The Second Coming

A week? He felt his beard. At least a week.
    This time when he checked his bones, he found that one was probably broken, the small bone below the knee. When he tried to stand, it seemed to want to come through the skin. But there was little pain. It was possible to go on all fours, knees spread. Perhaps the bone was only cracked.
    It was only after an hour, when at least, by any calculation, he should have gained the top and the opening, that there came the awful sense of loss, like a traveler who even before he slaps his back pocket knows his wallet is missing. Something was missing. He had lost something. What? The crawl. He had misplaced the crawl.
    No, he hadn’t misplaced the crawl. The crawl opened into the theater. When he crossed the theater he should have entered the crawl. Instead, he had started up the slide. It was the wrong slide, however. He was lost. A cave is like a river. It is hard to get lost going down. Going up is something else.
    Turning off the light, he made himself comfortable and took stock. All he knew for certain was that he could not go back to the theater, let alone negotiate the crawl and another slide. Well then—he thought, yawned, and either fainted or went to sleep.
    When he woke, he found himself wondering where he was, what strange bedroom. The toothache was gone, he noticed. He spat out something. Probably pus. The abscess had drained. Then the bad memories opened in his head like doors. This was not a bedroom but a cave. He had lost the crawl. He was very thirsty. It took a long time to stand up. As he shone the light around, he realized he was looking for something, water.
    One of the dark spots on the ceiling close above him drizzled. He reached up his free hand. It was not water. Furry bodies fell on him, around him, squeaking. Tiny fans of warm skin brushed against his face. Hooks went through his hair like a comb. The dark spot went away. The rock was dry. The spots were colonies of bats. It was the bats that drizzled. Then, whatever day it was, it was daytime. Bats roost during the day, don’t they? How did the bats get out?
    Did he imagine it or did another, stronger breath of air stir against his cheek. A great bat?
    Down on hands and knees again and slowly up the slide. What to do when slide meets roof? For here in fact slide did meet roof and he crouched in the angle, cleaving against the roof like a bat. He turned off the light. It was only after a minute or so that he realized that it was not quite dark. Rather was it ordinary dark, not the blind black retinal dark of the cave. A breath of air stirred his hair.
    Turning his head as slowly as a sick man greeting a visitor, he saw a shadow on the rock. It was only a shadow, he thought. But consider that my flashlight is turned off. It follows then that the shadow has been made by another source of light. As he crawled along the cave a light breeze sprang up, and by the time he reached the shadow, he could smell leaves and bitter bark and the smell of lichened rock warming in sunlight.
    But when he turned, he saw, not sunlight but a lattice of vines which all but sealed a hole in the rock. The hole was square.
    Well then, he said, and noticed that he was not excited about his deliverance from the cave.
    Then there must be more than one opening in the ridge. But why the square hole? Perhaps this was the actual escape hatch for the Confederate moles. Even fat Confederates could use this hole.
    Carefully inching his way to the light, he discovered that the opening was not more than a foot and a half square and head high, the head, that is, of a man on all fours. The square shape came not from the rock but from a wooden frame beyond the rock.
    A rigor seized him and he shook like a leaf. His teeth chattered. Somewhere above the racket he was thinking that it would be a curious experience to emerge from the cave as a Confederate years later, like a Japanese holdout in the Philippines. Hey you in the Mercedes, who won the war?
    Resting elbows on the sill, he meant to poke his head through for a look, but both vines and sill were rotten and he fell, thinking even as he fell that it couldn’t be much of a fall, what with the vines and the ridge itself not being much higher than a man. But this was a fall through air not vines or bushes, through air and color, brilliant greens and violet and vermilion and a blue unlike any sky, a free-fall headfirst with time enough to wonder if he might not be dead after all,