The Book of Skulls

chapter thirty-six Oliver

Timothy showed up as I was getting ready to go to sleep. He came slouching in, looking surly and sullen, and for an instant I didn’t understand why he was there. “Okay,” he said, flopping down against the wall. “Let’s get it over with fast, huh?”

“You look angry.”

“I am. I’m angry about this whole fucking pile of crap I’ve been forced to wallow in.”

“Don’t take it out on me,” I said.

“Am I?”

“That’s not exactly a friendly expression on your face.”

“I don’t exactly feel friendly, Oliver. I feel like getting the hell out of this place right after breakfast. How long have we been here, anyway? Two weeks, three weeks? Too fucking long, however long it is. Too fucking long.”

“You knew it was going to take time when you agreed to go into it,” I said. “There was no way that the Trial could have been a quickie deal, four days, in, out. If you pull out of it now you spoil it for the rest of us. And don’t forget that we swore—”

“We swore, we swore, we swore, we swore! Oh, Christ, Oliver, you’re starting to sound just like Eli now! Scolding me. Nagging me. Reminding me that I swore to something. Oh, Jesus, do I hate this whole crappy routine! it’s like the three of you are holding me prisoner in a booby-hatch.”

“So you are angry at me.”

He shrugged. “I’m angry at everyone and everything. Most of all I’m angry at myself, I guess^ For getting myself into this. For not having had the sense to tell you to count me out, right at the start. I thought it would be amusing, so I went along for the ride. Amusing! Sheesh!”

“You still believe it’s nothing but a waste of time?”

“Don’t you?”

“I don’t think so,” I told him. “I can feel myself changing day by day. Deepening my control over my body. Extending my range of perceptions. I’m tuning in on something big, Timothy, and Eli and Ned are, too, and there’s no reason why you can’t be doing it also.”

“Lunatics. Three lunatics.”

“If you’d try to be a little less uptight about it and actually do some of the meditations and spiritual exercises—”

“There you go. Nagging me again.”

“I’m sorry. Forget it, Timothy. Forget the whole bit.” I took a deep breath. Timothy was perhaps my closest friend, maybe my only friend, and yet suddenly I was sick of him, sick of his big beefy face, sick of his close-chopped hair, sick of his arrogance, sick of his money, sick of his ancestors, sick of his contempt for anything beyond the reach of understanding. I said, keeping my voice flat and frosty, “Look, if you don’t like it here, go. Just go. I don’t want you to think I’m the one who’s holding you. You go, if that’s what you want. And don’t worry about me, about the oath, any of that stuff. I can look after myself.”

“I don’t know what I want to do,” he muttered, and for an instant the cranky scowl left his face. The expression that replaced it was one I couldn’t easily associate with Timothy: a look of confusion, a look of vulnerability. It vanished and he gave me the scowl once more. “Another thing,” he said, sounding cranky again. “Why the crap do I have to tell secrets to anybody?”

“You don’t have to.”

“Frater Javier said we should.”

“What’s that to you? If you don’t want to spill anything, don’t spill it.”

“It’s part of the ritual,” said Timothy.

“But you don’t believe in the ritual. Anyway, if you’re leaving here tomorrow, Timothy, you don’t need to do anything Frater Javier says you should do.”

“Did I say I was leaving?”

“You said you wanted to.”

“I said I felt like leaving. I didnt say I was going to leave. That’s not the same thing. I haven’t made up my mind.”

“Stay or not, as you please. Confess or not, as you please. But if you aren’t going to do what Frater Javier sent you here to do, I wish you’d go away and let me get some sleep.”

“Don’t hassle me, Oliver. Don’t start pushing. I can’t move as fast as you want me to.”

“You’ve had all day to decide whether you’re going to tell me anything or not.”

He nodded. He bent forward until his head was between his knees and sat like that, silent, for a very long time. My annoyance faded. I could see he was in trouble. This was a whole new Timothy to me. He wanted to unbend, he wanted to get into the skullhouse thing, and yet he despised it all so much that he couldn’t. So I didnt push him. I let him sit there, and finally he looked up and said, “If I tell you what I have to tell you, what assurance do I have that you won’t repeat it?”

