Origin of the Brunists

by Robert Coover

  On Saturday night, learning that there was no longer any hope left for the men still in the mine and that the toll was fixed at ninety-eight, she opened her mind to the Teacher and received the following message:

  As the body suffers, so is the mind cleansed. The seven starred image of life’s oscillation from abysses to cusps shadows forth in morning’s east, but a firmness is forthcoming. Is nine a number? Is eight a number? Lead men to numberlessness! In the earth a harsh tremor, above … an infinite repose. Avoid the illusory, the present accident of conjoined particles, and seek wisdom with love! For a time is to come, and the soul will swim in the vast and empty sea of enlightenment! Does the body tremble? Chastise it, mind, with mocking laughter! Domiron bids you!

  She was disturbed to discover that this new message was largely composed of parts of old ones, but the new ordering of these parts not only provided her startling insights into the events of the moment, but also revealed to her how blind and complacent she had become. It was there all the time, and she had not seen it—had virtually refused to see it! And it was she who had accused Domiron of betrayal! And now other wonders came to mind: the frequent minor accidents she had suffered recently around the house, the disappearance of objects, the unseasonal autumn blizzards and the strange damp January, not to mention the increasing turbulence of the messages, the ruptured syntax and enigmatic juxtapositions, all a kind of static, as it were, electromagnetic countersignals from malfeasant forces. Customarily, Domiron instructed her through her right hand, though occasionally through her left, and, in certain urgent situations, directly through her voice.

  By my light, thou shalt flee the darkness!

  he had cried in her throat more than once.

  She had attempted, over the years, to assist Wylie in attaining a communication with the higher forces in the universe, but, though he honestly tried, he had almost no success. Domiron explained privately to her that

  … if even the faithful are few, how rare then the master!

  and that passive natures, themselves noble and receptive, if not supremely spiritual,

  may find subtler paths to wisdom.

  In any event, it was common knowledge who Womwom (Domiron’s name for Wylie’s soul at the seventh aspect) once was—when the time was ripe, he would play his significant role.

  Have faith! All that is, I am, I am all that never was. All that shall be, I have been.

  Sunday, the eleventh, a thick fog pressed at her morning windows. Fog pleased her usually, misted the hard forms that so often deluded and misled her, provided fleeting images of the essential emptiness, but today it betokened her own uncertainties, her difficulties in finding the true way. It curled and wisped through the black branches of their tall elms, like her thoughts floating elusively through the stretched fingers of her mind. Now an object took shape, became an inference, a cipher for action, but then it faded behind the fog’s nervous curtain.

  She sought a clarification to last night’s message, but none came. She considered it. Last night she had understood it, but now she wondered if it were really anything more than the customary exhortation to maintain spiritual discipline. She understood, of course, the next ascendant sign—now befogged!—but what of the forthcoming firmness? For herself alone or for others? Lead men, the message said. Was she to lead them to the “firmness” in the time that “is to come”? Or is the firmness merely the vernal closing of the cycle? Doesn’t the message in fact dismiss the mine disaster as irrelevant? The “harsh tremor” in the earth does not disturb the “infinite repose” above, in the higher aspects. And “the time to come” is nothing more than the soul’s return to its source, is it not? Was Domiron trying to tell her that her own death was near? But then why would he ask her to “lead men”? Or might it have to do somehow with the “One” to come? And why should he draw especial attention to the sun’s sign? A signal to free herself from the merely phenomenological, or was there a more destructive intent, a parabolic reference to former devastations upon the earth? And there were the numbers to be considered, the number of miners who perished, of course, ninety-eight, but if thought of in a series, nine and then eight, then the next number would be seven … but what of that? For it is to “numberlessness” he asked her to lead men.

  She inspected the whole band and all channels, but neither radio nor television provided her clues, although the radio repeated frequently the toll of ninety-eight miners missing or dead. She copied down what names they gave, but they proved meaningless to her. Now, if something of cosmic significance were to happen, how would it be signaled? Isn’t a fire deep in the earth as telling as a prodigy in the sky? Perhaps, but there were few precedents. Of course, there was the evidence of lithomancy, and even the scales of fish had prophesied. Nevertheless, the message seemed to discount a cosmic event:

  … an infinite repose.

