Book of Skulls

by Robert Silverberg

  By the time we reach our goal, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, I think we’ll have drawn together into that cohesive four-sided unit that the Book of Skulls calls a Receptacle: that is, a group of candidates. Let’s hope so. It was last year, wasn’t it, that so much fuss was made over those midwestern students who carried out a suicide pact? Yes. A Receptacle can be considered to be the philosophical antithesis of a suicide pact. Both represent manifestations of alienation from present-day society. I reject your loathsome world entirely, says the member of a suicide pact; therefore I choose to die. I reject your loathsome world entirely, says the member of a Receptacle; therefore I choose never to die, in the hope that I will live to see better days.

  17. Ned

  Albuquerque. A dreary city, miles of suburbs, an endless string of gaudy motels along Route 66, a pathetic, schlocky, touristy Old Town down at the far end of things. If I have to have tourist-west, let me have Santa Fe, at least, with its adobe shops, its pretty hilltop streets, its few genuine remnants of the Spanish colonial past. But we aren’t going that way. Here we part from U.S. 66, finally, and roll southward on 85 and 25 almost to the Mexican border, down to Las Cruces, where we pick up Route 70 that shoots us toward Phoenix. How long have we been driving now? Two days, three, four? I’ve lost all track of time. I sit here hour after hour watching Oliver drive, and occasionally I do some of the driving myself, or Timothy does, and the wheels impinge on my soul, the carburetor fires in my gut, the interface between passenger and vehicle dissolves. We are all part of this snorting monster rolling westward. America lies sprawling, gassed, behind us. Chicago is only a memory now. St. Louis is only a bad dream. Joplin, Springfield, Tulsa, Amarillo—unreal, lacking in substance. A continent of pinched faces and small souls back there. Fifty million cases of severe menstrual cramps erupt to the east, and we couldn’t care less. A plague of premature ejaculation spreads through the great urban metropolises. All heterosexual males over the age of seventeen in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Tennessee have been smitten by an outbreak of hemorrhaging hemorrhoids, and Oliver drives on, giving no damns.

  I like this part of the country. It’s open, uncluttered, vaguely Wagnerian, with a good campy westernness about it: you see the men in their string ties and ten-gallon hats, you see the Indians sleeping in the doorways, you see the sagebrush swarming up the hillsides, and you know it’s right, it’s all the way it’s supposed to be. I was here the summer I was eighteen, mostly in Santa Fe, bunking with an agreeable weather-beaten suntanned fortyish dealer in Indian artifacts. A member of the Homintern, he. A card-carrying official of the International Pervo-Devo Conspiracy. They say it takes one to tell one, but in his case it took no great amount of telling: he did the lisp thing, the accent thing, he was plainly a squaw. He taught me, among much else, how to drive a car. All during August I made his collecting rounds for him, visiting his suppliers; he buys old pots for five bucks, sells them to antiquity-minded tourists for fifty. Low overhead, quick turnover. I undertook solitary terrifying voyages, hardly knowing my clutch from my elbow, driving down to Bernalillo, up to Farmington, over to the Rio Puerco country, even making a vast expedition out to Hopi, going to all sorts of places where, in violation of local archaeological ordinances, the farmers raid unexcavated ruined pueblos and winkle out salable merchandise. Also I met a number of Indians, many of them (surprise!) gay. I remember fondly a certain groovy Navaho. And a swaggering buck from Taos who, once he was sure of my credentials, took me down into a kiva and initiated me into some of the tribal mysteries, giving me access to ethnographical data for which many scholars no doubt would sell their foreskins. A profound experience. A mind-blower. I mean to tell the world that it’s not just your asshole that gets broadened, when you’re gay.

  Trouble with Oliver this afternoon. I was driving, rocketing down 25 somewhere between Belen and Socorro, feeling ballsy and light, for once the master of the car and not just something caught in the machinery. Half a mile ahead I spotted a figure, walking on our side of the road, evidently a hitchhiker. On impulse, I slowed. A hitcher, right: more than that, a hippie, the genuine 1967 article, long scruffy hair, sheepskin vest over bare chest, stars-and-stripes patch on the seat of his tie-dyed jeans, knapsack, no shoes. I suppose heading toward one of the desert communes, trudging alone from nowhere to nowhere. Well, in a sense we were heading toward a commune, too, and I felt we could accommodate him. I braked the car almost to a halt. He looked up, maybe flashing quickly on paranoia, saw Easy Rider once too often and was expecting a blast of good Amurrican gunfire, but the fear went out of his face when he saw we were kids. He grinned, gap-toothed, and I could almost hear the mumbled little courtesies, like I mean, wow, sure is cool of you to pick me up, man, like I mean, you know, it’s a long walk, the straights around here won’t help you nohow, man, when Oliver said, simply, “No.”

