The Book of Skulls

chapter twenty-nine Timothy

This afternoon, while we were scraping up barrels of hen shit in ninety-degree heat, I decided that I’d had it. The joke had gone on long enough. Vacation was just about over, anyway; I wanted out. I had felt that way the first day we were here, of course, but for Eli’s sake I suppressed my feelings. Now I couldn’t keep it in any longer. I decided that I’d speak to him before dinner, during the rest period.

When we came in from the fields I took a quick bath and went down the hall to Eli’s room. He was still in the tub; I heard the water running, heard him singing in his deep monotone voice. Eventually he came out, toweling himself. life here was agreeing with him: he looked stronger, more muscular. He gave me a frosty look.

“Why are you here, Timothy?”

“Just a visit.”

“It’s the rest period. We’re supposed to be alone.”

“We’re always supposed to be alone,” I said, “except when we’re with them. We never get a chance to talk privately to each other any more.”

“That’s evidently part of the ritual.”

“Part of the game,” I said, “part of the crappy game they’re playing with us. Look, Eli, you’re practically like a brother to me. There isn’t anyone can tell me when I can talk to you and when I can’t.”

“My brother the goy,” he said. Quick smile, on-off. “We’ve had plenty of time for talking. We’re under instructions now to keep apart from one another. You ought to go, Timothy. Really, you ought to go, before the fraters catch you in here.”

“What is this, a goddamn jail?”

“It’s a monastery. A monastery has rules, and by coming here we’ve made ourselves subject to those rules.” He sighed. “Will you please go, Timothy?”

“It’s those rules that I want to talk about, Eli.”

“I don’t make them. I can’t excuse you from any of them.”

“Let me talk,” I said. “You know, the clock keeps ticking while we stay here being a Receptacle. We’ll be missed, soon. Our families will notice they haven’t heard from us. Somebodyll discover we didn’t go back to school after Easter.”

“So?”

“How long are we going to stay here, Eli?”

“Until we have what we want.”

“You believe all the crap they’ve been telling us?”

“You still think it’s crap, Timothy?”

“I haven’t seen or heard anything to make me change my original opinion.”

“What about the fraters? How old do you think they are?”

I shrugged. “Sixty. Seventy. Some of them may be in their eighties. They lead a good life, plenty of fresh air and exercise, careful diets. So they keep themselves in shape.”

“I believe Prater Antony is at least a thousand years old,” Eli said. His tone was cold, aggressive, defiant: he was daring me to laugh at him, and I couldn’t. “Possibly he’s much older than that,” Eli went on. “The same for Frater Miklos and Frater Franz. I don’t think there’s one Of them who’s less than a hundred fifty or so.”

“Wonderful.”

“What do you want, Timothy? Do you want to leave?”

“I’ve been considering it.”

“By yourself or with us?”

“Preferably with you. By myself if necessary.”

“Oliver and I aren’t leaving, Timothy. And I don’t think Ned is either.”

“I guess that puts me on my own, then.”

“Is that a threat?” he asked. “It’s an implication.”

“You know what’ll happen to the rest of us if you pull out.”

“Are you seriously afraid that the fraters will enforce that oath?” I asked.

“We swore not to leave,” Eli said. “They named the penalty and we agreed to abide by it. I wouldn’t underestimate their ability to impose it if one of us gave them cause.”

“Crap. They’re just a bunch of little old men. If any of them came after me, I’d break them in half. With one hand.”

“Perhaps you would. Perhaps we wouldn’t. Do you want to be responsible for our deaths, Timothy?”

“Don’t hand me that melodramatic garbage. I’m a free agent. Look at it existentially, the way you’re always asking us to do: we shape our own fates, Eli, we go our own paths. Why should I be bound to you three?”

“You took a voluntary oath.”

“I can renounce it.”

