Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

“Which room, Davis? I take it you mean the morgue.”

The deeper they got, the blacker it got, the whitewashed timbers coated with soot and coke, the rock dust all but nonexistent — in Miller’s mind, as surely in most, the issue was settled, regardless of Davis’ rhetoric. The black walls sucked up the light from their lamps. Drip of water. Distant thump. Crickety-crick sound: scamper of rats maybe.

“… gob, rails, ties, props are piled too close to the track here, don’t you see?”

“All your stoppings has got blowed out by the violence, and so your air doesn’t …”

“… a spray stuff that helps some, but it don’t kill it all. Finally, you just gotta throw up and go on back to …”

“… as how they was apt to blow up the cable. You couldn’t hardly possibly see nothing, Professor, the machinery neither.”

“And, man, when my buddy seen all that shit flying around out there, why he commenced to plug her and put the brakes on, but …”

And then he was standing on the spot, before he understood properly where they were, that they had arrived at what was objectively referred to as “the ignition area.” Some contended for another room where drills lay with cap screws missing, while Davis and Osborne snorted at the electric arc theorists by drawing lines of force, declaring for ignition by cigarettes found alongside Clemens and Rosselli. Bonali, a little puffed up from his victories on the walk here, ridiculed: “You can’t light a fire with cigarettes, Davis.” But the absence of matches or lighter did not impress the inspectors. The former could have been consumed by the explosion, the latter picked up during rescue — or perhaps might still be in a dead man’s hands … it was doubtful anyone had checked.

What did impress the inspectors was that work had been going on in a squeezing area. An unnerving blue cap now crowned the yellow flame in the safety lamp. “Who declared this room safe?” a visiting UMW man asked angrily, and there were no answers, Osborne the night mine manager sneaking out of earshot, although Barney Davis did protest that the methane was normally vented out of the area, but since the disaster this section was now largely short-circuited. Besides, this face wasn’t being worked; Rosselli and Clemens must have slipped back here for the smoke, against orders. Nevertheless, most agreed: the area should have been sealed off. Miller followed the lead of others and put his ear to the face: soft buzz like a fine bubbling.

And here, in this tight black pit, which was crushed and shaken down, damp and dusty at once, in a gloomy intangible nimbus of CH 4, his legs cramped from kneeling, ducking, spine pinched, the air dead and stagnant, among furtive black faces mostly alien and isolate, Tiger Miller suffered for one febrile moment the leap and joy and glory of the state basketball championships — bright flash of meaning, a possible faith in a possible thing: that they could win! and there were globes of white light and wide-open space and a thundering excitement, a fast responsive body, patterns that worked , challenge, rescue, always a resolution, redemptions tested and proved in the scoring columns … a grace on him. Standing straight, he knocked his helmet against the roof: drums rolled funereally, blunt reminder, from the insensate earth, of the real.

“But the evidence?”

“Well, we first notice for soot and coke, Tiger, burnt fibers, paper, for polished surfaces. Here, you see how this rib has got rounded off? Well, that’s by coarse pieces flying by, and you can tell the direction plain enough.”

Coarse pieces of Oxford Clemens.

“And then, now look at this: see how the dust is streamlined here? The front side of this post is like sandblasted and then little eddy currents travel to the rear here — see? — and leave them little dust deposits. Way these here mines is cut up, the forces they go ever which way. But when you come on a point where all the forces go away from it in ever direction, why, you know something went off here.”

From this point, Oxford Clemens traveled off in ever which direction. They raked up the pieces and deposited them in a rubber bag. The bag was light and they guessed it was a little man. But the fingerprint expert identified the remains as not one but two persons, both once sizable. Clemens and Rosselli, like ultimate lovers cellularly conjoined, descended as one to their common grave.

“And look here, Tiger. You see how the materials here on the floor is all different sizes? Well, it makes sense, don’t it, that the coarser stuff is gonna get dropped first by the forces. And then it goes until you reach the dust point, and that is what is called sizing the materials. So, that’s the way you can tell how the flame and forces traversed along here….”

Expansion and white light, a thundering excitement: did Ox go out in a hot dream of the gilded past? It hardly mattered. Out was out. Miller chose not to size the materials too finely. He was giddy enough down here as it was. Kept feeling like he was walking around on a litter of human fatty tissue.

She heard them as a child, a voiced flutter of angels at her bedstead. Marcella, frail and often ill, watched for them, and they sustained her. But a hatred in the house frightened them away. Growing, she rediscovered them at the altar and in nature. No longer words, but whole sensations were what they brought her. An indivisibility to life, an essential sympathy: then, everything mattered. Giovanni heard them too. In truth, perhaps they were his, not hers. Of age, she lost them, seeking them. They fled from being understood. “It is grasped whole, Marcella, but never learned.” Thus, with tenderness and patience, Eleanor leads her back to her abandoned voices .

Voices. Out of mouths, over phone cables, on the streets, in his office, out of letters, from other papers, over the teletype. Day in, day out, they battered at Miller’s eyes and ears, throbbed convulsively through him, emerged at his fingertips as the West Condon Chronicle . Births and deaths. The forecast of snow, low pressure, high pressure, the unseasonable seasonable cold warm rainy dry front over front … process revealed. Twelfth Street under repair. Rotary’s district governor visits, is “favorably impressed.” Six or eight pages twenty inches deep by eight times wide, 960 to 1,280 column inches, upwards of 50,000 words of space, a decent novel, six days a week. Miller filled them up. Threats of war. Bingo at St. Stephen’s. Burglary in a supermarket. Cuts, heads, ads, syndicated features rescued him daily, but only from crisis, not from thrall. Afflictions, ball games, comic strips, and drunken drivers. The endless reiteration of sundered instants, grounded in the subject’s abject nature. He wanted to stop it, but once you turned it on, there was no turning it off. Grocers’ specials and Sunday services. Assassinations. High school prom. That’s where Miller’s January went. He didn’t want to see it go, but the next thing he knew, it was gone.

Always tomorrow’s deadline: but he no longer wished to lose today. Goddamn Clemens and his cigarette! The mine disaster had touched off something latently restless in him, and now he could not be satisfied. Miller felt rotten, edgy all the time. Snapped at Annie, wrote wearily, fell sullen at Mick’s. His stomach rumbled and burned and his gut softened and sank. But he had no time to think. The fleeting whimsy became a recurrent wish: he wanted to stop it. Should never have invented the written word. Kept folly hopelessly alive.

Hopelessly alive: epigraph of the day.

And as for folly, goddamn it, he hadn’t learned a thing. It took him a week to discover the classified ads Jones had planted, nearly on top of each other, in the Chronicle , and by then he was the last in town to do so: