The Book of Skulls (13 page)

27. Eli

So it begins. The rituals, the diet, the gymnastics, the spiritual exercises, and the rest. Doubtless we have seen only the tip of the iceberg. Much else remains to be revealed; and, for example, we still do not know when the terms of the Ninth Mystery must be carried out. Tomorrow, next Friday, Christmas, when? Already we eye one another in a sinister fashion, peering through the face to the skull beneath. You, Ned, will you kill yourself for us? You, Timothy, are you planning to kill me so you may live? We haven’t speculated on that aspect of it aloud at all, not once; it seems too terrible and too absurd to bear discussing or even thinking about. Perhaps the requirements are symbolic ones, metaphorical ones. Perhaps not. I worry about that. I’ve sensed since the beginning of this project certain unvoiced assumptions about who is to go, if any of us must go: me to die at their hands, Ned to perish at his own. Of course I’ll reject that. I came here to gain life eternal. I don’t know if any of them really did. Ned, freaky Ned, he’s capable of seeing suicide as his finest poem. Timothy doesn’t seem really to care about life-extension, though I suppose he’ll take it if it comes along without much effort. Oliver insists that he absolutely refuses to die, ever, and he gets quite impassioned on the subject; but Oliver’s a lot less stable than he appears on the surface, and there’s no accounting for his motives. With the right philosophical prompting he could get as enamored of dying as he claims to be of living. So I can’t say who lives, who succumbs to the Ninth Mystery. Except that I’m watching my step, and I’ll go on watching it for however long we stay here. (How long is that supposed to be? We never gave any thought to that, really. Easter holiday is over in six, seven more days, I imagine. Certainly the Trial won’t be finished by then. I get the feeling it lasts months or even years. Will we leave next week, regardless? We swore not to, but of course there isn’t much the fraters can do to us if we all slip away in the middle of the night. Except that I want to stay. Weeks, if necessary. Years, if necessary. They’ll report us missing in the outer world. The registrars, the draft boards, our parents, they’ll all wonder about us. As long as they don’t trace us here, though. The fraters have brought our baggage from the car. The car itself remains parked by the edge of the desert path. Will the state troopers notice it, eventually? Will they send a man down the path looking for the owner of that glossy sedan? We dangle loose ends by the score. But here we stay for the duration of the Trial. Here
I
stay, at any rate.)

And if the rite of the Skulls is genuine?

