“It’s a possibility. It gives us a finite chance to enter the infinite. Isn’t that good enough? Isn’t that worth trying? Where did sneering get us? Where did doubt get us? Where did skepticism get us? Can’t we try? Can’t we look?” Eli had found his faith again. He was shouting, sweating, standing up stark naked and waving his arms around. His whole body was on fire. He was actually beautiful, just for that moment. Eli, beautiful!

I said, “I’m into this all the way, and at the same time I don’t buy it for half an inch. Do you follow me? I dig the dialectic of the myth. Its implausibility batters against my skepticism and drives me onward. Tensions and contradictions are my fuel.”

Timothy, devil’s advocate, shook his head — a heavy taurine gesture, his big beefy frame moving like a slow pendulum. “Come on, man. What do you really believe? The Skulls, yes or no, salvation or crap, fact or fantasy. Which?”

“Both,” I said.

“Both? You can’t have it both.”

“Yes I can!” I cried. “Both! Both! Yes and no! Can you follow me to where I live, Timothy? In the place where the tension’s greatest, where the yes is drawn tight against the no. Where you simultaneously reject the existence of the inexplicable ^ind accept the existence of the inexplicable. Life eternal! That’s crap, isn’t it, a load of wishful thinking, the old hogwash dream? And yet it’s real, too. We can live a thousand years, if we want to. But it’s impossible. I affirm. I deny. I applaud. I jeer.”

“You don’t make sense,” Timothy grumbled.

“You make too much sense. I shit on your sense! Eli’s right: we need mystery, we need unreason, we need the unknown, we need the impossible. A whole generation’s been teaching itself to believe the unbelievable, Timothy. And there you stand with your crew cut on, saying it doesn’t make sense.”

Timothy shrugged. “Right. What do you want from me? I’m just a dumb jock.”

“That’s your pose,” Eli said. “Your persona, your mask. Big dumb jock. It insulates you. It spares you from having to make any commitment whatsoever, emotional, political, ideological, metaphysical. You say you don’t understand, and you shrug, and you step back and laugh. Why, do you want to be a zombie, Timothy? Why do you want to disconnect yourself?”

“He can’t help it, Eli,” I said. “He was bred to be a gentleman. He’s disconnected by definition.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Timothy said, in his most gentlemanly way. “What do you know, either of you? And what am I doing here? Dragged halfway across the Western Hemisphere by a Jew and a queer to check out a thousand-year-old fairy tale!”

I made a little curtsy. “Hey, well done, Timothy! The mark of the true gentleman: he never gives offense unintentionally.”

“You asked it,” said Eli, “so you answer it. What are you doing here?”

“And don’t blame me for dragging you here,” I said. “This is Eli’s trip. I’m as skeptical as you are, maybe even more so.”

Timothy snorted. I think he felt outnumbered. He said, very quietly, “I just came along for the ride.”

“For the ride! For the ride!” Eli.

“You asked me to come. What the crap, you needed four guys, you said, and I had nothing better to do for Easter. My buddies. My pals. I said I’d go. My car, my money. I can play along with a gag. Margo’s into astrology, you know, it’s Libra this and Pisces that, and Mars transits the solar tenth house, and Saturn’s on the cusp, and she won’t fuck without first checking the stars, which can sometimes be quite inconvenient. And do I make fun of her? Do I laugh at her the way her father does?”

“Only inside,” Eli said.

“That’s my business. I accept what I can accept, and I have no use for the rest. But I’m good-hearted about it. I tolerate her witch doctors. I tolerate yours, too, Eli. That’s another mark of the gentleman, Ned: he’s amiable, he doesn’t proselytize, he never pushes his thing at the expense of someone else’s thing.”

“He doesn’t have to,” I said.

“He doesn’t have to, no. All right: I’m here, yes? I’m paying for this room, yes? I’m cooperating 400 percent. Must I be a True Believer, too? Must I get your religion?”

“What will you do,” Eli said, “when we’re actually in the skullhouse and the Keepers are offering us the Trial? Will you still be a skeptic then? Will your habit of not believing be such a hassle for you that you won’t be able to surrender?”

“I’ll evaluate that,” Timothy answered slowly, “when I have something to base my evaluation on.” Suddenly he turned to Oliver. “You’ve been pretty quiet, All-American.”

“What do you want me to say?” Oliver asked. His long lean body stretched out in front of the television set. Every muscle outlined against his skin: a walking anatomy textbook. His lengthy pink apparatus, drooping out of a golden forest inspiring me with improper thoughts. Retro me, Sathanas. This way lies Gomorrah, if not Sodom.

“Don’t you have anything to contribute to the discussion?”

“I really wasn’t paying close attention.”

“We were talking about this trip. The Book of Skulls and the degree of faith we have in it,” said Timothy.

“I see.”

