The Book of Skulls

  It was only about twenty minutes since daybreak but the sun was already climbing fast and getting hot, and the temperature, which must have dipped into the forties or fifties during the night, was rapidly heading through the seventies toward the higher regions of the thermometer. I felt the warmth on my bare skin, the sweat beginning to burst from me in rivers, running down my back, my buttocks, my legs, and I told myself that this was the way it always ought to be when men went out to work in the fields on a hot day, that it was clean and good to be naked under the bright sun, that it made no sense at all to have to wrap a strip of rough dirty cloth around your middle when you could strip down all the way like this. The more I thought about it, the less sense it made to me to wear clothes at all: so long as the weather is warm and your body doesn’t offend the eye, why must you cover yourself? Of course a lot of people aren’t so pretty to look at; they’re better off clothed, I guess, or at least we are if they are. But I was glad to be out of my muddy shorts. Out here among other men, what the hell.

  And as I worked my way down the row of chili, sweating the good sweat, my nakedness put me in mind of other times, years ago, when I was first discovering my body and the bodies of others. I suppose it was the heat that stirred a ferment of memory in me, images drifting freely in my head, a hazy easy formless cloud of recollection. Down by the creek, a scorching July afternoon, when I was—how old?—eleven, yes, eleven, it was the year my father died. I was with Jim and Karl, my friends, my only really close friends, Karl twelve, Jim my age, and we were looking for Karl’s dog, the mutt, who ran away that morning. Following his spoor, we were, like Tarzan, trailing the dog upstream, finding a couple of turds here and a puddle of wet at the base of a treetrunk there, until we had gone a mile, two miles, out into nowhere, and the heat was on us and the sweat was drenching our clothes, and we hadn’t found the dog at all, and we came to the deep part of the creek, beyond the Madden farm, where it’s deep enough for swimming. Karl said, “Let’s go swimming,” and I said, “But we didn’t bring our trunks,” and they both laughed at me and started to take their clothes off. Well, of course, I had been naked in front of my father and my brothers, and I had even gone swimming naked now and then, but still I was so conventional, so tied to the right way of doing things, that the line about not having brought our trunks came out of me without thinking. But I stripped. We left our clothes on the bank and walked out on the wobbly flat rocks to the deep part of the stream, Karl first, then Jim, then me, and jumped in and splashed around for twenty minutes or so, and then when we came out we were wet, naturally, so we sat down on the bank to dry in the sun since we didn’t have any towels. That part of it was new to me, just sitting around naked with naked people in the open, the water not hiding our bodies. And we looked at each other. Karl, a year older than Jim or me, had begun to develop already, his balls were bigger, he had a dark patch of hair down there—I had a little hair, too, but because I was blond, it didn’t show—and he was proud of what he had, he lay belly up showing it off. I saw him looking at me, too, and I wondered what he was thinking. Criticizing my cock, maybe, because it was too small, it was a little boy’s cock and his was a man’s? But it was good to be in the sun, anyway, the heat on my skin, drying me, tanning me around the middle where I was fishbelly white. And then suddenly Jim gave a sort of shriek and clapped his knees together with his hands over his groin, and I looked around and there was Sissy Madden, who I suppose must have been sixteen or seventeen years old. She was out giving her horse some exercise. The sight of her is printed on my mind: a plump teenage girl with long red hair, big freckles, tight brown shorts, a white polo shirt out of which her fat breasts were practically exploding, and she sat atop her swaybacked roan mare looking down at the three of us and laughing. We scrambled to our feet, Karl, me, Jim, one, two, three, and we started to run like wild men, zigzag, every which way, desperately trying to get someplace where Sissy Madden couldn’t see our nakedness. I remember the urgency of it, the necessity of escaping that girl’s gaze. There weren’t any good places to hide, though. The only trees were behind us, down by the deep part of the creek where we had been swimming, but Sissy was there. Ahead lay only low shrubbery and tall grass, not tall enough. We couldn’t think straight. I ran one, two hundred yards, getting my feet all cut up, running as hard as I could, my little cock flapping against my body—I hadn’t ever run naked before, and I was discovering the inconveniences of it—and finally I just threw myself face down in the grass, huddling into myself, hiding like an ostrich. The shame was that intense. I must have stayed crouched there for fifteen minutes, and finally I heard voices and realized Karl and Jim were looking for me. Cautiously I stood up. They had their clothes on and Sissy was nowhere in sight. I had to walk all the way back to the creek naked for my clothes—it seemed I was walking miles, and I even felt ashamed being with them, the two of them with clothes and me stripped bare—and I turned my back on them to get dressed. Four days later at the movie house I saw Sissy Madden standing in the lobby talking to Joe Falkner, and she grinned at me and winked and I wanted to crawl into the guts of the earth. Sissy Madden saw my thing, I told myself, and those five words must have gone through my head a million times during the movie, so that I couldn’t pay attention to the story.

