Robert Silverberg: The Book of Skulls

“Can you be the judge of that?”

“Who else?” He was fidgeting now. “Look, I would have told you something else if I had anything to tell. But I don’t. What’s the use of making a big scene out of pulling the wings off flies? I’ve led a piddling little life full of piddling little sins that I wouldn’t dream of boring you with. I didn’t see any way I could possibly fulfill Frater Javier’s instructions. Then at the last moment I thought of this business of violating Oliver’s confidence, which I’ve now done. I think that’s sufficient. If you don’t mind I’d like to leave now.”

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.