Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Before returning to the studio they stopped at the shopping center on the highway to pick up some chop suey, Jesus complaining that he’s had enough carryout pizza for an eternity — why can’t those damned Romans leave him alone? She has never mastered the Dance of the Culinary Artist unfortunately, leaving most of that up to Ralph; she’s too easily distracted, never getting past the burnt frying pan jig. Her contributions to the church Christmas bake sales have always been packaged doughnuts topped with pancake syrup and sprinkled with red and green colored sugar. And there aren’t many carryout choices in West Condon; in fact, there’s only one. They weren’t dressed for a shopping trip, but she pulled on her car raincoat and dashed in to place their order, Jesus waiting back in the parking lot, shouting after her to ask for extra chow mein noodles. When she returned to the car he was gone. Can’t leave him alone for a minute. She found him preaching to some lounging beer-drinking teenagers who laughed and made rude remarks as she led him away, but they can go to hell and almost certainly will.

She finds her appetite has vanished, the very smell of the chop suey making her somewhat nauseous, but nothing wasted, Jesus is ravished and eats both portions himself. The day’s adventures have enlivened him. She had hoped he might be ready to go into retreat for a while, forty days and forty nights, for example, but he is already making big plans, reminding her that she told him his time is tomorrow. I think I was mistaken, she said, but he has paid no heed. Shedding Wesley has given him a new boldness; he is brusquer, more impatient, more demanding, but also more exciting, and a more eager and appreciative dance partner. Wesley was always polite and never took her for granted, but because of his natural diffidence, he often had to be coaxed into the more experimental aspects of the dance, Jesus urging him on from within. Now Wesley is gone as if molted (she has a serpent in her transfiguration dance, too, it’s one of her best movements, and it tumbles neatly into the succulent uroboros position), and the dances are freer and more direct, but she will miss the playful complexities of their old ménage à trois. Jesus, spooning up the last of the chop suey, announces that tomorrow they will revisit Main Street and pass through city hall and walk the various neighborhoods, and he will bring his message to the swimming pool and playing fields and address the foursomes at the country club, and on Sunday they will visit all the churches, that the preachers and their flocks might look directly upon the subject of their hypocritical prattle. Dear Christ, she wonders with a shudder, how will I get through all that?

He looks up and grins around a mouthful of crunchy chow mein noodles, rice and bean sprouts ornamenting his beard, and asks: “Were you speaking to me, dear lady?”

“Oh dear. Was I speaking out loud? I am so confused and exhausted. And I think I may be about to throw up.”

When the woman described her “Dance of the Incarnation” this morning as one of her most abstract (something is happening you can’t quite see) and least abstract (flesh is flesh), she was closer to the mark than she knew, for this paradoxical coincidence of opposites is the very essence of the Incarnation, a moment when the unimaginable ineffable supposedly coincides with its material expression. Videlicet, yours truly — he smiles at himself in a mirror and picks some grains of rice out of his beard. The creator identifies with his creation even as he simultaneously transcends all creation, becoming both part and whole at the same time, a mathematical conundrum. Whimsical amusements of the millennia of theological charlatans who have imbedded themselves in this preacher whose poor carapace he occupies, leaving him with this riddling residue. They also came up with the notion of learned ignorance, which is a kind of unlearning, and there is something to be said for it, if taken seriously and starting with that ruinously falsified history which is the Bible.

Can the Son of God and/or the Son of Man (another teasing conundrum) feel guilt? Yes, he can and does. The bizarrely fanciful apocalyptic delusions suffered by those no doubt well-intentioned but hopelessly benighted followers of his over in the church camp and indeed around the world are largely his own contribution to world history. Such vengeful bloodthirsty ideas had been around for a good while before he came along, but he made them his own, and because of his rhetorical and teacherly talents (yes, he had a certain charisma, he acknowledges, posing magisterially before the mirror, then softening his gaze to a loving, protective and understanding one and reaching out with open hands) and not least his exemplary intransigence, he got others around him to buy in to his claim that the much-prophesied establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth was not only imminent but had already begun to happen and he was the guy with the inside track. Many alive here will see the day and will not have to die, he’d said. Follow me and you’ll make the cut. Where did he get such megalomaniacal ideas? Well, they were in the air, but mainly it was the Baptist, wrongly said to be his cousin, who led him to it. Seduced him with his crazed evangel. Gave him the tools, the lingo, sent him off to round up a gang of his own. They were harsh times. He was pretty desperate. Everyone was desperate. If life were to be bearable, something had to happen. It did, but not what he’d foretold. No matter, people will believe anything. Enter mad Paul, the unscrupulous evangelist scribblers, the Patmos wild man, the remote muddle-headed church fathers (so called) plus a few ruthless tyrants and you’ve got a powerhouse world religion. And then down through the centuries: generations of other desperate people like those church campers out there, borrowing the spiel for equally fatuous end-times reruns of their own. All his fault.

The truth is you’re a fraud.

I know it, but as my jailer once asked, or is said to have asked: What is truth? Anyway, if I’m a fraud, then, as all those coincidence-of-opposites philosophasters would say, I am therefore all the more genuine.

At least you never said anything about your own Second Coming.

Never occurred to me. Somebody else thought up that—“Wait a minute. Who is this?”

After her thin retch (nothing since breakfast, really), Prissy gargles and rinses and, aware that she may have left the studio door unlocked, hastens back, grabbing up Ralph’s brandy bottle on the way and getting hit by his rage gun again. She stumbles (Ralph has been so surly of late; maybe it was a mistake to repaint the back window where he had scratched the peephole), picks herself up and hurries on, fearful Jesus might be on the loose again. He is not. He is standing before the mirror, hands on hips, looking put off with himself. “Why?” he asks, and answers himself: “Because you’re too slow. That’s why.”

“No, no,” she gasps, “I came back as quickly as I could!”

“I have a mission to fulfill! It is time for the Lord to act! If I’d waited for you, we’d be stuck in here until next Christmas!”

“Christmas?” She’s confused. What is he talking about? “That’s the other end of the year.”

“Exactly.” His reflection looks up at her, seeing her there as if for the first time. “Ah. Are you still here?”

“Who,” she asks in a voice she almost cannot hear herself, “were you talking to?”

He shrugs, glares at himself. “Shut up,” he says. “I’ll handle this.”

“I only meant—”

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Are you…are you still Jesus?”

“Of course I am,” he snaps. “Who else would I be?” He is glaring at her as he was glaring at himself.