The Book of Skulls

He moved toward the door.

“Wait,” I said. “I reject your confession, Eli. You’re trying to make me go along with an ad hoc sin, with willed guilt. Nothing doing. I want something real.”

“What I told you about Oliver is real.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I have nothing to give you.”

“This isn’t for me, EH. It’s for you, your own rite of purification. I’ve been through it, Oliver has, even Timothy, and here you stand, putting down your own sins, pretending that nothing you’ve ever done is worth feeling guilty about—” I shrugged. “All right. It’s your own immortality you’re screwing up, not mine. Go on. Go. Go.”

He threw me a terrible look, a look of fear and resentment and anguish, and hurried from the room. I realized, after he was gone, that my nerves were stretched taut: my hands were shaking and a muscle in my left thigh was jumping. What had strung me out this way? Eli’s cowardly self-concealment or his revelation of Oliver’s availability? Both, I decided. Both. But the second more than the first. I wondered what would happen if I went to Oliver now. Staring straight into those icy blue eyes of his. I know the truth about you, I’d say in a calm voice, a quiet voice. I know all about how you were seduced by your pal when you were fourteen. Only don’t try to tell me it was a seduction, Ol, because I don’t believe in seductions, and I have some knowledge of the subject. Being seduced isn’t what brings you out, if you’re gay. You come out because you want to, isn’t that so? It’s in you from the start, it’s programed into your genes, your bones, your balls, it’s just waiting for the right occasion to show itself, and somebody gives you that occasion and that’s when you come out. All right, Ol, you got your chance, and you loved it, and then you spent seven years fighting against it, and now you’re going to do it with me. Not because my wiles are irresistible. Not because I’ve stupefied you with drugs or booze. It won’t be a seduction. No, you’ll do it because you want to, Ol, because you’ve always wanted to. You haven’t had the courage to let yourself do it. Well, I’d tell him, here’s your chance. Here I am. And I’d go to him, and I’d touch him, and he’d shake his head and make a rattling, coughing noise deep in his throat, still fighting it, and then something would snap in him, a seven-year tension would break, and he’d stop fighting. He’d surrender, and we’d make it at last. And afterward we’d lie close together in an exhausted sweaty heap, but his fervor would cool as it always does just afterward, and the guilt and shame would rise up in him, and — I could see it so vividly! — he would beat me to death, clubbing me down, smashing me against the stone floor, staining it with my blood. He’d stand above me while I twitched in pain, and he’d howl at me in rage because I had shown him to himself, face to face, and he couldn’t bear the knowledge of what he had seen in his own eyes. All right, Ol, if you have to destroy me, then destroy me. That’s cool, because I love you, and so whatever you do to me is cool. And it fulfills the Ninth Mystery, doesn’t it? I came here to have you and die, and I’ve had you, and now at the proper mystic moment I’m going to die, and it’s cool, beloved Ol, everything’s cool. And his tremendous fists crush my bones. And my broken frame twists and writhes. And is finally still. And the ecstatic voice of Frater Antony is heard on high, intoning the text of the Ninth Mystery as an invisible bell tolls, dong, dong, dong, Ned is dead, Ned is dead, Ned is dead.

The fantasy was so intensely real that I began to shiver and quake; I could feel the force of that vision in every molecule of my body. It seemed to me that I had already been to Oliver, had already grappled with him in passion, had already perished beneath his flaming wrath. Thus there was no need for me to do these things now. They were over, accomplished, encapsulated in the sealed past. I savored my memories of him. The touch of his smooth skin against me. The granite of his muscles unyielding to my probing fingertips. The taste of him on my lips. The flavor of my own blood, trickling into my mouth as he began to pummel me. The sense of surrendering my body. The ecstasy. The bells. The voice on high. The fraters singing a requiem for me. I lost myself in visionary revery.

Then I became aware that someone had entered my room. The door, opening, closing. Footsteps. This, too, I accepted as part of the fantasy. Without looking around, I decided that Oliver must have come to me, and in a dreamy acid-high way I became convinced that it was Oliver, it necessarily had to be Oliver, so that I was thrown into confusion for an instant when eventually I turned and saw Eli. He was sitting quietly against the far wall. He had merely appeared depressed on his earlier visit, but now — ten minutes later? half an hour? — he seemed utterly disintegrated. Downcast eyes, slumping shoulders. “I don’t understand,” he said hollowly, “how this confessional thing can have any value, real, symbolic, metaphorical, or otherwise. I thought I understood it when Frater Javier first spoke to us, but now I can’t dig it. Is this what we must do in order to deliver ourselves from death? Why? Why?”

“Because they ask it,” I said.

“What of that?”

“It’s a matter of obedience. Out of obedience grows discipline, out of discipline grows control, out of control grows the power to conquer the forces of decay. Obedience is anti-entropic. Entropy is our enemy.”

“How glib you are,” he said.

“Glibness isn’t a sin.”

