The Book of Skulls

chapter thirty-eight Ned

Enter Eli, somber, shuffling, mantled in rabbinical gloom, a stoop-shouldered personification of the Wailing Wall, two thousand years of sorrow on his back. He is down. Very far down. I had noticed, we all had noticed, how well Eli was responding to life in the House of Skulls; he had been up since the day we got here, far up and cresting, as up as I had ever seen him. Not any more. For the past week he’d been heading downward. And these few confessional days seemed to have thrust him into the uttermost abyss. Sad eyes, drooping mouth. The quirky grimace of self-doubt, self-contempt. He radiates a chill. He is veh-is-mir made flesh. What buggest thou, beloved Eli?

We rapped a bit. I felt free and loose, pretty far up myself, as I had been for three days, since dumping the tale of Julian and The Other Oliver onto Timothy. Frater Javier knows his business; ventilating all that garbage was exactly what I needed. Getting it into the open, analyzing it, discovering which part of the episode was the part that was hurting me. So now with Eli I was relaxed and expansive, my usual mild maliciousness altogether absent; I had no wish to needle him, but simply sat waiting, the coolest kind of cat I had ever been, ready to receive his pain and ease him of it. I expected him to blurt out his confession in a soul-clearing hurry, but no, not yet, indirection is Eli’s hallmark; he wanted to talk of other things. How, he wondered, did I evaluate our chances in the Trial? I shrugged and told him that I rarely thought about such things and simply went through our daily round of weeding and meditating and exercising and screwing, telling myself that every day in every way I was getting closer and closer to the goal. Eli shook his head. A sense of impending failure obsessed him. He had been confident at first that our Trial would have a successful outcome, and the last vestiges of skepticism had dropped from him; he believed implicitly in the truth of the Book of Skulls and believed also that its bounty would be extended to us. Now his faith in the Book was unshaken but his self-confidence was shattered. He was convinced that a crisis was approaching that would doom our hopes. The problem, he said, was Timothy. Eli felt certain that Timothy’s tolerance for the skullhouse was virtually at its end and that in another couple of days he’d take off, leaving us stranded in an incomplete Receptacle.

“I think so, too,” I said.

“What can we do about it?”

“Not much. We can’t force him to stay.”

“If he goes, what happens to us?”

“How do I know, Eli? I guess we’ll be in trouble with the fraters.”

“I won’t let him leave,” Eli said with sudden vehemence.

“You won’t? How do you propose to stop him?”

“I haven’t worked it out yet. But I won’t let him leave.” His face contorted into a tragic mask. “Oh, Jesus, Ned, don’t you see, it’s all coming apart?”

“I actually thought we were getting it together,” I said.

“For a while. For a while. Not any longer. We never had any real hold on Timothy, and now he doesn’t even bother to hide his impatience, his contempt—” Eli pulled his head into his shoulders, turtlewise. “And this priestess thing. The afternoon orgies. I’m bungling them, Ned. I’m not gaining control over myself. It’s great to have all that easy tail, sure, but I’m not learning the erotic disciplines I’m supposed to be mastering.”

“You’re giving up on yourself too early.”

“I don’t see any progress. I haven’t been able to last for all three women yet. Two of them, a couple of times. Three, no.”

“It’s a matter of practice,” I said.

“Are you managing?”

“Pretty well.”

“Of course,” he said. “That’s because you don’t give a damn for women in the first place. It’s just a physical exercise for you, like swinging on a trapeze. But I relate to those girls, Ned, I see them as sexual objects, what I do with them has enormous significance for me, and so — and so — oh, Christ, Ned, if I don’t master this part of it, what’s the good of working so hard on all the rest of it?”

He disappeared into a chasm of self-pity. I made properly encouraging noises: don’t give up, lad, don’t sell yourself short. Then I reminded him that he was supposed to be making confession to me. He nodded. For a minute or more he sat in silence, distant, rocking back and forth. At last he said, suddenly, with startling irrelevance, “Ned, are you aware that Oliver is gay?”

“It must have taken me all of five minutes to discover it.”

