The Book of Skulls

the Belgian Congo. Didn’t find them, but he had a ball. I’m entitled to some wild geese too. I’ll go, I said. And put the whole matter out of my mind until after exams. It wasn’t until later on that Eli filled me in on some of the rules of the game. Out of every four candidates, two at best get to live forever, and two have to die. A neat little touch of melodrama. He looked me straight in the eyes. “Now that you know the risks,” he said, “you can back out if you like.” Putting me on the spot, searching for the yellow streaks in the blue blood. I laughed at him. “Those aren’t bad odds,” I said.

chapter four Ned

Quick impressions, before this trip changes us forever, for it will change us. Wednesday night the 7 of March, approaching New York City.

TIMOTHY. Pink and gold. A two-inch layer of firm fat coating thick slabs of muscle. Big, massive, a fullback if he’d bothered to try. Blue Episcopalian eyes, always laughing at you. He puts you down with a friendly smile. The mannerisms of the American aristocracy. He wears a crew cut in this era: by way of telling the world that he’s his own man. Goes out of his way to seem lazy and coarse. A big cat, a sleepy lion. Watch out. Lions are smarter than they look, and faster on their feet than their Victims tend to think.

ELI. Black and white. Slender, fragile. Beady eyes. An inch taller than I am, but still short. Thin sensual lips, strong chin, curling mop of Assyrian ringlets. The skin so white, so white: he’s never’been in the sun. An hour after he’s shaved he needs a shave. Dense mat of hair on chest and thighs; he’d look virile if he weren’t so flimsy. He has bad luck with girls. I could get somewhere with him but he’s not my type — too much like me. A general impression of vulnerability. Quick, clever mind, not as deep as he thinks it is, but no fool. Basically a medieval scholastic.

ME. Yellow and green. Agile little fairy with a core of clumsiness within his agility. Soft tangled golden brown hair standing up like a halo. Forehead high and getting higher all the time, damn it. You look like a figure out of Fra Angelico, two different girls said to me in a single week; I guess they’re in the same art appreciation class. I have a definitely priestly look. So my mother always said; she envisaged me as a gentle monsignor comforting the heartsore. Sorry, Ma. The pope won’t want my sort. Girls do; they know intuitively I’m gay and offer themselves anyway, I suppose for the challenge of it. A pity, a waste. I am a fair poet and a feeble short-story writer. If I had the balls for it I’d try a novel. I expect to die young. I feel that romanticism demands it of me. For consistency of pose I must constantly contemplate suicide.

OLIVER. Pink and gold, like Timothy, but otherwise how different! Timothy is a solid, brutal pillar; Oliver tapers. Improbable movie-star body and face: six foot three, wide shoulders, slim hips. Perfect proportions. Strong, silent type. Beautiful and knows it and doesn’t give a damn. Kansas farm boy, features open and guileless. Long hair so blond it’s almost white. From the back he looks like a huge girl, except that the waist is wrong. His muscles don’t bulge like Timothy’s, they’re flat and long. Oliver deceives no one with his hayseed stolidity. Behind the bland, cool blue eyes a hungry spirit. He lives in a seething New York City of the mind, hatching ambitious plans. Yet a kind of noble radiance comes from him. If I could only cleanse myself in that brilliant glow. If I could only.

OUR AGES. Timothy, 22 last month. Me, 21?. Oliver, 21 in January. Eli, 20?.

