Origin of the Brunists

by Robert Coover

  He looked down at her hair, coarse and dry like yellowed grass. An act, he thought, but he said, “I’m sorry, Wanda, this is all wrong. Hell, I’m not the kind of guy ever to …” He tried his damnedest to think of old Lee, that swell guy, but just couldn’t bring him well to mind, smelled the hair, odor of sweet soap, reluctantly let go her neat cranny, but she held on to him.

  “Don’t leave me, Vince!” she whispered.

  “Wanda, listen—”

  “Vince, I’m so terrible alone, you cain’t know how it is for me!” That sounded real enough. The toddler had left the baby squalling on its back in the corner, had crawled over to where they stood embraced, and now had a grip on Vince’s pant leg. “Vince, it’s Valentine’s Day!” she whispered into his mouth, then jammed her lips against it, her hand pulling mightily on his fly. He jerked up her dress, drove his hand down between her thighs as the three-year-old banged in through the front door, letting in a sharp gust of winter.

  Charlie announced that night he had joined the Marines. They were sitting in the living room watching television, Vince and Etta, and Vince said, “If you’re gonna butt in on the program, why don’t you tell us something important?” Both he and Etta made a lot of wisecracks about the Marines being the right place for a shaggy zootsuit bum like him, and Charlie wised back that at least he’d get a decent meal now and then, and he wouldn’t have to sweat getting nagged at every five minutes. Vince snorted, said he sure had a helluva lot to learn about the Marines. Charlie shrugged, tucked a butt in his mouth, moved out the door snapping his fingers. Vince watched him parade out, then turned to Etta to remark what a useless cocky grandstander that boy was, but checked himself just in time. Etta was crying. “Hey! what’s the matter, chicken? Was it something Charlie said? I’ll go—”

  She shook her head. “I don’t care how bad they are, Vince,” she whispered through her tears. “I just hate to see them go.”

  Angela came in from her bedroom where she’d been doing her homework. Music from her radio piped in to muddle with the television. “What’s Mom crying about?” she demanded.

  Vince stammered a moment before he realized he wasn’t guilty of anything, then said, “Nothing, baby. Go on back to your studies.”

  “I believe I have a right to know,” she insisted.

  Vince supposed she’d got the line out of some goddamn movie. That girl could get under a man’s skin sometimes. “It’s just that Charlie is going into the Marines, and your Mom—”

  “Oh, is that all! Well, that’s hardly something tragic! I’d say it was good riddance of bad rubbish!” She clamped her pencil between her neat white teeth, then apparently thought better of it and fitted it carefully over her ear, fiddled with a hairpin. There was a pause, filled only by an overemotional argument on TV and music from Angie’s radio that sounded to Vince like some guy having a public orgasm. Etta checked her sniffling, smiled feebly at Angie, and the girl went back to her room.

  Vince walked over, patted Etta gently on the shoulder. “Care for half a beer?” She shook her head. Vince figured maybe they ought to try to work something up tonight, been a long time and he felt she deserved a share of his rediscovered potency. But later he fell asleep watching an old movie on the set, and when he woke, Etta had already long since turned in.

  One night in bed with Wanda not long after that, he happened to mention that he had a boy going into the Marines. “You already got a boy growed up, Vince?” she asked absently.

  He swallowed, felt it shrivel. “Yeah,” he said. Decided not to mention the other six.

  At the bus station on Ash Wednesday, last week of the month, they made stale jokes about the snowstorm predicted and how Charlie, the lucky bastard, was headed south. Vince noticed how much taller the boy looked all of a sudden, and then, trying not to be nervous, said good-bye to Etta instead of Charlie. And from then on, there were just the three of them in the old house.

  8

  March tore into West Condon on a sudden savage snowstorm. The lawyer Ralph Himebaugh, brooding over the sinister state of affairs in the world, pushed through the swirling drifts, fur-capped head down butting the wind, feet secure in heavy galoshes, but still cold, cold to the bone. In the whine of wind and snow, there was little to see or hear. Ralph was a man removed, and it was as though the world were remarking the continuing aggravation of his isolation, as though nature herself were persecuting him, the victim, the sacrifice, the outcast. Disaster whistled at his wraps and portents stung his ears.

