Origin of the Brunists

Epilogue: Return

The West Condon Tiger rose from the dead, pain the only sign of his continuance, for he was otherwise blind, deaf to all but a distant shriek, and abidingly transfixed. There was light, or seemed to be, more felt than seen. And down again: into the black bowels. Later: coruscations of terrible brilliance, an engulfing center-less agony. “Help!” Sounds of the rude world — or only a dream? Then, as the earth lazed through a few million revolutions, the pain passed, leaving only the light, figureless and unaimed, a medium merely: so it had come after all. And was he impressed? Not at all. Last thoughts: obscene blasphemies, social phalanx erected to the whole holy lot. Retributive passage then through epochs of black nebulae that twisted into shapes and masks of the grieving dead, scarred and supplicating: he sorrowed but could not reach them in their distress nor could they him in his. Unrepentant wrenched back to light, torture, somebody cried out, then dropped again to the dark company. Thus ages passed, in flickering succession. And what would he emerge? toward what new monster was his soul evolving? He tried to move — anything — assert his will — could not. Nailed fast to his torment, he stared out with blind eyes on the impossibility of the cosmos, and, staring, saw what looked like a cord with a button at the end. He tried reaching for it, realized for perhaps the billionth time in the course of his soul’s racked passage that he could move nothing at all. Nonetheless, from nowhere, from his renascent will maybe, an Angel of Light—the Angel of Light — appeared. “I thought I died,” he said and wondered who had stuffed his mouth with rocks. “How many years have I been here?” meaning light-years.

“Some eighteen, twenty hours,” said Happy Bottom drily. “And how feels today the man who redeemed the world?”

“A little while …” he said, but already he was tumbling, and there were great convulsions and mountains fell, burying his words. And again a little while …

She came to him on the arid plain, a motion of dull white on dull white, defined by her shadows, by her shifting tunic folds, by the dark point of her head. How she moved he could not tell, if she did at all: their convergence seemed governed by some law irrelevant to willed motion. From his height he could see the smooth curve of her brow, the clasp in her loose brown hair. He sought for images there, but convulsions of pain shrank his vision. Heal me! She looked up and, smiling faintly, uncertainly, held his gaze. Now! he gasped. In her hands, she held a fading dandelion, which now she brought to her smiling lips. From his great bulge of pain hung his knees and feet, and between them he could see her upturned face. Oh damn it, Marcella! Let me in! Her smile faded, her grieving eyes drooped to the dying flower, her lowering head’s delicate rotation conducting the hairclasp between his toes. In it now he saw himself, crosshung, huge below, head soaring out of sight. She turned, receding. When next he perceived her, she was kneeling, not far away, scratching a hole in the hard dead clay to plant the dandelion. Was that blood? “Please! Oh God!” But, smiling, she was patting dust around the stem. Her tunic lay limp on her spine and haunches, darkened between her thighs. A pale foot’s sole showed itself below the hem: then suddenly shot out, the hem flew up—“No!.” he cried, squeezing shut his eyes. Something knocked against his cross: vibrations racked him and, screaming, he fell.

It was night. He was staring straight up at the ceiling, one arm outstretched and the other folded but elevated, and both pinned to something or other. His neck ached from the weight that lay upon it, and he was unable to see lower than the tip of his enormous nose. He was breathing hard; screams echoed in his ears still, the wound in his fork screamed still. Nailed into it: a flower — but had it taken root? He was almost sure, but he’d heard of amputees who felt their fingers and toes, and so he couldn’t trust the testimony of his nerve ends.

She came in then and said, “Well, the old cock crows again!”

“You mean—?”

“Does it hurt?” He heard water running, then felt the lid fly off it and a shriveling cold wrap it. Intact! “Shame to waste it,” Happy said, “but I don’t want any crowds forming outside your door.”

He laughed around the rocks and muck. “You know, I thought I’d lost it,” he said.

“You nearly did. You can thank that big horsey lady for holding back the hatchets.”

“Who? Clara? No kidding!”

“I guess she knew a good thing when she saw it.”

“Why didn’t those goddamn cops come?”

“I don’t know,” Happy said flatly, a frown crossing her freckled face. “Maybe they knew a good thing when they saw it, too.”

