But we’re here. It’s real. We’re inside it. They’ll take us on as candidates.

That’s all established. That’s all real. But “real” is just a noise. “Real” isn’t real. I don’t think I’m connected any more. I don’t think I’m plugged in. The other three, they could go to a restaurant and they’d think they were biting into a rare juicy broiled steak; I’d know I’m biting into a bundle of atoms, an abstract percept that we’ve labeled “steak,” and you can’t get nourishment from abstract percepts. I deny the steakness of the steak. I deny the reality of the steak. I deny the reality of the House of Skulls. I deny the reality of Oliver Marshall. I deny the reality of reality.

I must have been out in the sun too long today. I’m scared. I’m coming apart. I’m not plugged in. And I can’t tell any of them about it. Because I deny them, too. I’ve denied everything. God help me, I’ve denied God! I’ve denied death and I’ve denied life. What do the Zen people ask? What’s the sound of one hand clapping, eh? Where does the flame of the candle go when it’s been snuffed? Where does the flame go? I think I’m going to go there too, soon.

chapter twenty-seven

Eli

So it begins. The rituals, the diet, the gymnastics, the spiritual exercises, and the rest. Doubtless we have seen only the tip of the iceberg. Much else remains to be revealed; and, for example, we still do not know when the terms of the Ninth Mystery must be carried out. Tomorrow, next Friday, Christmas, when? Already we eye one another in a sinister fashion, peering through the face to the skull beneath. You, Ned, will you kill yourself for us? You, Timothy, are you planning to kill me so you may live? We haven’t speculated on that aspect of it aloud at all, not once; it seems too terrible and too absurd to bear discussing or even thinking about. Perhaps the requirements are symbolic ones, metaphorical ones. Perhaps not. I worry about that. I’ve sensed since the beginning of this project certain unvoiced assumptions about who is to go, if any of us must go: me to die at their hands, Ned to perish at his own. Of course 111 reject that. I came here to gain life eternal. I don’t know if any of them really did. Ned, freaky Ned, he’s capable of seeing suicide as his finest poem. Timothy doesn’t seem really to care about life-extension, though I suppose he’ll take it if it comes along without much effort. Oliver insists that he absolutely refuses to die, ever, and he gets quite impassioned on the subject; but Oliver’s a lot less stable than he appears on the surface, and there’s no accounting for his motives. With the right philosophical prompting he could get as enamored of dying as he claims to be of living. So I can’t say who lives, who succumbs to the Ninth Mystery. Except that I’m watching my step, and I’ll go on watching it for however long we stay here. (How long is that supposed to be? We never gave any thought to that, really. Easter holiday is over in six, seven more days, I imagine. Certainly the Trial won’t be finished by then. I get the feeling it lasts months or even years. Will we leave next week, regardless? We swore not to, but of course there isn’t much the fraters can do to us if we all slip away in the “middle of the night. Except that I want to stay. Weeks, if necessary. Years, if necessary. They’ll report us missing in the outer world. The registrars, the draft boards, our parents, they’ll all wonder about us. As long as they don’t trace us here, though. The fraters have brought our baggage from the car. The car itself remains parked by the edge of the desert path. Will the state troopers notice it, eventually? Will they send a man down the path looking for the owner of that glossy sedan? We dangle loose ends by the score. But here we stay for the duration of the Trial. Here / stay, at any rate.)

And if the rite of the Skulls is genuine?

I won’t stay here, as the fraters seem to do, after I’ve won what I seek. Oh, I might hang around for five or ten years, out of a sense of propriety, a sense of gratitude. But then I take off. It’s a big world; why spend eternity in a desert retreat? I have my vision of the life to come. In a way, it’s like Oliver’s: I mean to feed my hunger for experience. I’ll live a sequence of lives, draining the utmost out of each. Say, I’ll spend ten years on Wall Street, piling up a fortune. If my father’s right, and I’m sure he is, any reasonably clever sort can beat the market, just by doing the opposite of what all the supposedly smart ones are doing. They’re all sheep, cattle, a bunch of goyishe kops. Dumb, greedy, following this fad and that one. So I’ll play the other side of the game and come away with two or three million, which I’ll invest in the right blue chips, good dividends, nothing fancy, steady income-producers. After all, I mean to live off those dividends for the next five or ten thousand years. Now I’m financially independent. What next? Why, ten years in debauchery. Why not? With enough money and self-confidence, you can have any woman in the world, right? I’ll have Margo and a dozen like her every week. I’m entitled. A little lust, sure: it’s not intellectual, it’s not Significant, but fucking has its place in a well-rounded existence. All right. Gold and lust. Then I look after my spiritual welfare. Fifteen years in a Trappist monastery. I say not a word to anyone; I meditate, I write poetry, I try to reach God, I break through to the itness of the universe. Make that twenty years. Purify the soul, purge it, lift it to heights. Then I come forth and devote myself to body-building.