“You knew?‘

“It takes one to tell one, haven’t you ever heard that line? I saw it in his face the first time I met him. I said, this man is gay whether he knows it or not, he’s one of us, it’s obvious. The glassy eyes, the tight jaw, the look of repressed longing, that barely concealed ferocity of a soul that’s trussed up tight, that’s in pain because it’s not allowed to do what it desperately wants to do. Everything about Oliver advertises it — the self-punishing academic load, the way he goes about his athletic commitments, even his compulsive studding. He’s a classic case of latent homosexuality, all right.”

“Not latent,” Eli said.

“What?”

“He’s not just potentially gay. He’s had a homosexual experience. Only one, true, but it made a profound impression on him, and it’s colored all of his attitudes since he was fourteen years old. Why do you think he asked you to room with him? It was to test his self-control — it’s been an exercise in stoicism for him, all these years when he hasn’t let himself touch you — but you’re what he wants, Ned, did you realize that? It’s not just latent. It’s conscious, it’s just below the surface.”

I looked strangely at Eli. What he was saying was something I might perhaps turn to my own great advantage; and aside from the hope of personal gain from Eli’s revelation, I was fascinated and astonished by it, as one always is by intimate gossip of that sort. But it gave me a queasy feeling. I was reminded of something that had happened during my summer in Southampton, at a drunken, bitchy party where two men who had been living together for about twenty years got into an exceptionally vicious quarrel, and one of them suddenly ripped the terrycloth robe from the other, showing him naked to all of us, revealing a fat jiggling belly and an almost hairless crotch and the undeveloped genitals of a ten-year-old boy, and screaming that this was what he’d had to put up with all those years. That moment of exposure, that catastrophic unmasking, had been a source of delicious cocktail-party chatter for weeks afterward, but it left me sickened, because I and everyone else in that room had been made involuntary witness to someone else’s private agony, and I knew that what had been stripped bare that day was not merely someone’s body. I had not needed to know what I learned then. Now Eli had told me something that might be useful to me in one way but which in another had transformed me without my bidding into an intruder in another man’s soul.

I said, “Where’d you find all this out?”

“Oliver told me the other night.”

“In his confes—”

“In his confession, yes. It happened back in Kansas. He went hunting in the woods with a friend of his, a kid a year older than he was, and they stopped for a swim, and when they came out of the water the other fellow seduced him, and it turned Oliver on. And he’s never forgotten it, the intensity of the situation, the sheer physical delight, although he’s taken care never to repeat the experience. So you’re absolutely correct when you say that it’s possible to explain a lot of Oliver’s rigidity, his obsessive character, in terms of his constant efforts to repress his—”

“Eli?”

“Yes, Ned?”

“Eli, these confessions are supposed to be confidential.”

He nibbled his lower lip. “I know.”

“You’re violating Oliver’s privacy by telling me all this. Me, of all people.”

“I know I am.”

“Then why are you doing it?”

“I thought you’d be interested.”

“No, Eli, I won’t buy that. A man of your moral perception, of your general existential awareness — balls, man, you don’t just have gossip-peddling on your mind. You came in here intending to betray Oliver to me. Why? Are you trying to get something started between Oliver and me?”

“Not really.”

“Then why’d you tell me about him?”

“Because I knew it was wrong.”

“What kind of half-assed reason is that?”

He gave me a funny chuckle and an embarrassed grin. “It provides me with something to confess,” Eli said. “I regard this breach of confidence as the most odious thing I’ve ever done. To reveal Oliver’s secret to the one person most capable of taking advantage of his vulnerability. Okay, I’ve done it, and now I formally confess that I’ve done it. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. The sin has been committed right before your eyes, and give me absolution, will you?” He rattled the words out so fast that for an instant I couldn’t follow the Byzantine convolutions of his reasoning. Even after I understood, I wasn’t able to believe that he was serious.

Finally I said, “That’s a cop-out, Eli!”

“Is it?”

“It’s cynical shit that wouldn’t even be worthy of Timothy. It violates the spirit and maybe the letter of Frater Javier’s instructions. Frater Javier didn’t intend us to commit sins on the spot and then instantly repent of them. You have to confess something real, something out of your past, something that’s been burning your guts for years, something deep and poisonous.”

“What if I have nothing of that kind to confess?”

“Nothing, Eli?”

