The Book of Skulls (9 page)

There was more, eighteen Mysteries in all, plus a peroration in absolutely opaque verse. I was captured. It was the intrinsic fascination of the text that caught me, its somber beauty, its ominous embellishments, its gonglike rhythms, rather than any immediate connection with that Arizona monastery. Taking the manuscript from the library was impossible, of course, but I went upstairs, emerging from the vaults like Banquo’s grimy ghost, and arranged for the use of a study cubicle deep in the recesses of the stacks. Then I went home and bathed, saying nothing to Ned about my discovery, though he saw I was preoccupied with something. And returned to the library armed with notepaper, pencils, my own dictionaries. The manuscript was already on my assigned desk. Until ten that evening, until closing time, I wrestled with it in my badly lit cloister. Yes, no doubt of it: these Spaniards were claiming a technique for attaining immortality. The manuscript gave no actual clues to their processes, but merely insisted that they were successful. There was much symbology of the-skull-beneath-the-face; for a life-oriented cult, they were greatly attracted to the imagery of the grave. Perhaps that was the necessary discontinuity, the sense of jarring juxtapositions, that Ned makes so much of in his esthe-tic theories. The text made it plain that some of these skull-worshipping monks, if not all, had survived for centuries. (Even for thousands of years? An ambiguous passage in the Sixteenth Mystery implied a lineage older than the pharaohs.) Their longevity evidently earned them the resentment of the mortals around them, the peasants and shepherds and barons; many times had they moved their headquarters, seeking always a place where they could practice their exercises in peace.

Three days of hard work gave me a reliable translation of perhaps 85 percent of the text and a working understanding of the rest. I did it mostly by myself, though I consulted Professor Vasquez Ocaña about some of the more troublesome phrases, concealing from him, however, the nature of my project. (When he asked if I had found the Maura Gudiol cache I replied vaguely.) At this point I still thought of the whole thing as a charming fantasy. I had read
Lost Horizon
when I was a boy; I remembered Shangri-la, the secret monastery in the Himalayas, the monks practicing yoga and breathing pure air, that wonderful shocker of a line, “
That you are still alive, Father Perrault.
” One didn’t take such stuff seriously. I visualized myself publishing my translation in, say,
Speculum,
with appropriate commentary on the medieval belief in immortality, references to the Prester John mythos, to Sir John Mandeville, to the Alexander romances. The Brotherhood of the Skulls, the Keepers of the Skulls who are its high priests, the Trial which must be undergone by four simultaneous candidates, only two of whom are permitted to survive, the hint of ancient mysteries passed down across millennia—why, this might have been some tale told by Sheherazade, might it not? I went to the trouble of carefully checking Burton’s version of the
Thousand Nights and a Night,
all sixteen volumes, thinking that the Moors might have brought this tale of skulls to Catalonia in the eighth or ninth century. No. Whatever I had found, it was no free-floating fragment of the Arabian Nights. Perhaps part of the Charlemagne cycle, then? Or some unattributed Romanesque yarn? I prowled through bulky indices of medieval mythological motifs. Nothing. I went further back. I became an expert on the whole literature of immortality and longevity, all in a single week. Tithonus, Methuselah, Gilgamesh, the Uttarakurus and the Jambu tree, the fisherman Glaukus, the Taoist immortals, yes, the whole bibliography. And then, the burst of insight, the pounding of the forehead, the wild shout that brought student couriers running from all corners of the stacks. Arizona! Monks who came from Mexico and before that went to Mexico from Spain! The frieze of skulls! I hunted for that article in the Sunday supplement again. Read it in a kind of delirium. Yes. “Skulls are everywhere, grinning, somber, in high relief or in three-dimensional representation. . . . The monks are lean, intense men. . . . The one I spoke to . . . might have been thirty years old or three hundred, it was impossible to tell.”
That you are still alive, Father Perrault.
My astounded soul recoiled. Could I believe such things? I, skeptic, scoffer, materialist, pragmatist? Immortality? An age-old cult? Could such a thing be? The Keepers of the Skulls thriving among the cactus? The whole thing no myth of the medievals, no legend, but an actual continuing establishment that has penetrated even our automated world, one which I could visit whenever I chose to make the trip? Offering myself as candidate. Undergoing the Trial. Eli Steinfeld living to see the dawn of the thirty-sixth century. It was beyond all plausibility. I rejected the juxtaposition of manuscript and newspaper article as a wild coincidence; then, meditating, I succeeded in rejecting my rejection; and then I moved beyond that toward acceptance. It was necessary for me to make a formal act of faith, the first I had ever achieved, in order to begin to accept it. I compelled myself to agree that there could be powers outside the comprehension of contemporary science. I forced myself to shed a lifelong habit of dismissing the unknown until it has been made known by rigorous proofs. I allied myself willingly and gladly with the flying saucerites, with the Atlanteans, with the scientologists, with the flat-earthers, with the Forteans, with the macrobioticists, with the astrologers, with that whole legion of the credulous in whose company I had rarely felt comfortable before. At last I believed. I believed fully, though allowing for the possibility of error. I believed. Then I told Ned, and, after a while, Oliver and Timothy. Dangling the bait before them. Life eternal we offer thee. And here we are in Phoenix. Palm trees, cactus, the camel outside the motel: here we are. Tomorrow to commence the final phase of our quest for the House of Skulls.