I won’t stay here, as the fraters seem to do, after I’ve won what I seek. Oh, I might hang around for five or ten years, out of a sense of propriety, a sense of gratitude. But then I take off. It’s a big world; why spend eternity in a desert retreat? I have my vision of the life to come. In a way, it’s like Oliver’s: I mean to feed my hunger for experience. I’ll live a sequence of lives, draining the utmost out of each. Say, I’ll spend ten years on Wall Street, piling up a fortune. If my father’s right, and I’m sure he is, any reasonably clever sort can beat the market, just by doing the opposite of what all the supposedly smart ones are doing. They’re all sheep, cattle, a bunch of
goyishe kops.
Dumb, greedy, following this fad and that one. So I’ll play the other side of the game and come away with two or three million, which I’ll invest in the right blue chips, good dividends, nothing fancy, steady income-producers. After all, I mean to live off those dividends for the next five or ten thousand years. Now I’m financially independent. What next? Why, ten years in debauchery. Why not? With enough money and self-confidence, you can have any woman in the world, right? I’ll have Margo and a dozen like her every week. I’m entitled. A little lust, sure: it’s not intellectual, it’s not Significant, but fucking has its place in a well-rounded existence. All right. Gold and lust. Then I look after my spiritual welfare. Fifteen years in a Trappist monastery. I say not a word to anyone; I meditate, I write poetry, I try to reach God, I break through to the itness of the universe. Make that twenty years. Purify the soul, purge it, lift it to heights. Then I come forth and devote myself to bodybuilding. Eight years of full-time exercise. Eli the beach boy. No longer a ninety-seven-pound weakling. I surf, I ski, I win the East Village Indian Wrestling Championship. Next? Music. I’ve never gotten as far into music as I’d like. I’ll enroll at Juilliard, four years, the full schtick, penetrating the innerness of the musical art, going deep into Beethoven’s late quartets, the Bach forty-eight, Berg, Schoenberg, Xenakis, all the toughest stuff, and I’ll use the techniques I learned in the monastery in order to enter the heart of the universe of sound. Perhaps I’ll compose. Perhaps I’ll do critical essays. Perform, even. Eli Steinfeld in a Bach series at Carnegie Hall. Fifteen years for music, right? That takes care of the first sixty-odd years of my immortality. What next? We’re well into the twenty-first century by now. Let’s see the world. Go traveling like the Buddha, wander from land to land on foot, let my hair grow, wear yellow robes, carry a begging-bowl, pick up my checks once a month at American Express in Rangoon, Katmandu, Djakarta, Singapore. Experiencing humanity at the gut level, eating every food, curried ants, fried balls, sleeping with women of all races and creeds, living in leaky huts, in igloos, in tents, in houseboats. Twenty years for that and I should have a good idea of humanity’s cultural complexity. Then, I think, I’ll return to my original specialty, linguistics, philology, and allow myself the career I’m presently abandoning. In thirty years I might produce the definitive treatise on irregular verbs in Indo-European languages, or crack the secret of Etruscan, or translate the complete corpus of Ugaritic verse. Whatever field strikes my fancy. Next I’ll become a homosexual. With life eternal at your disposal, you have to try everything at least once, don’t you, and Ned insists that the gay life is the good life. Personally I’ve always preferred girls, intuitively, instinctively—they’re softer, smoother, nicer to touch—but somewhere along the line I ought to see what the other gender has to offer.
Sub specie aeternitatis,
why should it matter whether I plug this hole or that one? When I’m back in a heterosexual phase I’ll go to Mars. It’ll be about the year 2100 by then; we’ll have colonized Mars, I’m sure. Twelve years on Mars. I’ll do manual labor, pioneer stuff. Then twenty years for literature, ten for reading everything worthwhile that’s ever been written, ten for producing a novel that will rank with the best of Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Proust. Why shouldn’t I be able to equal them? I won’t be a snotty kid any more; I’ll have had 150 years of engagement with life, the deepest and broadest self-education any human being ever enjoyed, and I’ll still be in full youthful vigor. So if I apply myself to the task, a page a day, a page a week, five years to plan the architectonics of the book before I write word one, I should be able to produce, well, an immortal masterpiece. Under a pseudonym, of course. That’s going to be a special problem, shifting my identity every eighty or ninety years. Even in the shiny futuristic future, people are likely to be suspicious of someone who simply won’t die. Longevity is one thing, immortality something else again. I’ll have to transfer my investments to myself somehow, name my new identity as my old one’s heir. I’ll have to keep disappearing and resurfacing. Dye my hair, beards on and off, mustaches, wigs, contact lenses. Be careful not to come too close to the machinery of government: once my fingerprints get into the master computer, I’ll have troubles. What will I use for birth certificates each time I reappear? I’ll think of something. If you’re smart enough to live forever, you’re smart enough to be able to cope with the bureaucracy. What if I fall in love? Marry, have kids, watch my wife wither and grow old, watch my kids slide into old age too, while I remain ever fresh and young? Probably I shouldn’t marry at all, or else do it just for the experience, ten, fifteen years at most, then get a divorce even if I still love her, to avoid all the later complications. We’ll see. Where was I? On into the 2100s, parceling out the decades with a free hand. Ten years as a lama in Tibet. Ten years as an Irish fisherman, if they still have any fish left by then. Twelve years as a distinguished member of the United States Senate. Then I should take up science, the great neglected area of my life. I’ll be able to handle it, given the proper amount of patience and application—physics, math, whatever I need to learn. I’ll allot forty years for science. I intend to get right up there with Einstein and Newton, a full career in which I function at the highest level of intellect. And then? I could return to the skullhouse, I guess, to see how Frater Antony and the rest of his crowd have been getting along. Five years in the desert. Out, out into the world again. What a world it’ll be! They’ll have whole new careers available, things that haven’t begun to be invented yet: I can spend twenty years as a dematerialization expert, fifteen in poly-valent levitation, a dozen as a symptom-peddler. And then? And then? On and on and on. The possibilities will be infinite. But I’d better keep close watch on Timothy and Oliver, and maybe even Ned too, because of the accursed thrice-fucked Ninth Mystery. That’s something big to worry about. If a couple of my pals kill me next Tuesday, say, it’s going to spoil some awfully elaborate long-term plans.