“Frater Javier instructed us not to repeat anything we hear in these confessions.”

“Sure, but will you really keep quiet about it?”

“Don’t you trust me, Timothy?”

“I don’t trust anybody with this. This could destroy me. The frater wasn’t kidding when he said that each of us must have something locked inside him that he doesn’t dare let out. I’ve done a lot of crappy things, yes indeed, but there’s one thing so crappy that it’s almost holy, almost a sacred sin, it’s so monstrous. People would despise me if they knew about it. You’ll probably despise me.” His face was gray with strain. “I don’t know if I want to talk about it.”

“If you don’t then don’t.”

“I’m supposed to let it out.”

“Only if you’re committed to the disciplines of the Book of Skulls. And you aren’t.”

“If I wanted to be, though, I’d have to do as Frater Javier says. I don’t know. I don’t know. You absolutely wouldn’t tell this to Eli or Ned? Or anybody else?”

“I absolutely wouldn’t,” I said.

“I wish I could really believe that.”

“I can’t help you on that score, Timothy. It’s like Eli says: some things you have to take on faith.”

“Maybe we could make a deal,” he said, sweating, looking desperate. “I’ll tell you my story, and then you tell me your story, and that way we’ll each have leverage. Well have something to hold against each other by way of guaranteeing that there’ll be no gossiping.”

“The person I’m supposed to confess to,” I said, “is Eli. Not you. Eli.”

“No deal, then?”

“No deal.”

He was silent again. An even longer time. At last he looked up. His eyes frightened me. He moistened his lips and moved his jaws, but no words came out. He seemed to be on the edge of panic, and some of his terror was bleeding through to me; I felt tense and jumpy, itchy, uncomfortably aware of the blanket of close, clinging heat.

Eventually he forced a few words out. “You’ve met my kid sister,” he said.

Yes, I had met his sister, several times, when I had gone home with Timothy for Christmas holidays. She was two or three years younger than Timothy, a leggy blonde, quite goodlooking but not especially bright: Margo without Margo’s personality, in fact. Timothy’s sister was a Wellesley girl, your stereotyped debutante-Junior League-charity tea kind of girl, your tennis-golf-horseback-riding kind of girl. She had a fine body, but otherwise I hadn’t found her attractive at all, because I was turned off by her smugness, her moneyedness, her air of don’t-touch-me virginity. I don’t think virgins are terribly interesting. This one gave a definite impression of being far above such coarse, vulgar things as sex. I could imagine her drawling to her fiance, as the poor freak tried to get his hand into her blouse, “Oh, darling, don’t be so crude!” I doubt that she cared for me very much more than I did for her: my Kansas background marked me as a clodhopper, and my daddy hadn’t belonged to the right clubs and I wasn’t a member of the right church. My total lack of upper-class credentials dumped me into that very large class of male human beings whom girls of that sort simply don’t consider as potential escorts, lovers, or husbands. For her I was just part of the furniture, like a gardener or a stable boy. “Yes,” I said, “I’ve met your kid sister.”

Timothy studied me for an endless moment.

“When I was in my last year at prep school,” he said in a voice as hollow and as rusty as an abandoned tomb, “I raped her, Oliver. I raped her.”

I think he expected the heavens to open and lightning to descend when he made his big confession. I think that at the very least he expected me to recoil, covering my eyes, and cry out that I was shattered by his shocking words. Actually I was a little surprised, both that Timothy should have bothered with any such grubby business and that he had managed to put it to her without any immediate consequences, such as getting horsewhipped when her screams brought the rest of the family running. And I had to rearrange my image of her, knowing now as I did that her supercilious thighs had been furrowed by her brother’s cock. But otherwise I wasn’t exactly astounded. Where I come from the sheer weight of boredom is always driving the young’uns to incest and much worse; and though I hadn’t ever balled my sister, I knew plenty of fellows who had had theirs. It was lack of inclination, not tribal taboo, that led me to keep my sticky hands off Sis. Still, this was clearly a serious business to Timothy, and I maintained a respectful silence, looking grave and disturbed, as he told me his story.