19. Oliver

Maybe I did make too much fuss over picking up that hitchhiker. I don’t know. The whole episode puzzles me. Usually my motives for anything are clear, right out on the surface, but not this time. I was really shouting and rampaging at Ned. Why? Eli chewed me out for it afterward, saying that I had no business interfering with Ned’s freely taken decision to offer help to another human being. Ned was driving; he was in charge. Even Timothy, who backed me up when it happened, told me later that he thought I’d overreacted to the situation. The only one who didn’t say anything in the evening was Ned; but I knew Ned was burning about it.

Why did I do it, I wonder? I couldn’t have been in that much of a hurry to get to the skullhouse. Even if the hitchhiker had taken us fifteen minutes out of our way, so what? Throw a fit over fifteen minutes, with all of eternity ahead? It wasn’t the waste of time that was bugging me. It wasn’t that garbage about Charles Manson, either. It was something deeper, that I know.

I had this flash of intuition just as Ned was slowing down to offer the hippie a ride.
The hippie is a fag,
I thought. In just those words.
The hippie is a fag.
Ned has spotted him, I told myself; using the ESP that his kind seems to have, Ned has spotted him right on the highway, and Ned’s going to pick him up and bring him to the motel tonight. I have to be honest with myself. That was what I thought. Accompanied by an image of Ned and the hitchhiker in bed together, kissing, gasping, rolling around, fingering each other, doing whatever it is that homos like to do. I didn’t have any reason for suspecting stuff like that. The hippie was just a hippie, like five million others: barefoot, long messy hair, furry vest, tie-dyed jeans. Why did I think he was a fag? And even if he was a fag, so what? Didn’t Timothy and I pick up girls in New York and Chicago? Why shouldn’t Ned get some action of the kind he prefers? What do I have against homosexuals? One of my own roommates is one, isn’t he? One of my closest friends? I knew what Ned was when he moved in with us. I didn’t care, so long as he didn’t make passes at me. I liked Ned for himself, I didn’t give a shit about his sexual preferences. So why this sudden bigotry on the highway? Think about it some, Oliver. Think.

Maybe you were jealous. Eh? What about that possibility, Oliver? Maybe you didn’t want Ned carrying on with somebody else? Would you care to examine that notion a little while?

All right. I know he’s interested in me. He always has been. That puppydog look in his eyes when he looks at me, that dreamy wistfulness—I know what that means. Not that Ned’s ever approached me. He’s afraid to, afraid to explode a pretty useful friendship by stepping across the line. But even so, the desire’s there. Was I a dog in the manger, then, not giving Ned what he wants from me but not letting him get it from that hippie, either? What a tangled mess this is. But I have to sort everything out. My anger when Ned slowed the car. The shouting. The hysteria. Obviously something was being triggered in me. I’ve got to think some more about this. I’ve got to get it together. This frightens me. I’m likely to find out something about myself that I don’t want to know.

