The Book of Skulls

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.

“I think so, too,” I said.

“What can we do about it?”

“Not much. We can’t force him to stay.”

“If he goes, what happens to us?”

“How do I know, Eli? I guess we’ll be in trouble with the fraters.”

“I won’t let him leave,” Eli said with sudden vehemence.

“You won’t? How do you propose to stop him?”

“I haven’t worked it out yet. But I won’t let him leave.” His face contorted into a tragic mask. “Oh, Jesus, Ned, don’t you see, it’s all coming apart?”

“I actually thought we were getting it together,” I said.

“For a while. For a while. Not any longer. We never had any real hold on Timothy, and now he doesn’t even bother to hide his impatience, his contempt—” Eli pulled his head into his shoulders, turtlewise. “And this priestess thing. The afternoon orgies. I’m bungling them, Ned. I’m not gaining control over myself. It’s great to have all that easy tail, sure, but I’m not learning the erotic disciplines I’m supposed to be mastering.”

“You’re giving up on yourself too early.”

“I don’t see any progress. I haven’t been able to last for all three women yet. Two of them, a couple of times. Three, no.”

“It’s a matter of practice,” I said.

“Are you managing?”

“Pretty well.”

“Of course,” he said. “That’s because you don’t give a damn for women in the first place. It’s just a physical exercise for you, like swinging on a trapeze. But I relate to those girls, Ned, I see them as sexual objects, what I do with them has enormous significance for me, and so — and so — oh, Christ, Ned, if I don’t master this part of it, what’s the good of working so hard on all the rest of it?”

He disappeared into a chasm of self-pity. I made properly encouraging noises: don’t give up, lad, don’t sell yourself short. Then I reminded him that he was supposed to be making confession to me. He nodded. For a minute or more he sat in silence, distant, rocking back and forth. At last he said, suddenly, with startling irrelevance, “Ned, are you aware that Oliver is gay?”

“It must have taken me all of five minutes to discover it.”

“You knew?‘

“It takes one to tell one, haven’t you ever heard that line? I saw it in his face the first time I met him. I said, this man is gay whether he knows it or not, he’s one of us, it’s obvious. The glassy eyes, the tight jaw, the look of repressed longing, that barely concealed ferocity of a soul that’s trussed up tight, that’s in pain because it’s not allowed to do what it desperately wants to do. Everything about Oliver advertises it — the self-punishing academic load, the way he goes about his athletic commitments, even his compulsive studding. He’s a classic case of latent homosexuality, all right.”

“Not latent,” Eli said.

“What?”

“He’s not just potentially gay. He’s had a homosexual experience. Only one, true, but it made a profound impression on him, and it’s colored all of his attitudes since he was fourteen years old. Why do you think he asked you to room with him? It was to test his self-control — it’s been an exercise in stoicism for him, all these years when he hasn’t let himself touch you — but you’re what he wants, Ned, did you realize that? It’s not just latent. It’s conscious, it’s just below the surface.”

I looked strangely at Eli. What he was saying was something I might perhaps turn to my own great advantage; and aside from the hope of personal gain from Eli’s revelation, I was fascinated and astonished by it, as