“All right,” he said. “Renounce it. Pack up and clear out.” He was lying sprawled out naked on his cot, staring me down; I had never seen Eli look this determined, this formidable, before. Suddenly he was tremendously together. Or else he had a demon inside him. He said, “Well, Timothy? You’re a free agent. Nobody’s stopping you. You can be in Phoenix by sundown.”

“I’m not in that much of a rush. I wanted to discuss this with the three of you, come to some kind of rational understanding, nobody bludgeoning anybody else but all of us agreeing that—”

“We agreed to come here,” Eli said, “and we agreed to give it a chance. Further discussion’s not necessary. You can pull out whenever you please, bearing in mind, of course, that by doing so you’ll expose us to certain risks.”

“That’s blackmail.”

“I know.” His eyes flashed. “What are you afraid of, Timothy? The Ninth Mystery? Does that scare you? Or is it the possibility of really getting to live forever that you’re worried about? Are you bowed down under existential terror, man? Seeing yourself going on and on through the centuries, tied to the wheel of karma, unable to get free? Which frightens you more, Timothy — living or dying?”

“You little cocksucker.”

“Wrong room,” he said. “Go out to the left, two doors up the hall, ask for Ned.”

“I came in here with something serious on my mind. I didn’t ask for jokes and I didn’t ask for threats and I didn’t ask for personal smears. I just want to know how long you and Oliver and Ned plan to stay here.”

“We’ve only just arrived. It’s too soon to talk about leaving. Will you excuse me now?”

I went out. I was getting nowhere, and we both knew it. And Eli had stung me, a few times, in places where I hadn’t realized I was so vulnerable.

At dinner, he acted as though I hadn’t said a thing to him,

And now? Do I just sit and wait and wonder? Jesus, I can’t put up with much more of this, honestly. I simply wasn’t designed for the monastic life — completely leaving out of the question the matter of the Book of Skulls and all it may offer. You have to be bred for this sort of thing; you have to have renunciation in your genes, a touch of masochism. I’ve got to make them realize that, Eli and Oliver. The two madmen, the two immortality-crazed lunatics. They’d stay here ten or twenty years, pulling weeds, breaking their backs with these exercises, staring at the sun till they’re half blind, breathing deep, eating peppered mush, and convincing themselves that this was the right way to get to live forever. Eli, who always struck me as freaky and neurotic but fundamentally pretty rational, seems definitely to have flipped. His eyes are strange now, glassy and fierce, like Oliver’s: psychotic eyes, terrible eyes. Things are stirring inside Eli. He’s gaining strength day by day, adding not just muscles but a sort of moral strength, a fervor, a dynamism: he’s bound on his course and he lets you know that he isn’t going to allow anything to come between him and what he wants. For Eli that’s something brand new. Sometimes I think he’s turning into Oliver — a short, dark, hairy Yiddish edition of Oliver. Oliver, of course, keeps his mouth shut and does enough chores for six and at exercise time bends himself into a pretzel trying to out-frater the frater. And even Ned is catching the faith. No wisecracks from him now, no little snotty quips. In the morning we sit there listening to Frater Miklos spin long driveling skeins of senile gibberish, with maybe one intelligible sentence out of every six, and there’s Ned, like a six-year-old being told about Santa Claus, screwing up his face in excitement, sweating, chewing his nails, nodding, gulping it all down. Right on, Frater Miklos! Atlantis, yes, and Cro-magnon Man, sure, and the Aztecs, and all the rest, I believe, I believe! And then we eat our lunch, and then we meditate on the cold stone floor of our rooms, each by himself, and then we go out and sweat for the fraters in the fucking fields. Enough. I can’t take very much more. I muffed my chance today, but I’ll go back to Eli again in a day or two and see if I can’t get him to be reasonable. Though I don’t have much hope of that.

Eli frightens me a little, now.

And I wish he hadn’t said that bit about what I’m afraid of, whether the Ninth Mystery or living forever. I very much wish he hadn’t said that to me.