He spoke haltingly at first, in obvious embarrassment, sweating and stumbling and stammering, like Lyndon Johnson beginning to explain his Vietnam policy to a war-crimes tribunal. But before long the words were flowing freely, as though this was a story Timothy had told many times in the privacy of his own head, rehearsing it so often that by now the telling of it was automatic once the first awkwardness of speaking was behind him. It had happened, he said, exactly four years ago this month, when he was home for Easter recess from Andover and his sister was in from the girls’ academy in Pennsylvania that she attended. (At that time my own first meeting with Timothy was still five months in the future.) He was 18 and his sister about 15½. They didn’t get along well, never had; she was the sort of kid whose relationship with her older brother had always been conducted on the sticking-her-tongue-out-at-him level. He thought she was impossibly snotty and snobbish and she thought he was impossibly rude and brutish. During the previous Christmas holiday he had laid his sister’s closest friend and classmate, which the sister had found out about, and that had placed an extra strain on their relationship.

It was a difficult season in Timothy’s life. At Andover he was a powerful and universally admired leader, a football hero, president of his class, a famed symbol of virility and savoir faire; but in a couple of months he’d be graduating and all that accumulated prestige would count for zip as he moved on to become just another freshman in a large, world-famous university. That was traumatic for him. He had also been conducting a strenuous and expensive long-distance love affair with a girl from Rad-cliffe who was a year or two his senior; he didn’t love her, it was just a status thing for him to be able to say he was fucking a college girl, but he was pretty sure she was in love with him. Just before Easter he had accidentally learned from a third party that in fact she regarded him as an amusing pet, a sort of prep-school trophy to display to her innumerable suave Harvard boyfriends; her attitude to him, in short, was even more cynical than his to her. So he came home to the family acres that spring feeling pretty crushed, which was a novelty for Timothy. Immediately he was into a new source of uprightness. In his home town there was a girl he loved, really loved. I’m not sure what Timothy means by “love,” but I think it’s a term he , applies to any girl who fits his criteria of looks, money, and birth, and who won’t let him sleep with her; that makes her unattainable, that puts her up on a pedestal, and so he tells himself he “loves” her. The Don Quixote number, in a way. This girl was seventeen and had just been accepted by Bennington, came from a family with nearly as much bread as Timothy’s, was an Olympic-quality equestrienne, and, to hear him tell it, had a body that was strictly Playmate-of-the-Year category. He and she belonged to the same country-club set, and he had been golfing, dancing, and playing tennis with her since before puberty, but his occasional attempts to achieve a deeper friendship had been expertly turned aside. He was obsessed by her to the point where he even thought of marrying her eventually, and he deluded himself into thinking that she had already picked him as her eventual husband; therefore, he reasoned, she wasn’t letting him get his hands on her because she knew he was a double-standard man at heart and was afraid he’d regard her as unmarriageable if he got into her this early.