  But the shame I felt when I was eleven, that embarrassment over my half-formed manhood, soon disappeared. I filled out, I developed physically, I grew tall, and there was no reason after that for me to feel ashamed of my body. And so I remember a lot of swimming expeditions, and I never once came out with that line about bringing bathing suits. Sometimes there even were girls with us, a bunch of us skinny-dipping, four girls and five fellows, maybe, politely getting out of our clothes behind different trees, girls here, guys there, but then everybody running down to the creek together in one mad rush, cocks and tits bouncing and jiggling. And in the water you could see everything pretty well, when they jumped around. And afterward sometimes we coupled off, when we got to be thirteen, fourteen years old, for our first fumbling experiments in screwing. I recall never quite getting over my amazement that the bodies of the girls looked the way they did, so blank at the crotch, so empty there. And their hips wider than ours, and their buttocks bigger and softer, like round pink cushions. All the skinny-dipping I did in my middle teens made me look back on that time with Karl and Jim and Sissy Madden and laugh at my own stupid shyness. Especially the time once when Billie Madden came swimming with us; she was our age, but she looked just like her older sister, and somehow, standing there naked at the edge of the creek next to Billie, looking at the freckles running down into the valley between her fat breasts and the deep dimples puckering her big behind, I felt as if all the shame of that time with Sissy had now been canceled out, that the fact of Billie’s nakedness evened the score between me and the Madden girls, that none of it mattered any longer in any important way.

  Thinking of these things as I plucked weeds in the fraters’ chili patch, my bare ass warmed by the climbing sun, I was aware also of other things floating in the deep places of my memory, old events, dark and unpleasant and half-forgotten, that I had no wish to remember. A whole curdled mass of memories. Myself naked on other days, with other people. Boyhood games, some of them not so innocent. Unwanted images came roaring like a spring flood out of my past. I stood still, swept by waves of fear. Muscle tensing against muscle, body gleaming with sweat. And something shameful happened to me. I felt a familiar throbbing down below, felt it starting to stiffen and rise, and I looked, and yes, yes, there it was, coming up hard. I could have died. I wanted to fling myself face down to the ground. It was like that time after Sissy Madden had seen us swimming, when I had had to walk naked back to the creek when Karl and Jim already had their clothes on, and I had experienced a real sense of what it is to be naked and ashamed among those who are clothed. Again, now: Ned and Eli and Timothy and the fraters all had their shorts on, and I was bare, and I hadn’t cared a damn about it, until suddenly this had started to happen
and now I felt as exposed as though I was on network television. They would all be staring at me, seeing me aroused, wondering what had turned me on, what nasty thoughts had passed through my mind.

  Where could I hide? How could I cover myself? Were any of them watching me?

  Actually no one seemed to be. Eli and the fraters were far up the row. Timothy, ambling lazily along, was almost out of sight behind me. The only one close to me was Ned, perhaps fifteen feet to my rear. Standing as I was with my back to him, my shame was screened. Already I could feel myself beginning to sag; in another moment I’d be back to normal and I could saunter down the row to the tree where my shorts were hanging. Yes. It was down, now. All clear. I turned.

  Ned gave a guilty start, practically jumped as my eyes met his. His face went crimson. He looked away. And I understood. I didn’t need to inspect the front of his shorts for bulges to know what was going on in his head. For fifteen or twenty minutes now he’d been treating himself to a little fantasy trip, studying my body, contemplating my buttocks, snatching little glimpses of other goodies now and then. Dreaming his tricksy homo dreams about me. Well, there’s nothing surprising in that. Ned is a fag. Ned has always wanted me, even if he’s never dared to make a pass. And I was on display right in front of him, all of me, a temptation, a provocation. Still, I was taken aback by that look of desire, so obvious on his face, so raw; that shook me. To be wanted like that by another man. To be the object of his yearnings. And he seemed so stunned and abashed as I walked past him to get my shorts. As if he’d been caught off guard, with his real intentions showing. And what, pray tell, what sort of intentions had I been showing? My intentions had been sticking out six inches in front of me. We’re into something very deep here, deep and nasty and complicated. It frightens me. Were Ned’s gay vibes getting into my head by some sort of telepathy and stirring old shames? It’s strange, isn’t it, that I would get hard just then. Christ. I thought I understood myself. But I keep finding out that I don’t know a damned thing for certain. Not even who I am. What kind of person I want to be. An existential dilemma, right, Eli, right, right? To choose one’s own destiny. We express our identities through our sexual selves, is that right? I don’t think so. I don’t want to think so. And yet I’m not sure. The sun was hot on my back. I was so stiff down there for a couple of minutes that it hurt. And Ned breathing hard behind me. And the past churning in me. Where’s Sissy Madden now? Where’s Jim? And Karl? Where’s Oliver? Where’s Oliver? Oh, Christ, I think Oliver’s a very very sick boy.