“Nothing.”

“You never wished your grandmother would drop dead because she made you put on a clean suit? You never peeked into the girls’ shower room? You never pulled the wings off a fly? Can you honestly say you have no buried guilts at all, Eli?”

“None that matter.”

“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.

Aha! The sin of Eli Steinfeld! No trifling sexual peccadillo, no boyhood adventure in buggery or mutual masturbation, no incestuous snuggling with his mildly protesting mother, but rather an intellectual crime, the most damning of all. Little wonder he had held back from admitting it. Now, though, he poured forth the incriminating truth. His father, he said, lunching one afternoon‘ in an Automat on Sixth Avenue, had happened to notice a small, gray, faded man sitting by himself, exploring a thick, unwieldy book. It was an arcane volume on linguistic analysis, Sommerfelt’s Diachrordc and Synchronic Aspects of Language, a title that would have meant nothing whatever to the elder Steinfeld had he not just a short while before forked out $16.50, no trivial sum in that family, to buy a copy for Eli, who felt he could not live much longer without it. The shock of recognition, then, at the sight of that bulky quarto. Upswelling of parental pride: my son the philologist. An introduction follows. Conversation. Immediate rapport; one middle-aged refugee in an Automat has nothing to fear from another. “My son,” says Mr. Steinfeld, “he’s reading that same book!” Expressions of delight. The other is a native of Rumania, formerly professor of linguistics at the University of Cluj; he had fled that land in 1939, hoping to enter Palestine but arriving instead, by a roundabout route through the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Canada, in the United States. Unable to secure an academic appointment anywhere, he lives in quiet poverty on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, holding whatever jobs he can find: dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant, proofreader for a short-lived Rumanian newspaper, mimeograph operator for a displaced-persons information service, and so on. All the while he is diligently preparing his life’s work, a structural and philosophical analysis of the decay of Latin in early medieval times. The manuscript now is virtually complete in Rumanian, he tells Eli’s father, and he has begun the necessary translation into English, but the work goes very slowly for him, since even now he is not at home in English, his head being so thoroughly stuffed with other languages. He dreams of finishing the book, finding a publisher for it, and retiring to Israel on the proceeds. “I should like to meet your boy,” the Rumanian says abruptly. Instant emanations of suspicion from Eli’s father. Is this some kind of pervert? A molester, a fondler? No! This is a decent Jewish man, a scholar, a melamed, a member of the international fellowship of victims; how could he mean any harm to Eli? Telephone numbers are exchanged. A meeting is negotiated. Eli goes to the Rumanian’s apartment: one tiny room, crammed with books, manuscripts, learned periodicals in a dozen languages. Here, read this, the worthy man says, this and this and this, my essays, my theories; and he thrusts papers into Eli’s hands, onionskin sheets closely typed, single spaced, no margins. Eli goes home, he reads, his mind expands. Far out! This little old man has it all together! Inflamed, Eli vows to learn Rumanian, to be his new friend’s amanuensis, to help him translate his masterwork as quickly as possible. Feverishly the two, the boy and the old man, plan collaborations. They build castles in Rumania. Eli, out of his own money, has the manuscripts Xeroxed, so that some goy in the next apartment, falling asleep over a cigarette, does not wipe out this lifetime of scholarship in a mindless conflagration. Every day after school Eli hurries to the little cluttered room. Then one afternoon no one answers his knock. Calamity! The janitor is summoned, grumbling, whiskey-breathed; he uses his master key to open the door; within lies the Rumanian, yellow-faced, stiff. A society of refugees pays for the funeral. A nephew, mysteriously unmentioned previously, materializes and carts off every book, every manuscript, to a fate unknown. Eli is left with the Xeroxes. What now? How can he be the vehicle through which this work is made known to mankind? Ah! The essay contest for the scholarship! He sits possessed at his typewriter, hour after hour. The distinction in his own mind between himself and his departed acquaintance becomes uncertain. They are collaborators now; through me, Eli thinks, this great man speaks from the grave. The essay is finished and there is no doubt in Eli’s mind of its worth; it is plainly a masterpiece. Moreover he has the special pleasure of knowing that he has salvaged the life’s work of an unjustly neglected scholar. He submits the required six copies to the contest committee; in the spring the registered letter comes, notifying him he has won; he is summoned into marble halls to receive a scroll, a check for more money than he can imagine, and the excited congratulations of a panel of distinguished academics. Shortly afterward comes the first request from a professional journal for a contribution. His career is launched. Only later does Eli realize that in his triumphant essay he has, somehow, forgotten entirely to credit the author of the work on which his ideas are based. Not an acknowledgment, not a footnote, not a single citation anywhere.