20. Ned

And now we’ve become detectives. Scouting all over Phoenix, trying to trace the skullhouse. I find it amusing: to come this far and not to be able to make the final connection. But all Eli has to go by is his newspaper clipping, which places the monastery “not far north of Phoenix.” That’s a big place, though, “not far north of Phoenix.” It covers everything between here and the Grand Canyon, say, from one side of the state to the other. We need help. After breakfast this morning Timothy took Eli’s clipping to the desk clerk, Eli feeling too shy or too eastern-looking to want to do the asking himself. The desk clerk didn’t know anything about any monastery anywhere, though, and suggested we inquire at the newspaper office, just across the street. But the newspaper, being an afternoon journal, didn’t open shop till nine, and we, still living on eastern standard time, had awakened very early this morning. It was even now only a quarter past eight. So we wandered around town to kill the forty-five minutes, peering at barber shops, at newsstands, at the windows of stores selling Indian pottery and cowboy accessories. The sun was already bright and the thermo-meter on a bank building announced that the temperature was seventy-nine degrees. It promised to be a stifling day. The sky was that fierce desert blue; the mountains just beyond the edge of town were pale brown. The city was silent, scarcely a car in the streets. Unrush hour in downtown Phoenix.

We hardly said a thing to one another. Oliver seemed still to be sulking over the ruckus he had started about that hitchhiker: he apparently felt embarrassed, and with good reason. Timothy acted bored and superior. He had expected Phoenix to be much livelier, the dynamic center of the dynamic Arizona economy, and the quiet here offended him. (Later we discovered that things are dynamic enough a mile or two north of downtown, where the real growth is taking place.) Eli was tense and withdrawn, no doubt wondering whether he had led us across the continent for nothing. And I? Edgy. Dry lips, dry throat. A tightness of the scrotum that comes over me only when I’m very, very, very nervous. Flexing and unflexing my gluteal muscles. What if the skullhouse doesn’t exist? Worse, what if it does? An end, then, to my elaborate oscillating dance; I would have to take sides at last, commit myself to the reality of the thing, give myself up wholly to the rites of the Keepers, or else, jeering, depart. What would I do? Always the threat of the Ninth Mystery lurked in the wings, shadowy, menacing, tempting.
Eternities must be balanced by extinctions.
Two live forever, two die at once. That proposition holds tender, quavering music for me; it shimmers afar; it sings seductively out of the naked hills. I fear it and yet I cannot resist the gamble it offers.

At nine we presented ourselves at the newspaper office. Again Timothy did the talking; his easy, self-assured, upper-class manners carry him smoothly through any kind of situation. The advantages of breeding. He identified us as college students doing research for a thesis on contemporary monasicism, which swept us past a receptionist and a reporter to one of the feature editors, who looked at our clipping and said that he knew nothing about any such monastery in the desert (dejection!) but that there was a man on his staff who specialized in keeping track of all the communes, cult headquarters, and similar settlements on the fringes of the town (hope!). Where was this man now? Oh, he’s on vacation, said the editor (despair!). When will he be back in town? Didn’t leave town, matter of fact (hope reborn!). Spending his holiday at home. He might be willing to talk. At our request, the editor phoned and got us invited out to the house of this specialist in crackpottery. “He lives up past Bethany Home Road, just off Central, the sixty-four hundred block. You know where that is? You just go up Central, past Camelback, past Bethany Home—”

