Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

But they might. Certainly he’d got a lot of letters from all over the country expressing interest in and sympathy with the Brunist movement. Tonight’s paper was full of these letters. A minister in Mississippi who said he’d chartered a bus for the West Condon pilgrimage. A movie actress who wrote from California that Bruno had appeared to her in her dreams, promising her salvation. A blind man in an old folks’ home in New Hampshire who claimed that, hearing about Bruno on television, he had suddenly had a glimpse of light and seemed headed for a cure. That wasn’t the only miracle. An invalid in Arizona had risen from his bed and begun to walk, and, if his letter could be believed, was presently hitchhiking his way across the country to West Condon. A woman in Chicago, committing suicide, had left a note behind, confirming, through her own sources, Bruno’s prophecy, and explaining that she couldn’t bear to face the horror that would be her sinner’s lot.

The inside pages — there were now virtually no ads — were filled with a picture story of the Brunists. He was in a couple of the pictures himself. Nothing so fancy as some of the big spreads he’d helped work up for a couple of the national picture magazines, but pretty good at that. He’d filled in with a rerun of the texts of Ben Wosznik’s songs, the essentials of Eleanor Norton’s system, Bruno’s prophecies, or “words.” These latter, now six in number, had been codified as: Hark ye to the White Bird; I am the One to Come; Coming of Light, Sunday Week; The tomb is its message; A circle of evenings; and Gather on the Mount of Redemption. He had letters he had beguiled out of several eminent churchmen, an article on the lusty response of the mass media to the event, and blunt verbatim reports of conversations he’d overheard in Mick’s, the coffeeshop, in barbershops and on the street. Miller had also taken a last-minute interest in that vast segment of the holy milieu who were simply not involved, had interviewed the high school track coach, a drummer in a nearby roadhouse, a bartender in Waterton, his own mentally subnormal janitor Jerry. An old woman in her nineties told him she used to expect the end of the world all the time, but it was like all of a sudden it had slipped up on her. She’d always been a decent Godfearing woman, to be sure, but now did all this mean she had to go out on that hill and sing songs and all? How big a hill was it? Could they get all the people they were going to save up on that one hill? Would there be room for her even if she went out there? And what if it wasn’t the end of the world at all, why, she’d probably catch her death! And surely there would be photographers and, yes, television, because she’d noticed that all her favorites this week from Captain Kangaroo to What’s My Line? had got bumped by this thing. So what should she wear? She had nothing new. No, no, it was better to stay home and watch it on television, that was almost like being there, wasn’t it? Or maybe if she broke her leg and couldn’t get there, what if she did that? It’d be all the same, didn’t he think so? Yes, that was a splendid idea! Watch it on television, get a slip from the doctor explaining it would be unwise for her to spend the night out in the air, call a taxi to be at her house about twenty minutes before, you see, and if things seemed to be going on, why then, trot on out….

As for the Brunists, they now gave interviews freely to anyone but him, held open house daily, posed for photos, appeared gladly on radio and television. Last night, Ben Wosznik had given a touching account of his conversion, had sung a few songs he had composed, had spoken simply but convincingly of each of his fellow Brunists, and had even managed to turn so grotesque an object as that scabby black hand — still one of their altar relics and getting them a lot of mileage in the East Condon newspapers — into a moving symbol of the persecution that besets the holy. As for Marcella, Miller, staring again at his front-page group photo, hardly recognized her. Ralph Himebaugh and Eleanor Norton were holding her up, and her head lolled foolishly on Himebaugh’s shoulder. Her hair hung down haglike past her ears, past her face, now a dull matte white. Those eyes that had so captivated him now stared vapidly out past the camera, too large for this face, all their bright glitter gone. The others in the photo were pale and solemn, posed stiffly as in old daguerrotypes, heads high, hands folded, chins up … “such a one caught up, even to the third heaven …”

He realized that his own mind had also been, subtly, geared for an end tomorrow: Monday had been and still was an unreality. Projects always did that. They set up something that looked hard and real, something to aim at, but they always concealed then the thick tangle of endless ambiguities that were the one true thing of this world. For Miller, there was nothing worse than the end of a project: cold sweats, nausea, couldn’t eat — like shaking a habit. Even knowing that though, he could never resist launching new ones. The reason was: it was that or nothing, and nothing was not good at all. There was, of course, the alternative of the lifetime project instead of all these short ones, but he feared a greater despair, the midproject collapse. He could only make himself believe in a game a short time, and he preferred to take a lot of short hard falls than one long sickening and endless drop. Did Happy Bottom guess this? Did she see that Monday must come? It didn’t matter; forget it. He tossed the paper in a trash barrel and went home, there to crawl in a white hole with a great white mole, split white thighs and sleep a white sleep.

Marcella wakes from a distant place. An inexplicable chill. She supposes that, kissed by Death, she is dead. Her body is still bare as He left it, the tunic rolled up to her throat. The house is filled with noise. Her wake? Yet, when she rolls her ear into the pillow, she hears the beating of a heart. Can it be hers? Has she returned?

Freshly showered, richly fed, mildly drunk, the phone unplugged, the doors locked, and the blinds pulled, Happy Bottom and the West Condon Tiger lay face to fork, listening to the merry secular twang of Yogi Bear on the bedroom television, each contemplating in his/her own way that peculiar piece of anatomy toward which he/she was so relentlessly drawn, tasting it, toying with it, slowly drifting out of this time and this place, out of particularity toward union with the One. Classical copulation, belly to belly, was of course the true magical experience: the illusion of having solved the Great Mystery, simply because the parts seemed to fit. Antipodally, on the other hand, the parts no longer fit, and analogues had to be improvised. But, thus stripped of magic, it was closer to a pure mystical experience, for contemplation of the mystery was direct, enhanced by the strange fact that one could not imagine the thoughts of one’s partner, since one could not, without repugnance, imagine the partner’s perspective, being able only to feel — literally — the other’s hunger and excitement, the other’s joy. Though each knew, better even than any part of himself/herself, that concavity/convexity that he/she kissed, it nevertheless remained utterly unimaginable to him/her, impossible, always incredibly new. A tasty cornflakes commercial was the ding-dong epithalamium that accompanied their gradual ascent into blessedness. Happy’s thighs twitched, kicked, cuffed his ears, her bottom leapt, her fingers scurried, burrowed, clawed, kneaded, her mouth raged—

“This man, Giovanni Bruno, was born thirty-four years ago next November, the fourth child of five of Antonio Bruno, an immigrant Italian coalminer, and his wife Emilia. Three months ago — or to be precise, fourteen Sundays ago tomorrow — he was rescued from a mine disaster that killed ninety-seven men. Tomorrow, he and a band of devout followers anticipate the end of the world. The astonishing story of the Brunists of West Condon, after this message …”