Free The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg Page B

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 171⁄2 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.
    The spring of our sophomore year we acquired Ned. Oliver and I had signed up to room together again that year. Ned was in two of Oliver’s classes: physics, which Ned needed to fulfull his minimum science requirement, and comparative lit, which Oliver needed to fulfill his minimum humanities requirement. Oliver had a little trouble digging Joyce and Yeats, and Ned had a lot of trouble digging quantum theory and thermodynamics, so they worked out a reciprocal coaching arrangement. It was an attraction of opposites, the two of them. Ned was small, soft-spoken, skinny, with big gentle eyes and a delicate way of moving. Boston Irish, strong Catholic background, educated in parochial schools; he still wore a crucifix when we were sophs and sometimes even went to mass. He intended to be a poet and short-story writer. No, “intended” isn’t the right word. As Ned explained it once, people with talent don’t
intend
to be writers. Either you have it or you don’t. Those who have it, write, and those who don’t, intend. Ned was always writing. Still is. Carries a spiral-bound notebook, jots down everything he hears. Actually I think his short stories are crap and his poetry is nonsense, but I recognize that the fault probably lies in my taste, not in his talent, since I feel the same way about a lot of writers much more famous than Ned. At least he works at his art.
    He became a kind of mascot for us. He was always much closer to Oliver than he was to me, but I didn’t mind having him around; he was somebody different, somebody with a whole other outlook on life. His husky voice, his sad-dog eyes, his freaky clothes (he wore robes a lot, I suppose by way of pretending he had gone into the priesthood after all), his poetry, his peculiar brand of sarcasm, his complicated head (he always took two or three sides of every issue and managed to believe in everything and nothing simultaneously)—they all fascinated me. We must have seemed just as foreign to him as he to us. He spent so much time around our place that we invited him to room with us for our junior year. I don’t remember whose idea that was, Oliver’s or mine. (Ned’s?)
    I didn’t know he was queer, at the time. Or rather, that he was gay, to use the term he prefers. The problem with leading a sheltered Wasp life is that you see only a narrow slice of humanity, and you don’t come to expect the unexpected. I knew such things as fags existed, of course. We had them at Andover. They walked with their elbows out and combed their hair a lot and talked with a special accent, the universal faggot accent that you hear from Maine to California. They read Proust and Gide all the time and some of them wore brassieres under their T-shirts. Ned wasn’t outwardly swishy, though. And I wasn’t the sort of meatball who automatically assumed that anyone who wrote (or read!) poetry had to be queer. He was arty, yes, he was hip, he was nonjock all the way, but you don’t expect a man who weighs 115 pounds to have much interest in football. (He did go swimming almost every day. We swim bare-ass at the college pool, of