He laughed and made no reply. I could see that he was on the thin edge, walking the razor-sharp line between sanity and madness, and I, who had teetered on that edge all my life, was not going to be the one to nudge him. Time passed. My vision of myself and Oliver receded and became unreal. I bore no grudge against Eli for that; this night belonged to him. Ultimately he started to tell me about an essay he had written when he was sixteen, in his senior year in high school, an essay on the moral collapse of the Western Roman Empire as reflected in the degeneration of Latin into the various Romance languages. He remembered a good deal of what he had written even now, quoting lengthy chunks of it, and I listened with half an ear, giving him the polite pretense of attention but nothing more, for although the essay sounded brilliant to me, a remarkable performance for a scholar of any age and certainly astonishing for a boy of sixteen to have written, I did not at that particular moment have any vast desire to hear about the subtle ethical implications to be found in the patterns of evolution of French, Spanish, and Italian. But gradually I comprehended Eli’s motives for telling me this story and paid closer heed: he was, in fact, making confession to me. For he had written that essay for submission to a contest sponsored by some prestigious learned society and had won, receiving thereby a valuable scholarship that had underwritten his college tuition. Indeed, he had built his entire academic career on that piece, for it had been reprinted in a major philological journal and had made him a celebrity in that small scholastic realm. Though only a freshman, he was mentioned admiringly in the footnotes of other scholars; the gates of all libraries were open to him; he would not have had the opportunity to find the very manuscript that had led us to the House of Skulls had he not written the masterly essay on which his fame depended. And — so he told me in the same expressionless tone with which, moments before, he had been expounding on irregular verbs — the essential concept of that thesis had not been his own work. He had stolen it.

Aha! The sin of Eli Steinfeld! No trifling sexual peccadillo, no boyhood adventure in buggery or mutual masturbation, no incestuous snuggling with his mildly protesting mother, but rather an intellectual crime, the most damning of all. Little wonder he had held back from admitting it. Now, though, he poured forth the incriminating truth. His father, he said, lunching one afternoon‘ in an Automat on Sixth Avenue, had happened to notice a small, gray, faded man sitting by himself, exploring a thick, unwieldy book. It was an arcane volume on linguistic analysis, Sommerfelt’s Diachrordc and Synchronic Aspects of Language, a title that would have meant nothing whatever to the elder Steinfeld had he not just a short while before forked out $16.50, no trivial sum in that family, to buy a copy for Eli, who felt he could not live much longer without it. The shock of recognition, then, at the sight of that bulky quarto. Upswelling of parental pride: my son the philologist. An introduction follows. Conversation. Immediate rapport; one middle-aged refugee in an Automat has nothing to fear from another. “My son,” says Mr. Steinfeld, “he’s reading that same book!” Expressions of delight. The other is a native of Rumania, formerly professor of linguistics at the University of Cluj; he had fled that land in 1939, hoping to enter Palestine but arriving instead, by a roundabout route through the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Canada, in the United States. Unable to secure an academic appointment anywhere, he lives in quiet poverty on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, holding whatever jobs he can find: dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant, proofreader for a short-lived Rumanian newspaper, mimeograph operator for a displaced-persons information service, and so on. All the while he is diligently preparing his life’s work, a structural and philosophical analysis of the decay of Latin in early medieval times. The manuscript now is virtually complete in Rumanian, he tells Eli’s father, and he has begun the necessary translation into English, but the work goes very slowly for him, since even now he is not at home in English, his head being so thoroughly stuffed with other languages. He dreams of finishing the book, finding a publisher for it, and retiring to Israel on the proceeds. “I should like to meet your boy,” the Rumanian says abruptly. Instant emanations of suspicion from Eli’s father. Is this some kind of pervert? A molester, a fondler? No! This is a decent Jewish man, a scholar, a melamed, a member of the international fellowship of victims; how could he mean any harm to Eli? Telephone numbers are exchanged. A meeting is negotiated. Eli goes to the Rumanian’s apartment: one tiny room, crammed with books, manuscripts, learned periodicals in a dozen languages. Here, read this, the worthy man says, this and this and this, my essays, my theories; and he thrusts papers into Eli’s hands, onionskin sheets closely typed, single spaced, no margins. Eli goes home, he reads, his mind expands. Far out! This little old man has it all together! Inflamed, Eli vows to learn Rumanian, to be his new friend’s amanuensis, to help him translate his masterwork as quickly as possible. Feverishly the two, the boy and the old man, plan collaborations. They build castles in Rumania. Eli, out of his own money, has the manuscripts Xeroxed, so that some goy in the next apartment, falling asleep over a cigarette, does not wipe out this lifetime of scholarship in a mindless conflagration. Every day after school Eli hurries to the little cluttered room. Then one afternoon no one answers his knock. Calamity! The janitor is summoned, grumbling, whiskey-breathed; he uses his master key to open the door; within lies the Rumanian, yellow-faced, stiff. A society of refugees pays for the funeral. A nephew, mysteriously unmentioned previously, materializes and carts off every book, every manuscript, to a fate unknown. Eli is left with the Xeroxes. What now? How can he be the vehicle through which this work is made known to mankind? Ah! The essay contest for the scholarship! He sits possessed at his typewriter, hour after hour. The distinction in his own mind between himself and his departed acquaintance becomes uncertain. They are collaborators now; through me, Eli thinks, this great man speaks from the grave. The essay is finished and there is no doubt in Eli’s mind of its worth; it is plainly a masterpiece. Moreover he has the special pleasure of knowing that he has salvaged the life’s work of an unjustly neglected scholar. He submits the required six copies to the contest committee; in the spring the registered letter comes, notifying him he has won; he is summoned into marble halls to receive a scroll, a check for more money than he can imagine, and the excited congratulations of a panel of distinguished academics. Shortly afterward comes the first request from a professional journal for a contribution. His career is launched. Only later does Eli realize that in his triumphant essay he has, somehow, forgotten entirely to credit the author of the work on which his ideas are based. Not an acknowledgment, not a footnote, not a single citation anywhere.