The Book of Skulls

The bitter odor of sweat was strong in the room. Oliver’s voice was hard-edged and sharp; every syllable came forth with the force of a dart. His eyes were glazed and his face was flushed. He seemed to be in some sort of trance. If it hadn’t been Oliver, I would have thought he was stoned. This confession was costing him some tremendous i

“What happened afterward?” I asked at last.

“We took a swim and cleaned ourselves up and got dressed and went and shot some wild ducks.”

“No, I mean afterward. Between Karl and you. The effect on your friendship.”

“On our way back to town,” Oliver said, “I told Karl that if he ever went near me again I’d blow his fucking head off.”

“And?”

“He never went near me again. A year later he lied about his age and joined the marines and got killed in Vietnam.” Oliver looked at me challengingly, evidently awaiting another question, something he was sure I must inevitably ask, but I had no more questions; the sheer inconsequentiality, the irrelevance, of Karl’s death had broken the narrative thread for me. There was a long pause. I felt foolish and inarticulate. Then Oliver said, “That was the only time in my life I ever had any sort of gay experience. Absolutely the only time. You believe me, don’t you, Eli?”

“Of course I do.”

“You better. Because it’s true. There was that once with. Karl, when I was fourteen, and that was all. You know, one reason I agreed to have a gay roommate was as a sort of a test, to see whether I could be tempted, to learn where my natural inclinations lay, to find out whether what I did that day with Karl was a one-shot, a fluke, or if it would happen again if there was the opportunity. Well, there was the opportunity, all right. But I’m sure you know I’ve never made it with Ned. You know that, don’t you? The question of a physical relationship just hasn’t ever come up between Ned and me.”

“Of course.”

His eyes were on me, fierce again. Still waiting, Oliver? For what?

He said, “There’s just one thing else I have to say.”

“Go on, Oliver.”

“Just one thing. A little footnote, but it carries the whole point of the story, because it isolates the guilt for me. Where the guilt lives, Eli, isn’t in what I did. It’s in how I felt about what I did.” A nervous chuckle. Another pause. He was having trouble getting his one last thing said. He looked away from me. I think he was wishing he had left well enough alone and had ended his confession five minutes before. At length he said, “I’ll tell you. I enjoyed it, Eli. With Karl. I got a real thrill out of it. My whole body seemed to be erupting. It may have been the biggest kick of my life. I never went back for a second time, because I knew that kind of thing was wrong. But I wanted to. I still want to. I’ve always wanted to.” He was shaking. “I’ve had to fight it, every minute of my life, and I never realized until just a short while ago how hard I actually was fighting. That’s all. That’s the whole thing, Eli, right there. That’s all I have to say.”

chapter thirty-eight

Ned

Enter Eli, somber, shuffling, mantled in rabbinical gloom, a stoop-shouldered personification of the Wailing Wall, two thousand years of sorrow on his back. He is down. Very far down. I had noticed, we all had noticed, how well Eli was responding to life in the House of Skulls; he had been up since the day we got here, far up and cresting, as up as I had ever seen him. Not any more. For the past week he’d been heading downward. And these few confessional days seemed to have thrust him into the uttermost abyss. Sad eyes, drooping mouth. The quirky grimace of self-doubt, self-contempt. He radiates a chill. He is veh-is-mir made flesh. What buggest thou, beloved Eli?

We rapped a bit. I felt free and loose, pretty far up myself, as I had been for three days, since dumping the tale of Julian and The Other Oliver onto Timothy. Frater Javier knows his business; ventilating all that garbage was exactly what I needed. Getting it into the open, analyzing it, discovering which part of the episode was the part that was hurting me. So now with Eli I was relaxed and expansive, my usual mild maliciousness altogether absent; I had no wish to needle him, but simply sat waiting, the coolest kind of cat I had ever been, ready to receive his pain and ease him of it. I expected him to blurt out his confession in a soul-clearing hurry, but no, not yet, indirection is Eli’s hallmark; he wanted to talk of other things. How, he wondered, did I evaluate our chances in the Trial? I shrugged and told him that I rarely thought about such things and simply went through our daily round of weeding and meditating and exercising and screwing, telling myself that every day in every way I was getting closer and closer to the goal. Eli shook his head. A sense of impending failure obsessed him. He had been confident at first that our Trial would have a successful outcome, and the last vestiges of skepticism had dropped from him; he believed implicitly in the truth of the Book of Skulls and believed also that its bounty would be extended to us. Now his faith in the Book was unshaken but his self-confidence was shattered. He was convinced that a crisis was approaching that would doom our hopes. The problem, he said, was Timothy. Eli felt certain that Timothy’s tolerance for the skullhouse was virtually at its end and that in another couple of days he’d take off, leaving us stranded in an incomplete Receptacle.