“Would you care to make a profession of belief, Dr. Marshall?”

Oliver seemed to be midway in a journey to another galaxy. He said, “I give Eli the benefit of the doubt.”

“You believe in the Skulls, then?” Timothy asked.

“I believe.”

“Although we know the whole thing’s absurd.”

“Yes,” said Oliver. “Even though it’s absurd.”

“That was Tertullian’s position, too,” Eli put in. Credo quia absurdum est. I believe because it’s absurd. A different context of belief, of course, but the psychology’s right.”

“Yes, yes, my position exactly!” I said. “I believe because it’s absurd. Good old Tertullian. He says precisely what I feel. My position exactly.”

“Not mine.” Oliver.

“No?” Eli asked.

Oliver said, “No. I believe despite the absurdity.”

“Why?” Eli said.

“Why, Oliver?” I said, a long moment later. “You know it’s absurd, and yet you believe. Why?”

“Because I have to,” he said. “Because it’s my only hope.”

He stared straight at me. His eyes held a peculiarly devastated expression, as though he had looked into the face of Death with them and had come away still alive, but with every option blasted, every possibility shriveled. He had heard the drums and the fifes of the dead-march, at the edge of the universe. Those frosty eyes withered me. Those strangled words impaled me. I believe, he said. Despite the absurdity. Because I have to. Because its my only hope. A communique from some other planet. I could feel the chilly presence of Death there in the room with us, brushing silently past our rosy boyish cheeks.

We’re a heavy mixture, we four. How did we ever get together? What tangling of lifelines dumped us all into the same dormitory suite, anyway?

In the beginning it was just me and Oliver, two freshmen who’d been computer-assigned to a double room overlooking the quadrangle. I was straight out of Andover and very full of my own importance. I don’t mean that I was impressed by the family money. I took that for granted, always had: everybody I grew up with was rich, so I had no real sense of how rich we were, and anyway I had done nothing to earn the money (nor my father, nor my father’s father, nor my father’s father’s father, et cetera et cetera), so why should it puff me up? What swelled my head was a sense of ancestry, of knowing that I had the blood of Revolutionary War heroes in me, of senators and congressmen, of diplomats, of great nineteenth-century financiers. I was a walking slab of history. Also I enjoyed knowing that I was tall and strong and healthy — sound body, sound mind, all the natural advantages. Out beyond the campus was a world full of blacks and Jews and spastics and neurotics and homosexuals and other misfits, but I had come up three cherries on the great slot machine of life and I was proud of my luck. Also I had an allowance of one hundred dollars a week, which was convenient, and I may not actually have been aware that most eighteen-year-olds had to get along on somewhat less. Then there was Oliver. I figured the computer had given me a lucky dip again, because I might have been assigned somebody weird, somebody kinky, somebody with a squashed, envious, embittered soul, and Oliver seemed altogether normal. Good-looking corn-fed pre-med from the wilds of Kansas. He was my own height — an inch or so taller, in fact — and that was cool; I’m ill at ease with short men. Oliver had an uncomplicated exterior. Almost anything made him smile. An easygoing type. Both parents dead: he was here on a full scholarship. I realized right away that he had no money at all and was afraid for a minute that would cause resentment between us, but no, he was altogether levelheaded about it. Money didn’t appear to interest him as long as he had enough to pay for food and shelter and clothing, and he had that — a small inheritance, the proceeds of selling the family farm. He was amused, not threatened, by the thick roll I always carried. He told me the first day that he was planning on going out for the basketball team, and I thought he had an athletic scholarship, but I was wrong about that: he liked basketball, he took it very seriously, but he was here to learn. That was the real difference between us, not the Kansas thing or the money thing, but his sense of dedication. I was going to college because all the men of my family go to college between prep school and adulthood; Oliver was here to transform himself into a ferocious intellectual machine. He had — still has — tremendous, incredible, overwhelming inner drive. Now and then, those first few weeks, I caught him with his mask down; the sunny farm-boy grin vanished and his face went rigid, the jaw muscles clamping, the eyes radiating a cold gleam. His intensity could be scary. He had to be perfect in everything. He had a straight-A average, close to the absolute top of our class, and he made the freshman basketball team and broke the college scoring record in the opening game, and he was up half of every night studying, hardly sleeping at all. Still, he managed to seem human. He drank a lot of beer, he balled any number of girls (we used to trade with each other), and he could play a decent guitar. The only place where he revealed the other Oliver, the machine-Oliver, was when it came to drugs. Second week on campus I scored some groovy Moroccan hash and he absolutely wouldn’t. Told, me that he’d spent 17½ years calibrating his head properly and he wasn’t about to let it get messed up now. Nor has he blown so much as a single joint, as far as I’m aware, in the four years since. He tolerates our smoking dope but he won’t have any.