The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel by Robert Coover

squalor following upon three days of serious neglect and abuse, and it is that sad state which greets him when he returns, there being no magic in the world, though by leaving the lights off (nobody home) he is able to dismiss the worst of it to shadow. “Let there be dark!” he says. More than three days of neglect. Debra traditionally does her spring housecleaning the first half of Easter week, but this year those energies were devoted to getting the Brunists moved in. Likewise, all their supplies; he’d seen her empty out the cupboards under the sink and bundle the stuff to the car. So, that’s right, he couldn’t really clean the place up properly if he wanted to. Good, forget it. The prophet’s drear unkempt hovel. Which he has entirely to himself now. There’s a certain melancholy in this, and a certain elation. He runs himself a hot bath, strips off his wet garments and throws them on the pile of other wet garments, and—“I stand naked before the Lord!” he declares to the silent house, and Jesus replies good-naturedly (they are coming to an understanding): Nakedness will not separate you from the love of Christ, my son!—settles his cold shivering body (now, as it were, the humble abode of the Master) into the hot water for a long healing soak and a solemn meditation on the nature of his new vocation.
    While walking home through the deluged town (the drains are clogged, the potholed streets are like running rivers, the desolate little town is in deep decay; no one cares), Jesus brought him the new evangel: the end has already happened. It was something Wesley already knew, has always known, and yet, walking through the cold rain down deserted streets in a numbed body, it was a revelation. He was thinking about the Brunists and their apocalyptic visions to which his wife has been drawn, and Jesus said: They are prophets of the past. That’s old news. The world has already ended. In fact, it ended when it began. This is not merely a post-Christian or post-historical world, as some of those people you’ve been reading say, it is a post-world world. We are born into our deaths, my son, which have already happened. I am the first and the last, he said, acknowledging John the Seer who he said was blind as a bat, the beginning and the end, and so are you. We are not, but only think we are. Our actions are nothing more than the mechanical rituals of the mindless dead. This is the truth. Go forth and prophesy.
    A prophet, Wesley knows (he has preached on this), does not see into the future, he simply sees the inner truth of the eternal present more clearly than others. He understands what Jesus is saying. He knows that he was born into death. Sure. This makes sense. Someone he read back in college said as much. All beginnings contain their own endings and are contained by them. It is his calling now to bring this truth to the world, or at least to this place on earth where he has been found, and to reveal all the hypocrisy and injustice and corruption and expose the madness of sectarian conflict which has no foundation. To what end such endeavor? There are no further ends; the question is irrelevant. Ignorance is sin and this town is full of it, for every man is stupid and without knowledge, as Jesus has reminded him. That’s all one needs to know. Thus, his feelings of failure and unworthiness are being transcended by a new sense of mission. His life, thought wasted, is acquiring meaning. Direction. Procrastination, the cause until now of much regret, can be seen in retrospect as a patient waiting for the spirit to descend. He would perhaps prefer to continue his ministry as of old (it ensures the comfort of hot baths, for example), but it’s too late for that. Actions have been taken, in particular his own, and, like Adam before him (Adam did not eat the apple, the apple ate him), he has to live with their consequences. If one can speak of consequences in a world that has already ended. He is somewhat