Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

She hung up her coat, fixed sandwiches for both of them, but finally didn’t eat her own, decided first to read the evening paper. Wylie sank sleepily into the armchair. She felt a kind of peculiar dizziness as she reached for the paper. She glanced at the headlines — and started up, her heart pounding: not only had Giovanni Bruno recovered from his coma, but he had announced a visitation by what he called the Holy Virgin during his entombment! She had appeared to him, he said, in the form of a …a white bird!

A white bird! the image of the soul, the volatile principle, life itself! messenger of peace and prodigies! symbol through man’s story of spiritualism and sublimation! of thoughts and of angels! the color and creature of mystic illumination! ecstasis out of time and freed from space! “Oh Domiron!” she cried, and fell to the floor. “Let me have light!” She rolled onto her back, and the chandelier above her lit, swayed, expanded, burst into flame like a skyrocket.

She was on the couch. Her head throbbed. Wylie was leaning over her, patting her hand. She breathed as though against resistances. He withdrew the thermometer from her armpit, shook his head as he read it, gazed compassionately down upon her over the pale rims of his spectacles, his round chin doubling. “Over a hundred,” he said. “You’ve got to slow down a little.”

“Wylie … what happened?”

“You were reading the paper. Then you … you cried out, and, well, you sort of passed out.”

“Did you read about it?” He nodded. “Wylie, what did I say?”

He hesitated, looked away from her. “You said, first you said, ‘Domiron,’ and then, ‘Let me have light.’“

“Yes …?”

“And then you said: ‘Ask and thou shalt be confirmed.’“

“Ask and thou shalt be confirmed.”

“That’s right.”

“What do you think … what do you think it means, Wylie?”

“I … I don’t know, dear.”

“I do.” It had been on her mind since Sunday night, since Thursday, perhaps even before. “I must see Mr. Bruno tonight,” she said.

“Eleanor, please! You have a fever!”

“It doesn’t matter. Nothing else does.” As she sat up, a chill vibrated through her. “I have to go, Wylie.”

He pressed his lips together, his eyes pained, but then he smiled. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”

The heated rhythm of fever disturbed the uniformity of Eleanor’s perceptions, and what happened at the hospital had afterwards to be reconstructed. People, there were many, though she noticed few in particular. The clocking knock of heels on the marble floor. Whiteness, the antiseptic odor. A fat dark priest was there, old women. One of these, wizened and brown, gnarled with misery but not with great wisdom, was the rescued miner’s mother; she spoke no English. Eleanor, impelled by forces far greater than herself, had reached his bedside. He was gaunt and spectral, high-browed with hollowed eyes and fragile as she had known he would be, still passing, thought Eleanor headily, into substance. There were other women outside, a coarse mulelike woman named Mrs. Collins, whose husband, Giovanni Bruno’s working partner in the mine, had been killed by the disaster. One of the seven, Eleanor learned, and another chill rattled through her. Other widows, the Collins child — Eleanor knew the girl from school, a shy and weak-minded student. And Giovanni’s sister Marcella — when their eyes met, Eleanor discovered a friendship already eons old. “Wylie!” she had whispered. “The girl! She is one of us!” A remarkable innocence, so profoundly seated it could never be excised, opened wide her brown eyes, taught delicacy and gaiety to her ready smile, graced the motions of her limbs. The old woman said her boy had died and come back to life! Marcella translated it, her warmth transforming it, elevating it to essential truth. Marcella, like Eleanor herself, lived, she saw, in a responsive universe. By his bedside, Eleanor contemplated the strange and inexorable processes that had transported her here, suddenly envisioned the confused complex of her past as a series of concentric circles, each smaller and pulling toward the center … and wasn’t this the very sense of aspects?

Shards of old prophecies broke kaleidoscopically on her mind, as memories of old conflicts, old conquests, streamed out into pattern, rationally ordered. He opened his eyes and looked at her. A sudden terror gripped her: he was Italian, a Roman Catholic, a stranger, she knew nothing about him, a laborer in the mines, would he find her mad? Hostile faces of old crises appeared, floated, rippled over his gaunt face like watery masks, and if she were wrong …?

Ask and thou shalt be confirmed!

And, indeed, hadn’t Mrs. Collins all but confirmed it? That message had excited Eleanor, even though a reading of it was disappointing. A simple Christian admonition finally, which the Collins woman with equal simplicity equated to stale dreams of a Last Judgment. Eleanor could not help becoming impatient with the Christians and their adolescent clubbiness, their absurd dualities, concern with the physical body, their chosen-people complex … even though the Bible itself, before Domiron, had been her chief guide. Now, the woman believed that something — perhaps even the Second Coming — must happen on the eighth of February, finding this implication in her dead husband’s note, and she was bullish and tense and she had power. She led a group called the “Evening Circle”; Eleanor was invited to attend the Sunday night meeting, but, for the moment, on the pretext of precarious health, Eleanor declined. She understood clearly, in spite of her feverish state of mind, the threat that the Collins woman posed: it was the threat of ignorance. But, in any case, she had to agree with the woman, events of supreme importance were in the air, although the function and date hardly appealed to her, especially since they had never been mentioned by her own sources. Of course, Mr. Collins had been a preacher, it was quite natural that his imagery should be lower-class Christian (and misspelled at that!), he could not be blamed, and there was above all a prodigious, an awesome, coincidence of interest in Giovanni Bruno.

Ask and thou shalt be confirmed!

In that brief moment beside his bed, before they discovered her there and ordered her away, in that instant when he looked up at her, through her terror she drove the question: “Are you the One who is to come?” His eyes burned through her. His breath came shortly. He nodded. They found her leaning against the foot of the bed, eyes closed. Wylie explained calmly to them about her fever, and she apologized, saying she had come in here looking for a place to rest.

Marcella had invited them all to return Friday evening, but by Thursday, Eleanor could wait no longer. Though free from fever, she now suffered from a head cold and sore throat, and had stayed home from this first day of school. Messages since Tuesday evening had appeared one on the heels of another, and all arrowed upon the same incredible event, long foretold, but terrifying in its realization: Giovanni Bruno’s body had been invaded by a higher being! Contact had been established!

She had to take extreme care. So far as she knew, she was the only person alive who realized it, the entire burden of keeping the connection alive was on her shoulders — a foolish move and it was lost! She hardly slept, though feared sleeplessness that it might weaken her. She distrusted antibiotics: they muddled her, and she could not afford that now. It would be difficult, in the transpiercing of aspects there would be problems. Had it ever really happened before? Surely, but always there must have been final failure, the contact interrupted, its significance distorted, the agent body destroyed; and always the walls were built, introceptive minds buried behind the rubble mounds of power and dogma, the charismatic moment forgotten, misconstrued, the light hopelessly flickering out, extinguished by the terrible density of this earth. And now, over fifteen years of resolute intransigent preparation — no! more! centuries! — were coming to bear upon this delicate moment, visible within the fragility of human time and space! Every breath she breathed seemed fraught with peril, yet starred and eternal as well, each a cosmic breath. And no sooner had the connection been established, but from somewhere, from within, or from denser aspects, from something malefic in the universe perhaps, something she did not understand, there came resistance: fever, disease, attacks from all sides on her body, on her mind, confusion, a blurring of vision: so frail a fortress! She trembled, searching out a greater strength. Her mortality shadowed her, clung to her ankles … yes, she would die soon, she must make haste, a second lost and it was for nothing— she must go tonight!