The Book of Skulls

“It’s a possibility. It gives us a finite chance to enter the infinite. Isn’t that good enough? Isn’t that worth trying? Where did sneering get us? Where did doubt get us? Where did skepticism get us? Can’t we try? Can’t we look?” Eli had found his faith again. He was shouting, sweating, standing up stark naked and waving his arms around. His whole body was on fire. He was actually beautiful, just for that moment. Eli, beautiful!

I said, “I’m into this all the way, and at the same time I don’t buy it for half an inch. Do you follow me? I dig the dialectic of the myth. Its implausibility batters against my skepticism and drives me onward. Tensions and contradictions are my fuel.”

Timothy, devil’s advocate, shook his head — a heavy taurine gesture, his big beefy frame moving like a slow pendulum. “Come on, man. What do you really believe? The Skulls, yes or no, salvation or crap, fact or fantasy. Which?”

“Both,” I said.

“Both? You can’t have it both.”

“Yes I can!” I cried. “Both! Both! Yes and no! Can you follow me to where I live, Timothy? In the place where the tension’s greatest, where the yes is drawn tight against the no. Where you simultaneously reject the existence of the inexplicable ^ind accept the existence of the inexplicable. Life eternal! That’s crap, isn’t it, a load of wishful thinking, the old hogwash dream? And yet it’s real, too. We can live a thousand years, if we want to. But it’s impossible. I affirm. I deny. I applaud. I jeer.”

“You don’t make sense,” Timothy grumbled.

“You make too much sense. I shit on your sense! Eli’s right: we need mystery, we need unreason, we need the unknown, we need the impossible. A whole generation’s been teaching itself to believe the unbelievable, Timothy. And there you stand with your crew cut on, saying it doesn’t make sense.”

Timothy shrugged. “Right. What do you want from me? I’m just a dumb jock.”

“That’s your pose,” Eli said. “Your persona, your mask. Big dumb jock. It insulates you. It spares you from having to make any commitment whatsoever, emotional, political, ideological, metaphysical. You say you don’t understand, and you shrug, and you step back and laugh. Why, do you want to be a zombie, Timothy? Why do you want to disco

“He can’t help it, Eli,” I said. “He was bred to be a gentleman. He’s disco

“Oh, fuck you,” Timothy said, in his most gentlemanly way. “What do you know, either of you? And what am I doing here? Dragged halfway across the Western Hemisphere by a Jew and a queer to check out a thousand-year-old fairy tale!”

I made a little curtsy. “Hey, well done, Timothy! The mark of the true gentleman: he never gives offense unintentionally.”

“You asked it,” said Eli, “so you answer it. What are you doing here?”

“And don’t blame me for dragging you here,” I said. “This is Eli’s trip. I’m as skeptical as you are, maybe even more so.”

Timothy snorted. I think he felt outnumbered. He said, very quietly, “I just came along for the ride.”

“For the ride! For the ride!” Eli.

“You asked me to come. What the crap, you needed four guys, you said, and I had nothing better to do for Easter. My buddies. My pals. I said I’d go. My car, my money. I can play along with a gag. Margo’s into astrology, you know, it’s Libra this and Pisces that, and Mars transits the solar tenth house, and Saturn’s on the cusp, and she won’t fuck without first checking the stars, which can sometimes be quite inconvenient. And do I make fun of her? Do I laugh at her the way her father does?”

“Only inside,” Eli said.

“That’s my business. I accept what I can accept, and I have no use for the rest. But I’m good-hearted about it. I tolerate her witch doctors. I tolerate yours, too, Eli. That’s another mark of the gentleman, Ned: he’s amiable, he doesn’t proselytize, he never pushes his thing at the expense of someone else’s thing.”

“He doesn’t have to,” I said.

“He doesn’t have to, no. All right: I’m here, yes? I’m paying for this room, yes? I’m cooperating 400 percent. Must I be a True Believer, too? Must I get your religion?”

“What will you do,” Eli said, “when we’re actually in the skullhouse and the Keepers are offering us the Trial? Will you still be a skeptic then? Will your habit of not believing be such a hassle for you that you won’t be able to surrender?”

“I’ll evaluate that,” Timothy answered slowly, “when I have something to base my evaluation on.” Suddenly he turned to Oliver. “You’ve been pretty quiet, All-American.”

“What do you want me to say?” Oliver asked. His long lean body stretched out in front of the television set. Every muscle outlined against his skin: a walking anatomy textbook. His lengthy pink apparatus, drooping out of a golden forest inspiring me with improper thoughts. Retro me, Sathanas. This way lies Gomorrah, if not Sodom.

“Don’t you have anything to contribute to the discussion?”

“I really wasn’t paying close attention.”

“We were talking about this trip. The Book of Skulls and the degree of faith we have in it,” said Timothy.

“I see.”

“Would you care to make a profession of belief, Dr. Marshall?”

Oliver seemed to be midway in a journey to another galaxy. He said, “I give Eli the benefit of the doubt.”

“You believe in the Skulls, then?” Timothy asked.

“I believe.”

“Although we know the whole thing’s absurd.”

“Yes,” said Oliver. “Even though it’s absurd.”

“That was Tertullian’s position, too,” Eli put in. Credo quia absurdum est. I believe because it’s absurd. A different context of belief, of course, but the psychology’s right.”

“Yes, yes, my position exactly!” I said. “I believe because it’s absurd. Good old Tertullian. He says precisely what I feel. My position exactly.”

“Not mine.” Oliver.

“No?” Eli asked.

Oliver said, “No. I believe despite the absurdity.”

“Why?” Eli said.

“Why, Oliver?” I said, a long moment later. “You know it’s absurd, and yet you believe. Why?”

“Because I have to,” he said. “Because it’s my only hope.”

He stared straight at me. His eyes held a peculiarly devastated expression, as though he had looked into the face of Death with them and had come away still alive, but with every option blasted, every possibility shriveled. He had heard the drums and the fifes of the dead-march, at the edge of the universe. Those frosty eyes withered me. Those strangled words impaled me. I believe, he said. Despite the absurdity. Because I have to. Because its my only hope. A communique from some other planet. I could feel the chilly presence of Death there in the room with us, brushing silently past our rosy boyish cheeks.

chapter fourteen

Timothy

We’re a heavy mixture, we four. How did we ever get together? What tangling of lifelines dumped us all into the same dormitory suite, anyway?

In the begi