We have a long way to go. These are still the preliminary stages of the series of training routines that the Brothers term the Trial. What lies ahead, I suspect, is largely psychological or even psychoanalytic: a purging of excess baggage from the soul. The ugly business of the Ninth Mystery is part of that. I still don’t know whether to interpret that passage of the Book of Skulls literally or metaphorically, but in either event I’m sure it deals with the banishing of bad vibes from the Receptacle; we kill one scapegoat, actually or otherwise, and the other scapegoat removes himself, actually or otherwise, and the net effect of this is to leave two fledgling fraters who are without the jangling death-jitters bome by the defective duo. Besides purging the group as a whole, we must purge our individual inner selves. Last night after dinner Frater Javier visited me in my room, and I assume visited each of the others; he told me that I must prepare myself for the confessional rites. I was asked to review my entire life, giving special attention to episodes of guilt and shame, and to be ready to discuss those episodes in depth when asked to do so. I suppose some kind of primordial encounter group will be organized shortly, with Frater Javier in charge. A formidable man, that one. Gray eyes, thin lips, chiseled face. As accessible as a slab of granite. When he moves through the halls I imagine that I hear an accompaniment of dark groaning music. Enter the Grand Inquisitor! Yes. Frater Javier: the Grand Inquisitor. Night and chill; fog and pain. When begins the Inquisition? What shall I say? Which of my guilts shall I place on the altar, which of my shames?

I gather that the purpose of this unburdening will be to simplify our souls through a yielding up of — what term shall I use? — neuroses, sins, mental blocks, hangups, en-grams, deposits of bad karma? We must pare ourselves down, pare ourselves down. Bone and flesh, these we retain, but the spirit must be whittled. We must strive toward a kind of quietism, in which there are no conflicts, in which there is no stress. Avoid everything that goes against the grain, and, if necessary, redirect the grain. Effortless action, that’s the key. No energy rip-offs allowed; struggles shorten lives. Well, we’ll see. I’m carrying plenty of inner dross, and so are we all. A psychic enema might not be such a bad thing.

What shall I tell you, Frater Javier?

chapter thirty-two

Ned

Review your life, declares the mysterious and vaguely reptilian Frater Javier, entering my monastic cell unannounced, bringing with him the faint hissing rustle of scales against stone. Review your life, rehearse the sins of your past, make yourself ready for confession. Right on, cries Ned the depraved choirboy! Right on, Frater Javier, chortles the fallen Papist! This is up his well-greased alley. The ritual of the confessional is certainly something he comprehends: it is encoded in his very genes, it is imprinted in his bones and balls, it is utterly natural to him. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Whereas those other three are strangers to the closet of truth, the uptight Israelite and the two Protestant bullocks. Oh, oh, I suppose the Episcopalians have the custom of the confessional too, crypto-Romans that they are, but they always tell lies to their priests. I have that on the authority of my mother, who feels that the flesh of Anglicans isn’t fit to feed to pigs. But mother, I say, pigs don’t eat meat. If they did, she says, they wouldn’t touch the tripes of an Anglican! They break every commandment and lie to their priests, she says, and crosses herself, four vigorous thumps, om mani padme hum!

Ned is obedient. Ned is a good little fairy. Frater Javier gives him The Word, and Ned instantly commences reviewing his misspent past, so that he can gush it all forth at the appropriate occasion. What have been my sins? Where have I transgressed? Tell me, Neddy-boy, have you had any other gods before Him? No, sir, in truth I can’t say that I have. Have you made unto yourself any graven images? Well, I’ve doodled a bit, I admit, but we don’t apply that commandment so rigorously, do we, sir? We’re not bloody Moslems, eh, sir? Thank you, sir. Next: have you taken the name of the Lord in vain? God help me, Father, would I do a thing like that? Very well, Ned, and have you remembered the Sabbath Day and kept it holy? Abashed, the honest boy replies that he has occasionally been guilty of dishonoring the Sabbath. Occasionally? Shit, he’s polluted more Sundays than a Turk! A venial sin, though, a venial sin. Ego absolvo te, iny child. And have you honored thy father and thy mother? I have indeed, sir, honored them in my way. Hast thou killed? I have not killed. Hast thou committed adultery? To the best of my knowledge, Father, I have not. Hast thou stolen? I have not stolen, at least, nothing important, sir. Nor have I borne false witness against my neighbor. And hast thou coveted thy neighbor’s house, or thy neighbor’s wife, or thy neighbor’s manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass, or anything that is thy neighbor’s? Well, sir, there’s that part about my neighbor’s ass; I admit I’m on shaky grounds there, but otherwise — but otherwise — I do my best, sir, considering that I came into this world tainted, considering the odds against us all from the start, bearing in mind that in Adam’s fall we sinned all, nevertheless I regard myself as relatively pure and good. Not perfect, of course. Tut, my child, what would you confess? Well, Father — confiteor, confiteor, the fist striking the boy’s chest with admirable zeal, thump, thump, thump, thump, Om! Mani! Padme! Hum! — my fault, my most grievous fault — well, I did go one Sunday after mass with Sandy Dolan to spy on his sister changing her clothes, and I saw her bare breasts, Father, they were small and round with little pink tips, and at the base of her belly, Father, she had this hairy black mound, something I had never seen before, and then she turned her back to the window and I saw her ass, Father, the two most beautiful sweet plump white cheeks that I had ever seen, with these lovely deep dimples just at the top of them, and down the center this delicious shadowy cleft that — what’s that, Father? I can go on to something else? All right, then, I confess that I did lead Sandy astray in other ways, that I engaged in sins of the body with him, sins against God and Nature, that when we were eleven years old and spending the night together in the same bed, his mother being occupied in childbirth and there being no one at his house to look after him, I did fetch from under my bed a bottle of Vaseline and did scoop from it a good-sized glob and wantonly apply it to his sexual organ, telling him not to be afraid, that God wasn’t able to see us here in the dark with the covers over us, and then I — and then he — and then we — and then we -

And so, at Frater Javier’s behest, I plumbed my degenerate past and dredged up much mucky detritus, the better to shine at the sessions of confessions that I assumed would be commencing. But the fraters are less linear-minded than that. A variation in our daily routine was about to be introduced, yes, but it involved neither Frater Javier nor any confessional aspects. That must lie still further in the future. The new rite is a sexual one, Buddha save me, a hieterosexual one. These fraters, I now realize, are Chinamen of some sort beneath their deceptive Caucasian skins, for they are instructing us now in nothing less than the tao of sex.

They don’t call it that. They don’t speak of yin and yang, either. But I know my Oriental erotica, and I know the ancient spiritual significances of these sexual exercises, which are close kin to the various gymnastic and contem-platory exercises we’ve been practicing. Control, control, control over every bodily function, that’s the aim here.