This error of omission abashes him, but he feels it is too late to remedy the oversight, nor does the giving of proper credit become any easier for him as the months pass, as his essay gets into print, as the scholarly discussion of it begins. He lives in terror of the moment when some elderly Rumanian will arise, clutching a parcel of obscure journals published in prewar Bucharest, and cry out that this impudent young man has shamelessly rifled the thought of his late and distinguished colleague, the unfortunate Dr. Nicolescu. But no accusing Rumanian arises. Years have gone by; the essay is universally accepted as Eli’s own; as the end of his undergraduate days approaches, several major universities vie for the honor of having him do advanced study on their faculty.

And this sordid episode, Eli said in conclusion, could serve as metaphor of his whole intellectual life — all of it face, no depth, the key ideas borrowed. He had gone a long way on a knack for making synthesis masquerade as originality, plus a certain undeniable skill in assimilating the syntax of archaic languages, but he had made no real contribution to mankind’s store of knowledge, none, which at his age would be pardonable had he not fraudulently gained a premature reputation as the most penetrating thinker to enter the field of linguistics since Benjamin Whorf. And what was he, in truth? A golem, a construct, a walking Potemkin Village of philology. Miracles of insight now were expected of him, and what could he give? He had nothing left to offer, he told me bitterly. He had long ago used up the last of the Rumanian’s manuscripts.

A monstrous silence descended. I could not bear to look at him. This had been more than a confession; it had been hara-kiri. Eli had destroyed himself in front of me. I had always been a little suspicious, yes, of Eli’s supposed profundity, for though he undoubtedly had a fine mind his perceptions all struck me in an odd way as having come to him at second hand; yet I had never imagined this of him, this theft, this imposture. What could I say to him now? Cluck my tongue, priestlike, and tell him, Yes, my child, you have sinned grievously? He knew that. Tell him that God would forgive him, for God is love? I didn’t believe that myself. Perhaps I might try a dose of Goethe, saying, Redemption from sin through good works is still available, Eli, go forth and drain marshes and build hospitals and write some brilliant essays that aren’t stolen and all will be well for you. He sat there, waiting for absolution, waiting for The Word that would lift the yoke from him. His face was blank, his eyes devastated. I wished he had confessed some meaningless fleshly sin. Oliver had plugged his playmate, nothing more, a sin that to me was no sin at all, only jolly good fun; Oliver’s anguish thus was unreal, a product of the conflict between his body’s natural desires and the conditioning society had imposed. In the Athens of Pericles he would have had nothing to confess. Timothy’s sin, whatever it was, had surely been something equally shallow, sprouting not from moral absolutes but from local tribal taboos: perhaps he had slept with a serving wench, perhaps he had spied on his parents’ copulations. My own was a more complex transgression, for I had taken joy in the doom of others, I perhaps had even engineered the doom of others, but even that was a subtle Jamesian sort of thing, in the last analysis fairly insubstantial. Not this. If plagiarism lay at the core of Eli’s glittering scholastic attainments, then nothing lay at the core of Eli: he was hollow, he was empty, and what absolution could anyone offer him for that? Well, Eli had had his cop-out earlier in the evening, and now I had mine. I rose, I went to him, I took his hands in mine and lifted him to his feet, and I said magic words to him: contrition, atonement, forgiveness, redemption. Strive ever toward the light, Eli. No soul is damned for all eternity. Work hard, apply yourself, persevere, seek self-understanding, and there will be divine mercy for you, because your weakness comes from Him and He will not chastise you for it if you show Him you are able to transcend it. He nodded remotely and left me. I thought of the Ninth Mystery and wondered if I would ever see him again.

I paced my room a long while, brooding. Then Satan inflamed me and I went to call on Oliver.