The Second Coming

her, she was a beetle stuck on a pin, arms and legs beating the air. There was no purchase. It was an impalement and a derailment.
    So it had been in school. Alone at her desk she could do anything, solve any problem, answer any question. But let the teacher look over her shoulder or, horror of horrors, stand her up before the class: she shriveled and curled up like paper under a burning glass.
    The lieder of Franz Schubert she knew by heart, backwards and forwards, as well as Franz ever knew them. But when four hundred pairs of eyes focused on her, they bored a hole in her forehead and sucked out the words.
    When he landed on the floor of her greenhouse, knocking himself out, he was a problem to be solved, like moving the stove. Problems are for solving. Alone. After the first shock of the crash, which caught her on hands and knees cleaning the floor, her only thought had been to make some sense of it, of him, a man lying on her floor smeared head to toe with a whitish grease like a channel swimmer. As her mind cast about for who or what he might be—new kind of runner? masquerader from country-club party? Halloween trick-or-treater?—she realized she did not yet know the new world well enough to know what to be scared of. Maybe the man falling into her house was one of the things that happened, albeit rarely, like a wood duck flying down the chimney.
    But wait. Was he a stranger? Strange as he was, smeared with clay and bent double, there was something about the set of his shoulders, a vulnerability in their strength, that struck in her a sweet smiling pang. She recognized him. No, in a way she knew who he was before she saw him. The dog recognized him. It was the dog, a true creature of the world, who knew when to be affrighted and enraged, e.g., when a man falls on him, who therefore had attacked as before and as before had as quickly stopped and spat out the hand, the furious growl winding down to a little whine of apology. Again the dog was embarrassed.
    Perhaps she ought to be an engineer or a nurse of comatose patients. For, from the moment of her gazing down at him, it was only a matter of figuring out how to do what needed to be done, of calculating weights and angles and points of leverage. Since he had crashed through one potting table, the problem was to get him up on the other one. But first make sure he wasn’t dead or badly hurt. It seemed he was neither, though he was covered with bumps and scrapes and blood and clay. He smelled of a freshly dug ditch. A grave. Again her mind cast about. Had he been digging a well for her in secret, knowing her dislike of help? But how does one fall from a well? Perhaps he had found a water supply on the ridge above.
    She tried to pick him up. Though she was strong and had grown stronger with her heavy work in the greenhouse and though he was thin, he was heavy. He was slippery. His long slack muscles were like straps on iron. When she lifted part of his body, the rest clove to the earth as if it had taken root. Now sitting propped against the wall, the dog’s anvil head on her thigh, she considered. The block-and-tackle she figured gave her the strength of three men. Better than three men. Three men would have demoralized her. Her double and triple pulleys conferred mastery of energy gains and mechanical advantages. With pulleys and ropes and time to plan, one could move anything. Now that she thought of it, why couldn’t anyone do anything he or she wished, given the tools and the time? It was hard to understand why scientists had not long ago solved the problems of the world. Were they, the scientists, serious? How could one not solve any problem, once you put your mind to it, had forty years, and people didn’t bother you? Problems were for solving. Perhaps they the scientists were not serious. For if people solved the problems of cancer and war, what would they do then? Who could she ask about this? She made a note to look it up in the library.
    She got him up by first rolling him onto a door from the ruin, then, using a single double-gain pulley, hoisted one end of the door enough to slide the creeper under it, then rolled him to her bunk, devised a rope sling for the door, a two-strand hammock, hoisted door by two double-blocks hooked to the metal frame of the gambrel angle in the roof where the vents opened. The trick was to pull the ropes to both systems, then when the pulleys had come together take both ropes in one hand and stack