chapter sixteen

Eli

How strange the world looks here. Texas; New Mexico. A lunar landscape. Why did anyone ever want to settle in this kind of country? The broad brown plateaus, no grass, only twisted scrubby greasy gray-green plants. The bare purple mountains, jagged, sharp, rimming the harsh blue horizon like eroded teeth. I thought the mountains out west were bigger than these. Timothy, who’s been everywhere, says that the really big mountains are in Colorado, Utah, California; these are just hills, five or six thousand feet high. I was shaken by that. The biggest mountain east of the Mississippi is Mount Mitchell, North Carolina, something like sixty-seven hundred feet. I lost a bet about that when I was ten and never forgot it. The biggest mountain I had ever seen before this trip was Mount Washington, sixty-three hundred feet or so, New Hampshire, where my parents took me the one year we didn’t go to the Catskills. (I was betting on Mount Washington. I was wrong.) And here all around me are mountains the size of those, and they’re just hills. They probably don’t even have names. Mount Washington hung in the sky like a giant tree, about to fall and crush me. Of course, here the view is broader, the landscape is wide open; even a mountain is dwarfed by the immense perspective.

The air is crisp and cold. The sky is improbably blue and clear. This is apocalyptic country: I keep expecting to hear the crack of trumpet calls resounding out of the “hills.” Wondrous sound the trumpet flingeth, through earth’s sepulchres it ringeth, all before the throne it bringeth. Yes. And death will be stupefied. We go thirty, forty miles between towns, seeing only jackrabbits, deer, squirrels. The towns themselves seem new: filling stations, a row of motels, small square aluminum houses that look as though they can be attached to an automobile and driven off to some other place. (Probably they can be.) On the other hand, we have passed two pueblos, six or seven hundred years old, and there will be more. The idea that there are actually Indians, live Indians, walking around all over the place, blows my Manhattanized mind. There were Indians galore in the technicolor movies I saw every Saturday afternoon for years on Seventy-third Street and Broadway, but I was never taken in, I knew with my cool small-boy wisdom that they were just Puerto Ricans or maybe Mexicans togged out in fancy feathers. Real Indians were nineteenth-century stuff, they had died out long ago, none of them left except on the nickel with the buffalo on the other side, and when did you last see one of those? (When did you last see a buffalo?) Indians were archaic, Indians were extinct, Indians, to me, were in a class with the mastodon, the tyrannosaurus, the Sumerians, the Carthaginians. But no, here I am in the Wild West for the first time in my life, and the flat-faced, leather-colored man who sold us our lunchtime beer in the grocery store was an Indian, and the roly-poly kid who filled our gas tank was an Indian, and those mud huts on the far side of the Rio Grande there are inhabited by Indians, even though I can see a forest of television aerials rising above the adobe rooftops. See the Indians, Dick! See the giant cactus plants! Look, Jane, look, the Indian drives a Volkswagen! Watch Ned cut the Indian off! Listen to the Indian honk his horn!

I think our commitment to this adventure has deepened since we reached the desert’s edge. Certainly mine has. That terrible day of doubt, while we were driving across Missouri, now seems as far in the past as the dinosaurs. I know now (how do I know? how can I say?) that what I have read in the Book of Skulls is real, and what we have come to find in the wastes of Arizona is real, and that if we persevere we will be granted that which we seek. Oliver knows it, too. A weird freaky intensity has surfaced in him these last few days. Oh, it was always there, that tendency toward monomania, but he did a better job of concealing it. Now, sitting behind the wheel ten or twelve hours a day, needing virtually to be forced to stop driving, he makes it altogether clear that nothing is more urgent for him than to reach our destination and submit himself to the disciplines of the Keepers of the Skulls. Even our two unbelievers are catching the faith. Ned oscillates between absolute acceptance and absolute rejection, as ever, and often holds both positions simultaneously; he mocks us, he needles us, and yet he studies maps and mileage charts as though he, too, is seized by impatience. Ned is the only man I know capable of attending a mass at sunrise and a black mass at midnight, all the while feeling no sense of incongruity, devoting himself with equal fervor to each rite. Timothy still remains aloof, a genial scoffer, protesting that he’s merely humoring his far-out roommates by undertaking this pilgrimage — but how much of that is just a front, a show of proper aristocratic coolness? More than a little, I suspect. Timothy has less reason than the rest of us to hunger after metaphysical life-extensions, because his own life as presently constituted offers him such an infinity of possibilities — his financial resources being what they are. But money isn’t everything, and you can do only so much in the standard threescore and ten, even if you’ve inherited Fort Knox. He’s tempted by the vision of the skullhouse, I believe. He’s tempted.

By the time we reach our goal, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, I think well 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.

chapter seventeen

Ned

Albuquerque. A dreary city, miles of suourbs, 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 parts 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 Sante 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 Farm-ington, 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.