The bitter odor of sweat was strong in the room. Oliver’s voice was hard-edged and sharp; every syllable came forth with the force of a dart. His eyes were glazed and his face was flushed. He seemed to be in some sort of trance. If it hadn’t been Oliver, I would have thought he was stoned. This confession was costing him some tremendous inner price; that had been plain from the moment he walked in, jaws rigid, lips clamped, looking weirdly uptight as I had seen him only a few times previously, and began his rambling, hesitant tale of a late-summer day in the Kansas woods when he was a boy. As the story unwound I had been trying to anticipate its route and guess its payoff. Obviously he had betrayed Karl in some way, I supposed. Had he cheated Karl in the division of the day’s catch? Had he stolen ammunition from Karl when his friend’s back was turned? Had he shot Karl dead in some sudden quarrel and told the sheriff it was an accident? None of those possibilities persuaded me; but I was unprepared for the actual turn in the narrative, the wandering hand, the skillful seduction. The rural background — guns and wild game and woods — had misled me; my simpleminded image of Growing Up In Kansas left no room for homosexual adventures and other manifestations of what to me was a purely urban species of decadence. Yet here was Karl, the virile huntsman, groping innocent young Oliver, and here was an older Oliver crouching before me pulling the reluctant words from his bowels. The words became less reluctant; Oliver was caught up in the rhythms of his tale, now, and, though his anguish seemed no less, his flow of description became more copious, as if he took some masochistic pride in baring this episode to me: it was not so much a confession as an act of abasement. The story rolled inexorably on, liberally embellished with telling detail. Oliver portraying his maidenly shyness and uneasiness, his gradual succumbing to Karl’s earnest sophistries, the critical moment when his uncertain hand at last sought Karl’s body. Oliver spared me nothing. Karl had not been circumcised, I learned, and in case I might not be familiar with the anatomical implications of that fact Oliver carefully explained to me the appearance of an uncircumcised member, both flaccid and erect. He told me also of the manual caresses and of his indoctrination into the oral joys, and finally he painted the picture of the two sinewy young male bodies writhing in elaborate copulation beside the pond. There was Bible Belt fervor in his words: he had committed an abomination, he had dabbled in the sins of Sodom, he had fouled himself unto the seventh generation, all in that one afternoon of boyish fun. “All right,” I wanted to say, “all right, Oliver, so you made out with your pal, why stretch it into such a big megillah? You’re still basically hetero, aren’t you? Everyone fools around with other boys when he’s a kid, and Kinsey told us a long time ago that at least one male adolescent out of three goes to the point of climax with—” But I said not a word. This was Oliver’s big moment and I didn’t want to put him down. This was his shaping trauma, this was the fiery-eyed demon that rode him, and he was letting it all hang out for my inspection. He had awesome momentum now. He swept me grandly along to the final orgasmic spurt, and then sat back, spent, dazed, face going slack, eyes going dull. Waiting for my verdict, I guess. What could I say? How could I pass judgment on him? I said nothing.

“What happened afterward?” I asked at last.

“We took a swim and cleaned ourselves up and got dressed and went and shot some wild ducks.”

“No, I mean afterward. Between Karl and you. The effect on your friendship.”

“On our way back to town,” Oliver said, “I told Karl that if he ever went near me again I’d blow his fucking head off.”

“And?”

“He never went near me again. A year later he lied about his age and joined the marines and got killed in Vietnam.” Oliver looked at me challengingly, evidently awaiting another question, something he was sure I must inevitably ask, but I had no more questions; the sheer inconsequentiality, the irrelevance, of Karl’s death had broken the narrative thread for me. There was a long pause. I felt foolish and inarticulate. Then Oliver said, “That was the only time in my life I ever had any sort of gay experience. Absolutely the only time. You believe me, don’t you, Eli?”

“Of course I do.”

“You better. Because it’s true. There was that once with. Karl, when I was fourteen, and that was all. You know, one reason I agreed to have a gay roommate was as a sort of a test, to see whether I could be tempted, to learn where my natural inclinations lay, to find out whether what I did that day with Karl was a one-shot, a fluke, or if it would happen again if there was the opportunity. Well, there was the opportunity, all right. But I’m sure you know I’ve never made it with Ned. You know that, don’t you? The question of a physical relationship just hasn’t ever come up between Ned and me.”

“Of course.”

His eyes were on me, fierce again. Still waiting, Oliver? For what?

He said, “There’s just one thing else I have to say.”

“Go on, Oliver.”

“Just one thing. A little footnote, but it carries the whole point of the story, because it isolates the guilt for me. Where the guilt lives, Eli, isn’t in what I did. It’s in how I felt about what I did.” A nervous chuckle. Another pause. He was having trouble getting his one last thing said. He looked away from me. I think he was wishing he had left well enough alone and had ended his confession five minutes before. At length he said, “I’ll tell you. I enjoyed it, Eli. With Karl. I got a real thrill out of it. My whole body seemed to be erupting. It may have been the biggest kick of my life. I never went back for a second time, because I knew that kind of thing was wrong. But I wanted to. I still want to. I’ve always wanted to.” He was shaking. “I’ve had to fight it, every minute of my life, and I never realized until just a short while ago how hard I actually was fighting. That’s all. That’s the whole thing, Eli, right there. That’s all I have to say.”

Enter Eli, somber, shuffling, mantled in rabbinical gloom, a stoop-shouldered personification of the Wailing Wall, two thousand years of sorrow on his back. He is down. Very far down. I had noticed, we all had noticed, how well Eli was responding to life in the House of Skulls; he had been up since the day we got here, far up and cresting, as up as I had ever seen him. Not any more. For the past week he’d been heading downward. And these few confessional days seemed to have thrust him into the uttermost abyss. Sad eyes, drooping mouth. The quirky grimace of self-doubt, self-contempt. He radiates a chill. He is veh-is-mir made flesh. What buggest thou, beloved Eli?

We rapped a bit. I felt free and loose, pretty far up myself, as I had been for three days, since dumping the tale of Julian and The Other Oliver onto Timothy. Frater Javier knows his business; ventilating all that garbage was exactly what I needed. Getting it into the open, analyzing it, discovering which part of the episode was the part that was hurting me. So now with Eli I was relaxed and expansive, my usual mild maliciousness altogether absent; I had no wish to needle him, but simply sat waiting, the coolest kind of cat I had ever been, ready to receive his pain and ease him of it. I expected him to blurt out his confession in a soul-clearing hurry, but no, not yet, indirection is Eli’s hallmark; he wanted to talk of other things. How, he wondered, did I evaluate our chances in the Trial? I shrugged and told him that I rarely thought about such things and simply went through our daily round of weeding and meditating and exercising and screwing, telling myself that every day in every way I was getting closer and closer to the goal. Eli shook his head. A sense of impending failure obsessed him. He had been confident at first that our Trial would have a successful outcome, and the last vestiges of skepticism had dropped from him; he believed implicitly in the truth of the Book of Skulls and believed also that its bounty would be extended to us. Now his faith in the Book was unshaken but his self-confidence was shattered. He was convinced that a crisis was approaching that would doom our hopes. The problem, he said, was Timothy. Eli felt certain that Timothy’s tolerance for the skullhouse was virtually at its end and that in another couple of days he’d take off, leaving us stranded in an incomplete Receptacle.