The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (102 page)

Consider, she writes in her notebook: the whole of the human environment as a pedagogic instrument, art as a particular technique for focusing attention, for teaching skills of close regard. Why you have to mix it up, keep people on their toes. See everything.

She thumbs through the notebook and her current mood of disappointment extends to what she has written. The sophomoric silliness of so much of it. The pretension. The self-pity. Those lines she has set down about Bo Peep and Little Boy Blue, for example. She crosses them out in disgust. Then regrets it. Leave it. It is what it is, she is who she is, even in her stupid infantile doodlings. The doodle as a form of meditation. Meditation as process, not product. Books, too. When they become product, they’re dead. Writing is it, not the written. For all her disappointment, she still believes. Language makes and unmakes reality. There’s an unfathomable gap between nature and culture, the infinite and the finite. Only the imagination can even try to bridge it. Its failures are what beauty is. And so on. The litany of Saint Sal.

As the sky darkens toward showtime, Sally spreads her blanket on the little slope she picked out, though out of the private spot and onto a more public one so Tommy can at least see her should he chance by. She lights up the joint she has rolled and stretches out to watch the stars appear. Tommy vanished from sight some time ago. Probably gone off with one or more of his groupies. Sprawled in his convertible somewhere with a view of the upcoming fireworks. Where they can time their orgasms with the bursts in the sky. In the beginning, she thinks, staring up into that sky (the sheer volume of it!): the fundamental error of giving form to the formless, thus creating time and the perception of space. God’s famous parlor trick. But the notion that light—creation—is “good” will not stand the test of inquiry. Something like that. She’d write it down, but it’s getting dark and she’s tired of writing things down. She has worked at holding the earth together long enough for one day. Time to mellow. Beautiful summer night. New crescent moon like a glossy fingernail, brightening as the dark deepens, becoming a tiny rip in the sky, illumined from behind. On the horizon, the flicker of heat lightning. The birds are still into their nightfall bragging and seduction racket. The crickets and katydids. Crazy about love. Mosquitoes with grosser appetites. She sits up, already feeling the impact of the weed (whoo, nice), spreads repellant on her wrists, arms, forehead, and the back of her neck, buttons the shirt sleeves and covers her bare legs with the second blanket. She was wondering what would linger long after she left this place. This might be it, not a visual image at all, just the feel of summer. Before lying back again, she rolls a few more joints, her fresh supply courtesy of Moron. Feeling sad. But okay. How she wants it, really. Independence, it’s the day for it, isn’t it? Maybe she’ll just smoke the entire lot and crash out here for the rest of the summer. Dream a little dream of you.

She has been recording her dreams since she came home from college, cataloguing their peculiarities. Take-home coursework of a sort. Dreamtime 101. Once she’d done it for a while, she found she could make them up, or at least imitate the form. At first she thought it was leading her into something disruptively new, a break from the conventional well-told tales of the day, but in the end it revealed itself as a definable and familiar form of its own with its own set of rules and limitations. Vivid imagery, and just about nothing but. Actions, not language, until trying to describe them. Then, simple declarative sentences, like movie scripts. But little or no continuity, things happening and then not happening. Like the fireworks beginning to explode in the sky above. Pop! this and then pop! that. Linked by as little as trailing color. Sensations of flow, flight, fall, heavy-limbed slowness, mazy disrupted travels. Odd lines of dialogue with hidden meanings. Or not. Lots of family stuff. Abrupt transitions and bizarre juxtapositions. Unstable settings. Sudden breaks and gaps of time and space, casual violence, fleshy landscapes, public nakedness, absurdist reasoning. Spectacularly illogical events that seem completely normal. Strangers you know but don’t know. The threat of the Other. Feelings of powerlessness, vulnerability, masked by illusions of superhuman power, etc. In short, an awful lot like all those creation myths she read back in college, the main difference being that, while dreams are private, myths have been honed for the public marketplace. Invested with intentionality while hiding the original nonsensical flow. Just as the dreams she makes up with words are never as weird as the ones she actually dreams, which often defy inscription. Images in them she could never think up awake, and no idea where they come from or how they get into her dreams. Easy to see, then, how primitive minds would think of them as coming from outside themselves like visions from the beyond. Get doped up and let it flow in. Hello? God talking. First storytellers. Crazy zonked-out dream weavers. Establishing the fatal fetal patterns.