28. Ned

The fraters are in love with us. No other term applies. They try to be poker-faced, solemn, hieratic, aloof, but they cannot conceal the simple joy our presence brings them. We rejuvenate them. We have rescued them from an eternity of repetitious toil. Not for an eon and a half have they had novices here, have they had new young blood on the premises; just the same closed society of fraters, fifteen of them in all, going about their devotions, working in the fields, doing the chores. And now we are here to be led through the rituals of initiation, and it is something novel for them, and they love us for having come.

They all participate in our enlightenment. Frater Antony presides over our meditations, our spiritual exercises. Frater Bernard leads us in the physical exercises. Frater Claude, the kitchen-frater, supervises our diet. Frater Miklos instructs us circumvolutely in the history of the order, providing us in his ambiguous way with the proper background information. Frater Javier is the father-confessor who will guide us, some days hence, through the psychotherapy that seems to be a central part of the entire process. Frater Franz, the work-frater, shows us our responsibilities as hewers of wood and drawers of water. Each of the other fraters has his special role to play, but we have not yet had occasion to meet with them. Also there are women here, an unknown number of them, perhaps only three or four, perhaps a dozen. We see them peripherally, a glance now, a glance then. Always they move across our field of vision at a distance, going from room to room on mysterious private errands, never pausing, never looking at us. Like the fraters, the women all are garbed alike, in brief white frocks rather than ragged blue shorts. Those that I’ve seen have long dark hair and full breasts, nor have Timothy, Eli, and Oliver noticed any willowy blondes or redheads. They bear close resemblance to one another, which is why I’m uncertain of their number; I never can tell whether the women I see are different ones each time, or the same few. The second day here, Timothy asked Frater Antony about them, but he was told gently that it was forbidden to ask a direct procedural question of any member of the Brotherhood; all will be made manifest to us at the proper time, Frater Antony promised. With that we must be content.

Our day is fully programed. We rise with the sun; lacking windows, we depend on Frater Franz, who goes at dawn down the dormitory wing hammering on doors. A bath is the mandatory first deed. Then we go into the fields for an hour of labor. The fraters raise all their food themselves, in a garden about two hundred yards behind the building. An elaborate irrigation system pumps water from some deep spring; it must have cost a fortune to install, just as the House of Skulls must have cost a fortune and a half to build, but I suspect the Brotherhood is enormously wealthy. As Eli has pointed out, any self-perpetuating organization that can compound its assets at 5 or 6 percent for three or four centuries would end up owning whole continents. The fraters grow wheat, herbs, and an assortment of edible fruits, berries, roots, and nuts; I have no idea yet what most of the crops are that we weed and tend so lovingly, and I suspect that many of them are exotic plants. Rice, beans, corn, and “strong” vegetables such as onions are forbidden here. Wheat, I gather, is tolerated only grudgingly, deemed spiritually unworthy but somehow necessary: it undergoes a rigorous fivefold sifting and tenfold milling, accompanied by special meditations, before it is made into bread. The fraters eat no meat, nor shall we as long as we remain here. Meat, apparently, is a source of destructive vibes. Salt is banished. Pepper is outlawed. Black pepper, that is; chili pepper is within the pale, and the fraters dote on it, consuming it as the Mexicans do in any number of ways—fresh peppers, dried pods, chili powder, pickled peppers, etc., etc., etc. The stuff they grow here is fiery. Eli and I are spice freaks, and we use it liberally even though it sometimes brings tears to our eyes, but Timothy and Oliver, reared on blander diets, can’t handle it at all. Another favorite food here is eggs. There’s a hatchery out back full of busy hens, and eggs in some form appear on the menu three times a day. The fraters also produce certain mildly alcoholic herb-liqueurs, under the supervision of Frater Maurice, the distiller-frater.

