The Book of Skulls

chapter eight Oliver

Don’t go, LuAnn said, whatever it is, don’t go, dont get involved, I don’t like the sound of it. And I hadn’t told her much at all, really. Just the externals of it: a religious group in Arizona, see, a sort of monastery, in fact, and Eli thinks it could be of great spiritual value for the four of us to pay it a visit. We might gain a whole lot from going, I told LuAnn. And her immediate response was one of fear. The housewife syndrome: if you don’t know what it is, don’t go near it. Frightened, in-drawing. She’s a sweet kid but she’s too predictable. Perhaps if I told her about the never-dying aspect she might have reacted differently. But of course I’d sworn not to breathe a word. And in any case, even immortality would scare LuAnn. Don’t, she’d say, there’s a catch in it, something awful will come out of it, it’s strange and mysterious and frightening, it isn’t God’s will that such things should be. Each of us owes God a death. Beethoven died. Jesus died. President Eisenhower died. Do you think you should be excused from dying, Oliver, if they had to go? Please don’t get mixed up in this.

Death. What does poor simpleheaded LuAnn know about death? She even has her grandparents still alive. Death is an abstraction for her, something that happened to Beethoven and Jesus. I know death better, LuAnn. I see his grinning skullface every night. And I have to fight him. I have to spit at him. Eli comes to me, he says, I know where you can get excused from dying, Oliver, it’s just out yonder in Arizona. Visit the Brotherhood and play their little game, and they’ll release you from the wheel of fire, Do not pass Go, do not descend into the grave, do not put on corruption. They can pluck his sting. How can I pass up the chance?

Death, LuAnn. Think about the death of LuAnn Chambers, say, next Thursday morning. Not in 1997, but next Thursday morning. You’re walking down Elm Street on your way to visit your grandparents, and a car comes flying out of control at you the way the car of those poor Puerto Ricans went out of control last night, and — no, I take that back. I don’t think even the Brotherhood can protect you against accidental death, violent death; whatever process they have, it doesn’t work miracles, only retards physical decay. We start again, LuAnn. You’re walking down Elm Street on your way to visit your grandparents and a blood vessel treacherously bursts in your temple. Cerebral hemorrhage. Why not? It can happen to nineteen-year-olds once in a while, I suppose. The blood bubbles through your skull and your legs fold up and you hit the sidewalk, wriggling and kicking, and you know something bad is happening to you but you can’t even scream, and in ten seconds you’re dead. You have been subtracted from the universe, LuAnn. No, the universe has been subtracted from you. Forget what’s going to happen to your body now, the worms in your gut, the pretty blue eyes turning to muck, and just think about all you’ve lost. You’ve lost it all, sunrise and sunset, the smell of broiling steak, the feel of a cashmere sweater, the touch of my lips that you like so much against your little hard nipples. You’ve lost the Grand Canyon and Shakespeare and London and Paris and champagne and your big church wedding and Paul McCartney and Peter Fonda and the Mississippi River and the moon and the stars. You’ll never have babies and you’ll never taste real caviar, because you’re dead on the sidewalk and the juices are already going sour in you. Why should that be, LuAnn? Why should we be put into such a wonderful world and then have everything taken away from us? God’s will? No, LuAnn, God is love, and God wouldn’t have done such a cruel thing to us, so therefore there is no God, there’s only death, Death, whom we must reject. Not everyone dies at nineteen? That’s true, LuAnn. I loaded the dice a little there. What if you hung on until 1997, yes, you had your church wedding and your babies, you saw Paris and Tokyo, too, you tasted champagne and caviar, and you went to the moon for a Christmas trip with your husband the rich doctor? And then Death came to you and said, Okay, LuAnn, it was a good trip, wasn’t it, baby, only it’s over now. Zap and you have cancer of the cervix, rotting ovaries, one of those female things, and it metastasizes overnight and you come apart, turning into a puddle of stinking fluids in the county hospital. Does the fact that you lived a full life for forty or fifty years make you any more willing to check out? Doesn’t that just make the joke sicker, to find out how groovy life can be and then to be cut off? You’ve never thought about these things, LuAnn, but I have. And I tell you: the longer you live, the longer you want to live. Unless, of course, you’re in pain or deformed or alone in the world and it’s all become a terrible burden. But if you love life, you’ll never have enough of it. Even you, you swest placid nothinghead, you won’t want to go. And I don’t want to go. I’ve thought about the death of Oliver Marshall, believe you me, and I reject the concept entirely. Why did I go into pre-med program? Not so I could make a fortune prescribing pills for suburban ladies, but so I could do research in geriatrics, in senility phenomena, in life extension. So I could stick my finger in Death’s eye. That was my big dream, still is; but Eli tells me of the Keepers of the Skulls, and I listen to him. I listen. At sixty miles an hour we roll westward. The death of Oliver Marshall could happen eight seconds from now — whiz, crash, smash! — and it could happen ninety years from now and perhaps it will never happen. Perhaps it will never happen.

