The Book of Skulls (16 page)

32. Ned

Review your life, declares the mysterious and vaguely reptilian Frater Javier, entering my monastic cell unannounced, bringing with him the faint hissing rustle of scales against stone. Review your life, rehearse the sins of your past, make yourself ready for confession. Right on, cries Ned the depraved choirboy! Right on, Frater Javier, chortles the fallen Papist! This is up his well-greased alley. The ritual of the confessional is certainly something he comprehends: it is encoded in his very genes, it is imprinted in his bones and balls, it is utterly natural to him.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Whereas those other three are strangers to the closet of truth, the uptight Israelite and the two Protestant bullocks. Oh, oh, I suppose the Episcopalians have the custom of the confessional too, crypto-Romans that they are, but they always tell lies to their priests. I have that on the authority of my mother, who feels that the flesh of Anglicans isn’t fit to feed to pigs. But mother, I say, pigs don’t eat meat. If they did, she says, they wouldn’t touch the tripes of an Anglican! They break every commandment and lie to their priests, she says, and crosses herself, four vigorous thumps,
om mani padme hum!

Ned is obedient. Ned is a good little fairy. Frater Javier gives him The Word, and Ned instantly commences reviewing his misspent past, so that he can gush it all forth at the appropriate occasion. What have been my sins? Where have I transgressed? Tell me, Neddy-boy, have you had any other gods before Him? No, sir, in truth I can’t say that I have. Have you made unto yourself any graven images? Well, I’ve doodled a bit, I admit, but we don’t apply that commandment so rigorously, do we, sir? We’re not bloody Moslems, eh, sir? Thank you, sir. Next: have you taken the name of the Lord in vain? God help me, Father, would I do a thing like that? Very well, Ned, and have you remembered the Sabbath Day and kept it holy? Abashed, the honest boy replies that he has occasionally been guilty of dishonoring the Sabbath. Occasionally? Shit, he’s polluted more Sundays than a Turk! A venial sin, though, a venial sin.
Ego absolvo te,
my child. And have you honored thy father and thy mother? I have indeed, sir, honored them in my way. Hast thou killed? I have not killed. Hast thou committed adultery? To the best of my knowledge, Father, I have not. Hast thou stolen? I have not stolen, at least, nothing important, sir. Nor have I borne false witness against my neighbor. And hast thou coveted thy neighbor’s house, or thy neighbor’s wife, or thy neighbor’s manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass, or anything that is thy neighbor’s? Well, sir, there’s that part about my neighbor’s ass; I admit I’m on shaky grounds there, but otherwise—but otherwise—I do my best, sir, considering that I came into this world tainted, considering the odds against us all from the start, bearing in mind that in Adam’s fall we sinned all, nevertheless I regard myself as relatively pure and good. Not perfect, of course. Tut, my child, what would you confess? Well, Father
—confiteor, confiteor,
the fist striking the boy’s chest with admirable zeal, thump, thump, thump, thump,
Om! Mani! Padme! Hum!—
my fault, my most grievous fault—well, I did go one Sunday after mass with Sandy Dolan to spy on his sister changing her clothes, and I saw her bare breasts, Father, they were small and round with little pink tips, and at the base of her belly, Father, she had this hairy black mound, something I had never seen before, and then she turned her back to the window and I saw her ass, Father, the two most beautiful sweet plump white cheeks that I had ever seen, with these lovely deep dimples just at the top of them, and down the center this delicious shadowy cleft that—what’s that, Father? I can go on to something else? All right, then, I confess that I did lead Sandy astray in other ways, that I engaged in sins of the body with him, sins against God and Nature, that when we were eleven years old and spending the night together in the same bed, his mother being occupied in childbirth and there being no one at his house to look after him, I did fetch from under my bed a bottle of Vaseline and did scoop from it a good-sized glob and wantonly apply it to his sexual organ, telling him not to be afraid, that God wasn’t able to see us here in the dark with the covers over us, and then I—and then he—and then we—and then we—

And so, at Frater Javier’s behest, I plumbed my degenerate past and dredged up much mucky detritus, the better to shine at the sessions of confessions that I assumed would be commencing. But the fraters are less linear-minded than that. A variation in our daily routine was about to be introduced, yes, but it involved neither Frater Javier nor any confessional aspects. That must lie still further in the future. The new rite is a sexual one, Buddha save me, a
hetero
sexual one. These fraters, I now realize, are Chinamen of some sort beneath their deceptive Caucasian skins, for they are instructing us now in nothing less than the
tao
of sex.