The first few days he was home he phoned her every afternoon. Polite, friendly, distant conversation. She didn’t seem to be available for solo dating — dating apparently wasn’t much of a custom in their group — but she said she’d see him at the country-club dance on Saturday night. High hopes building. The dance was one of those formal deals with constantly changing partners, interrupted by interludes of necking in various approved recesses of the club. He succeeded in getting her into one of those recesses by mid-evening, and, though he didn’t even come close to entering her recesses, he did manage to get further with her than ever before: tongue in the mouth, hands under the bra. And he thought he saw a certain glitter in her eye. The next time he danced with her he invited her to take a stroll with him — also part of the country-club ritual. They paraded the grounds. He suggested that they go down to the boathouse. In that set, a trip to the boathouse was code for fucking. They went to the boathouse. His fingers slithered eagerly along her cool thighs. Her palpitating body throbbed to his caresses. Her passionate palm rubbed the swollen front of his trousers. Like a maddened bull he seized her with the intention of plonking her right then and there, and with the skill of an Olympic virginity champion she gave him a maidenly knee in the balls, escaping certain rape at the very last minute. After delivering some choice remarks on his bestial habits she stormed out, leaving him numb and dazed in the chilly boathouse. There was a fierce ache in his groin and there was blind rage in his head. What would any redblooded American youth have done in such a situation? What Timothy did was to stagger back to the clubhouse, grab a half-full bottle of bourbon from the bar, and go lurching out into the night, feeling furious and very sorry for himself. After gulping half the bourbon he jumped into his sleek little Mercedes sports car and drove home at eighty miles an hour; then he sat in the garage finishing off the bourbon; then, blind drunk and raging mad, he went upstairs, invaded his virginal young sister’s bedroom, and flung himself on top of her. She struggled. She implored. She whimpered. But his strength was as the strength of ten and nothing could swerve him from his chosen course, not with that giant hard-on doing his thinking for him. She was a girl; she was a bitch; he was going to use her. He didn’t currently see any difference between the luscious cock-teaser in the boathouse and this uppity sister of his; they were both bitches, they were all bitches, and he was going to get even with the whole tribe of women at once. He held her down with his knees and elbows. “If you yell,” he told her, “I’ll break your neck,” and he meant it, because just then he was out of his head, and she knew it, too. Down came his trembling sister’s pajama bottoms. Cruelly the snorting stallion of a brother battered at her tender gate. “I don’t even think she was a virgin,” he told me morosely. “I went right in, easy.” It was all over in two minutes. Then he rolled free of her, and they were both shivering, she from shock and he from release, and he pointed out to her that it wouldn’t do her any good to complain to their parents about this, since they probably wouldn’t believe her, and if they called in a doctor to check the story there would certainly be a scandal, whispers, insinuations, and once that began to get around town it would ruin her chances of getting married, ever, to anyone worth marrying. She glared at him. He had never seen such hate in anyone’s eyes.

He made his way to his own room, falling down a couple of times. When he woke, sober and aghast, it was late the next afternoon and he expected to find the police waiting for him downstairs. But there was no one there but his father and his stepmother and the servants. Nobody acted as if anything unusual had happened. His father smiled, asked him how the dance had gone. His sister was out with friends. She didn’t return until dinnertime, and when she came in she behaved as though everything was as it should be, giving Timothy a cool, distant, customary nod as a greeting. That evening she called him aside and said in a menacing, terrifying voice, “If you ever try anything like that again, you’ll get a knife in the balls, I promise you.” But that was the last reference she ever made to what he had done. In four years she hadn’t spoken of it once, at least not to him and probably not to anyone; she apparently had sealed the episode into some stony compartment of her mind, filing it away as a night’s unpleasantness, like an attack of the trots. I could testify that she maintained a perfect icy surface, playing the role of the eternal virgin no matter who or what had been into her.

That was all. That was the whole thing. When he was finished, Timothy looked up, drained, empty, gray-faced, a million and a half years old. “I can’t tell you how crappy I’ve always felt about doing something like that,” he said. “How much goddamned guilt I’ve had.”

“You feel better now?” I asked.

“No.”

I wasn’t surprised. I’ve never believed that opening your soul brings you surcease from sorrow. It just spreads the sorrow around some. What Timothy had told me was a dumb story, a sordid story, a downer, a bummer. A tale of the idle rich, mind-fucking each other in the usual fashion, worrying about virginity and propriety, creating little melodramatic operas starring themselves and their friends, with snobbishness and frustration spinning the plot. I almost felt sorry for Timothy, big hulking good-natured upper-crust Timothy, as much victim as criminal, simply looking for a little action at the country club and getting kneed in the groin instead. So he got drunk and raped his sister because he thought it would make him feel better, or because he wasn’t thinking at all. And that was his great secret, that was his terrible sin. I felt soiled by the story. It was such a shabby thing, such a pitiful thing; and now I would have to carry it around in my head forever. I couldn’t say a word to him. After what seemed like ten silent minutes he got heavily to his feet and shambled toward the door.

“All right,” he said. “I did what Frater Javier wanted me to do. Now I feel like a load of shit. How do you feel, Oliver?” He laughed. “And tomorrow it’s your turn.”

He went out.

Yes. Tomorrow it’s my turn.