The dream she is having right now is of a drunk and/or stoned Tommy Cavanaugh sitting beside her, asking if she has smoked up all the grass. She doesn’t reply, just passes him her roach, lights another. They do the cabbages and kings thing, Tommy explaining that his dad left him in charge of everything to go track down the governor personally to try to get troops here by tomorrow, and he’s had to do everything from fending off the news guys asking about the sheriff’s murder, to dismantling the stage and food stalls and getting the kids out from under foot so they could begin the fireworks display, she pointing out for him meanwhile the Andromeda constellation backgrounding the light show up there, because the story of a hero’s last-minute rescue of a maiden chained to a rock seems to fit the dream narrative underway. He thanks her for all the help she’s been over the past weeks, and she says, Sure, boss, any time. By this time, they’re lying side by side on one blanket and under another, hand in each other’s pants, passing a joint back and forth with the free one while the flying sprays of color burst overhead, and she’s not quite sure how this has happened, but now that his hand’s there, digging deeper, it feels just right. She slides the blanket away and unzips his fly to bring his erection out into the open so that she can—what? not sure, let’s just see what happens—when Jesus turns up with a lady friend. Seems okay. Jesus has seen it all, what can he care? Tommy flinches, so she grips him all the tighter. Jesus is walking with a picturesque shepherd’s crook, which appears to be an old man’s cane with a taped-on extension made from a mop handle. There are a bunch of kids trailing along, too, but their eyes are on the sky, which is full of the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air. Jesus makes a sign that could be a blessing or it might just be waving off what he sees or he might want a drag. She passes the joint up to him, and that’s exactly what he wanted, yes. He sucks deeply, as if seeking ascension, and passes it to his friend for a toke, but she hands it back with a sad smile, patting her tum. She is wearing the tails of her blouse out over her slacks. There is a little bulge there. Jesus has been busy. Sally is thinking about Jesus’ forgotten wife, poor red-eyed Aunt Debra, whom she visited in hospital before she was sent elsewhere, where they could supposedly deal with deep depression: when you’re chained to a rock, the hero doesn’t always come along. Aunt Debra had gone silent, except for a simple mantra repeated over and over: I’ll be there. I’ll be there. She leaned in to kiss her and Aunt Debra didn’t move or kiss back, just said flatly, I’ll be there. “Bless you, my children, and be of good cheer,” Jesus says now, the smoke curling out of his mouth like cartoon balloons of speech. “God has so adjusted the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior part: lo
(cough!)
, it is given unto your hands.”

“This is kind of public,” Tommy says with a laugh when Jesus and his friends have moved on. “Maybe we should go somewhere.”

“It’s already booked,” she says.

She yelps with pain. Tommy recoils, but she claps him to her. “No, stay where you are, don’t move. It just hurt more than I thought it would.” She’s gasping, as if she’s run a mile. She doesn’t know if the pot has served as a partial anesthetic or has intensified her sensory apparatus. “Give me a minute.”

“What
hurt?” he asks in palpable confusion. “Wait a minute! Why are you so
wet?
Omigod, Sal!”

“It’s all right, Tommy. It really is. Just hug me for a minute.”

“But I always assumed—I wouldn’t have—fuck! You should have told me!”

“Ssshh!”

To be naked with him. Holding him. Such a sweet thing. But awkward at first. She felt self-conscious, offering up all she had and fearful he might not want it. Thankfully he left his T-shirt on, so then she did too, and that seemed to help. When their pants came down, it all felt completely natural. Almost too natural, like when they were little kids jumping about under the garden hose. But this time he had a hard-on. She was so grateful for that hard-on. It meant he wanted her. Even if he was too stoned to be sure just who she was. It meant everything would really happen. She wanted to kiss him but was afraid to. She wasn’t used to it, might do something stupid, and didn’t think he’d want to, kissing being more intimate than mere sex. But no need to fear. He’s an experienced lover. Did all the right things, made her feel desirable, desired. He was the one to turn the lights out. To put her at ease, she thought. He was so pleased about the room. Before switching off the lights, he thanked her for choosing a place with air conditioning, but he was looking out the window onto the highway and she knew he had been afraid she might be taking him to the Blue Moon Motel. She was staring at his bare backside as he stood there at the window. It was heart-breakingly beautiful. She wanted to nuzzle it. Wipe her tears on it. Bite it. Chew it. With the least encouragement, she would have done so. She was high as a kite. The cliché seemed right. All clichés did. Everything happening was a most wonderful cliché. When he did kiss her, his long-fingered ball-playing hands stroked her gently, lovingly, passed down her back, over her buttocks, between her thighs. Also a cliché. A creamy one. She was already coming before he lowered her to the bed.