They don’t call it that. They don’t speak of
yin
and
yang,
either. But I know my Oriental erotica, and I know the ancient spiritual significances of these sexual exercises, which are close kin to the various gymnastic and contemplatory exercises we’ve been practicing. Control, control, control over every bodily function, that’s the aim here.

The dark-haired women in short white robes who we’ve been seeing flitting about the skullhouse are, in fact, priestesses of sex, holy cunts, who serve the needs of the fraters and who, by playing the part of receptacles for the Receptacle, now indoctrinate us into the sacred vaginal mysteries. What used to be the rest period after afternoon chores has now become the hour of transcendental copulation. We were given no warning. The day it began, I had come back from the fields and had had my bath and was sprawled out on my cot when in the usual no-knock manner of this place my door opened and Frater Leon, the physician-frater, entered my room, followed by three of the girls in white. I was naked, but I figured it was no obligation of mine to conceal my vital organs from those who barged in on them, and quickly I was made to realize that there was no point whatever in covering myself.

The women arranged themselves against one of the walls. This was the first time I had ever had a chance to look closely at them. They could have been sisters: all of them short, slender, nicely stacked, with swarthy skins, prominent noses, large liquid dark eyes, full lips. In a way they reminded me of the girls in Minoan murals, although they might also have been American Indians; in any case they were definitely exotic. Midnight hair, heavy breasts. Anywhere between twenty and forty years in age. They stood like statues. Frater Leon delivered a brief oration. It is essential, he said, for candidates to learn the arts of mastering the sexual passions. To expend the seminal fluid is to die a little. Right on, Frater Leon! Old Elizabethan idiom: to come = to die. We must not, he continued, repress the sexual impulse, but rather we must dominate it and turn it to our service. Hence intercourse is praiseworthy but ejaculation is to be deplored. I recalled having encountered all this stuff before, and eventually I remembered where: it’s pure Taoism, is what. Union of
yin
and
yang,
cunt and cock, is harmonious and necessary to the welfare of the universe, but expenditure of
ching,
semen, is self-destructive. One must strive to conserve the
ching,
to increase one’s supply of it, and so forth. Funny, Frater Leon, you don’t
look
Chinese! Who, I wonder, is stealing theories from whom? Or did the Taoists and the Brotherhood hit independently on the same principles?

Frater Leon finished his little prologue and said something to the girls in a language I didn’t understand. (I checked with Eli afterward, but he couldn’t identify it either. Aztec or Mayan, he supposed.) Instantly off came the short white robes, and three mother-naked mounds of
yin
stood there at my service. Sniveling faggot that I am, I was still capable of pronouncing esthetic judgment: they were impressive girls. Heavy breasts with no more than a moderate amount of sag, flat bellies, firm rumps, outstanding thighs. No scars of appendectomy, no traces of pregnancy. Frater Leon barked a quick unintelligible command and the priestess closest to the door promptly stretched out on the cold stone floor, knees flexed and slightly parted. Turning now to me, Frater Leon allowed himself a slight smile and gestured with the tips of the fingers of one hand. Go to it, lad, he seemed to be saying. Angelic Ned was nonplussed. He gaped and clutched for words. Here, now is that it? You don’t understand, Frater Leon, the bitter truth is that I am what they call an urning, a fairy, a fag, an invert, a deviate, a pansy, a queer; I am not particularly attracted by cunt; my addiction, I must reveal, is to buggery. But I said none of this, and Frater Leon beckoned again, less amiably. What the devil, the truth is that I have always been bisexual with gay leanings, and on occasion I have been willing to fill the clerically approved vacancy. Since life everlasting appears to depend on it, I will undergo the ordeal. And I advanced toward the parted thighs. With fraudulent hetero cockiness I sank my sword into the waiting wench. What now? Conserve your
ching,
I told myself, conserve your
ching.
I moved in slow stately thrusts while Frater Leon coached me from the sidelines, advising me that the rhythms of the universe demanded that I bring my partner to orgasm although I myself should endeavor not to get there. Very well. Admiring my own performance every inch of the way, I induced the proper spasms and grunts in my spiritual concubine, myself remaining aloof, apart, wholly divorced from the adventures of my tool. When the divine moment was over, my satisfied partner evicted me with a deft and expert flip of her pelvis, and I discovered that priestess number two was settling to the floor, assuming the receiving position. Very well, the master stud will oblige. In. Out. In. Out. Gasp. Grunt. Moan. With a surgeon’s precision I coolly stitched her off to ecstasy, Frater Leon providing an approving commentary from a point above my left shoulder. Again the pelvic flip, again the change of partners; one more dark yawning
yoni
awaited my glistening rigid rod. God help me. I was beginning to feel like a rabbi whose doctor has told him that he’ll drop dead unless he eats a pound of pork a day. But old devil-may-care Ned slammed home the bolt. This time, said Frater Leon, I could allow myself the self-indulgence of coming. By now I was very much pushed to my limits anyway, and it was with some relief that I relaxed my iron self-control.

