’t the whole universe just a bundle of atoms, which we arrange into meaningful patterns by means of our abilities to perceive? And can’t the packets of perception that we assemble be disassembled just as easily, by our ceasing to believe in the whole process? I simply have to withdraw my acceptance of the abstract notion that what I see, what I think I see, really is there. So that I could walk through the wall of this room, once I succeeded in denying that wall. So that I could live forever, once I denied death. So that I could die yesterday, once I denied today. I get into a mood like this and I go spiraling down and down on the whirlpool of my own thoughts, until I’m lost, I’m lost, I’m lost forever.

But we’re here. It’s real. We’re inside it. They’ll take us on as candidates.

That’s all established. That’s all real. But “real” is just a noise. “Real” isn’t real. I don’t think I’m connected any more. I don’t think I’m plugged in. The other three, they could go to a restaurant and they’d think they were biting into a rare juicy broiled steak; I’d know I’m biting into a bundle of atoms, an abstract percept that we’ve labeled “steak,” and you can’t get nourishment from abstract percepts. I deny the steakness of the steak. I deny the reality of the steak. I deny the reality of the House of Skulls. I deny the reality of Oliver Marshall. I deny the reality of reality.

I must have been out in the sun too long today. I’m scared. I’m coming apart. I’m not plugged in. And I can’t tell any of them about it. Because I deny them, too. I’ve denied everything. God help me, I’ve denied God! I’ve denied death and I’ve denied life. What do the Zen people ask? What’s the sound of one hand clapping, eh? Where does the flame of the candle go when it’s been snuffed? Where does the flame go? I think I’m going to go there too, soon.