  thirty-one

  eli

  The meditation, I’m convinced, is the core of the process. Being able to turn inward. You absolutely have to do that if you hope to accomplish anything here. The rest—the gymnastics, the diet, the baths, the field-labor—all that is just a series of techniques for achieving self-discipline, for lifting the balky ego toward the degree of control on which real longevity depends. Of course, if you want to live a long time it helps to get plenty of exercise, keep your body in trim, avoid unhealthy foods, etc., etc. But I think it’s a mistake to place much emphasis on those aspects of the Brotherhood’s routine. Hygiene and gymnastics may be useful in extending the average life-span to eighty or eighty-five, but something more transcendental is required if you want to live to eight hundred or eight hundred and fifty. (Or eighty-five hundred? Eighty-five thousand?) Complete control of bodily function is needed. And meditation’s the key.

  At this stage they’re stressing the development of inner awareness. We’re supposed to stare at the setting sun, say, and convey its heat and power to different parts of our bodies—the heart, first, then the testicles, the lungs, the spleen, and so forth. I maintain that it isn’t the solar radiance they’re interested in—that part is just metaphor, just symbol—but rather the idea of putting us in contact with heart, testicles, lungs, spleen, etc., so that in case of problems in those organs we can go to them with our minds and fix whatever has to be fixed. This whole business of skulls, around which so much of the meditation revolves: more metaphor, which I’m sure is intended solely to give us a convenient focus of attention. So that we can pick up off the image of the skull and use it as a springboard for the inward leap. Any other symbol would have worked just as well, probably—a sunflower, a cluster of acorns, a four-leaf clover. Once invested with the proper psychic clout, the mana, anything could serve. The Brotherhood just happened to fasten on the symbology of skulls. Which was quite good enough, really; there’s mystery in a skull, there’s romance, there’s wonder. So we sit and stare at Frater Antony’s little jade skull-pendant, and we’re told to perform various metaphorical absorptions and engulfments having to do with the relation of death to life, but what they really want us to do is learn how to focus all our mental energy on a single object. Having mastered concentration, we can apply our new skill to the tasks of perpetual self-repair. That’s the whole secret. Longevity drugs, health foods, sunshine cults, prayer, and such things are peripheral; meditation is all. It’s a kind of yoga, I guess—mind over matter—although, if the Brotherhood is as ancient as Frater Miklos implies, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that yoga is an offshoot of the skullhouse.

  We have a long way to go. These are still the preliminary stages of the series of training routines that the Brothers term the Trial. What lies ahead, I suspect, is largely psychological or even psychoanalytic: a purging of excess baggage from the soul. The ugly business of the Ninth Mystery is part of that. I still don’t know whether to interpret that passage of the Book of Skulls literally or metaphorically, but in either event I’m sure it deals with the banishing of bad vibes from the Receptacle; we kill one scapegoat, actually or otherwise, and the other scapegoat removes himself, actually or otherwise, and the net effect of this is to leave two fledgling fraters who are without the jangling death-jitters borne by the defective duo. Besides purging the group as a whole, we must purge our individual inner selves. Last night after dinner Frater Javier visited me in my room, and I assume visited each of the others; he told me that I must prepare myself for the confessional rites. I was asked to review my entire life, giving special attention to episodes of guilt and shame, and to be ready to discuss those episodes in depth when asked to do so. I suppose some kind of primordial encounter group will be organized shortly, with Frater Javier in charge. A formidable man, that one. Gray eyes, thin lips, chiseled face. As accessible as a slab of granite. When he moves through the halls I imagine that I hear an accompaniment of dark groaning music. Enter the Grand Inquisitor! Yes. Frater Javier: the Grand Inquisitor. Night and chill; fog and pain. When begins the Inquisition? What shall I say? Which of my guilts shall I place on the altar, which of my shames?