  Discord, famine, war, cruelty, deaths, rape—couldn’t the fools see it? Every day, mounting, tragedy upon tragedy, horror succeeding horror, oh my God! It was too plain! Yet their blindness was a part of it, was it not? For years it had been clear to him, the pervasive current of mantling terror, discernible through the scrim of false and superficial reportage, and for years now he had kept records of its progress, scrapbooks of calamities and disasters, deathtoll lists, maps of its movements. Everything about it absorbed him: the scope, the periodicity, the routes of passage, certain correlativities, duration and instantaneity, origin and distant derivative effects, expenditure of energy, parallelisms and counteractions, and, above all, its wake of mathematical clues. Oh, he was wise to have done so! For although at the outset the incredible complexities had pitched him into a hell of confusion and despair, by disciplining himself, by literally chaining himself to the task and pummeling himself to greater wakefulness, he had at last mastered the necessary technology. No, it had been no delusion, not at all! Almost immediately, he had discovered the steady intensification of the disaster frequency, the irreversible course toward cataclysm.

  Suddenly, as his own mind was on the terror, a car fluttering through the snow about a hundred yards away went into a spin. Ralph stood transfixed, appalled, as the black machine, mindless, yet possessed by its own inner necessities, lazed through wide chaotic circles in the unbounded street, then bumped up and stopped against a telephone pole that reared out of the shifting snow like a black cross. Oh my God, my God! How much time? A man got out, startling Ralph. He had somehow forgot to expect a man. Ralph felt the old impulse, the impulse to flee, but he overrode it; the recent years, while sobering, had engendered a new kind of courage. It was what emerged and took over, he supposed, when the old irrational constructs of hope and their false comforts were cut away. He stumbled through the snow toward the man, wind nearly blinding him.

  The man looked up, smiled, shook his head. “Damn!” he said. “Just like a merry-go-round!”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah.” The man laughed nervously. “But I’m gonna leave her stuck right where she’s at and walk the rest of the way. Boy! She really come in like a lion, didn’t she?”

  Ralph nodded, but did not return the stupid smile. The man’s indifference to the experience angered him. They shook gloved hands, and the man left him. His heart still racing, Ralph considered the car and the pole. When the man was out of sight, Ralph glanced about to assure himself of the snow’s effective screen, then kicked a dent in the door. “Goddamn you!” he whispered. The rest of the walk home, the machine coiled and spun in maddening sweeps before his eyes.

  On his porch, he mechanically checked the mailbox, then remembered it was Sunday. He tugged off the galoshes and stepped inside to greet his cats, Grendel, Nabob, Melpomene, Nyx, and Omar. They were hungry and so attended his presence. Nabob twisted and coiled, rubbing against his moving leg. It was not love. Their emotional range was between indifference and pure hate. He could accept that, yet at times it hurt him, for, against his will, he could not help loving them. He turned into the kitchen and Nabob nearly tripped him up—he brought his foot down on a paw. He removed hake from the freezer and put it to boil. He poured them some milk, but they lapped at it distractedly, their minds on the fish. Nyx sulked. He slipped her a piece of chicken liver. Nyx was a big pure-black animal with a long straight nose. Ralph feared her. “You hot black bitch!” he whispered at her.

  W
hile the fish thawed and cooked, he sat down at his desk in the front room and recorded the car accident in the P.O.—Personal Observations—journal. While constructing an essentially objective system, Ralph did not entirely reject subjectivity from it: the mere fact that it was he who had assumed the responsibility of this task was in itself a subjective element, and he recognized it. It was not proven, after all, that the force was mindless—the purity of its mathematics would in fact argue the contrary—and were it not mindless, he could well expect to be regarded as its enemy. He unwrapped last Sunday’s Guardian and Times, sent to him airmail, clipped out pertinent articles, recorded data from them.

  The cats protested. He returned to the kitchen, poured the boiling water into the sink, dumped the fish on the cats’ plate. With his foot, he blocked Nyx’ approach to the plate, made sure the other four had got their share. She clawed his ankle, but he laughed and held her back a little longer. “One day …!” he warned her.