  “No?”

  “Keep on driving.”

  “We’ve got room in the car,” I said.

  “I don’t want to take the time.”

  “Christ, Oliver, the guy’s harmless! And he gets maybe one car an hour out here. If you were in his position—”

  “How do you know he’s harmless?” Oliver asked. By now the hippie was less than a hundred feet to the rear of where I’d stopped. “Maybe he’s part of Charles Manson’s family,” Oliver went on quietly. “Maybe his thing is knifing guys who sentimentalize hippies.”

  “Oh, wow! How sick can you get, Oliver?”

  “Start the car,” he said, in his ominous flat prairie voice, his tornado’s-a-comin’ voice, his out-of-this-town-by-nightfall-nigger voice. “I don’t like him. I can smell him from here. I don’t want him in the car.”

  “I’m driving now,” I answered. “I’ll make the decisions about—”

  “Start the car,” Timothy said.

  “You, too?”

  “Oliver doesn’t want him, Ned. You aren’t going to impose him on Oliver against his wishes, are you?”

  “Jesus, Timothy—”

  “Besides, it’s my car, and I don’t want him either. Put the foot on the gas, Ned.”

  Out of the back came Eli’s voice, soft, perplexed. “Wait a second, guys, I think we have a moral issue to consider here. If Ned wants—”

  “Will you drive?” Oliver said, in as close to a shout as I’ve ever heard from him. I glanced at him in my rear-view mirror. His face was red and sweat-beaded, and a vein stood out terrifyingly on his forehead. A manic face, a psychotic face. He might do anything. I couldn’t risk a blowup over one hitchhiking hippie. Shaking my head sadly, I put my foot to the accelerator, and, just as the hippie was reaching to open the door on Oliver’s side in back, we blasted off with a roar, leaving him standing alone and astonished in a cloud of exhaust fumes. To his credit, he didn’t shake his fist at us, he didn’t even spit at us, he just let his shoulders slump and went on walking. Maybe he was expecting a rip-off all the time. When I could no longer see the hippie, I looked at Oliver again. His face was more calm now; the vein had receded, the color had ebbed. But there was still a weird chilling fixity about it. Rigid eyes, a muscle flickering in his pretty-boy cheek. We were twenty miles down the highway before the electricity had stopped crackling in the car.

  Finally I said, “Why’d you do that, Oliver?”

  “Do what?”

  “Force me to screw that hippie.”

  “I want to get where I’m going,” Oliver said. “Have you seen me pick up any hitchhikers so far? Hitchhikers mean trouble. They mean delay. You would have taken him down some side road to his commune, an hour, two hours off the schedule.”

  “I wouldn’t have. Besides, you complained about his smell. You worried about getting knifed. What was that all about, Oliver? Haven’t you picked up enough paranoid shit yourself on account of your long hair?”

  “Perhaps I wasn’t thinking clearly,” said Oliver, who had never thought any other way but clearly in his life. “Perhaps I’m in such a rush to get a move on that I say thing
s I don’t mean,” said Oliver, who never spoke except from a prepared script. “I don’t know. I just had this gut feeling that we shouldn’t pick him up,” said Oliver, who last gave way to a gut feeling when he was being toilet-trained. “I’m sorry I leaned on you, Ned,” said Oliver.

  Ten minutes of silence later he said, “I think we ought to agree on one thing, though. From here to the end of the trip, no hitchhikers. Okay? No hitchhikers.”

