Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

“You used to get a little of that, didn’t you, Tiger?” Castle asked.

Miller smiled. For several days, he had felt his past sticking to him here like shreds of flypaper. “Well, she wasn’t the toughest teacher we had in high school,” he said, “but she was the sincerest.”

Mick stretched himself through the loose laughter to his feet and gathered up the beer glasses, lining them up on the bar. He got a bar rag to finish mopping the table. “That was sure one goddamn story,” he coda’d.

“Beasts!” bleated Himebaugh insistently and wiped his mouth nervously with a clean handkerchief. Castle snorted, and they started in again.

For an instant something seems to hover … enters him: his eyes open. They turn to her, blink in recognition. A hand faces its pale palm to her and she takes it. She assures him .

The phone rang. Everyone was gone. Miller, dozing upright in his swivel chair, listened to it jangle. Wouldn’t answer it. Looked at his watch. Seven. Home was an empty icebox and an unmade bed, didn’t feel like going there. Too bushed to go elsewhere. Still it rang, jarring him. He looked at it. Angry black fish, eyeing him with one gleam of reflection. He took it off the spit. “Hello?” He’d tell them it was a wrong number. But it was Marcella. He awoke. Giovanni was conscious and his condition was satisfactory. He listened to her voice, dreamed up questions to keep her talking, knew now there was a better place to go. But there was little more she could tell him. Except that Giovanni had been visited in the mine by the Virgin, a vision, so to speak. Yes, he could publish that. She had come to him in the form of a white bird.

While the mine disaster reduced itself to numbers, repercussions, and causes, Eleanor Norton turned all her time — for school was closed of course — to a review of messages received in Carlyle and West Condon, reasoning that it was the Carlyle crisis that had driven them here, so a relevancy might well be expected. On the first page of each of her logbooks were the words, which she took from the apocryphal book of Baruch: “Walk in the presence of the light of this book, that you may be illuminated.” On a first reading, she found only familiar admonitions to live a deeper life and lessons in the cosmological verities …

A flower plucked, a fish’s leap: the distant star is tortured!

… preceded in Carlyle by simple warnings of imminent danger. But by Saturday she had read them all six times, and had begun to discover, beneath the placid surface, an emergent design of revelation. There was, for example, that peculiar reference of a year ago December to

… the one who is to come.

At the time, already harassed, she had supposed it to be merely another in the succession of warnings in Carlyle, for the “one” was to bring her suffering and injustice, and Domiron had urged her not to fear him. But now she remembered that she had received similar cautions three or four times in the past — she searched them out, astonished to discover the almost identical wording. Had she misread them all along?

Do not despair if One should come. Faith and truth have fled away, to be replaced by evil and violence and the lust for illusory things of the body. Oh men of the earth! only a cleansing can preserve you! Wash the earth from your hands and feet, and cast your eyes to the limitless stars!

Did this confirm her theory that the earth had formerly enjoyed a higher aspect of intensity? Was a cleansing to occur? And she, was she to be the agent? And then there was that exceedingly strange message, only a month old, that told her to

… look to the east! look to the west! the feet tug downward, but the spirit soars!

The east: the source of light, of course. The west … West Condon? And the tugging downward, was that the miners? These messages troubled her, yet consoled her as well; nevertheless, it was altogether clear that more remained to be revealed.

On Saturday night, learning that there was no longer any hope left for the men still in the mine and that the toll was fixed at ninety-eight, she opened her mind to the Teacher and received the following message:

As the body suffers, so is the mind cleansed. The seven starred image of life’s oscillation from abysses to cusps shadows forth in morning’s east, but a firmness is forthcoming. Is nine a number? Is eight a number? Lead men to numberlessness! In the earth a harsh tremor, above … an infinite repose. Avoid the illusory, the present accident of conjoined particles, and seek wisdom with love! For a time is to come, and the soul will swim in the vast and empty sea of enlightenment! Does the body tremble? Chastise it, mind, with mocking laughter! Domiron bids you!

She was disturbed to discover that this new message was largely composed of parts of old ones, but the new ordering of these parts not only provided her startling insights into the events of the moment, but also revealed to her how blind and complacent she had become. It was there all the time, and she had not seen it — had virtually refused to see it! And it was she who had accused Domiron of betrayal! And now other wonders came to mind: the frequent minor accidents she had suffered recently around the house, the disappearance of objects, the unseasonal autumn blizzards and the strange damp January, not to mention the increasing turbulence of the messages, the ruptured syntax and enigmatic juxtapositions, all a kind of static, as it were, electromagnetic countersignals from malfeasant forces. Customarily, Domiron instructed her through her right hand, though occasionally through her left, and, in certain urgent situations, directly through her voice.

By my light, thou shalt flee the darkness!

he had cried in her throat more than once.

She had attempted, over the years, to assist Wylie in attaining a communication with the higher forces in the universe, but, though he honestly tried, he had almost no success. Domiron explained privately to her that

… if even the faithful are few, how rare then the master!

and that passive natures, themselves noble and receptive, if not supremely spiritual,

may find subtler paths to wisdom.

In any event, it was common knowledge who Womwom (Domiron’s name for Wylie’s soul at the seventh aspect) once was — when the time was ripe, he would play his significant role.

Have faith! All that is, I am, I am all that never was. All that shall be, I have been.

Sunday, the eleventh, a thick fog pressed at her morning windows. Fog pleased her usually, misted the hard forms that so often deluded and misled her, provided fleeting images of the essential emptiness, but today it betokened her own uncertainties, her difficulties in finding the true way. It curled and wisped through the black branches of their tall elms, like her thoughts floating elusively through the stretched fingers of her mind. Now an object took shape, became an inference, a cipher for action, but then it faded behind the fog’s nervous curtain.

She sought a clarification to last night’s message, but none came. She considered it. Last night she had understood it, but now she wondered if it were really anything more than the customary exhortation to maintain spiritual discipline. She understood, of course, the next ascendant sign — now befogged! — but what of the forthcoming firmness? For herself alone or for others? Lead men, the message said. Was she to lead them to the “firmness” in the time that “is to come”? Or is the firmness merely the vernal closing of the cycle? Doesn’t the message in fact dismiss the mine disaster as irrelevant? The “harsh tremor” in the earth does not disturb the “infinite repose” above, in the higher aspects. And “the time to come” is nothing more than the soul’s return to its source, is it not? Was Domiron trying to tell her that her own death was near? But then why would he ask her to “lead men”? Or might it have to do somehow with the “One” to come? And why should he draw especial attention to the sun’s sign? A signal to free herself from the merely phenomenological, or was there a more destructive intent, a parabolic reference to former devastations upon the earth? And there were the numbers to be considered, the number of miners who perished, of course, ninety-eight, but if thought of in a series, nine and then eight, then the next number would be seven … but what of that? For it is to “numberlessness” he asked her to lead men.