She helped him then to urinate, and though he felt like one long ravaged nerve, he was able to smile. “Take good care of it,” he whispered. “God gave the greater honor to the inferior part, let us not do less.” With a wink, she pierced his side with a needle, and the nerve coated over. He relaxed, and though he plunged once more toward darkness, he plunged now without dread; the nails in his palms were basketballs and his legs were lean and could run again. “I’ll be back!” he said, and, distantly, he thought he heard rewarding laughter.

Judas sat in the garden, propped against the tuberous trunk of an ancient tree, and gazed wearily upon his companions. Most slept, scratching fitfully at the old itches. It would come to nothing, he knew, watching them. He fingered the moneybox. There was now almost nothing in it. Why had they trusted him with it? Because his pure hope belied their weaknesses. They trusted him because he included them all and needed none of them, but they feared him for what he wanted, and his were never the decisions made. The prophet brooded distantly. For days now, Judas had suffered the man’s wretched beseeching eyes. Judas knew what he wanted, knew that the man himself nor none of these could ever do it. Simon Peter, snoring, scratched one calloused foot on a tree trunk. One of the others seemed to be making running motions with his feet. A woman, too sleepy to shuffle away the prescribed distance, squatted to piss; someone protested, and she moved on. The fattening Passover moon illuminated their fragmented pathos. Judas stood. He looked up toward where the prophet knelt, saw that the man was watching him. He’d expected that, but felt a shudder just the same. He stared out on the hard dry hills, stared ahead at the days succeeding days, the endless wearisome motions, all prospects sickened to habit, stared out on the hopeless generative and digestive processes of unnumbered generations, and thought: Well, anyway, it’s something different. And he went down into the town.

“Listen, Happy,” said Miller, celebrating the bath hour, “let’s set up a private little cult of our own.” He saw doubt cross her eyes, as she looked up from his wet belly to study his face. “Trade rings, break a pot, whatever it is they do these days, build for perpetuity.” Blushing, she turned back to the belly, rained suds on it from a sponge squeezed high. “Anyway,” he said, “it’d be something different.”

She dipped an index finger into his navel. “And on this rock …” she said, and they both watched the church grow.

The Coming of Light had been, unless one took Eleanor Norton’s point of view, delayed; the Powers of Darkness had stormed the holy Mount, throwing the Sons of Light into dungeons or dispersion, and so there were none there to whom God might, in proper glory, come. From visitors, from doctors and nurses, from others hospitalized like himself, Miller picked up the pieces, and, oddly, without hands to write it down, he seemed to enjoy it all the more. Happy, he learned, had watched it all on television — all channels carried it, in spite of the nudity, none apparently wanting to be the first to cut itself off — and though reception had been bad with the storm, she had recognized him floundering around out there in his trenchcoat and had decided he might need a little help. But by the time she had arrived, the police had at last moved in, religious freedom or no, the Brunists were being herded into schoolbuses brought out there for the purpose, and Miller was nowhere to be seen. Overhearing lurid accounts of what had just happened and thinking him dead, she had turned her woman’s wrath on the mayor, judging him guilty by negligence, and poor Mort Whimple had nearly joined the army of the blind. Then she had chased up the hill, learned from that fat boy who used to be Tiger’s assistant where he thought the body had been dumped, raced there to find him in an awry heap, a public curiosity, in a puddle before the red clay cranny of Cunt Hill. A mess, dressed only in mud and blood, but alive. She had grabbed an ambulance boy she knew and made them load him up — in spite of demands already rising on the Mount, where the cops, in their inimitable manner and being perhaps just a bit excited themselves, were opening a few recalcitrant skulls — and they had rushed him off to the hospital.

Eventually, another twenty or so Brunists had joined him, a few newsmen who, curiously, got the brunt of the Brunist wrath, as well as another forty-odd who sustained injuries from getting trampled inside the bingo tent which had suddenly collapsed. Few had died. A small child had been mashed to a pulp in the bingo tent panic and a woman near the entrance had perished in a fit; somebody had had a miscarriage; an old man, with several bones shattered when the tent fell, had died in the hospital of a stroke; a lady named Clegg had apparently succumbed in medius ritus to a heart attack, though she, like many, Doc Lewis said, had also got knocked around a bit; a woman who had flown in all the way from the East Coast had died a week later of pneumonia, and the old man in New Hampshire whose sight, he’d said, was returning to him had, following the new light, taken abortive flight off the roof of the old folks’ home; and, of course, a few weeks later they found Ralph Himebaugh under the Bruno bed, though by then Miller was already down off his rood and out of the hospital. Other than that: only broken heads, collapsed lungs, bruised bellies, crushed spines, and the like, minor statistics.