A ten-minute drive. We left sleepy downtown behind, plunging northward through the busy uptown section, all glass skyscrapers and sprawling shopping centers, and passed through that into a district of impressive-looking modern homes half concealed by thick gardens of tropical vegetation. Beyond that a short way, into a more modest residential zone, and we came to the house of the man who had the answers. His name was Gilson. Forty, deep tan, open blue eyes, high shiny forehead. A pleasant sort. Keeping track of the lunatic fringe was plainly a hobby, not an obsession, with him; this wasn’t the sort of man who had obsessions. Yes, he knew about the Brotherhood of the Skulls, though he didn’t call it that. “The Mexican Fathers” was the term he used. Hadn’t been there himself, no, though he had talked to someone who had, visitor from Massachusetts, maybe even the same one who wrote the newspaper article. Timothy asked if Gilson could tell us where the monastery was. Gilson invited us inside: small house, clean, typical southwestern decor—Navaho rugs on the wall, half a dozen Hopi pots in cream and orange occupying the bookshelves. He produced a map of Phoenix and environs. “Here you are, now,” he said, tapping the map. “To get out of town you go over here, Black Canyon Highway, that’s a freeway, you pick it up here and ride north. Follow the signs to Prescott, though of course you don’t want to go anywhere near that far. Now, here, you see, not much past city limits, a mile, two miles, you get off the freeway—you got a map? Here, let me mark it. And you follow this road here—then you turn onto this one, see, going northeast—I guess you drive six, seven miles—” He sketched a series of zigzags on our roadmap and finally a big X. “No,” he said, “that isn’t where the monastery is. That’s where you leave your car and walk. The road becomes just a trail, there, no car could possibly get through, not even a jeep, but young fellers like you, you won’t have any problems, it’s just three, four miles straight east.” “What if we miss it?” Timothy asked. “The monastery, not the road.” “You won’t,” Gilson told us. “But if you come to the Fort McDowell Indian Reservation, you’ll know you’ve gone a little too far. And when you see Roosevelt Lake, you’ll know you’ve gone a whole lot too far.”

He asked us, as we left, to stop by at his house on our way back through town and tell him what we had discovered up there. “Like to keep my files up to date,” he said. “Been meaning to have a look at the place myself, only, you know how it is, lot of things to do and so little time for doing them.”

Sure, we told him. We’ll give you the whole story.

Into the car. Oliver driving, Eli navigating, the map spread out wide in his lap. Westward to Black Canyon Highway. A broad super-highway, frying in the midmorning heat. No traffic other than a few huge trucks. We headed north. All our questions would shortly be answered; doubtless some new ones would be asked. Our faith, or perhaps merely our naivete, would be repaid. I felt a chill in the midst of the torrid zone. I heard a brawling, surging overture rising from the pit, ominous, Wagnerian, tubas and trombones making a dark, throbbing music. The curtain was going up, though I was not sure if we were entering the last act or the first. No longer did I doubt that the skullhouse would be there. Gilson had been too matter-of-fact about it; it was no myth, just another manifestation of the urge to spirituality that this desert seemed to awaken in mankind. We would find the monastery, and it would be the right one, the lineal descendant of the one described in the Book of Skulls. Another delicious shiver: what if we came face to face with the very author of that ancient manuscript, millennial, timeless? Anything is possible, if ye have faith.

Faith. How much of my life has been shaped by that five-letter Anglo-Saxon word? Portrait of the artist as a young snot. The parochial school, its leaky roof, wind whistling through the windows so sorely in need of puttying, the pale sisters steely in their severe eyeglasses scowling at us in the hall. The catechism. The well-scrubbed little boys, white shirts, red ties. Father Burke instructing us. Plump, young, pink-faced, always beads of sweat on his upper lip, a bulge of soft flesh hanging over his clerical collar. He must have been, oh, twenty-five, twenty-six years old, a young priest, itchy in his celibacy, dong not yet withered, wondering in the dark hours whether it all was worth it. To Ned, age seven, he was the embodiment of Holy Writ, fierce, immense. Always a yardstick in his hand, and he used it, too: he’d read his Joyce, he played the role, wielding the pandybat. Asking me now to stand. I rise, trembling, wanting to shit in my pants and run. My nose running. (My nose dripped constantly until I was twelve; my image of my child-self is marred by a dark smudge, a sticky dirt-mustache. Puberty shut off the tap.) My wrist goes now to my snout: a quick wipe. “Don’t be disgusting!” from Father Burke, watery blue eyes flashing. God is love, God is love; what then is Father Burke? The yardstick whooshing through the air. The lightnings of his terrible swift sword. He gestures irritably at me. “The Apostles’ Creed, now, out with it!”

