Robert Silverberg: The Book of Skulls

In the middle of the night I felt a certain pressure of the bladder and went searching for a john in that maze of hallways and doorways. I opened a few wrong doors. Heaps of humanity everywhere. Out of one room, sounds of passion, the regular, rhythmic bouncing of bedsprings. No need to peek: that had to be Oliver the Bull, giving his Judy her sixth or seventh ride of the night. She’d walk bowlegged for a week by the time he got through with her. Out of another room, snores and whistles: begorrah, kinky Ned’s sweet sow at her slumbers. Ned was sleeping in the hall. Enough was enough, I guess. At last I found a john, only it was occupied by Eli and Mickey, taking a shower together. I didn’t mean to intrude, but what the crap. Mickey struck a delicate Grecian pose, right hand over the black bush, left arm flung across the very minimal jugs. I would have believed she was fourteen or younger. “Excuse me,” I said, backing out. Eli, dripping, naked, came out after me. I said, “Don’t make a hassle, I didn’t intend to intrude on your privacy,” but that wasn’t what was on his mind at all. He asked me if we could swing a fifth passenger for the rest of the trip. “Her?” He nodded. Love at first sight; they had clicked, they had found real happiness in each other. Now he wanted to bring her along. “Christ,” I said, coming close to waking everybody up, “have you told her about—”

“No. Just that we’re going to Arizona.”

“And what happens when we get there? Do you bring her to the skullhouse with us?”

He hadn’t thought it through that far. Dazzled by her modest charms, he could see only as far as his next fuck, our brilliant Eli. Of course it was impossible. If this had been planned as an erotica trip, I’d have brought Margo and Oliver would have brought LuAnn. We were stagging it, though, excepting only such stuff as we foraged along the way, and Eli would have to abide by that. At his insistence we were a closed foursome, hermetically sealed. Now Eli wouldn’t abide. “I can drop her off in a Phoenix motel while we’re in the desert,” he argued. “She doesn’t have to know what we’re going there for.”

“No.”

“And anyway, does it have to be such a fucking secret, Timothy?”

“Are you out of your tree? Aren’t you the very one who practically made us take a blood oath never to reveal a single syllable of the Book of Skulls to—”

“You’re shouting. They’ll hear everything.”

“Right on. Let them hear. You don’t want that, do you? To have these chicks here find out about your Fu Manchu project. And yet you’re ready to let her in on the whole thing. You aren’t thinking, Eli.”

“Maybe I’ll forget about Arizona, then,” he said. I wanted to take him and shake him. Forget about Arizona? He organized it. He lured the necessary three other males into it. He went on for hours and hours to us about the importance of opening your soul to the inexplicable and implausible and the fantastic. He goaded us to set aside mere pragmaticism and empiricism and perform an act of faith, et cetera, et cetera. Now a winsome daughter of Israel spreads her legs for him and he’s willing in a flash to give the whole thing up, just to be able to spend Easter holding hands with her at the Cloisters and the Guggenheim and other metropolitan cultural shrines. Well, crap on that. He got us into this, and, entirely leaving out of the picture the question of how much faith we really had in his weirdo immortality cult, he wasn’t going to shuck us that simply. The Book of Skulls says that candidates have to present themselves in fours. I told him that we wouldn’t let him drop out. He was silent a long while. Much gulping of the Adam’s apple: sign of Great Internal Conflict. True love versus eternal life. “You can look her up when we come back east,” I reminded him. “Assuming that you’re one of those who comes back.” He was pronged on one of his own existential dilemmas. The bathroom door opened and Mickey peered chastely out, bath-toweled. “Go on,” I said. “Your lady’s waiting. I’ll see you in the morning.” Finding another john some where beyond the kitchen, I relieved myself and groped through the darkness back to Bess, who greeted me with little snorting sighs. Caught me by the ears, pulled me down between her bouncy, rubbery knockers. Large breasts, my father told me when I was fifteen, are rather vulgar; a gentleman chooses his women by other criteria. Yes, Dad, but they make groovy pillows. Bess and I celebrated the rites of spring one final time. I slept. At six in the morning Oliver, fully dressed, woke me. Ned and Eli were up and dressed already, too. All the girls were asleep. We breakfasted silently, rolls and coffee, and were on the road before seven, the four of us, up Riverside Drive to the George Washington Bridge, across into Jersey, westward on Interstate 80. Oliver did the driving. Old Iron Man.