When we have done our hour of service in the fields a gong summons us; we go to our rooms to bathe again, and then it is breakfast time. Meals are served in one of the public rooms, at an elegant stone bench. The menus are calculated according to arcane principles not yet disclosed to us; it seems as if the color and texture of what we eat has as much to do with the planning of meals as the nutritional value. We eat eggs, soups, bread, vegetable mashes, and so forth, copiously seasoned with chili; for beverages we have water, a kind of wheat-beer, and, in the evening, the herb-liqueurs, but nothing else. Oliver, a steak-eater, complains a good deal about the lack of meat. I missed it at first but by now have completely adapted to this odd regimen, as has Eli. Timothy grumbles to himself and swills the liqueurs. At lunch the third day he had too much beer and threw up on the marvelous slate floor; Frater Franz waited until he was finished, then handed him a cloth and wordlessly ordered him to clean up his own mess. The fraters plainly dislike Timothy, and perhaps fear him, for he’s half a foot taller than any of them and must outweigh the heaviest by ninety pounds. The rest of us, as I say, they love, and in the abstract they love Timothy too.

After breakfast comes morning meditations with Frater Antony. He says little, merely provides a spiritual context for us with a minimum of words. We meet in the other long rear wing of the building, opposite the dormitory wing; this is entirely given over to the monastic functions. Instead of bedrooms, there are chapels, eighteen of them, I suppose corresponding to the Eighteen Mysteries; they are as sparsely furnished and as powerfully austere as the other rooms, and contain a series of overwhelming artistic masterpieces. Most of these are pre-Columbian, but some of the chalices and carvings have a medieval European look, and there are certain abstract objects (of ivory? bone? stone?) that are completely un-familiar to me. This side of the building also has a large library, crammed with books, rarities, by the looks of the shelves; we are forbidden at present to enter that room, though its door is never locked. Frater Antony meets with us in the chapel closest to the public wing. It is empty except for the ubiquitous skull-mask on the wall. He kneels; we kneel; he removes from his breast his tiny jade pendant, which unsurprisingly is carved in the shape of a skull, and places it on the floor before us as a focus for our meditations. As frater-superior, Frater Antony has the only jade pendant, but Frater Miklos, Frater Javier, and Frater Franz are entitled to wear similar pendants of polished brown stone—obsidian, I imagine, or onyx. These four are the Keepers of the Skulls, an elite group within the fraternity. What Frater Antony urges us to contemplate is a paradox: the skull beneath the face, the presence of the death-symbol hidden under our living masks. Through an exercise of “interior vision,” we are supposed to purge ourselves of the death-impulse by absorbing, fully comprehending, and ultimately destroying the power of the skull. I don’t know how successful any of us has been at achieving this: another thing we are forbidden to do is compare notes on our progress. I doubt that Timothy is much good at meditation. Oliver evidently is; he stares at the jade skull with lunatic intensity, engulfing it, surrounding it, and I think his spirit goes forth and enters it. But is he moving in the correct direction? Eli, in the past, has complained to me of the difficulties he’s had in reaching the highest levels of mystic experience on drugs; his mind is too agile, too jumpy, and he’s spoiled several acid trips for himself by darting hither and thither instead of settling down and gliding into the All. Out here, too, I think he’s having trouble getting it together; he looks tense and impatient during the meditation sessions and seems to be forcing it, trying to push himself into a region he can’t really attain. As for me, I rather enjoy the daily hour with Frater Antony; the paradox of the skull is, of course, precisely my line of irrationality, and I think I’m grooving properly with it, though I recognize the possibility that I’m deceiving myself. I’d like to discuss the degree of my progress, if any, with Frater Antony, but all such self-conscious inquiries are prohibited for now. So I kneel and stare at the little green skull each day, and cast forth my soul, and conduct my perpetual internal struggle between corrosive cynicism and abject faith.