Born to be caught and killed. Frail cages. Containing what? Staring at X rays of his fractured clavicle, right thumb and left humerus, which Happy held out for him to see one morning while one of her buddies gave him an enema, both of them joking about his torn ear, rooted-out hair, broken nose, blackened eyes, and chipped and loosened teeth, he suddenly felt himself out there on the hill again, being danced on, bedded with corpses, splayed for a good Christian gelding, saw again the massed-up nameless bodies, the mad frenzy for life, the loins giving birth, and deep despair sprayed up his ass and inundated his body. “Why did you bother, Happy?” he asked.

He expected her to make some crack, but instead she only smiled and said, “I don’t know. I guess because I like the way you laugh.”

Yes, there was that. Not the void within and ahead, but the immediate living space between two. The plug was pulled and the sheet lifted, and the despair, a lot of it anyway, flooded out of him with a soft gurgle. “My message to the world,” he said, and if he hadn’t been afraid of swallowing half his teeth in the process, he might have laughed along with them.

Survival of the fittest. Or was it the youngest? Or rather the one with the right connections? Jesus yelling from his cross: “Maggie! where the hell is Maggie?” Miller mused, uprighted, staring out on a balmy April afternoon. What next? He didn’t know. A lot of feelers from radio and television, but all they offered him was a job and he didn’t want a job. Dear Mr. Christ: In view of your experience in personnel management … No, it was somehow like Ox Clemens going down in the mines: a broken bird. Once Ox had scandalized a whole stadium of fans and players, those that saw and heard, when, coming into a time-out huddle just after making a brilliant drive-in shot in a whale of a game up in the state championships, face dripping sweat and eyes closed, hand on a hard-on that not even a jockstrap could hold back, he gasped, “Oh Jesus! I jist wanna jack off!” In the walled-in years of datelines that had followed, whenever for a moment he’d broken out of the pattern, Miller had remembered Ox’s mystical moment, and he was thinking about it now.

On a table nearby sat, or stood, his old speedgraphic. Somebody had gathered up the pieces, Jones maybe, and sent them to him. Jones’ own photos, he’d learned, were being made into a book called On the Mount of Redemption. Happy had reassembled the whole apparatus into a kind of squatting figure with the lens for a navel, looking, not back into a dark inscrutable box, but out on West Condon, and her parabolic intent was not lost on him: shrunk and its perspective distorted, West Condon was upside down. Happy, he knew, wanted to leave West Condon. He couldn’t blame her. So did he, yet at the same time he knew better than to expect too much of East Condon. A little more elbow room, of course, a little more privacy in which to nurture their nascent sect. Here, he no longer hated really, he was only tired, the spirit was gone out of him and he just felt plain cramped … or maybe that was only a product of his present plight. Crucifixion was a proper end for insurgents: it dehumanized them. Man only felt like man when he could bring his hands together.

A lot of people had come to see him. Some of the klatch from Mick’s had brought him a fifth of Canadian and some cheap bourbon, most of which they’d managed to drink up themselves at his bedside, either forgetting he had no arms to help himself with, or feeling too embarrassed about it to hold the glass for him. No one had said anything directly, but the way they’d talked, Miller had got the idea they supposed he’d be moving on when he was able. Guys on his ball team had stopped up to shoot the shit. He’d urged them to get a team up, but they seemed to have no heart for it. Most of his people from the plant had dropped by, too, sooner or later. Naturally, they’d wanted to know what was going to happen: was the Chronicle going to publish again? He didn’t know. But he’d told them he thought it would open and he paid them their regular salaries. Sometimes, he had to admit it, the idea of working up a good layout or chasing a story appealed to him, and he longed to hear old Hilda hump again. Just the taste of a Coke stirred up the old excitement. But then somebody like Robbins or Elliott would drop in and make him want to run again. Reverend Wesley Edwards had winked at him and tossed a wave from the doorway most mornings, but he had never come in. Was he gloating? Probably.

