Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Nuts. “So how’s your mom doing?” It’s like her presence has somehow created her own absence…

“Better. That lady has been attempting some kind of faith cure, and it seems to be working. Sort of. At least Mom’s in a better mood. Less bitter, somehow. She seems to have resolved something in her mind. So what the hell. If it works, all power to her.” What can she say? That his mother would be better off suffering? “Here, Sal. Why don’t you take the cameras, get us some more pix?”

“Nah. I’d just lose them. Before you go, though, could you let me use your car a minute?”

“Sure. What for?”

“I’m about to blow a fuse, Tommy. I need to change ponies.” Is that a mixed metaphor, or what? I gotta sandbag the flood. Reload the rocket chamber. Feed the kitty. Diaper up. Ram a tam.

Make a list.

“Well, all right. But don’t leave the old one in the ashtray, please.”

“Don’t worry. It’s what trenchcoat pockets are for. Keeps the sniffer dogs away from the grass.”

In his car, after making the change, she takes out her notebook and writes down that phrase about presence and absence. What does it mean? And what will she do with the spent bullet? Dracula’s tea bag, as her roomie calls it. Where will Angela most likely poke around and find it?

Gods fucking mortals, whether as birds, bulls, dragons, or rain, are always stories of rape. Mary got bonked in the ear, so it was a kind of mind-rape. The Annunciation as an act of conceptual violence.

Words as random ejaculate. Potent. Diseased. Syphilitic. Mind rot.

Virtuosity alone is not satisfying, she writes. What is needed is the unmistakable crack of a hammer against glass.

Riding the Hood. Story about a chick who comes of age, dons the rag, and heads out into the world to make her fortune, delivering the goods to grandma. Who is juiced beyond redemption. A wolf tries to cut in on her territory, but he gets stoned on grandma. Red rules.

A woman’s biological liquidity — blood, milk, tears: the emergence of life from a fluid medium.

There’s a chinless little guy with big ears and buckteeth who passes through the food tent at regular intervals, spouting Bible verses. Mostly about last times. Death and destruction and the tortures of hell. God’s playground delights. The verse-spouter doesn’t look at anyone or speak to anyone. He is speaking to the world. Or some world. He reminds Sally of a sick polar bear she once saw in a zoo, striding compulsively back and forth between two fixed points. She draws a cartoon of him. “A city on a hill cannot be hid!” the little fellow cries out. For at least the fifth or sixth time. A line from the Sermon on the Mount. Most loathsome text in that loathsome book. He’s probably talking about the plans for a temple up here. If he knows what he’s talking about at all. “Sweet Jesus!” he exclaims.

City on a hill. Imagine. A wandering hill. A soft hill. A slippery hill: The city loses its footing. Oops. As the city slides toward the darkness below, the city fathers enact desperate ordinances against the decline. They float away like comicstrip balloons as the slide accelerates. This tent is perched on a hillside. Made of what? Coal slag maybe. She has to sit facing downslope for fear of tipping over, holding her place by gripping it with her butt. Facing upslope would be easier, but she might fall backwards.

Story idea: Struggling against invisible resistance up a hillside or mountain, like in a dream. What is on the other side? A destroyed town? Pleasure? The abyss? The feeling of persisting inside a negative force for no reason other than the need to persist. Ipsey Wipsyphus.

Sweet Jesus: a killer, dangerously criminal but given to endearing eccentricities. Pissed off at what they’ve done to him and out for revenge: Listen, you think I can forgive this? He shows his scars. When I think about them they still sting. I’m going to rapture the shit out of those dickheads! Dirty Pete as his enforcer. His ma: Big Mary. I Love to Tell the Story…

Maybe the easiest thing to do is found another church. She writes that, turns the page over, hoping no one demands to see what she has written. She tries to look like she might be praying. Her scribbling has drawn scowls, questions. But also beatific smiles. She’s more comfortable with the scowls. To be sitting here among them is no doubt dangerous, but here she is. On one tagged page, which she can quickly flip to if someone comes to peer over her shoulder, she has written: The Brunists: an amazing movement! And it is. Almost like a magic act: something conjured out of nothing.

Two homely kids in tunics come into the tent, go out, one skinny, the other fat, looking stoned, careful not to touch, but never more than a foot or so apart. Not part of the others. Vaguely familiar. A rash of red fuzz on the boy’s lip. They seem to share some dreadful knowledge. Or wrongful expectation.

One is deprived of full contact with reality by the flaw of hope.

Write about that. The woefullest thing. Hope.

As best she can understand these people, they hope the world is about to end, possibly even today, but are also afraid it might. Meanwhile, even as they get ready to fly away, they are building themselves a big spread for their headquarters and even a temple up here on the mine hill. Part of what that “city on a hill” cry is all about. The cathedral impulse: Is it an admission of failure?

There’s a sad sack of a woman who can’t stop eating. She picks up a sandwich, leaves the tent, tugging her tunic down at the back. A few minutes pass, she returns, picks up another sandwich, leaves, tugging her tunic down. She’s not wearing any shoes. Chin sunk in her cleavage, mouth stuffed with sandwich. Often, she seems to be crying. She must have put away at least twenty sandwiches since Sally has been sitting here.

Time. Back to that. The shriveling of those foreskin relics. What time does. But: Christ preaching, riding a donkey, posing on the cross. Acting. In time, objects dissolve, but gesture is frozen forever. Sally Elliott’s molecular law.

Words: somewhere in between. Their excessive superfluity. Like sperm. Now and then, after millions swim past and die, one sticks. Makes everyone sick for a while.

At first, people came over to speak to her, introduce themselves, invite her to come pray or sing or just walk about with them and she was able to put them off by saying she was waiting for someone, thanks; now they mostly leave her alone. Some asked what she was writing. “My thoughts,” she said.

Her discomfort. Her stupidity. Her ugliness. Her blood sacrifice.

There’s an old lady in the doorway, sitting upright in her chair as though bracing herself for an immediate ascent. Must be nearly a hundred. Can’t come too soon for her, else she’ll have to go through the burial, decomposition, and resurrection drill.

Idea for a story: The dead rise from their graves. Billions of them. Brief elation. And then they fall over and die again. A mess.

Now and then a helicopter rattles overhead. Five years ago, there were a lot of them. She thought of them then as pestilential, locust-like emblems of the last days. Today’s loner is a distant melancholic echo of that day, like a marker on the grave of that lost time, of all lost time. But what time is not lost? Even future time is lost. What is different about the end when it comes: it cannot be remembered.

There are some snotnosed brats running around in the tent and a huge bald redfaced man in a split tunic gives one of them a sullen clout that sends him sprawling. Bawling. A lit cigarette dangles between the fat man’s thick lips like a pea shooter. Darren and Billy Don said no smoking in the tent, but nobody is going to argue with that guy. A thin little woman with coarse sandy hair, a pooched belly, and a sad martyred look comes in and leads the yowling kid out. The big man takes up a fistful of sandwiches and follows them, brushing the tent flaps, making everything tremble. So much of him.