Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Tommy and Pete hurriedly exit the playing field, pulling some of the little ones out with them, Tommy remarking as he strides by that he needs a fucking beer, Pete offering him one from the cooler in the trunk of his car over at the parking lot. Monica throws her kid over her shoulder and apologizes, saying she’d better go keep an eye on the boys that they don’t get into trouble, and leaves her. Down on the field, the fight ends when Angela’s brother steps into it, slugs a few, and leads his troops out before the cops turn up. Should she wander over to the parking lot and invite herself to a beer? She shouldn’t.

Consider, she writes in her notebook: the whole of the human environment as a pedagogic instrument, art as a particular technique for focusing attention, for teaching skills of close regard. Why you have to mix it up, keep people on their toes. See everything.

She thumbs through the notebook and her current mood of disappointment extends to what she has written. The sophomoric silliness of so much of it. The pretension. The self-pity. Those lines she has set down about Bo Peep and Little Boy Blue, for example. She crosses them out in disgust. Then regrets it. Leave it. It is what it is, she is who she is, even in her stupid infantile doodlings. The doodle as a form of meditation. Meditation as process, not product. Books, too. When they become product, they’re dead. Writing is it, not the written. For all her disappointment, she still believes. Language makes and unmakes reality. There’s an unfathomable gap between nature and culture, the infinite and the finite. Only the imagination can even try to bridge it. Its failures are what beauty is. And so on. The litany of Saint Sal.

As the sky darkens toward showtime, Sally spreads her blanket on the little slope she picked out, though out of the private spot and onto a more public one so Tommy can at least see her should he chance by. She lights up the joint she has rolled and stretches out to watch the stars appear. Tommy vanished from sight some time ago. Probably gone off with one or more of his groupies. Sprawled in his convertible somewhere with a view of the upcoming fireworks. Where they can time their orgasms with the bursts in the sky. In the beginning, she thinks, staring up into that sky (the sheer volume of it!): the fundamental error of giving form to the formless, thus creating time and the perception of space. God’s famous parlor trick. But the notion that light — creation — is “good” will not stand the test of inquiry. Something like that. She’d write it down, but it’s getting dark and she’s tired of writing things down. She has worked at holding the earth together long enough for one day. Time to mellow. Beautiful summer night. New crescent moon like a glossy fingernail, brightening as the dark deepens, becoming a tiny rip in the sky, illumined from behind. On the horizon, the flicker of heat lightning. The birds are still into their nightfall bragging and seduction racket. The crickets and katydids. Crazy about love. Mosquitoes with grosser appetites. She sits up, already feeling the impact of the weed (whoo, nice), spreads repellant on her wrists, arms, forehead, and the back of her neck, buttons the shirt sleeves and covers her bare legs with the second blanket. She was wondering what would linger long after she left this place. This might be it, not a visual image at all, just the feel of summer. Before lying back again, she rolls a few more joints, her fresh supply courtesy of Moron. Feeling sad. But okay. How she wants it, really. Independence, it’s the day for it, isn’t it? Maybe she’ll just smoke the entire lot and crash out here for the rest of the summer. Dream a little dream of you.

She has been recording her dreams since she came home from college, cataloguing their peculiarities. Take-home coursework of a sort. Dreamtime 101. Once she’d done it for a while, she found she could make them up, or at least imitate the form. At first she thought it was leading her into something disruptively new, a break from the conventional well-told tales of the day, but in the end it revealed itself as a definable and familiar form of its own with its own set of rules and limitations. Vivid imagery, and just about nothing but. Actions, not language, until trying to describe them. Then, simple declarative sentences, like movie scripts. But little or no continuity, things happening and then not happening. Like the fireworks beginning to explode in the sky above. Pop! this and then pop! that. Linked by as little as trailing color. Sensations of flow, flight, fall, heavy-limbed slowness, mazy disrupted travels. Odd lines of dialogue with hidden meanings. Or not. Lots of family stuff. Abrupt transitions and bizarre juxtapositions. Unstable settings. Sudden breaks and gaps of time and space, casual violence, fleshy landscapes, public nakedness, absurdist reasoning. Spectacularly illogical events that seem completely normal. Strangers you know but don’t know. The threat of the Other. Feelings of powerlessness, vulnerability, masked by illusions of superhuman power, etc. In short, an awful lot like all those creation myths she read back in college, the main difference being that, while dreams are private, myths have been honed for the public marketplace. Invested with intentionality while hiding the original nonsensical flow. Just as the dreams she makes up with words are never as weird as the ones she actually dreams, which often defy inscription. Images in them she could never think up awake, and no idea where they come from or how they get into her dreams. Easy to see, then, how primitive minds would think of them as coming from outside themselves like visions from the beyond. Get doped up and let it flow in. Hello? God talking. First storytellers. Crazy zonked-out dream weavers. Establishing the fatal fetal patterns.

The dream she is having right now is of a drunk and/or stoned Tommy Cavanaugh sitting beside her, asking if she has smoked up all the grass. She doesn’t reply, just passes him her roach, lights another. They do the cabbages and kings thing, Tommy explaining that his dad left him in charge of everything to go track down the governor personally to try to get troops here by tomorrow, and he’s had to do everything from fending off the news guys asking about the sheriff’s murder, to dismantling the stage and food stalls and getting the kids out from under foot so they could begin the fireworks display, she pointing out for him meanwhile the Andromeda constellation backgrounding the light show up there, because the story of a hero’s last-minute rescue of a maiden chained to a rock seems to fit the dream narrative underway. He thanks her for all the help she’s been over the past weeks, and she says, Sure, boss, any time. By this time, they’re lying side by side on one blanket and under another, hand in each other’s pants, passing a joint back and forth with the free one while the flying sprays of color burst overhead, and she’s not quite sure how this has happened, but now that his hand’s there, digging deeper, it feels just right. She slides the blanket away and unzips his fly to bring his erection out into the open so that she can — what? not sure, let’s just see what happens — when Jesus turns up with a lady friend. Seems okay. Jesus has seen it all, what can he care? Tommy flinches, so she grips him all the tighter. Jesus is walking with a picturesque shepherd’s crook, which appears to be an old man’s cane with a taped-on extension made from a mop handle. There are a bunch of kids trailing along, too, but their eyes are on the sky, which is full of the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air. Jesus makes a sign that could be a blessing or it might just be waving off what he sees or he might want a drag. She passes the joint up to him, and that’s exactly what he wanted, yes. He sucks deeply, as if seeking ascension, and passes it to his friend for a toke, but she hands it back with a sad smile, patting her tum. She is wearing the tails of her blouse out over her slacks. There is a little bulge there. Jesus has been busy. Sally is thinking about Jesus’ forgotten wife, poor red-eyed Aunt Debra, whom she visited in hospital before she was sent elsewhere, where they could supposedly deal with deep depression: when you’re chained to a rock, the hero doesn’t always come along. Aunt Debra had gone silent, except for a simple mantra repeated over and over: I’ll be there. I’ll be there. She leaned in to kiss her and Aunt Debra didn’t move or kiss back, just said flatly, I’ll be there. “Bless you, my children, and be of good cheer,” Jesus says now, the smoke curling out of his mouth like cartoon balloons of speech. “God has so adjusted the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior part: lo (cough!) , it is given unto your hands.”