I say, stammering, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ—and in Jesus Christ—”

Faltering. From behind me, a hoarse whisper, Sandy Dolan: “His only son, our Lord.” My knees shake. My soul quakes. Last Sunday, after mass, Sandy Dolan and I went peering into windows and saw his sister changing her clothes, fifteen years old, little pink-tipped breasts, dark hair below. Dark hair. We’ll grow hair too, Sandy whispered. Did God see us spying on her? The Lord’s Day, and such a sin! Now the yardstick flicks warningly.

“—his only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born from the Virgin Mary—” Yes. Now I’m into the heart of it, the melodramatic part that I love so much. I speak more confidently, loudly, my voice a clear fluting soprano. “—suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, descended to Hell, on the third day rose again from the dead, ascended to the heavens—ascended to the heavens—”

I am lost again. Sandy, help me! But Father Burke is too close. Sandy does not dare speak.

“—ascended to the heavens—”

“He’s up there already, boy,” the priest snaps. “Get on with it! Ascended to the heavens—”

My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth. They all stare at me. Can’t I sit down? Can’t Sandy continue? Seven years old, Lord, must I know the whole creed?

The yardstick—the yardstick—

Incredibly, the father himself prompts me. “Sits at the right hand—”

Blessed clue. I seize on it. “Sits on the right hand—”

“
At
the right hand!” And my left hand gets the pandybat. A hot burning stinging tingling blow like the loud crack of a broken stick makes my trembling hand crumple together like a leaf in the fire: and at the sound and the pain scalding tears are driven into my eyes. May I sit down, now? No, I must go on. They expect so much of me. Old Sister Mary Joseph, face a mass of wrinkles, reading one of my poems aloud in the auditorium, my ode on Easter Sunday, telling me afterward I have great gifts. Go on, now. The creed, the creed, the creed! It isn’t fair. You hit me, now I ought to be allowed to sit. “Continue,” says the inexorable father. “Sits at the right hand—”

I nod. “Sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, thence will come to judge the living and the dead.” The worst is over. Heart pounding, I rush through the rest. “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the remission of sins, the resurrection of the flesh, and eternal life.” A mumbled torrent of words. “Amen.” Should one finish with amen? I am so confused I don’t know. Father Burke smiles sourly; I tumble into my seat, drained. There’s faith for you. Faith. The Christ Child in the manger and the yardstick descending toward your knuckles. Cold hallways; scowling faces; the dry, powdery smell of the holy. One day Cardinal Cushing paid us a visit. The whole school was in terror; it couldn’t have been more frightening if the Savior Himself had stepped out of a textbook closet. The angry glances, the furious whispered warnings: stay in line, sing in tune, keep your mouth shut, show your respect. God is love, God is love. And the beads, the crucifixes, the pastel portraits of the Virgin, the Friday fish, the nightmare of first communion, the terror of stepping into the confessional—all the apparatus of faith, the debris of centuries—well, of course, I had to junk all that. Escaping from the Jesuits, from my mother, from the apostles and martyrs, St. Patrick, St. Brendan, St. Dionysius, St. Ignatius, St. Anthony, St. Theresa, St. Thais the penitent harlot, St. Kevin, St. Ned. I became a stinking accursed apostate, not the first of my family to fall away from truth. When I go to damnation I’ll meet uncles and cousins galore, turning on their spits. And now Eli Steinfeld demands new faith of me. As we all know, says Eli, God is irrelevant, an embarrassment; to admit in our modern age that you have faith in His existence is something like admitting you have pimples on your ass. We sophisticates, we who have seen everything and know it for the shuck it is, can’t bring ourselves to surrender to Him, much as we’d like to let the obsolete old bastard make all the hard decisions for us. But wait, crieth Eli! Give up your cynicism, give up your shallow mistrust of the invisible! Einstein, Bohr, and Thomas Edison have destroyed our capacity to embrace the Hereafter, but would you not gladly embrace the Here-and-Now? Believe, says Eli. Believe in the impossible. Believe because it
is
impossible. Believe that the received history of the world is a myth and that myth is what survives of the true history. Believe in the Skulls, believe in their Keepers. Believe. Believe. Believe. Make an act of faith, and life eternal shall be your reward. Thus speaketh Eli. We go north, east, north, east again, zigzagging into the thorny wilderness, and we must have faith.