  Outside, the fog lifted, but the day remained overcast. Lunch came and went, but she had little appetite. Wylie napped after, then went for an afternoon walk—she had been greatly blessed: she knew she could never have survived the humiliations and suffering of the last fifteen years without Wylie’s belief in her. She read once more the past two years of communications, and struggled with the enigma of these present words. Impulsively, she counted them … ninety-eight! She started, counted again. Her heart raced. No doubt about it!

  Lead men to numberlessness!

  Of course! Domiron was trying to tell her to lead men away from … from a head-count of mortalities to his message! to the limitless and ununumbered truth of his word! “Does it matter these have died?” he was in effect asking. “Bring all to wisdom!” She nearly leapt for excitement! And it was in this state that she found herself when Wylie came back from his walk with a copy of the special edition of the West Condon Chronicle, announcing in headlines the miraculous rescue of Giovanni Bruno. “Wylie!” she cried. “I knew it! I knew it! I knew it before you came back! Domiron told me!”

  “What! You mean about the rescue?”

  “Yes! It was all there! I wanted to shout it out, but I was alone!”

  “But how—?”

  “It started with the numbers. Nine and eight in a series. Next comes seven, and it—”

  “Seven?”

  “Yes, and it is seven that leads to numberlessness and to the One!” She was so excited she hardly knew what she was saying. Everything fit at last! It was happening! She even felt certain she had begun thinking about Bruno before Wylie came in.

  “That’s funny,” said Wylie, as though disquieted.

  “Yes, don’t you—”

  “Eleanor,” he said softly, “there were other men trapped in a room with Bruno, but they died.” He paused, but his gentle blue gaze, aglitter with a kind of awe, was on her unwavering.

  She lowered herself slowly to sit on the sofa. “How many?” she asked in fear.

  “There were six others,” he said. “With Bruno, they made seven.” They said nothing more for a long time. There was much to consider.

  A fine snow, more like frost, flecked the land overnight, and Monday dawned bright and cold. Eleanor dressed in warm wool and, after poached egg on toast, slipped on her winter coat and galoshes, fur cap, gloves and scarf and walked out to the mine, she had decided upon it last night, walked out, as it were, to the point of origin.

  The town, as she passed through it, or at least this northwest segment of it, seemed strangely unaffected by the disaster that had rocked its very underpinnings and widowed so many of its houses. If anything, there was a fresh renewal, a mocking sense of gladness, brick and painted homes adazzle under the harsh blue sky, toys and bikes in a gay scatter, naked elms casting long graceful shadows on the gilt pavement.

  But what was an exhilarating crispness in town became a bitter cold at its edge. Wind smarted her eyes, tears converting the blue radiance into a blurred and angry glare. She pinched the scarf up tight against her throat, but the cold blew through it. The mine road was rutted and her booted feet made p
oor progress on it. After about ten minutes, she stopped, looked back at the town behind her. She had barely begun. It would take her at least an hour, She faltered. What was the point of it, anyway? But something vital in her, something more than mere will, some deep-celled quality forged in some other life’s trial, pivoted her once more and thrust her forward down the old road to Deepwater No. 9.

  The road, like the barren yellow-stalked fields, was of a brownish clay the color of bruised fruit. Short bushes grew wildly along the ditches to either side of her, and occasional tree sprouts stuck up like stripped switches, but desolation and death was mostly what she saw through her tears. Much of the time, she walked with eyes closed, her face a numb mask, the air gathering in icy pockets within her lungs. Her legs grew very weary, then indifferent, then seemed even to strengthen, discovering a needled warmth in motion. She walked head down, staring at her feet, counting the steps. She began to see the burdened feet of humanity, treading through their endless centuries of despair. Each gray-booted foot appeared before her like a birth, and died just as quickly as the other materialized to replace it, a ceaseless recurrence, and yet each step was different, unique, fell on different soil, angled away from hazards, delayed a moment longer or perished in a quickened stumble, and always, cushioned by soft earth or tormented by frozen corrugations, there was pain and, in spite of the progress … a loss. The voice beside her took her wholly by surprise. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What did you say?”

  “Can we give you a lift? It’s a cold morning.” Inside the old car there were two men, both in miners’ clothes. They looked to be Italians, the driver a large dark man, bold-jawed and perhaps intemperate, the other slender with a generous hooked nose and crinkly smile.

  “No, no, thank you,” she stammered. “I … I’m just out for the walk.” How foolish that sounded! Timidly, she smiled.

  “Are you sure?” asked the driver. He had a large voice, resonant and willful, but friendly. “It’s a pretty rough hike.”

  “How much farther is it?”

  “About ten, fifteen minutes more. You can see the small rise up there ahead, that hill. The offices and portal are just to the left.”

  She could see nothing, but she nodded. “I’ll walk,” she said. “But thank you very much.”

  They shrugged and left her. She watched the car lurch and rattle away from her, then turned her eyes once more to her feet. She had been close to something and had lost it, but still she could hold before her that which she had had and investigate it with her mind. The unthought thought that the men in the car had blocked was this: Though each step, each appearance and disappearance, was singularly unique, the spirit lodged in them was of an unalterable whole, inseparable from past steps, a part of future ones—it was not the mere passage of finite existences themselves with which one had to reckon, but with passage itself; motion, not the moving thing. And though opposites her feet—this, too, had been at the edge of her broken thoughts—though apparently isolate and contrary, at their source they were a single essence, there their duality disappeared. A triangle occurred to her, but something suddenly unpleasant about it repulsed her. She looked up, wearied of her feet, and discovered the mine buildings just ahead of her, crouched in a sparse grove of barren trees. To her right, distantly, a small rise, itself almost treeless. Above, a potbellied watertank that overlorded the squat buildings; beneath it, cars sat in a gravel lot, including that which had passed her. She was glad she had walked the whole distance, yet an edge of disappointment frustrated complete satisfaction: her meditations had not equaled the promise of the previous direct experience.

  An odor of sulfur here, soot in the air, and near the buildings the sky seemed to yellow. Slate like black jasper crunched underfoot. Behind the watertower reared an insectlike structure, housed in at the top, about four stories high. She guessed it was where the coal was processed—was it sorted or cleaned or something?—for a chute yawned from it over railroad tracks. She stared at the building, letting its eccentric shape sear into her underconsciousness—there was nothing like it in her memory—while her thoughts sputtered and bubbled away. A line came to her suddenly from somewhere, she fumbled in her coat pocket, found paper and pencil:

  Out of fog: new signals; in clarity: the gathering of … fog.

  She seemed to wake, discovered for the first time there were people about her, mostly miners, motion was minimal, there seemed to be nothing happening, some glanced at her, but none paid attention. She sighed, secretly relieved, for the sense of awakening in public had startled her. She read the message. It did not seem to be from Domiron. Some lesser aspect probably. Of these, she trusted few, and doubted now. On the contrary, she reasoned, fog is a false emptying that adds interest to the mystified forms, while clarity, simplifying perception, liberated the mind from counteractive effort. Nevertheless, she pocketed the note … it was foolish to be too hasty.

  Over one grimy brick office building, a wind sock jabbed rigidly. A northwest wind, and it pierced her thoroughly. The sock poked its signal at the nearby rise, which lifted its nubbed crest just over the fretwork of denuded trees to the east of the buildings. Too squat for a hill really: a hummock, a soft knoll. On a concrete wall, next to a steel door, she found a sign that read: CAUTION! NO SCUFFLING OR PLAYING! NO SMOKING! This is a Closed Light Mine—Smoking in or Carrying Smoking Materials into This Mine is a VIOLATION OF THE LAW! Scratched on the wall with coal was: Look! This Means You! with an arrow aimed at the word “Scuffling.” A few adolescent obscenities, cartooned nude women, male genitals, no clues. In red: JE$U$ $AVE$! Why don’t you? 1st Nat’l Bank. She counted the words on the printed sign: twenty-eight—it meant nothing to her. Four sevens. Well, so what? The first five words, true, contained a certain meaning applicable to her: to be careful not to become childish about this crisis, nor to seek unnecessary trouble; but, given the rest of it, it was probably merest accident. What was a “closed light mine”? She didn’t know. Were the lights enclosed, or was the mine defined somehow as “light”? Perhaps there was, in a sense, light trapped in the mine that needed now to be released. But all these directions seemed futile. And then, suddenly, beside the steel door, as though it were materializing, appearing there now for the first time, she saw a telephone! So certain was she that she had marched this bitter way to receive a message, that she impulsively lifted the phone off the hook and put it to her ear.

