chapter thirteen
Ned
A cold blue Ozark evening. Exhaustion, anoxia, nausea: the dividends of auto-fatigue. Enough is enough; here we halt four red-eyed robots stagger out of the car. Did we really drive more than a thousand miles today? Yes, a thousand and some, clear across Illinois and Missouri into Oklahoma, long stretches at seventy or eighty miles per, and if Oliver had had his way we’d have driven five hundred more before knocking off. But we couldn’t have gone on. Oliver himself admits the quality of his performance began to decline after his six-hundredth mile of the day. He nearly totaled us outside of Joplin, glassy-faced and groggy, wrists failing to deal with the curve his eyes registered. Timothy drove perhaps a hundred miles today, a hundred fifty; I must have done the rest, several stints amounting to three or four hours’ worth, sheer terror all the way. But now we must stop. The psychic toll is too great. Doubt, despair, depression, dejection have seeped into our sturdy band. Dejected, disheartened, discouraged, disillusioned, dismayed, we slither into our chosen motel, wondering in our various ways how we could have persuaded ourselves to undertake this expedition. Aha! The Moment-of-Truth Motor Lodge, Nowhere, Oklahoma! The Edge of Reality Motel! Skepticism Innl Twenty units, fake Colonial, plastic red-brick facing and white wooden columns flanking the entrance. We are the only guests, it seems. Gum-chewing female night clerk, about seventeen years old, her hair teased up into a fantastic 1962 beehive and held in place with embalming fluid. She looks at us languidly, no flicker of interest. Heavy eye makeup, turquoise with black edging. A doxy, a drab, too dumb-whorish even to be a successful whore. “Coffee shop closes at ten,” she tells us. Bizarre twanging drawl. Timothy is thinking about inviting her to his room for some fucking, that’s obvious to us all; I think he wants to add her to some collection he’s making of all-American types. Actually — let me say it in my capacity as objective observer, subspecies polymorphous perverse — she wouldn’t really be bad-looking, given a good scrubbing to get rid of all that makeup and hair spray. Fine high breasts jutting against her green uniform; outstanding cheekbones and nose. But the dull eyes, the slack pouting lips, can’t be washed away. Oliver gives Timothy a fiery scowl, warning him not to start anything with her. For once Timothy yields: the prevailing mood of depression has him down, too. She assigns us to adjoining double rooms, thirteen dollars apiece, and Timothy offers her his omnipotent slice of plastic. “Room’s around to the left,” she says, doing her thing with the credit-card machine, and, having done it, disconnects completely from our presence, returning her attention to a Japanese television set with a five-inch screen perched on her counter. We go out to the left, past the drained swimming pool, and let ourselves into our rooms. We must hurry or well miss dinner. Drop the luggage, splash water in the faces, out to the coffee shop. One waitress, slouch-backed, gum-chewing; could be the sister of the desk clerk. She too has had a long day; there is an acrid cunty smell about her that hits us hard as she bends over us to plunk silverware on the Formica tabletop. “What’ll it be, boys?” No escalopes de veau tonight, no caneton aux cerises. Dead hamburgers, oily coffee. We eat in silence and silently shuffle back to our lodgings. Off with the sweaty clothes. Into the shower, Eli first, then me. The door connecting our room to theirs can be opened. It is opened. Dull boomings from beyond: Oliver, naked, is kneeling before the television set, twiddling dials. I survey him, his taut rear, broad back, the dangling genitals visible below his muscle-bunched thighs. I repress my warped lustful thoughts. These three humanitarians have coped quite well with the problem of living with a bisexual roommate; they pretend that my “sickness,” my “condition,” does not exist, and carry on from there. The prime liberal rule: don’t patronize the handicapped. Pretend that the blind man can see, that the black man is white, that the gay man feels no stirrings at the sight of Oliver’s smooth firm ass. Not that I have ever overtly offered at him. But he knows. He knows. Oliver’s no fool.
Why are we so depressed tonight? Why this loss of faith?
It must have come from Eli. He was bleak all day, lost in realms of existential despondency. I think it was a purely personal gloom, born of Eli’s difficulties in relating to the immediate environment and to the cosmos at large, but it subtly, surreptitiously generalized itself and infected us all. It takes the form of grinding doubts:
1. Why have we bothered to make this trip?
2. What do we really expect to gain?
3. Can we really hope to find what we’re looking for?
4. If we find it, do we want it?
So it must begin again, the task of self-hyping, of self-conversion. Eli has his papers out and studies them intently: the manuscript of his translation of the Book of Skulls, the Xeroxes of the newspaper clippings that led him to connect the place in Arizona with the antique and implausible cult whose scripture the book may have been, and his mass of peripheral documents and references. He looks up after some time and says, “ ‘All at present known in medicine is almost nothing in comparison of what remains to be discovered… we could free ourselves from an infinity of maladies of body as well as of mind, and perhaps also even from the debility of age, if we had sufficiently ample knowledge of their causes, and of all the remedies provided for us by nature.’ That’s Descartes,
Not the first time I’ve heard this. Eli presented all his data to us long before. The decision to go to Arizona ripened exceedingly slowly and was forced along to maturity by acres of pseudophilosophical palaver. Then I said, now I say, “Descartes died at fifty-four, didn’t he?” . “An accident. A surprise. Besides, he hadn’t perfected his theories of longevity yet.”
Timothy: “A pity he didn’t work faster.”
“A pity, yes, for all of us,” Eli said. “But we have the Keepers of the Skulls to look forward to.
“So you say.”
“So I believe,” said Eli, striving to make himself believe. And the familiar routines came forth once more. Eli, eroded by weariness, teetering on the brink of disbelief, trotting out his arguments to get his head together once more. His hands upraised, fingers outspread, the pedagogical gesture. “We agree,” he said, “that coolness is out, pragmatism is through, sophisticated skepticism is obsolete. We’ve tried that whole pack of attitudes and they don’t work. They cut us off from too much that’s important. They don’t answer enough of the real questions; they just leave us looking wise and cynical, but still ignorant. Agreed?”
“Agreed.” Oliver, eyes rigid.
“Agreed.” Timothy, yawning,
“Agreed.” Even me. A grin.
Eli, again: “There’s no mystery left in modern life. The scientific generation killed it all. The rationalist purge, driving out the unlikely and the inexplicable. Look how hollow religion has become in the last hundred years. God’s dead, they say. Sure he is: murdered, assassinated. Look, I’m a Jew, I took Hebrew lessons like a good little Yid, I read the Torah, I had a Bar Mitzvah, they gave me fountain pens — Did anybody once mention God to me in any context worth listening to? God was somebody who talked to Moses. God was a pillar of fire four thousand years ago. Where’s God now? Don’t ask a Jew. We haven’t seen Him in a while. We worship rules, dietary laws, customs, the words of the Bible, the paper the Bible’s printed on, the bound book itself, but we don’t worship supernatural beings such as God. The old man in the whiskers, counting sins — no, no, that’s for the