  18. Eli

  They were right to choose this cruel and shriveled terrain as the site of the skullhouse. Ancient cults need a setting of mystery and romantic remoteness if they are to maintain themselves against the clashing, twanging resonances of the skeptical, materialistic twentieth century. A desert is ideal. Here the air is painfully blue, the soil is a thin burnt crust over a rocky shield, the plants and trees are twisted, thorny, bizarre. Time stands still in a place like this. The modern world can neither intrude nor defile. The old gods can thrive. The old chants rise skyward, undamped by the roar of traffic and the clatter of machines. When I told this to Ned he disagreed; the desert is stagy and obvious, he said, even a little campy, and the proper place for such survivors of antiquity as the Keepers of the Skulls is the heart of the busy city, where the contrast between their texture and ours would be greatest. Say, a brownstone on East 63rd Street, where the priests could go complacently about their rites cheek by jowl with art galleries and poodle parlors. Another possibility, he suggested, would be a one-story brick-and-plate-glass factory building in a suburban industrial park devoted to the manufacture of air-conditioners and office equipment. Contrast is everything, Ned said. Incongruity is essential. The secret of art lies in attaining a sense of proper juxtapositions, and what is religion if not a category of art? But I think Ned was putting me on, as usual. In any case I can’t buy his theories of contrast and juxtaposition. This desert, this dry wasteland, is the perfect place for the headquarters of those who will not die.

  Crossing from New Mexico into southern Arizona we left the last traces of winter behind. Up by Albuquerque the air had been cool, even cold, but the elevation is greater there. The land dipped as we drove toward the Mexican border and made our Phoenixward turn. The temperature rose sharply, from the fifties into the seventies, or even higher. The mountains were lower and seemed to be made of particles of reddish-brown soil compressed into molds and sprayed with glue; I imagined I could rub a deep hole in such rock with a fingertip. Soft, vulnerable, sloping hills, practically naked. Martian-looking. Different vegetation here, too. Instead of dark sweeps of sagebrush and gnarled little pines, we now traveled through forests of widely spaced giant cacti surging ithyphallically out of the brown, scaly earth. Ned botanized for us. Those are saguaros, he said, those big-armed cacti taller than telephone poles, and these, the shrubby spiky-branched blue-green leafless trees that might have been native to some other planet, these are palo verde, and those, the knobby upthrust clusters of jointed woody branches, they call that ocotillo. Ned knows the Southwest well. Feels quite at home here, having spent some time in New Mexico a couple of summers ago. Feels quite at home everywhere, Ned. Likes to speak of the international fraternity of the gay; wherever he goes, he’s sure of finding lodging and companionship among His Own Kind. I envy him sometimes. It might be worth all the peripheral traumas of being gay in a straight society to know that there are places where you’re always welcome, for no other reason than that you’re a child of the tribe. My own tribe isn’t quite as hospitable.

  We crossed the state border and zoomed westward toward Phoenix, the land becoming more mountainous again for a while, the terrain less forbidding. Indian country here—Pimas. We caught a glimpse of Coolidge Dam: memories of third-grade geography lessons. When we were still a hundred miles east of Phoenix, we began to see billboards inviting, no, commanding, us to stay at a downtown motel: HAVE A HAPPY HOLIDAY IN THE VALLEY OF THE SUN. The sun already impinged on us, here in late afternoon, hanging suspended over the windshield and hurling bolts of red-gold fire into our eyes. Oliver, driving like a robot, produced glittering silvered wrap-around sunglasses and kept right on going. We shot through a town called Miami. No beaches, no matrons in mink. The air was purple and pink from the fumes belching out of smokestacks; the odor of the atmosphere was sheer Auschwitz. What were they cremating here? Just before the central part of the town we saw the huge gray battleship-shaped mound of a copper mine’s discards, the great heap of tailings flung up across many years. A gaudy giant motel was right across the highway from it, I suppose for the benefit of those who dig close-up views of environmental rape. What they cremate here is Mother Nature. Sickened, we hurried on, into uninhabited territory. Saguaro, palo verde, ocotillo. We swooped through a long mountain tunnel. Forlorn townless countryside. Lengthening shadows. Heat, heat, heat. And then, abruptly, the tentacles of urban life reaching out from still-distant Phoenix: suburbs, shopping centers, gas stations, trading posts selling Indian souvenirs, motels, neon lights, fast-food stands offering tacos, custard, hot dogs, fried chicken, roast beef sandwiches. Oliver was persuaded to stop and we had tacos under eerie yellow streetlamps. And onward. The gray slabs of immense windowless department stores flanking the road. This was money country, the home of the affluent. I was a stranger in a strange land, poor disorientated alienated Yidling from the Upper West Side whizzing through the cactus and the palm trees. So very far from home. These flat towns, these glistening one-story bank buildings of green glass with psychedelic plastic signs. Pastel houses, pink and green stucco. Land that has never known snow. American flags aflutter. Love it or leave it, Mac! Main Street, Mesa, Arizona. The University of Arizona Experimental Farm right up against the highway. Far-off mountains glooming in the blue dusk. Now we are on Apache Boulevard in the town of Tempe. Wheels screeching; road turns. And suddenly we are in the desert. No streets, no billboards, nothing: no-man’s-land. Dark lumpy shapes on our left: hills, mountains. Headlights visible, far away. A few minutes more and the desolation ends; we have crossed from Tempe into Phoenix and now are on Van Buren Street. Shops, houses, motels. “Keep going till we’re downtown,” Timothy says. His family, it seems, has a major financial stake in one of the inner-city motels; we’ll stay there. Ten minutes more, through a district of secondhand bookshops and five-dollar-a-night motor lodges, and we are downtown. Skyscrapers here, ten or twelve stories: bank buildings, a newspaper office, large hotels. The heat is fantastic, close to ninety degrees. This is late March; what is the weather like in August? Here is our motel. Statue of a camel out front. Big palm tree. Cramped, ungenerous lobby. Timothy registers. We’ll have a suite. Second floor, in back. A swimming pool. “Who’s for a swim?” Ned asks. “And then a Mexican dinner,” says Oliver. Our spirits bubble. This is Phoenix, after all. We’re actually here. We’ve almost reached our goal. Tomorrow we set out to the north in quest of the retreat of the Keepers of the Skulls.