Jesus, dying, disconnected, was shocked to find Judas at his feet. “Which … one of us,” Jesus gasped, “is really He: I or … or thou?” Judas offered up a hallowing omniscient smile, shrugged, and went his way, never to be seen in these parts again. Probably best, all right.

His own connection came by then to lower him, turning a noisy crank at his feet: mechanized Descent. Later, she would prepare spices and ointments. For now, she only wrapped his body in the sterile linens, stuck a thermometer in his mouth, turned her back to pluck idly at the wandering legband. Five picas, given all stresses. And that was what he needed to know: what were the stresses? Even the thermometer was a lesson, he knew. Was he going to go on forever plucking at legbands and submitting to having his temperature pointlessly taken? Oh Christ! How he wanted to move his arms again! How he wanted to feel! He spat out the thermometer, careful not to dislodge any teeth, and said, “Happy, come here!” She had to stand on a phonebook because of his arm’s elevation, and he could only use one hand, but she could use two. He closed his eyes and received a world of messages, and while they were plugged in like that, he worrying about whether or not his whole life until now hadn’t been just one fractured waste of time, she phoned him in yet another Judgment….

At one point during the Last Judgment, at a particularly tense and difficult moment, someone present released a thundering, monumental — if not indeed mystical — fart. It was not, however, as efficacious as its historic reputation might have led one to expect. The Divine Judge did not disappear in a cloud of crimson smoke, nor did His Judgments reflect increasing or diminishing wrath or benevolence, nor did the Devil lead a raucous dance around the Throne, nor did the Angels faint, nor did their wings quiver sensuously from suppressed giggling and set the fabled West Wind going, nor was the farter pardoned (he or she was not even recognized), nor, in the end, were the masses edified by this commentary, if it was that, on Divine Justice. In short, nothing happened at all. Nevertheless, one should not lose sight of the reality of it….

Old Wally Fisher came by when he got out of jail. Because of the bingo tent scandal and his general poor attitude, he’d been jugged that night with all the Brunists. When they’d spied him in their midst, still in streetclothes, they’d taken him for an envoy from the dark powers, and he would have gone the way of all poor flesh, meaning Miller, had not Dee Romano propitiously and for five bucks intervened. Fisher’s account of that night’s whole wild scene was hilarious, obscene but hilarious, from the no doubt apocryphal tale of the state centurion caught mixing it up in the women’s cell to the description of the comedy outside, seen through the cell windows, where a wobbly-kneed scar-faced Mort Whimple and a ring of unnerved troopers had stood, weapons at the ready, to keep at bay a rollicking mob of news and cameramen, East and West Condoners, visiondrunk one and all — and Miller, hearing it, felt better than he’d felt in weeks. They had jailed the poor guy, hadn’t set him free until he had agreed to turn over the entire proceeds of his First Annual Spring Carnival to the West Condon Chamber of Commerce for its industrial brochure, had brought a series of damage suits against him, and had started boycotting his coffeeshop, but the old bastard could still laugh about it, and Miller laughed with him. “Oh Jesus, Tiger, we gotta do something like that again soon!” he wheezed, dewlaps awag, old man’s lowslung paunch quaking. (Jesus, crucified, had a sudden glimpse of all his end would lead to, and he began to giggle. A Roman soldier, indignant at the blasphemy, thrust his spear into Jesus’ quaking side. Real blood came out, and the soldier paled. But Jesus went right on giggling: once you know you’re going to die, what, really, can they do to you?)

“Well, we could run Doris for mayor,” Miller suggested. The old man had a fit about that, but Miller, laughing, had a funny thought: what about running Abner Baxter?

By the time Ted Cavanaugh came to see Miller, the idea had got a pretty firm hold on him. A number of things had happened in the meantime. The article he’d set out to do on the Brunists in the first place, his study of small-group rebound in the face of public embarrassment and a description of the roots of religious motivation and commitment, his public excuse for involvement and his private antidote against the guilt he felt for the pain he’d caused, got rejected again, discouraging him from any more games-playing in that direction. On the other hand, he had received — and accepted — an offer to do a series of TV commentaries on the Brunists which, he saw, might give him a wimble into the whole world’s cranny. Moreover, he could move his arms again, plug in razors, use the telephone, pinch bottoms, and piss alone: in short, felt a man again.