When we finish our hour with Frater Antony we go back to the fields. We pull weeds, spread fertilizer—it’s all organic, naturally—and plant seedlings. Here Oliver is at his best. He’s always tried to repudiate his farm-boy upbringing, but now suddenly he’s flaunting it, the way Eli flaunts his Yiddish vocabulary despite not having been inside a synagogue since his bar mitzvah. The more-ethnic-than-thou syndrome, and Oliver’s ethnos is rural-agricultural, so he goes at his hoeing and spading with formidable vim. The fraters try to slow him down: I think his energy appalls them, but also they worry about his chances of heatstroke; Frater Leon, the physician-frater, has spoken to Oliver several times, pointing out that the midmorning temperatures are in the low nineties and will soon be much higher than that. Still Oliver chugs furiously on. I find all this grubbing in the soil agreeably strange and strangely agreeable, myself. It appeals to the back-to-nature romanticism that I suppose lurks in the hearts of all excessively urbanized intellectuals. I’ve never done any manual labor more strenuous than masturbation before this, so the field chores are back-breaking as well as mindblowing for me, but I haul myself eagerly through the work. So far. Eli’s relationship to the farm stuff is very similar to mine, though if anything more intense, more romantic; he talks about drawing physical renewal from Mother Earth. And Timothy, who of course had never had to do so much as tie his own shoelaces, takes a lordly gentleman farmer attitude:
noblesse oblige,
he says with every languid gesture, doing as the fraters tell him but making it quite plain that he deigns to dirty his hands only because he finds it amusing to play their little game. Well, we all dig, each in his own way.

By ten or half past ten in the morning it becomes unpleasantly hot, and we leave the fields, all except three farmer-fraters whose names I do not yet know. They spend ten or twelve hours outdoors each day: as a penance, perhaps? The rest of us, both fraters and the Receptacle, go to our rooms and bathe again. Then we four convene over in the far wing for our daily session with Frater Miklos, the history-frater.

Miklos is a compact, powerfully built little man, with forearms like thighs and thighs like logs. He gives the impression of being older than the other fraters, though I admit there’s something paradoxical about applying a comparative like “older” to a group of ageless men. He speaks with a faint and indefinable accent, and his thought processes are distinctly nonlinear: he rambles, he wanders, he slides unexpectedly from theme to theme. I believe it’s deliberate, that his mind is subtle and unfathomable rather than senile and undisciplined. Perhaps over the centuries he’s grown bored with mere consecutive discourse; I know I would.

