The Book of Skulls

chapter forty-one Ned

I tried to get Oliver to help with the task of burying Timothy, but he sulked in his room like Achilles in his tent, so the job fell entirely to Eli and me. Oliver wouldn’t open his door, he wouldn’t even acknowledge my knock wjth a surly grunt from within. I left him and rejoined the group outside the building. Eli, standing beside fallen Timothy, wore a seraphic, transfigured look; he glowed. His face was flushed and his body glistened with a coating of sweat in the morning light. Surrounding him were four of the fraters, the four Keepers, Fraters Antony, Miklos, Javier, and Franz. They were calm and seemed gratified by what had occurred. Frater Franz had brought gravediggers’ tools, picks and shovels. The burying ground, said Frater Antony, was a short distance into the desert.

Perhaps for reasons of ritual purity, the fraters would not touch the corpse. I doubted that Eli and I could carry Timothy as much as ten yards by ourselves, but Eli was not at all daunted. Kneeling, he knotted Timothy’s feet around each other and put his shoulder under Timothy’s calves, signaling to me to grab Timothy by the middle. Hup! and we heaved and hauled and lifted that inert 200-pound hulk from the ground, staggering a little. With Frater Antony leading us, Eli and I marched toward the burying ground, the other fraters somewhere to the rear. Though dawn was not far behind us, the sun was already remorseless, and the effort of bearing that terrible burden through the shimmering heat haze of the desert cast me into a quasi-hallucinatory state; my pores opened, my knees swayed, my eyes lost focus, I felt an invisible hand clutching my throat. I entered an instant-replay trip, seeing again the flashback shots of Eli’s great moment in slow motion, the camera stopping at the critical intervals. I saw Eli running, Eli bending to snatch that heavy basalt globe, Eli in pursuit of Timothy again, Eli catching him, Eli winding up like a shot-putter, the muscles of his right side standing out in startling relief, Eli slowly extending his arm in a wonderfully fluid way, reaching forward as though he meant to rap Timothy on the back but instead gently and smoothly driving the stone skull against Timothy’s more fragile one. Timothy crumpling, dropping, lying still. Again. Again. Again. The chase, the assault, the impact, in a magic newsreel of the mind. Intersecting these pictures came other familiar images of mortality, drifting like phantom overlays of gauze: the astonished face of Lee Harvey Oswald as Jack Ruby approaches him, the rumpled form of Bobby Kennedy on the kitchen floor, the severed heads of Mishima and his companion neatly resting back of the general’s desk, the Roman soldier prodding the figure on the Cross with his spear, the gaudy mushroom unfolding over Hiroshima. And again Eli, again the trajectory of the antique blunt object, again the impact. Stop-time. The poetry of termination. I stumbled and nearly fell, and the beauty of those images sustained me, flooding my cracking joints and bursting muscles with new strength, so that I remained upright, a plodding diligent pallbearer, lurching over the crumbling alkaline earth. As by living we daily die, so then by dying we shall forever live.

“We have reached the place,” said Frater Antony.

Was this a graveyard? I saw no tombstones, no markers of any kind. The low leathery-leaved gray plants of the thirsty wasteland grew in random splotches on an empty field. I looked more closely then, perceiving things with the strange tripped-out intensity of exhaustion, and noticed certain irregularities in the terrain, a patch here that seemed sunken by a few inches, a patch there that looked to be elevated above the rest, as though there had indeed been some disturbances of the surface. Carefully we lowered Timothy. When we put him down my body, relieved, seemed to float; I thought actually I would leave the ground. My limbs trembled and my arms, of their own accord, rose shoulder-high. It was a short respite. Frater Franz handed us the tools and we began to dig the grave. He alone assisted us; the other three Keepers stood apart, like votive statues, motionless, aloof. The soil was coarse and soft, perhaps having had all the cohesion baked out of it by ten million years of Arizona sun. We dug like slaves, like ants, like machines, thrust and heave, thrust and heave, thrust and heave, each of us making his own little pit and then joining the three pits. Occasionally we intruded on someone else’s work area; once Eli nearly speared my bare foot with his pick. But we got the job done. At length a rough trench, perhaps seven feet long, three feet wide, four feet deep, lay open before us. “It is sufficient,” said Frater Franz. Gasping, sweat-shiny, dizzied, we threw down our tools and stepped back. I was at the edge of exhaustion and could barely remain standing. An attack of dry heaves threatened me; I fought it and converted it, absurdly, into hiccups. Frater Antony said, “Place the dead man in the ground.” Just like that? No coffin, no covering at all? Dirt in the face? Dust to dust? It seemed that way. We found a final reservoir of energy and lifted Timothy, swung him out over our excavation, eased him down. He lay on his back, the ruined head •cradled on soft earth, the eyes — did they show a look of surprise? — staring up at us. Eli reached in, closed the eyes, turned Timothy’s head slightly to the side, a position more like that of sleep, a more comfortable way to spend one’s eternal rest. The four Keepers now took up stations at the four corners of the grave. Fraters Miklos, Franz, and Javier put their hands to their pendants and bowed their heads. Frater Antony, staring straight ahead, recited a brief service in that liquid, unintelligible language that the fraters use when talking to the priestesses (Aztec? Atlantean? The Cro-Magnon muttersprach?), and, switching to Latin for the final phrases, spoke something which Eli told me later, confirming my own guess, was the text of the Ninth Mystery. Then he gestured to Eli and me to fill the grave. We seized our shovels and flung dirt. Farewell, Timothy! Golden scion of the Wasps, heir to eight generations of careful breeding! Who will have your trust funds, who will carry the family name onward? Dust to dust. A thin layer of Arizona sand now covering the burly frame. Like robots we toil, Timothy, and you disappear from view. As it was ordained in the beginning. As it was written in the Book of Skulls ten thousand years ago. “All regular activities are canceled this day,” said Frater Antony when the grave was filled and the earth had been tamped down. “We will spend today in meditation, taking no meals, devoting ourselves to. a contemplation of the Mysteries.” But there was more work for us before our contemplations could begin. We returned to the House of Skulls, intending first of all to bathe, and discovered Frater Leon and Frater Bernard in the hall outside Oliver’s room. Their faces were masks. They pointed within. Oliver lay sprawled face-up across his cot. Evidently he had borrowed a kitchen knife, and, surgeon that he never lived to be, he had done an extraordinary job on himself with it, belly and throat, nor had he spared even the traitor between his thighs. The incisions were deep and had been cut by a steady hand: disciplined to the end, rigid Oliver had slaughtered himself with a characteristic adherence to methodology. I could no more have endured finishing such a project, once I had begun it, than I could walk on moonbeams, but Oliver always had had unusual powers of concentration. We studied the results in a curiously dispassionate way. I have many squeamish attitudes, and so does Eli, but on this day of the Ninth Mystery’s fulfillment all such weaknesses were purged from me. “There is one among thee,” said Frater Antony, “who has relinquished eternity for his brothers of the four-sided figure, so that they may come to comprehend the meaning of self-denial.” Yes. And so we staggered to the burial place a second time. And afterward, for my sins, I scrubbed the thick clotted stains from the room that had been Oliver’s. And finally I bathed, and sat alone in my room, examining in my mind the Mysteries of the Skull.