  “Excuse me, lady, can I help you?”

  She nearly dropped the phone in fright, fumbling returned it to its cradle, apologized to the tall miner beside her. “No, no! I’m sorry! I was only curious, and—”

  The miner smiled. “Oh well, go ahead and listen, if you like.”

  Eleanor calmed. “Thanks,” she said, “but I’m just getting in your way, I’m afraid. I hope you’ll pardon me.” They exchanged smiles, and she walked away.

  Unexpectedly, she came upon a Salvation Army canteen, still operating although the two women inside were packing things away into carton boxes. There was coffee, though, steaming hot against the chill in her, and they seemed delighted to have a customer. They apologized that the doughnuts were from Saturday, but, suddenly hungry, Eleanor accepted one anyway. It was rubbery and tough, sugarless, but sweet to her. When the women learned she was not herself a widow, had lost no one out here, they grew talkative, but Eleanor was too weak to listen. A sense of displacement was overtaking her; exhaustion threatened to buckle her knees. She sat on a wooden folding chair. She could never walk back again. The women told her that all the bodies had been recovered and were being prepared by morticians at the high school gymnasium. They described the hideous condition of some. Funerals tomorrow and Wednesday. They produced anecdotes of rescue, which Eleanor pretended to attend. Their hollow voices clucked and moaned at the horror. Well, did they think they would escape it? Sensational slaughter made people count death exceptional.

  The two miners who had offered her the ride entered, and she asked if they might be going back soon; she wou
ld like to take them up on their offer. They laughed and said Sure, introduced themselves as Mr. Ferrero and Mr. Bonali. They had coffee first, and Eleanor received an account of Mr. Bonali’s escape from the disaster.

  The ride back into town was surprisingly brief. On foot, it was a healthy hike, of course, but the cold wind had distorted the distance. She told the two men that she was a teacher at the high school, and Mr. Bonali, the driver, said he had thought so when she had told him her name, because he had a daughter, a freshman this year, who had mentioned her. Angela. Angie. Eleanor said, oh, of course, Angela Bonali, but she couldn’t bring the girl’s face to mind. Mr. Ferrero said it must be a tough job, he wouldn’t have the courage to face up to a pack of teen-age monsters every day. She replied that she enjoyed her work, but regretted the absence of spontaneity and receptivity in today’s youth. Of course, she didn’t mean Angela, she was only speaking generally.

  “No, I know what you mean,” Mr. Bonali concurred. “She’s a wise kid, thinks she’s pretty smart. They all do.”

  “Well, we weren’t angels,” observed Mr. Ferrero, and Mr. Bonali, laughter booming, agreed with that.

  Eleanor explained to them that she had to pick up some papers to be graded in her office at the school, so they dropped her off there, although of course her purpose was to visit the gymnasium.

  The mine company guards at the gymnasium door would not allow her to enter. Beyond their bulked shoulders she could see the dark cadaver lumps on the floor under army blankets, fewer than she had expected, white light raying in on them from the opaque windows back of the bleachers, dust hovering gloomily. On the basketball scoreboard: WEST CONDON 14, VISITORS 11. Eleanor rarely thought about numbers—she respected the numerologists, but the ever-present prime numbers were too vague to satisfy her—but, out of an old prejudice from childhood, multiples of seven always caught her eye. Seven, fourteen, twenty-eight, thir—well, yes! of course! the toll! incredible!