Now he’s moving in her again. This is okay, she thinks. This is really okay. Bring on the clowns. Even the pain’s okay. Mostly gone now and overtaken by all the other physical stuff happening. Worth cataloguing, but not now. All the way to her throat she feels it. Her eyes, the roots of her hair. On her own, it was never like this. She clutches his undulating buttocks, her hands grasping what her eyes ate up, and as he drives harder and harder, she knows just how to respond, as though she has been doing this all her life, her hips rising to meet his thrusts, her thighs clamping him. She even—how did she know to do this? maybe she read it somewhere—while gripping his neck with one hand, fingers his anus with the other, then searches for the base of his testicles, some special spot there, pulling him deeper into her. At the last minute (for her, it’s not the last minute, just another one, it’s great, don’t stop, her whole body an infinitely expanding orgasm), he grunts, jerks out of her, spills his seed on her belly, both hands cupping her buttocks, pulling her to him, whimpering softly, his body still pumping furiously, and then with a deep sigh he collapses gently on her. The right thing to do. But, oh, how she ached to have him stay where he was, explode inside her. What an ecstasy—even as chubby Monica with the bad complexion comes to mind—that must be! So much yet to experience, to try, to learn. He kisses her under the ear, his nose guard massaging her scalp. A kiss of appreciation. Not once but twice; leaves his lips there. She feels so rewarded.

They lie there a while like that, she holding him in place, caught in the parentheses of her thighs like a delicious thought to be squeezed of nuance. Like hugging a heavy pillow. The darkness is not so dark now. She can see his shoulders, faintly blue from the light outside, can hear beyond the hum of the air conditioner more fireworks going off, the distant drone tone of motors out on the highway, the world returning but not the familiar one she knew before. She’s never been in a room like this, for example. Out by a highway. In a houseful of adventurous transients. Fondling a boy’s testicles. He will ask her why she did this, and does. The answers she has rehearsed won’t do. This is no time for her usual wiseass comebacks. No mention of that night at the ice plant, please. She tells him simply she had always wanted it to be him, even before she knew what “it” exactly was, and she has waited all this time until it could happen and she thanks him for it. No obligations, she says, but only to herself, happy when he hugs her tenderly in response.

And then finally he does slide off and stand up and turn on the light. “Oh man. They’ll think there’s been a murder. Why didn’t you put something under you?”

“I always sign my work,” she says, hearing her old self again, but proud of the body that his paired shiners are staring down at: it did everything it was supposed to do and it did it well, never mind what he might think of it as an aesthetic object.

“Just look at my dick,” he laughs, holding the bloody thing up with his fingertips. She’s afraid he might be angry or disgusted, but he grins and takes her hand and pulls her to her feet and says, “C’mon, let’s get cleaned up.”

And so they do that, and the shirts come off and there’s all the fun with the soap, and more sex standing up and kissing under the shower, and then toweling each other off and back to bed—it’s a big room with two beds, so they have clean sheets to crawl into—and one last joint to share (thank you, Moron, you dear little horse’s ass). It’s all very tender and loving and completely naked now, better than she could ever have imagined it, using their mouths as well as everything else, he punching her here and there with his funny nose, one position not unlike that dogleg at the fourth tee. My God what has she been missing? She even gets to realize that little fantasy of a while ago of nipping his bottom in her teeth. But also a certain melancholy is stealing in because she knows it can’t last—he doesn’t love her and her feelings, well, they’re mixed at best. Much as this is, it may be all of it. Tomorrow it will already be a memory, a dream dreamt like all memories and fading as dreams do, and she’ll be overtaken by a longing quite different from the sort felt until now. Humans. They think too much. “Are you hungry?” she asks. “I’ve only had a hotdog all day.”