And so our Trial moves into a new and raunchier phase. The priestesses call upon us every afternoon. I suppose for studs like Timothy and Oliver this is an unexpected bonus, an unalloyed delight, though perhaps not; what’s being offered here is nothing so simple as the kind of good, hearty fucking they enjoy, but rather an arduous, highly demanding exercise in extreme self-control, which to them may seem to drain all the joy out of the act. That’s their problem. Mine is different. Poor old Ned, he’s had more hetero sex this week than in the previous five years. Give him credit, though: he’s doing all that they ask of him and nary a complaint. But it’s a struggle. Mother of God, never in my bummest trips did I imagine that the road to immortality would take me through so many heaving female bellies!

33. Eli

Last night in the dark small hours the thought came to me for the first time that I should offer myself to fulfill the suicide requirement of the Ninth Mystery. A quick moment of evanescent despair, here and gone, but worth examination in bright light. Obviously it’s the sexual thing that’s preying on me. My total failure to make a start at mastering the techniques. Fiasco after fiasco; how can I hold myself back? They give me beautiful women, they tell me to plough two or three in a row—oh,
schmendrick, schmendrick, schmendrick!
It’s the Margo scene all over again. I get inflamed, I get carried away—the opposite of the proper Skullish attitude. I haven’t once succeeded in restraining myself long enough to handle all three. I don’t think it’s humanly possible, at least for me. But of course the kind of longevity we’re talking about here isn’t humanly possible either. It’s necessary to transcend the merely human, to become literally inhuman, nonhuman, if one would defeat death. But if I can’t even govern the treacherous twitches of my cock, how can I hope to monitor my metabolism, reverse organic decay through mental effort, acquire the sort of cellular-level body control these fraters must have? I can’t. I see failure looming. Frater Leon and Frater Bernard have said they’ll give me special training, they’ll show me some useful techniques for sexual de-escalation, but I don’t have much confidence in that. The problem is rooted too deeply in my essential Eli-ness, and it’s too late to alter that; I am what I am. I mount these wenches, these silent supple Aztec priestesses, and though my mind is full of instructions about withholding my seed, my body goes at full gallop, running away, and I explode with passion, and passion is precisely what must be conquered if one is to survive the Trial. By failing this test, I fail everything; I fall by the wayside, immortality lost; let me therefore destroy my unworthy self now, since someone must, and thus I will open the path for the others. So I thought last night in the dark small hours, at any rate. Thinking, also, that Timothy is another who must certainly fail, for he is unable or unwilling to achieve the necessary innerness; he is the prisoner of his scorns, so contemptuous of the Brotherhood and its rites that he can barely contain his impatience. Thus he can never attain even the basic disciplines. We meditate; he merely watches. There is a real danger that he will simply walk out, in the next few days, which would, of course, wreck everything by unbalancing the Receptacle. I therefore privately nominate Timothy to fulfill the other part of the Ninth Mystery; he can’t possibly win what the Brotherhood offers, so therefore let him lose, let him be slain for the others’ sake. Last night, lying dismally awake, I thought I would bring matters immediately to their desired climax: steal a knife from the kitchen, nail Timothy as he sleeps, then skewer myself. The Ninth Mystery thereby would be obeyed, and Ned and Oliver would have their passports to eternity. I actually sat up. But at the critical moment I paused to ask myself whether this was the right time for what I planned to do. Perhaps there is an appointed place in the unfolding ritual for the Ninth Mystery, at some later stage in the process. Perhaps I would be spoiling things by doing it now, arbitrarily, without a signal from the fraters. If a premature sacrifice would be worthless, I had better not act. So I remained in bed, and the impulse fled. This morning, though I’m still depressed, I find I have no wish at all to take my own life. I have grave misgivings about myself, I’m deeply dismayed by my assorted glaring inadequacies, yes, but all the same I want to live as long as possible. The prospects for attaining the longevity of the fraters suddenly seem quite bleak, though. I don’t think any of us is going to make it. I think this Receptacle is falling to pieces.