He has two subjects: the origin and development of the Brotherhood and the history of the concept of human longevity. On the first of these he is at his most elusive, as if determined never to give us a straightforward outline. We are very old, he keeps saying, very old, very old, and I have no way of knowing whether he means the fraters or the Brotherhood itself, though I think perhaps both; perhaps some of the fraters have been in it from the beginning, their lives spanning not merely decades or centuries but entire millennia. He hints at prehistoric origins, the caves of the Pyrenees, the Dordogne, Lascaux, Altamira, a secret confraternity of shamans that has endured out of mankind’s dawn, but how much of this is true and how much is fable I cannot say, any more than I know if the Rosicrucians really do trace their genesis to Amenhotep IV. But as Frater Miklos speaks I have visions of smoky caverns, flickering torches, half-naked artists clad in the skins of woolly mammoths and daubing bright pigments on walls, medicine men conducting the ritual slaughter of aurochs and rhinoceros. And the shamans whispering, huddling, whispering, saying to one another, We shall not die, brothers, we will live on, we will watch Egypt rise out of the swamps of the Nile, we will see Sumer born, we will live to behold Socrates and Caesar and Jesus and Constantine, and yes! we will still be here when the fiery mushroom flares sun-bright over Hiroshima and when the men from the metal ship descend the ladder to walk the face of the moon. But did Miklos tell me this, or did I dream it in the haze of noonday desert heat? Everything is obscure; everything shifts and melts and runs as his mazy words circle round themselves, circle round themselves, twist, dance, tangle. Also he tells us, in riddles and periphrasis, of a lost continent, of a vanished civilization, from which the wisdom of the Brotherhood is derived. And we stare, wide-eyed, exchanging little covert glances of astonishment, not knowing whether to snicker in skeptical scorn or gasp in awe.
Atlantis!
How did Miklos do it, conjuring in our minds those images of a glittering land of gold and crystal, broad leafy avenues, towering white-walled buildings, shining chariots, dignified philosophers in flowing robes, the brassy instruments of forgotten science, the aura of beneficent karma, the twanging sound of strange music echoing through the halls of vast temples dedicated to unknown gods. Atlantis? How narrow a line we tread between fantasy and foolishness! I have never heard him utter the name, but he put Atlantis into my mind the first day, and now my conviction grows that I am correct, that he indeed claims for the Brotherhood an Atlantean heritage. What are these emblems of skulls on the temple facade? What are these jeweled skulls worn as rings and pendants in the great city? Who are these missionaries in auburn fabric, crossing to the mainland, making their way to the mountain settlements, dazzling the mammoth-hunters with their flashlights and pistols, holding high the sacred Skull and calling upon the cave-dwellers to drop down, give knee. And the shamans in the painted caves, crouched by their sputtering fires, whispering, conniving, at length rendering homage to the splendid strangers, bowing, kissing the Skull, burying their own idols, the fat-thighed Venuses and the carved slivers of bone.
Life eternal we offer thee,
say the newcomers, and they show a shimmering screen within which swim images of their city, towers, chariots, temples, jewels, and the shamans nod, they crack their knuckles and pass water on the holy fires, they dance, they clap hands, they submit, they submit, they stare into the shimmering screen, they kill the fatted mastodon, they offer their guests a feast of fellowship. And so it commences, that alliance between mountain-men and island-men, in that chilly dawn, so it starts, the flow of karma to the icebound mainland, the awakening, the transfer of knowledge. So that when the earthquake comes, when the veil is rent asunder and the pillars tremble and a black pall hangs over the world, when the avenues and the towers are swallowed by the angry sea, something lives on, something survives in the caves, the secrets, the rituals, the faith, the Skull, the Skull, the Skull! Is that how it was, Miklos? And is that how it has been, across ten, fifteen, twenty thousand years, out of a past that we choose to deny? Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive! And you are still here, Frater Miklos? You have come down to us out of Altamira, out of Lascaux, out of doomed Atlantis itself, you and Frater Antony and Frater Bernard and the rest, outlasting Egypt, outlasting the Caesars, giving knee to the Skull, enduring all things, hoarding wealth, tilling the soil, moving from land to land, from the blessed caves to the newborn neolithic villages, from the mountains to the rivers, across the earth, to Persia, to Rome, to Palestine, to Catalonia, learning the languages as they evolve, speaking to the people, posing as men of their gods, building your temples and monasteries, nodding to Isis, to Mithra, to Jehovah, to Jesus, this god and that, absorbing everything, withstanding everything, putting the Cross over the Skull when the Cross was in fashion, mastering the arts of survival, replenishing yourselves now and then by taking in a Receptacle, demanding always new blood though your own grew never thin. And then? Moving on to Mexico after Cortes broke her people for you. Here was a land that understood the power of death, here was a place where the Skull had always reigned, perhaps brought there as well as to your own land by the island-folk, eh, Atlantean missionaries in Cholula and Tenochtitlán also, showing the way of the death mask? Fertile ground, for a few centuries. But you insist on constant renewal, and so you went onward, taking your loot with you, your masks, your skulls, your statues, your paleolithic treasures, north, into the new country, the empty country, the desert heart of the United States, into the bomb-land, into the pain-land, and with the compound interest of the ages you built your newest House of Skulls, eh, Miklos, and here you sit, and here sit we. Is that how it was? Or have I hallucinated it all, bum-tripping your vague and muddy words into a gaudy self-deceptive dream? How can I tell? How will I ever know? All I have is what you tell me, which blurs and trembles and flees my mind. And I see what is around me, this contamination of your primordial imagery by Aztec visions, by Christian visions, by Atlantean visions, and I can only wonder, Miklos, how is it you are still here when the mammoth has shuffled off the stage, and am I a fool or a prophet?