  I gather that the purpose of this unburdening will be to simplify our souls through a yielding up of—what term shall I use?—neuroses, sins, mental blocks, hangups, engrams, deposits of bad karma? We must pare ourselves down, pare ourselves down. Bone and flesh, these we retain, but the spirit must be whittled. We must strive toward a kind of quietism, in which there are no conflicts, in which there is no stress. Avoid everything that goes against the grain, and, if necessary, redirect the grain. Effortless action, that’s the key. No energy rip-offs allowed; struggles shorten lives. Well, we’ll see. I’m carrying plenty of inner dross, and so are we all. A psychic enema might not be such a bad thing.

  What shall I tell you, Frater Javier?

  thirty-two

  ned

  Review your life, declares the mysterious and vaguely reptilian Frater Javier, entering my monastic cell unannounced, bringing with him the faint hissing rustle of scales against stone. Review your life, rehearse the sins of your past, make yourself ready for confession. Right on, cries Ned the depraved choirboy! Right on, Frater Javier, chortles the fallen Papist! This is up his well-greased alley. The ritual of the confessional is certainly something he comprehends: it is encoded in his very genes, it is imprinted in his bones and balls, it is utterly natural to him. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima
culpa. Whereas those other three are strangers to the closet of truth, the uptight Israelite and the two Protestant bullocks. Oh, oh, I suppose the Episcopalians have the custom of the confessional too, crypto-Romans that they are, but they always tell lies to their priests. I have that on the authority of my mother, who feels that the flesh of Anglicans isn’t fit to feed to pigs. But mother, I say, pigs don’t eat meat. If they did, she says, they wouldn’t touch the tripes of an Anglican! They break every commandment and lie to their priests, she says, and crosses herself, four vigorous thumps, om mani padme hum!

  Ned is obedient. Ned is a good little fairy. Frater Javier gives him The Word, and Ned instantly commences reviewing his misspent past, so that he can gush it all forth at the appropriate occasion. What have been my sins? Where have I transgressed? Tell me, Neddy-boy, have you had any other gods before Him? No, sir, in truth I can’t say that I have. Have you made unto yourself any graven images? Well, I’ve doodled a bit, I admit, but we don’t apply that commandment so rigorously, do we, sir? We’re not bloody Moslems, eh, sir? Thank you, sir. Next: have you taken the name of the Lord in vain? God help me, Father, would I do a thing like that? Very well, Ned, and have you remembered the Sabbath Day and kept it holy? Abashed, the honest boy replies that he has occasionally been guilty of dishonoring the Sabbath. Occasionally? Shit, he’s polluted more Sundays than a Turk! A venial sin, though, a venial sin. Ego absolvo te, my child. And have you honored thy father and thy mother? I have indeed, sir, honored them in my way. Hast thou killed? I have not killed. Hast thou committed adultery? To the best of my knowledge, Father, I have not. Hast thou stolen? I have not stolen, at least, nothing important, sir. Nor have I borne false witness against my neighbor. And hast thou coveted thy neighbor’s house, or thy neighbor’s wife, or thy neighbor’s manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass, or anything that is thy neighbor’s? Well, sir, there’s that part about my neighbor’s ass; I admit I’m on shaky grounds there, but otherwise—but otherwise—I do my best, sir, considering that I came into this world tainted, considering the odds against us all from the start, bearing in mind that in Adam’s fall we sinned all, nevertheless I regard myself as relatively pure and good. Not perfect, of course. Tut, my child, what would you confess? Well, Father—confiteor, confiteor, the fist striking the boy’s chest with admirable zeal, thump, thump, thump, thump, Om! Mani! Padme! Hum!—my fault, my most grievous fault—well, I did go one Sunday after mass with Sandy Dolan to spy on his sister changing her clothes, and I saw her bare breasts, Father, they were small and round with little pink tips, and at the base of her belly, Father, she had this hairy black mound, something I had never seen before, and then she turned her back to the window and I saw her ass, Father, the two most beautiful sweet plump white cheeks that I had ever seen, with these lovely deep dimples just at the top of them, and down the center this delicious shadowy cleft that—what’s that, Father? I can go on to something else? All right, then, I confess that I did lead Sandy astray in other ways, that I engaged in sins of the body with him, sins against God and Nature, that when we were eleven years old and spending the night together in the same bed, his mother being occupied in childbirth and there being no one at his house to look after him, I did fetch from under my bed a bottle of Vaseline and did scoop from it a good-sized glob and wantonly apply it to his sexual organ, telling him not to be afraid, that God wasn’t able to see us here in the dark with the covers over us, and then I—and then he—and then we—and then we—