Read Online The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg - Free Book Online

she says, doing her thing with the credit-card machine, and, having done it, disconnects completely from our presence, returning her attention to a Japanese television set with a five-inch screen perched on her counter. We go out to the left, past the drained swimming pool, and let ourselves into our rooms. We must hurry or we’ll miss dinner. Drop the luggage, splash water in the faces, out to the coffee shop. One waitress, slouch-backed, gum-chewing; could be the sister of the desk clerk. She too has had a long day; there is an acrid cunty smell about her that hits us hard as she bends over us to plunk silverware on the Formica tabletop. “What’ll it be, boys?” No escalopes de veau tonight, no caneton aux cerises. Dead hamburgers, oily coffee. We eat in silence and silently shuffle back to our lodgings. Off with the sweaty clothes. Into the shower, Eli first, then me. The door connecting our room to theirs can be opened. It is opened. Dull boomings from beyond: Oliver, naked, is kneeling before the television set, twiddling dials. I survey him, his taut rear, broad back, the dangling genitals visible below his muscle-bunched thighs. I repress my warped lustful thoughts. These three humanitarians have coped quite well with the problem of living with a bisexual roommate; they pretend that my “sickness,” my “condition,” does not exist, and carry on from there. The prime liberal rule: don’t patronize the handicapped. Pretend that the blind man can see, that the black man is white, that the gay man feels no stirrings at the sight of Oliver’s smooth firm ass. Not that I have ever overtly offered at him. But he knows. He knows. Oliver’s no fool.
    Why are we so depressed tonight? Why this loss of faith?
    It must have come from Eli. He was bleak all day, lost in realms of existential despondency. I think it was a purely personal gloom, born of Eli’s difficulties in relating to the immediate environment and to the cosmos at large, but it subtly, surreptitiously generalized itself and infected us all. It takes the form of grinding doubts:
    1. Why have we bothered to make this trip?
    2. What do we really expect to gain?
    3. Can we really hope to find what we’re looking for?
    4. If we find it, do we want it?
    So it must begin again, the task of self-hyping, of self-conversion. Eli has his papers out and studies them intently: the manuscript of his translation of the Book of Skulls, the Xeroxes of the newspaper clippings that led him to connect the place in Arizona with the antique and implausible cult whose scripture the book may have been, and his mass of peripheral documents and references. He looks up after some time and says, “ ‘All at present known in medicine is almost nothing in comparison of what remains to be discovered . . . we could free ourselves from an infinity of maladies of body as well as of mind, and perhaps also even from the debility of age, if we had sufficiently ample knowledge of their causes, and of all the remedies provided for us by nature.’ That’s Descartes,
Discourse on Method.
And Descartes again, age forty-two, writing to Huygens’s father: ‘I never took so much care to conserve myself as I do now, and, though I had thought formerly that death could not rob me of more than thirty or forty years, henceforth it cannot surprise me without depriving me of the hope of more than a century: since it seems to me evident that if we guard ourselves from certain errors which we customarily commit in our way of life, we will be able without other inventions to achieve an old age much longer and happier than now.’ ”
    Not the first time I’ve heard this. Eli presented all his data to us long before. The decision to go to Arizona ripened exceedingly slowly and was forced along to maturity by acres of pseudophilosophical palaver. Then I said, now I say, “Descartes died at fifty-four, didn’t he?”
    “An accident. A surprise. Besides, he hadn’t perfected his theories of