Abner, he knew, was still in town, only Brunist leader not to run, and Miller learned he was holding clandestine Brunist meetings with a format all his own. His church had been wrecked, his home broken into and looted, black crosses swatched on his door, his kids beaten up, all credit canceled, and he’d got a lot of anonymous phonecalls and letters telling him he’d better move on or else. But he’d stayed. And, from what Miller could pick up, he also seemed to be at odds with the rest of the Brunists by now, or at least with Clara’s people, and partly, it seemed, because he still insisted louder than anybody that Bruno was a prophet and the Coming was at hand. A democratic mayoral election with the Millennium as an issue: it had a certain promise, and he could plot the documentary out from the beginning, wouldn’t have to move in after it was all over.

Wes Edwards came in with Cavanaugh, crinkled up his pastoral face, and asked, “Feeling better?” and that just about decided it for Miller.

The chat with Cavanaugh went poorly from the start. Ted was talking about West Condon’s troubles and “the best thing for all of us,” Miller was talking about Peter who, hearing the cock crow thrice, got to like the music of it, and Edwards was speaking nervously about friends he had up in the city who might find something for Justin more suitable for his talents. “Where things are livelier,” the preacher was saying, and Ted’s words were “shoulder to the wheel” and “a tough ball game,” while Miller, speaking of money changers and pigeon-sellers and getting nowhere, finally interrupted and said, “I’m not going.”

Cavanaugh stood. “Why not?”

Miller sighed. “Necessity is laid upon me,” he said.

“I’ve got a buyer for you,” Cavanaugh said, not getting it. He explained the details: amounted to enough to clear debts and buy gas to get out of town.

Miller listened. If he had any horse sense, he’d take it, but the recent deprivation of his senses had deprived him of that one as well. He knew, of course, that the plant was in bad shape, had been looted during his hospitalization, knew, too, that he was sick to death of deadlines and club meetings, knew that Happy wanted to get out of here and rightside-up again, but still he couldn’t stop himself. “Go to hell,” he said. He heard Happy outside his door, so he added as a sort of dedication: “Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.”

She came in after they’d gone and he explained it to her. “Just until November,” he said. He had a lot of money just now from all those articles and the TV assignments to get the plant in shape, and for the present a weekly would do as well as a daily. Maybe he could even get ahold of the radio station somehow. He began to make plans.

Happy sighed. “Okay, but if we stay that long, we might as well stay on through January.”

“Why? You mean the Brunist—?”

“I’m talking about tigers, man,” she said, and patted her belly.

“Hey! You mean it? But when—?”

She shrugged, grinned. “Sons of Noah …”

“Aha! sign of the covenant!”

So they quickly signed a pact, exchanged gifts, broke a chamberpot, bought Ascension Day airline tickets for the Caribbean, and, nailed to the old tree of life and knowledge that night, she murmured in his ear one last Last Judgment…

The trial proceedings, caught up in the absurd intricacies of human ambiguity, slowed to a near standstill. Several totally unanticipated logistic problems had been run up against, and the Angels, faced at last with the actuality of this long-planned but unfortunately never practiced event, proved less resourceful and efficient than was no doubt expected. A leading American public relations agency was hired for thirty pieces of silver to provide the solution, and indeed certain gains — or at least apparent gains — were made. To be sure, the image of this sordid business was improved. A catchy slogan was introduced to help everybody remember to bring their certificates of baptism, and, to take up the slack caused by the cramming of the judicial calendar, tourism of Heaven and Hell, formerly the privilege of the sensitive few, was introduced and became a democratic commonplace. Still, in spite of the agency, or probably in the long run because of it, the whole affair bogged down entirely in bureaucracy and the impenetrable paradoxes of behavior, language, and jurisdiction, until at last one day it occurred to someone (most likely not a child, in spite of the overwhelming tradition) to ask why the whole thing was being perpetrated in the first place, and the Divine Judge found Himself hard put to provide an answer that satisfied even Himself, having to confess that He was less amused by it than He had thought He would be. It was therefore agreed to drop it, and the various Divine Substances took their leave. The only trouble was that by that time the enormity of the support organization and the goal hunger of the participants were such that the absented Divine Substances were never missed. The proceedings, indulging the everlasting lust for perpetuity and stage directions, dragged on happily through the centuries, the only consolation for those who might have guessed the true state of affairs being that which the risen Jesus centuries ago offered to his appalled disciples….

“Come and have breakfast.”