  At his desk once more, he withdrew his scratchpad, did some hurried calculations. Still, the augmentation, the emergent numerical pattern, the cyclical behavior. Incredible! He sighed, chewed meditatively on the pencil, then began the task of carrying his figures all the way out. No, there was no escaping it. At the present rate of severity increase, mankind would necessarily be overcome within the next six or seven years. Six or seven years! Meticulously he rechecked his figures, and with graph paper he described a varied set of conceivable curves based on the slightly different scales he used in the different journal categories. And each time, it resulted in the same forecast—or suggested an even earlier date. Grotesque! It would be grotesque!

  This had happened before, of course, signs leading to the immediacy of catastrophe, and dates had in fact been passed, but always he had uncovered some fundamental error in the schematism itself, some critical factor omitted in ignorance from his computations. For example, at the very beginning he had simply listed all events as numerically equal, an appalling lack of sophistication that now amazed and embarrassed him in retrospect. But time and error had brought wisdom. Now, he was convinced, the system could not be more complete. There was no hope in it, given the human condition, for omniscient finality, to be sure, but it had to be taken seriously.

  The phone rang, startling him. What now? But it was only Jim Elliott, the Chamber of Commerce secretary. He was working at home on the new industrial brochure and needed information on certain zoning ordinances, which of course Ralph had at the office, not here at home. Elliott was a stupid arrogant ass. Himebaugh explained the problem. “But listen, Jim, if you really need the ordinances, I’ll go get them for you.”

  “Aw hell, no, Ralph! Not out in that fucking mess. I just thought you might, you know, have them at hand, or something.”

  “No, but I really don’t mind. It is a nasty day, but—”

  “Don’t think twice about it! Anyhow, there’s a game on TV, and I’m sick of this goddamn brochure anyway. We’ll do it tomorrow.”

  “Well, if you insist. But do come in the first thing tomorrow. You know I wish to help all I can. How’s your family?”

  “Oh, everybody’s fine, thanks. Fat and lazy. Sally’s sore at me because I wouldn’t let her go out in the storm to a movie, but I think she’ll get over it.”

  Ralph chuckled cordially, chewed irritably on his pencil. Would the fool never shut up? He and the mayor were the two men Ralph hated most in this stupid town. They never wearied of imposing on his good will with their infantile little games and incredibly insignificant problems. And, God, they monologized without cease. Now it was that hateful brochure. And it was useless, utterly useless. They would never recover from the mine disaster, of that Ralph was sure. But what good would it do to tell them? They were all sick.

  “See you tomorrow then, Ralph.”

  “Yes, I’ll keep the day entirely free for you, Jim. Give my best to your good wife.”

  “Thanks, I’ll do that. Hang loose, now!”

  Ralph laughed lightly, as he supposed he was expected to do, and cradled the receiver. The idiot! The cats, fed, had composed themselves about the house. One of them scratched in the sand in the pantry. Ralph stood at a window and gazed out on a gradually darkening world, vanishing under the deadweight of snow. The wind had diminished, but the snow still sifted down heavily. There would be accident suits and insurance claims.

  He poured himself a snifter of cognac, brushed Omar out of the armchair, and curled up moodily in it, alongside his several scrapbooks and records. He started back about seven years, flipped slowly through, disaster after disaster, pausing meditatively at unusually significant events or peculiarly grotesque ones, letting his mind drift unanchored through the accumulating morass of woe and rot and grief. Slowly the black shape grew. It came to bear, as it had every day for nearly two months, upon the explosion at the Deepwater Number Nine Coalmine, seemed to hover like thick black fumes over that ravaged pit. What did it mean, why was it that single horror so impressed him? He knew full well it was purblind to place exaggerated emphasis on one event merely because of its proximity, yet he could not rid his mind of the possibility that this disaster, this one in particular, provided him, him in particular, some vital urgent message: as though—as though he had been the intended victim and had in some incredible manner escaped, and now he had one more chance, one more chance to find the way out, to discover the system that would allow him to predict and escape the next blow.