Timothy: Aquarius. Me: Scorpio. Oliver: Capricorn. Eli: Virgo.

chapter five Oliver

I’d rather drive than be driven. I’ve held the wheel ten and twelve hours at a stretch. The way I see it, I’m safer when I’m driving than when somebody else is, because nobody else is quite as interested in preserving my life as I am. Some drivers, I think, actually court death — for the thrill of it, or, as Ned might say, for the esthetics of it. To hell with that. There’s nothing more sacred to me in all the universe than the life of Oliver Marshall, and I want as much control over life-or-death situations as I can get. So I intend to do most of the driving. Thus far this trip I’ve done all of it, though it’s Timothy’s car. Timothy’s the opposite; he’d rather be driven than drive. I suppose it’s a manifestation of class consciousness. Eli doesn’t know how to drive. So it comes down to me and Ned. Ned and me, all the way to Arizona, with Timothy taking a turn once in a while. Frankly, the thought of entrusting my neck to Ned terrifies me. Suppose I just stay where I am, foot on the gas, driving on and on through the night? We could be in Chicago by tomorrow afternoon. St. Louis late tomorrow night. Arizona the day after next. And start hunting for Eli’s skull house. I want to volunteer for immortality. I’m ready; I’m fully psyched up; I believe Eli implicitly. God, I believe! I want to believe. The whole future opens before me. I’ll see the stars. I’ll zoom from world to world. Captain Future from Kansas. And these bonzos want to stop in New York first for a night on the town, a night in the singles bars! Eternity is waiting, and they can’t pass up Maxwell’s Plum. I’d like to tell them what hicks I think they are. But I have to be patient. I don’t want them to laugh at me. I don’t want them to think I’m losing my cool over Arizona and the skulls. First Avenue, here we come.

chapter six Eli

We went to a place on Sixty-seventh that had opened last Christmas; one of Timothy’s fraternity brothers had been there and had reported the action was groovy, so Timothy insisted on going. We humored him. The name of the place was The Raunch House, which tells you the whole dull story in three syllables. The decor was Early Jockstrap and the clientele ran heavily toward suburban high school football players, with girls outnumbered approximately three to one. High noise level, much moronic laughter. The four of us entered as a phalanx, but our formation shattered the moment we were past the entrance. Timothy, all eager, went plunging toward the bar like a musk-ox in rut, his burly body slowing as he realized by his fifth step that the ambiance wasn’t what he was looking for. Oliver, who in some ways is the most fastidious of us all, never went in; he sensed at once that the place was inadequate and planted himself just inside the doorway to wait for us to leave. I ventured halfway into the room, was hit by a blast of raucousness that jangled every nerve, and, totally turned off, retreated to the relative tranquility of the checkroom alcove. Ned made straight for the washroom. I was naive enough to think he was simply in a hurry to take a piss. A moment later Timothy came up to me, a bumper of beer in his hand, and said, “Let’s get the crap out of here. Where’s Ned?”

“In the John,” I told him.

“For crap’s sake.” Timothy went off to fetch him. Emerging a moment later with a sulky Ned, Ned accompanied by a six-foot-six version of Oliver, maybe sixteen years old, a young Apollo with shoulder-length tresses and a lavender headband. A quick worker, Ned. Five seconds to size things up, thirty seconds more to locate the head and scout up a little rough trade. Timothy now cramping his style, ruining dreams of an exquisite beating in some East Village pad. Of course we had no time now to let Ned indulge his whims. Timothy said something curt to Ned’s find and Ned said something sourly to Timothy; the Apollo went hulking off and we four cleared out. Up the block to supposedly more reliable haunts, The Plastic Cave, where Timothy had gone with Oliver several times last year. Futuristic decor, undulating sheets of thick, shimmering gray plastic all over, waiters togged out in garish science-fiction costumes, periodic outbursts of strobe lights, every ten minutes or so a numbing hammering blare of hard rock smashing out of fifty speakers. More of a discotheque than a singles bar, really, but functioning as both. Much favored by Columbia and Barnard swingers, also utilized by girls from Hunter; high- schoolies are made to feel unwanted. To me it was an alien environment. I have no sense of contemporary chic; I’d rather sit around coffeehouses, swill cappuccino, and talk Big Thinks than do the singles/discotheque number. Rilke instead of rock, Plotinus instead of plastic. “Man, you’re straight out of 1957!” Timothy once told me. Timothy with the Republican brush-fuzz haircut.

The main project for tonight was to find a place to sleep, that is, to acquire girls with a flat capable of