Frater Franz waited until he was finished, then handed him a cloth and wordlessly ordered him to clean up his own mess. The fraters plainly dislike Timothy, and perhaps fear him, for he’s half a foot taller than any of them and must outweigh the heaviest by ninety pounds. The rest of us, as I say, they love, and in the abstract they love Timothy too.
After breakfast comes morning meditations with Frater Antony. He says little, merely provides a spiritual context for us with a minimum of words. We meet in the other long rear wing of the building, opposite the dormitory wing; this is entirely given over to the monastic functions. Instead of bedrooms, there are chapels, eighteen of them, I suppose corresponding to the Eighteen Mysteries; they are as sparsely furnished and as powerfully austere as the other rooms, and contain a series of overwhelming artistic masterpieces. Most of these are pre-Columbian, but some of the chalices and carvings have a medieval European look, and there are certain abstract objects (of ivory? bone? stone?) that are completely unfamiliar to me. This side of the building also has a large library, crammed with books, rarities, by the looks of the shelves; we are forbidden at present to enter that room, though its door is never locked. Frater Antony meets with us in the chapel closest to the public wing. It is empty except for the ubiquitous skull-mask on the wall. He kneels; we kneel; he removes from his breast his tiny jade pendant, which unsurprisingly is carved in the shape of a skull, and places it on the floor before us as a focus for our meditations. As frater-superior, Frater Antony has the only jade pendant, but Frater Miklos, Frater Javier, and Frater Franz are entitled to wear similar pendants of polished brown stone — obsidian, I imagine, or onyx. These four are the Keepers of the Skulls, an elite group within the fraternity. What Frater Antony urges us to contemplate is a paradox: the skull beneath the face, the presence of the death-symbol hidden under our living masks. Through an exercise of “interior vision,” we are supposed to purge ourselves of the death-impulse by absorbing, fully comprehending, and ultimately destroying the power of the skull. I don’t know how successful any of us has been at achieving this: another thing we are forbidden to do is compare notes on our progress. I doubt that Timothy is much good at meditation. Oliver evidently is; he stares at the jade skull with lunatic intensity, engulfing it, surrounding it, and I think his spirit goes forth and enters it. But is he moving in the correct direction? Eli, in the past, has complained to me of the difficulties he’s had in reaching the highest levels of mystic experience on drugs; his mind is too agile, too jumpy, and he’s spoiled several acid trips for himself by darting hither and thither instead of settling down and gliding into the All. Out here, too, I think he’s having trouble getting it together; he looks tense and impatient during the meditation sessions and seems to be forcing it, trying to push himself into a region he can’t really attain. As for me, I rather enjoy the daily hour with Frater Antony; the paradox of the skull is, of course, precisely my line of irrationality, and I think I’m grooving properly with it, though I recognize the possibility that I’m deceiving myself. I’d like to discuss the degree of my progress, if any, with Frater Antony, but all such self-conscious inquiries are prohibited for now. So I kneel and stare at the little green skull each day, and cast forth my soul, and conduct my perpetual internal struggle between corrosive cynicism and abject faith.
When we finish our hour with Frater Antony we go back to the fields. We pull weeds, spread fertilizer — it’s all organic, naturally — and plant seedlings. Here Oliver is at his best. He’s always tried to repudiate his farm-boy upbringing, but now suddenly he’s flaunting it, the way Eli flaunts his Yiddish vocabulary despite not having been inside a synagogue since his bar mitzvah. The more-ethnic-than-thou syndrome, and Oliver’s ethnos is rural- agricultural, so he goes at his hoeing and spading with formidable vim. The fraters try to slow him down: I think his energy appalls them, but also they worry about his chances of heatstroke; Frater Leon, the physician-frater, has spoken to Oliver several times, pointing out that the midmorning temperatures are in the low nineties and will soon be much higher than that. Still Oliver chugs furiously on. I find all this grubbing in the soil agreeably strange and strangely agreeable, myself. It appeals to the back-to-nature romanticism that I suppose lurks in the hearts of all excessively urbanized intellectuals. I’ve never done any manual labor more strenuous than masturbation before this, so the field chores are back-breaking as well as mindblowing for me, but I haul myself eagerly through the work. So far. Eli’s relationship to the farm stuff is very similar to mine, though if anything more intense, more romantic; he talks about drawing physical renewal from Mother Earth. And Timothy, who of course had never had to do so much as tie his own shoelaces, takes a lordly gentleman fanner attitude:
By ten or half past ten in the morning it becomes unpleasantly hot, and we leave the fields, all except three farmer-fraters whose, names I do not yet know. They spend ten or twelve hours outdoors each day: as a penance, perhaps? The rest of us, both fraters and the Receptacle, go to our rooms and bathe again. Then we four convene over in the far wing for our daily session with Frater Miklos, the history-frater.
Miklos is a compact, powerfully built little man, with forearms like thighs and thighs like logs. He gives the impression of being older than the other fraters, though I admit there’s something paradoxical about applying a comparative like “older” to a group of ageless men. He speaks with a faint and indefinable accent, and his thought processes are distinctly nonlinear: he rambles, he wanders, he slides unexpectedly from theme to theme. I believe it’s deliberate, that his mind is subtle and unfathomable rather than senile and undisciplined. Perhaps over the centuries he’s grown bored with mere consecutive discourse; I know I would.
He has two subjects: the origin and development of the Brotherhood and the history of the concept of human longevity. On the first of these he is at his most elusive, as if determined never to give us a straightforward outline. We are very old, he keeps saying, very old, very old, and I have no way of knowing whether he means the fraters or the Brotherhood itself, though I think perhaps both; perhaps some of the fraters have been in it from the beginning, their lives spanning not merely decades or centuries but entire millennia. He hints at prehistoric origins, the caves of the Pyrenees, the Dordogne, Lascaux, Altamira, a secret confraternity of shamans that has endured out of mankind’s dawn, but how much of this is true and how much is fable I cannot say, any more than I know if the Rosicrucians really do trace their genesis to Amenhotep IV. But as Frater Miklos speaks I have visions of smoky caverns, flickering torches, half-naked artists clad in the skins of woolly mammoths and daubing bright pigments on walls, medicine men conducting the ritual slaughter of aurochs and rhinoceros. And the shamans whispering, huddling, whispering, saying to one another, We shall not die, brothers, we will live on, we will watch Egypt rise out of the swamps of the Nile, we will see Sumer born, we will live to behold Socrates and Caesar and Jesus and Constantine, and yes! we will still be here when the fiery mushroom flares sun-bright over Hiroshima and when the men from the metal ship descend the ladder to walk the face of the moon. But did Miklos tell me this, or did I dream it in the haze of noonday desert heat? Everything is obscure; everything shifts and melts and runs as his mazy words circle round themselves, circle round themselves, twist, dance, tangle. Also he tells us, in riddles and periphrasis, of a lost continent, of a vanished civilization, from which the wisdom of the Brotherhood is derived. And we stare, wide-eyed, exchanging little covert glances of astonishment, not knowing whether to snicker in skeptical scorn or gasp in awe.