Eight years of full-time exercise. Eli the beach boy. No longer a ninety-seven-pound weakling. I surf, I ski, I win the East Village Indian Wrestling Championship. Next? Music. I’ve never gotten as far into music as I’d like. I’ll enroll at Juilliard, four years, the full schtick, penetrating the innerness of the musical art, going deep into Beethoven’s late quartets, the Bach forty-eight, Berg, Schoen-berg, Xenakis, all the toughest stuff, and I’ll use the techniques I learned in the monastery in order to enter the heart of the universe of sound. Perhaps I’ll compose. Perhaps I’ll do critical essays. Perform, even. Eli Steinfeld in a Bach series at Carnegie Hall. Fifteen years for music, right? That takes care of the first sixty-odd years of my immortality. What next? We’re well into the twenty-first century by now. Let’s see the world. Go traveling like the Buddha, wander from land to land on foot, let my hair grow, wear yellow robes, carry a begging-bowl, pick up my checks once a month at American Express in Rangoon, Katmandu, Djakarta, Singapore. Experiencing humanity at the gut level, eating every food, curried ants, fried balls, sleeping with women of all races and creeds, living in leaky huts, in igloos, in tents, in houseboats. Twenty years for that and I should have a good idea of humanity’s cultural complexity. Then, I think, I’ll return to my original specialty, linguistics, philology, and allow myself the career I’m presently abandoning. In thirty years I might produce the definitive treatise on irregular verbs in Indo-European languages, or crack the secret of Etruscan, or translate the complete corpus of Ugaritic verse. Whatever field strikes my fancy. Next I’ll become a homosexual. With life eternal at your disposal, you have to try everything at least once, don’t you, and Ned insists that the gay life is the good life. Personally I’ve always preferred girls, intuitively, instinctively — they’re softer, smoother, nicer to touch — but somewhere along the line I ought to see what the other gender has to offer. Sub specie aeternitatis, why should it matter whether I plug this hole or that one? When I’m back in a heterosexual phase I’ll go to Mars. It’ll be about the year 2100 by then; we’ll have colonized Mars, I’m sure. Twelve years on Mars. I’ll do manual labor, pioneer stuff. Then twenty years for literature, ten for reading everything worthwhile that’s ever been written, ten for producing a novel that will rank with the best of Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Proust. Why shouldn’t I be able to equal them? I won’t be a snotty kid any more; I’ll have had 150 years of engagement with life, the deepest and broadest self-education any human being ever enjoyed, and I’ll still be in full youthful vigor. So if I apply myself to the task, a page a day, a page a week, five years to plan the architectonics of the book before I write word one, I should be able to produce, well, an immortal masterpiece. Under a pseudonym, of course. That’s going to be a special problem, shifting my identity every eighty or ninety years. Even in the shiny futuristic “future, people are likely to be suspicious of someone who simply won’t die. Longevity is one thing, immortality something else again. I’ll have to transfer my investments to myself somehow, name my new identity as my old one’s heir. I’ll have to keep disappearing and resurfacing. Dye my hair, beards on and off, mustaches, wigs, contact lenses. Be careful not to come too close to the machinery of government: once my fingerprints get into the master computer, I’ll have troubles. What will I use for birth certificates each time I reappear? I’ll think of something. If you’re smart enough to live forever, you’re smart enough to be able to cope with the bureaucracy. What if I fall in love? Marry, have kids, watch my wife wither and grow old, watch my kids slide into old age too, while I remain ever fresh and young? Probably I shouldn’t marry at all, or else do it just for the experience, ten, fifteen years at most, then get a divorce even if I still love her, to avoid all the later complications. We’ll see. Where was I? On into the 2100s, parceling out the decades with a free hand. Ten years as a lama in Tibet. Ten years as an Irish fisherman, if they still have any fish left by then. Twelve years as a distinguished member of the United States Senate. Then I should take up science, the great neglected area of my life. I’ll be able to handle it, given the proper amount of patience and application — physics, math, whatever I need to learn. I’ll allot forty years for science. I intend to get right up there with Einstein and Newton, a full career in which I function at the highest level of intellect. And then? I could return to the skullhouse, I guess, to see how Frater Antony and the rest of his crowd have been getting along. Five years in the desert. Out, out into the world again. What a world it’ll be! They’ll have whole new careers available, things that haven’t begun to be invented yet: I can spend twenty years as a dematerialization expert, fifteen in polyvalent levitation, a dozen as a symptom-peddler. And then? And then? On and on and on. The possibilities will be infinite. But I’d better keep close watch on Timothy and Oliver, and maybe even Ned too, because of the accursed thrice-fucked Ninth Mystery. That’s something big to worry about. If a couple of my pals kill me next Tuesday, say, it’s going to spoil some awfully elaborate long-term plans.