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….