Don’t go, LuAnn said, whatever it is, don’t go, dont get involved, I don’t like the sound of it. And I hadn’t told her much at all, really. Just the externals of it: a religious group in Arizona, see, a sort of monastery, in fact, and Eli thinks it could be of great spiritual value for the four of us to pay it a visit. We might gain a whole lot from going, I told LuAnn. And her immediate response was one of fear. The housewife syndrome: if you don’t know what it is, don’t go near it . Frightened, in-drawing. She’s a sweet kid but she’s too predictable. Perhaps if I told her about the never-dying aspect she might have reacted differently. But of course I’d sworn not to breathe a word. And in any case, even immortality would scare LuAnn. Don’t, she’d say, there’s a catch in it, something awful will come out of it, it’s strange and mysterious and frightening, it isn’t God’s will that such things should be. Each of us owes God a death. Beethoven died. Jesus died. President Eisenhower died. Do you think you should be excused from dying, Oliver, if they had to go? Please don’t get mixed up in this.

Death. What does poor simpleheaded LuAnn know about death? She even has her grandparents still alive. Death is an abstraction for her, something that happened to Beethoven and Jesus. I know death better, LuAnn. I see his grinning skullface every night. And I have to fight him. I have to spit at him. Eli comes to me, he says, I know where you can get excused from dying, Oliver, it’s just out yonder in Arizona. Visit the Brotherhood and play their little game, and they’ll release you from the wheel of fire, Do not pass Go, do not descend into the grave, do not put on corruption. They can pluck his sting. How can I pass up the chance?

Death, LuAnn. Think about the death of LuAnn Chambers, say, next Thursday morning. Not in 1997, but next Thursday morning. You’re walking down Elm Street on your way to visit your grandparents, and a car comes flying out of control at you the way the car of those poor Puerto Ricans went out of control last night, and — no, I take that back. I don’t think even the Brotherhood can protect you against accidental death, violent death; whatever process they have, it doesn’t work miracles, only retards physical decay. We start again, LuAnn. You’re walking down Elm Street on your way to visit your grandparents and a blood vessel treacherously bursts in your temple. Cerebral hemorrhage. Why not? It can happen to nineteen-year-olds once in a while, I suppose. The blood bubbles through your skull and your legs fold up and you hit the sidewalk, wriggling and kicking, and you know something bad is happening to you but you can’t even scream, and in ten seconds you’re dead. You have been subtracted from the universe, LuAnn. No, the universe has been subtracted from you . Forget what’s going to happen to your body now, the worms in your gut, the pretty blue eyes turning to muck, and just think about all you’ve lost. You’ve lost it all, sunrise and sunset, the smell of broiling steak, the feel of a cashmere sweater, the touch of my lips that you like so much against your little hard nipples. You’ve lost the Grand Canyon and Shakespeare and London and Paris and champagne and your big church wedding and Paul McCartney and Peter Fonda and the Mississippi River and the moon and the stars. You’ll never have babies and you’ll never taste real caviar, because you’re dead on the sidewalk and the juices are already going sour in you. Why should that be, LuAnn? Why should we be put into such a wonderful world and then have everything taken away from us? God’s will? No, LuAnn, God is love, and God wouldn’t have done such a cruel thing to us, so therefore there is no God, there’s only death, Death, whom we must reject. Not everyone dies at nineteen? That’s true, LuAnn. I loaded the dice a little there. What if you hung on until 1997, yes, you had your church wedding and your babies, you saw Paris and Tokyo, too, you tasted champagne and caviar, and you went to the moon for a Christmas trip with your husband the rich doctor? And then Death came to you and said, Okay, LuAnn, it was a good trip, wasn’t it, baby, only it’s over now. Zap and you have cancer of the cervix, rotting ovaries, one of those female things, and it metastasizes overnight and you come apart, turning into a puddle of stinking fluids in the county hospital. Does the fact that you lived a full life for forty or fifty years make you any more willing to check out? Doesn’t that just make the joke sicker, to find out how groovy life can be and then to be cut off? You’ve never thought about these things, LuAnn, but I have. And I tell you: the longer you live, the longer you want to live. Unless, of course, you’re in pain or deformed or alone in the world and it’s all become a terrible burden. But if you love life, you’ll never have enough of it. Even you, you swest placid nothinghead, you won’t want to go. And I don’t want to go. I’ve thought about the death of Oliver Marshall, believe you me, and I reject the concept entirely. Why did I go into pre-med program? Not so I could make a fortune prescribing pills for suburban ladies, but so I could do research in geriatrics, in senility phenomena, in life extension. So I could stick my finger in Death’s eye. That was my big dream, still is; but Eli tells me of the Keepers of the Skulls, and I listen to him. I listen. At sixty miles an hour we roll westward. The death of Oliver Marshall could happen eight seconds from now — whiz, crash, smash! — and it could happen ninety years from now and perhaps it will never happen. Perhaps it will never happen .