  It seems like years since all this began. That passing reference, offhand, casual, in the Sunday newspaper. A “monastery” in the desert, not far north of Phoenix, where twelve or fifteen “monks” practice some private brand of so-called Christianity. “They came up from Mexico about twenty years ago, and are believed to have gone to Mexico from Spain about the time of Cortes. Economically self-sufficient, they keep to themselves and do not encourage visitors, though they are cordial and civil to anyone who stumbles into their isolated, cactus-encircled retreat. The decor is strange, a combination of medieval Christian style and what seems to be Aztec motifs. A predominant symbol that gives the monastery a stark, even grotesque, appearance is the human skull. Skulls are everywhere, grinning, somber, in high relief or in three-dimensional representation. One long frieze of skull images seems patterned after designs to be seen at Chichén Itzá, Yucatán. The monks are lean, intense men, their skins tanned and toughened by exposure to desert sun and wind. They seem, oddly enough, both old and young at once. The one I spoke to, who declined to give his name, might have been thirty years old or three hundred, it
was impossible to tell. . . .”

  Only an accident that I happened to notice that as I glanced randomly through the newspaper’s travel supplement. Only an accident that bits of strange imagery—that frieze of skulls, those old-young faces—lodged in my mind. Only an accident that I should, a few days later, come upon the manuscript of the Book of Skulls in the university library.

  Our library has a geniza, a storehouse of culls and curios, of scraps of manuscript, of apocrypha and oddities that nobody had bothered to translate, decipher, classify, or even examine in any detail. I suppose every great university must have a similar repository, filled with a miscellanea of documents acquired through bequest or unearthed on expeditions, awaiting an eventual (twenty years? fifty?) scrutiny of scholars. Ours is more copiously stocked than most, perhaps because for three generations our empire-building librarians have been hungrily acquisitive, piling up the treasures of antiquity faster than any battalion of scholars could cope with the accessions. In such a system certain items invariably are laid aside, inundated by the torrent of new acquisitions, and eventually are hidden, forgotten, orphaned. So we have cluttered shelves of Sumerian and Babylonian cuneiform documents, most of them unearthed during our celebrated digs in southern Mesopotamia in 1902–05; we have whole barrels of untouched papyri of the later dynasties; we have pounds of material from Iraqi synagogues, not only Torah scrolls but also marriage contracts, court decisions, leases, poetry; we have inscribed sticks of tamarisk wood from the caves of Tun-huang, a neglected gift from Aurel Stein long ago; we have cases of parish records from the moldy muniment rooms of cold Yorkshire castles; we have scraps and strips of pre-Columbian Mexican codices; we have stacks of hymns and masses from fourteenth-century monasteries in the Pyrenees. For all anyone knows, our library may hold a Rosetta Stone to unlock the secrets of the Mohenjo-daro script, it may have the Emperor Claudius’ textbook of Etruscan grammar, it may contain, uncatalogued, the memoirs of Moses or the diary of John the Baptist. Those discoveries, if they are to be made at all, will be made by other prowlers in the dim, dusty storage tunnels beneath the main library building. But I was the one who found the Book of Skulls.