Robert Silverberg: The Book of Skulls

“Then why — I mean, I never heard of going to Arizona for Easter. Is it something new?” A sheepish flicker of a smile. “I’m sorry. You have a girl out there?”

“Nothing like that.”

She wriggled, not wanting to pry but not knowing how to halt the inquisition. The inevitable sentence tumbled out: “Why are you going, then?” And I was stopped. What could I say? For fifteen minutes I had been playing a conventional role, horny college senior on the prowl, East Side singles bar, timid but available girl, hype her with a little esoteric poetry, the eyes meeting across the table, when can I see you again, a quick Easter romance, thank you for everything, good-bye. The familiar collegiate waltz. But her question opened a trapdoor beneath me and dropped me into that other, darker world, the fantasy world, the dreamworld, where solemn young men speculated on the possibility of being reprieved forever from death, where fledgling scholars noodled themselves into believing that they had come upon arcane manuscripts revealing the secrets of ancient mystic cults. Yes, I could say, we’re going on a quest for the secret headquarters of the Brotherhood of the Skulls, do you see, we hope to persuade the Keepers that we are worthy candidates for the Trial, and of course if we are accepted, one of us must give his life gladly for the others and one is going to have to be murdered, but we’re prepared to face those eventualities because the two lucky ones will never die. Thank you, H. Rider Haggard: exactly. Again I felt the sense of harsh incongruity, of dislocation, as I contemplated the juxtaposition of our up-to-the-minute Manhattan surroundings and my implausible Arizona dream. Look, I could say, it’s necessary to make an act of faith, of mystic acceptance, to tell yourself that life isn’t entirely made up of discotheques and subways and boutiques and classrooms. You must believe that inexplicable forces exist. Are you into astrology? Of course you are; and you know what The New York Times thinks of that . So carry your acceptance a little further, as we have done. Put aside your self-conscious oh-so-very-modern rejection of the improbable and allow the possibility that there could be a Brotherhood, there could be a Trial, there could be life everlasting. How can you deny without first investigating? Can you afford to take the risk of being wrong? And so we’re going to Arizona, the four of us, the big beefy one with the crew cut and the Greek god over there and the intense-looking fellow talking to the fat girl and me, and although some of us have more faith than others there isn’t one of us who doesn’t believe at least fractionally in the Book of Skulls. Pascal chose to have faith because the odds were stacked against the unbeliever, who might be tossin? away Paradise through his refusal to submit to the Church; so too with us, who are willing to look foolish for a week because we have at least the hope of gaining something beyond all price and can at worst lose nothing more than the cost of gasoline. But I said none of this to Mickey Bernstein. The music was too loud, and, anyway, the four of us had sworn a terrible sophomoric oath to reveal nothing to nobody. Instead I said, “Why Arizona? I guess because we’re cactus freaks. And it’s warm there in March.”

“It’s warm in Florida, too.”

“No cactus,” I said.

It took me an hour to find the right girl and arrange things. Her name was Bess; she was a busty kid from Oregon; she and four other Barnard juniors shared an immense apartment on Riverside Drive. Three of the four girls had gone home for the holiday; the fourth was sitting in the corner, letting a sideburned twenty-fivish advertising-man type make his pitch. Perfect. I explained that I and my three roommates were passing through the city tonight en route to Arizona and hoped to crash someplace groovy. “We should be able to manage it,” she said. Perfect. Now I just had to get it together. Oliver was talking in a bored way with a skinny, too-bright-eyed chick in a black jumpsuit, maybe a speedhead; I pried him loose, spelled out the scene, and turned him on to Bess’s roommate Judy. A Nebraska lass, no less; quickly the Mad Ave delegate was in the can and Judy and Oliver were discussing the price of hogfeed, or whatever. Next I rounded up Ned. The freaky little fucker had picked up a girl , of all strange objects; he does shticks like that occasionally, I suppose for the sake of thumbing his nose at the straights. This one was a downer — giant nostrils, giant tits, a mound of meat “We’re splitting,” I told him. “Bring her along, if you like.” Then I found Eli. This must have been National Heterosexuality Week; even Eli was scoring. Thin, dark sort, no flesh on her, a quick nervous smile. She was flabbergasted to discover that her Eli was rooming with a galumphing shegitz like me. “There’s room at the inn,” I said to him. “Come on.” He almost kissed my boots.

The eight of us piled into my car — nine, counting Ned’s catch as the double she was. I drove. Introductions went on forever. Judy, Mickey, Mary, Bess; Eli, Timothy, Oliver, Ned; Judy, Timothy; Mickey, Ned; Mary, Oliver; Bess,

Hi; Mickey, Judy; Mary, Bess; Oliver, Judy; Eli, Mary — oh, Jesus. It began to rain, a cold drizzle just above the freezing point As we entered Central Park, a decrepit car about a hundred yards ahead of us went into a skid, did a wild sideways slalom off the road, and smashed into a colossal tree; the car split open and at least a dozen people flew out, rocketing off in all directions. I braked in a hurry, for some of the victims were practically in my path. Heads were cracked, necks were broken, people were moaning in Spanish. I stopped the car and said to Oliver, “We better get out and see if there’s anything we can do.” Oliver looked stunned. He has this thing about death: it guts him just to run over a squirrel. Coping with a carload of damaged Puerto Ricans was enough to send our sterling pre-med into a state of shock. As he began to mumble something, Judy From Nebraska peered around his shoulder and said with real frenzy, “No! Keep going, Tim!”

“People are hurt,” I said.

“There’ll be cops here any minute. They see eight kids in a car, they’ll search us before they bother with them . And I’m holding , Tim, I’m holding ! We’ll all get busted!”

She was on the edge of panic. What the crap, we couldn’t afford to waste half our vacation being arraigned because one dumb cunt felt she had to carry her stash around with her, so I nudged the pedal and steered my way carefully through the dead and dying. Would the fuzzies really have paused to hunt for dope while the ground was strewn with bodies? I couldn’t believe that, but maybe it’s because I’m conditioned to think that the police are on my side; Judy might just have been right. Paranoia is contagious these days. Anyway, I drove on, and it wasn’t until we emerged onto Central Park West that Oliver opined it had been wrong to leave the scene of the accident. Morality after the fact, said Eli from the rear, is worse than no morality at all. And Ned cried bravo. What a routine, those two.

Bess and Judy lived up around 100th Street, in a huge, decaying apartment house that must have been a palace in 1920. Their apartment was an endless flat, room after room after room, high ceilings, gingerbread moldings, cracked lumpy plaster that had been patched and patched down through the centuries. Fifteenth floor or so: a magnificent view of New Jersey’s squalor. Bess put on a stack of records — Segovia, Stones, Sergeant Pepper, Beethoven, you name it — and fetched a jug of Ripple. Judy produced the dope that had panicked her in the park: a lump of hash as big as my nose. “You keep it on you for a good luck charm?” I asked, but it turned out she’d had it laid on her at The Plastic Cave. The pipe passed. Oliver, as usual, let it go by; I think he thinks drugs of any sort will pollute his precious bodily fluids. Ned’s Irish washerwoman also abstained — that much with-it she wasn’t prepared to be. “Come on,” I heard Ned telling her, “it’ll help you lose weight.” She looked terrified. Expecting Jesus to stride through the window any moment and rip the immortal soul out of her throbbing sinful body. The rest of us got pleasantly stoned and drifted off to various bedrooms.