Consider Kansas, LuAnn. You only know Georgia, but for a moment consider Kansas. Miles of corn, and the dusty wind whipping off the plains. Growing up in a town with 953 inhabitants. Give us this day our daily death, O Lord. The wind, the dust, the highway, the thin sharp faces. You want to see a movie? You drive half a day to Emporia. You want to buy a book? I guess you go to Topeka for that. Chinese food? Pizza? Enchiladas? Don’t be funny. Your school has eight grades and nineteen students. One teacher. He doesn’t know much, he grew up around here, too; too sickly to farm, he got a job teaching. The dust, LuAnn. The waving corn. The long summer afternoons. Sex. Sex isn’t a mystery there, LuAnn, it’s a necessity. Thirteen years old, you go behind the barn, you go to the far side of the creek. It’s the only game there is. We all played it. Christa pulls down her jeans; how strange she looks, she’s got nothing between her legs but yellow curls. Now you show me yours, she says. Here, get on top of me. Is it a thrill, LuAnn? It’s no thrill. You’re desperate, so you do it, and all the girls are pregnant by the time they’re sixteen, and the wheel keeps turning. It’s death, LuAnn, death in life. I couldn’t take it. I had to escape. Not to Wichita, not to Kansas City, but east, to the real world, the world on the TV. Do you know how hard I worked to get out of Kansas? Saving to buy books. Sixty miles twice a day to get to high school and back. The whole Abe Lincoln bit, yes, because I was living the one and irreplaceable life of Oliver Marshall, and I couldn’t afford to waste it raising corn. Fine, a scholarship to an Ivy League school. Fine, straight-A average in the pre-med program. I’m a climber, LuAnn, the devil’s burning my tail and I have to keep going higher. But for what? For what? For thirty or forty or fifty pretty decent years, and then the exit? No. No. I reject that. Death may have been good enough for Beethoven and Jesus and President Eisenhower, but, meaning no offense, I’m different, I can’t just lie down and go. Why is it all so short? Why does it come so soon? Why can’t we drink the universe? Death’s been hovering over me all my life. My father, he died at thirty-six, stomach cancer, he coughed blood one day and said, Hon, I think I’ve been losing a lot of weight lately, and ten days later he looked like a skeleton, and ten days after that he was a skeleton. They let him have thirty-six years. What kind of life is that? I was eleven when he died. I had a dog, the dog died, muzzle turning gray, ears going limp, tail hanging, good-bye. I had grandparents once, just like you, four of them, they died, one two three four, the leathery faces, the gravestones in the dust. Why? Why? Why? I want to see so much, LuAnn! Africa and Asia and the South Pole, and Mars, and the planets out by Alpha Centauri! I want to watch the sunrise the day the twenty-first century starts, and the twenty-second century, too. Am I greedy? Yes, I’m greedy. I have it now. I have it all. I’m scheduled to lose it all, just like everyone else, and I refuse to surrender. So I drive west with the morning sun at my back and Timothy snoring next to me and Ned writing poetry back there, and Eli brooding about the girl Timothy wouldn’t let him keep, and I think all this to you, LuAnn, these things I couldn’t explain. Oliver Marshall’s Meditation on Death. Soon we’ll be in Arizona. Then will come the disappointment and the disillusionment, and we’ll have some beers and tell ourselves the whole thing was obviously a crock, and we’ll drive east to resume the process of dying. But maybe not, LuAnn, maybe not. The chance exists. The barest merest chance that Eli’s book is legitimate.

The chance exists.