“Crap. They’re just a bunch of little old men. If any of them came after me, I’d break them in half. With one hand.”

“Perhaps you would. Perhaps we wouldn’t. Do you want to be responsible for our deaths, Timothy?”

“Don’t hand me that melodramatic garbage. I’m a free agent. Look at it existentially, the way you’re always asking us to do: we shape our own fates, Eli, we go our own paths. Why should I be bound to you three?”

“You took a voluntary oath.”

“I can renounce it.”

“All right,” he said. “Renounce it. Pack up and clear out.” He was lying sprawled out naked on his cot, staring me down; I had never seen Eli look this determined, this formidable, before. Suddenly he was tremendously together. Or else he had a demon inside him. He said, “Well, Timothy? You’re a free agent. Nobody’s stopping you. You can be in Phoenix by sundown.”

“I’m not in that much of a rush. I wanted to discuss this with the three of you, come to some kind of rational understanding, nobody bludgeoning anybody else but all of us agreeing that—”

“We agreed to come here,” Eli said, “and we agreed to give it a chance. Further discussion’s not necessary. You can pull out whenever you please, bearing in mind, of course, that by doing so you’ll expose us to certain risks.”

“That’s blackmail.”

“I know.” His eyes flashed. “What are you afraid of, Timothy? The Ninth Mystery? Does that scare you? Or is it the possibility of really getting to live forever that you’re worried about? Are you bowed down under existential terror, man? Seeing yourself going on and on through the centuries, tied to the wheel of karma, unable to get free? Which frightens you more, Timothy — living or dying?”

“You little cocksucker.”

“Wrong room,” he said. “Go out to the left, two doors up the hall, ask for Ned.”

“I came in here with something serious on my mind. I didn’t ask for jokes and I didn’t ask for threats and I didn’t ask for personal smears. I just want to know how long you and Oliver and Ned plan to stay here.”

“We’ve only just arrived. It’s too soon to talk about leaving. Will you excuse me now?”

I went out. I was getting nowhere, and we both knew it. And Eli had stung me, a few times, in places where I hadn’t realized I was so vulnerable.

At dinner, he acted as though I hadn’t said a thing to him,

And now? Do I just sit and wait and wonder? Jesus, I can’t put up with much more of this, honestly. I simply wasn’t designed for the monastic life — completely leaving out of the question the matter of the Book of Skulls and all it may offer. You have to be bred for this sort of thing; you have to have renunciation in your genes, a touch of masochism. I’ve got to make them realize that, Eli and Oliver. The two madmen, the two immortality-crazed lunatics. They’d stay here ten or twenty years, pulling weeds, breaking their backs with these exercises, staring at the sun till they’re half blind, breathing deep, eating peppered mush, and convincing themselves that this was the right way to get to live forever. Eli, who always struck me as freaky and neurotic but fundamentally pretty rational, seems definitely to have flipped. His eyes are strange now, glassy and fierce, like Oliver’s: psychotic eyes, terrible eyes. Things are stirring inside Eli. He’s gaining strength day by day, adding not just muscles but a sort of moral strength, a fervor, a dynamism: he’s bound on his course and he lets you know that he isn’t going to allow anything to come between him and what he wants. For Eli that’s something brand new. Sometimes I think he’s turning into Oliver — a short, dark, hairy Yiddish edition of Oliver. Oliver, of course, keeps his mouth shut and does enough chores for six and at exercise time bends himself into a pretzel trying to out-frater the frater. And even Ned is catching the faith. No wisecracks from him now, no little snotty quips. In the morning we sit there listening to Frater Miklos spin long driveling skeins of senile gibberish, with maybe one intelligible sentence out of every six, and there’s Ned, like a six-year-old being told about Santa Claus, screwing up his face in excitement, sweating, chewing his nails, nodding, gulping it all down. Right on, Frater Miklos! Atlantis, yes, and Cro-magnon Man, sure, and the Aztecs, and all the rest, I believe, I believe! And then we eat our lunch, and then we meditate on the cold stone floor of our rooms, each by himself, and then we go out and sweat for the fraters in the fucking fields. Enough. I can’t take very much more. I muffed my chance today, but I’ll go back to Eli again in a day or two and see if I can’t get him to be reasonable. Though I don’t have much hope of that.

Eli frightens me a little, now.

And I wish he hadn’t said that bit about what I’m afraid of, whether the Ninth Mystery or living forever. I very much wish he hadn’t said that to me.

chapter thirty

Oliver

A small accident while we were working in the fields before breakfast. I was passing between two rows of chili-plants and I put my bare left foot down on a sharp slab of stone that somehow had worked its way up to the surface and was sticking out, edge-on. I felt the stone starting to cut into my sole, and I shifted weight quickly, too quickly. My other foot wasn’t ready to take the burden. My right ankle began to buckle. There was nothing I could do but let myself fall, the way they teach you to fall on the basketball court when you’ve been faked badly out of position and are faced with a quick choice between toppling and tearing a bunch of ligaments. Down I went, catabloop, smack on my ass. I didn’t hurt myself in any way, but this section of the fields had been heavily irrigated the night before and still was muddy; I landed in a sticky, soggy patch, and there was a squooshy sucking sound as I pulled myself up. My shorts were a mess — the whole seat mud-stained and wet. Well, nothing serious about that, though I didn’t like the feel of the damp dirt as it soaked through the fabric to my skin. Frater Franz came trotting over to see if I had hurt myself, and I showed him that I was all right, all except my shorts. I asked if I should go back to the house and change, but he grinned and shook his head and told me there wasn’t any need of that. I could just take the shorts off and hang them on a tree and the sun would dry them in half an hour. Okay, why not? I’m not uptight about going around without clothes on, and anyway how much more privacy did I need than out here in the middle of the desert? So I wriggled out of the shorts and draped them on a branch and brushed the mud off my rump and began pulling weeds again.

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.