  The number ninety-seven, the number of the dead, was itself unbelievably relevant. Not only did it take its place almost perfectly in the concatenation of disaster figures he had been recording, but it contained internal mysteries as well: nine, after all, was the number of the mine itself, and seven, pregnant integer out of all divination, was the number of trapped miners. The number between nine and seven, eight, was the date of the explosion, and the day of the rescue was eleven, two one’s, or two, the difference between nine and seven. Nine and seven added to sixteen, whose parts, one and six, again added to … seven! Sixteen was, moreover, in the universe of the line, a fourth-dimensional figure, hardly less important than sixty-four, one more than the product of nine and seven. That product, sixty-three, also added to nine. And yet there was more: Though the acceleration curves for, as an example, energy expenditure and estimated cellular destruction were not the same, yet all of his curves tended to approximate the common parabola produced by the graph of y = x2, on which, as the value of x is increased by one in a series of whole numbers, the value of y increases as the square of the numbers in that series, and the value of the difference between the successive lengths of the accelerating y ordinates forms a series of odd numbers increasing at the rate of two units between each whole number in the original x series. When the unit value of x has reached three—the quotient of sixty-three divided by twenty-one, the number of the day within the tenth sign on which rescue took place!—the related value of y becomes nine and the difference between that value and the succeeding one of sixteen is seven! It was through this astounding discovery that Ralph had been able to place himself with certainty upon the present moment of the parabola, lacking only a final calculation of the value or values of the single x unit. When he had that, he knew he would be invulnerable! And it was not beyond his grasp, for he was slowly learning to measure the area under the several parabolas, and the area-function sooner or later would lead him to the ordinate-function, provided only he could finally expurgate these area measurements of all arbitrary components, which he believed his current project of graph overlays would eventually do. His head spun. He uncurled, poured another snifter of brandy, watching Grendel licking her genitals. Suddenly infuriated, he doused her with the cognac; she started, scampered under the couch. Only Nyx could do that and not nauseate him. He poured another snifterful.

  And then there was ninety-seven plus one: the infamous product of seven and fourteen. For years he had resented the emphasis placed on the number seven, supposing it to be the consequence of stupid obed
ience to the religionists’ texts. Only late in life did he discover that these infantile texts were actually corruptions of older and infinitely more precise, infinitely less adulterated writings, now lost, and he now willingly suffered through the garbage in search of the sources, now willingly respected the generative powers of numbers like one and seven and twelve and fourteen. Plus one: Giovanni Bruno. Who was he? Why was it he? John Brown! The very anonymity lent an unreal—or, rather, a superreal—odor to the occasion, a kind of terror, the terror inevitably associated with voids, infinities, absences, facelessness, zero. For seven weeks now, he had been contemplating a private conversation with the man. Ralph paced the living room. Perhaps he should go tonight. Yet, so much was at stake. His entire reputation in West Condon, for one thing. Nevertheless, a night like tonight, who would be out in it? Who would there be to see him coming and going? And, if apprehended, he could always explain himself in terms of some obscure legal matter. Even a will or something; God knows, the man should have a will. But how would he explain himself to Bruno himself? No, it was better to wait, to be certain, to have the questions precisely formulated. He poured more cognac, again stroked Omar out of the armchair, curled into it now with a thin jacketless book. He tried to read it, but could not concentrate. Why was it so famous? It was a pack of emotional ignorant ravings! He threw it down. The destroyer, damn it! The destroyer! They all saw it, but could not face it. Oh, the cowards! Oh, the disgusting yellow pigheads! Oh, the sniveling pissants! He again paced, cursing them, and drank his cognac. Precious ninnies! Asses! Babbling little chickenshits!

  Mel came tearing through the room, Nyx at her heels, and they rolled and tumbled, bounded and raced. He shouted, but they ignored him. They tangled in the cord of his desk lamp, brought it down with a crash. Separately, they scampered, but not before he had grabbed the broken lamp and brought it down punishingly on Mel’s sleek haunches. They hid. He crouched on his hands and knees, struggling to breathe. The room seemed to be afloat. He spied Nyx. With the lamp, on all fours, he stalked her. She curled her lip, emitting a kind of vicious snorting hiss. In his hand, the broken lamp shook. “You goddamn nigger whore!” he snarled. But he couldn’t hit her. Dizzily, he stood. He got a broom, swept the broken glass into a dustpan, emptied it into the wastebasket by his desk. His hands were quaking uncontrollably. Better read something, something to forget about it, he thought, but then decided on a warm bath instead.