The Second Coming

don’t worry about money. Money worry is not instigating.”
    â€œNo, it’s not. You’d better go.”
    She enjoyed her errands.
    Straight to the bus station, where she found the silver Mercedes. Though she wanted to try the keys and practice starting the car, she decided not to. Someone might see her. She would do her errands, wait until dark, and drive to the country club.
    Nobody saw her.
    What pleasure, obeying instructions! Then is this what people in the world do? This is called “joining the work force.” It is not a bad way to live. One gets a job. There is a task and a task teller (a person who tells you a task), a set of directions, instructions, perhaps a map, a carrying out of the task, a finishing of the task, a return to the task teller to report success, a thanking. A getting paid. An assignment of another task.
    She clapped her hands for joy. What a discovery! To get a job, do it well, which is a pleasure, please the employer, which is also a pleasure, and get paid, which is yet another pleasure. What a happy life employees have! How happy it must make them to do their jobs well and please their employers! That was the secret! All this time she had made a mistake. She had thought (and her mother had expected) that she must do something extraordinary, be somebody extraordinary. Whereas the trick lay in leading the most ordinary life imaginable, get an ordinary job, in itself a joy in its very ordinariness, and then be as extraordinary or ordinary as one pleased. That was the secret.
    On to Western Union, which was part of the Greyhound bus station. As she wrote the message she tried not to make sense of it. The telegram cost $7.89. When the clerk read the message, she said to him casually but with authority: “Straight message, please!”
    â€œRight,” said the clerk, not raising his eyes.
    Victory! She had made it in the world! Not only could she make herself understood. People even understood what she said when she didn’t.
    It was a pleasure spending her money for him. Why? she wondered. Ordinarily she hoarded her pennies, ate dandelion-and-dock salad.
    She sat on her bench but in a new way. The buildings and the stores were the same but more accessible. She might have business in them. Le Club was still there, its glass bricks sparkling in the sun. A cardboard sign in the window announced a concert by Le Hug, a rock group. What a pleasure to have a job! Smiling, she hugged herself and rocked in the sun. Imagine getting paid for a task by the task teller! Money wherewith to live! And live a life so, years, decades! So that was the system. Quel system!
    A real townie she felt like now, bustling past slack-jawed hippies, moony-eyed tourists, blue-haired lady leafers, antiquers, and quilt collectors.
    When she went into a building, the dog stayed on the sidewalk paying no attention to anyone until she came out. He showed his pleasure not by wagging his tail but by burying his heavy anvil head in her stomach until his eyes were covered.
    There was no way to see Dr. Battle except to sign a clipboard and wait her turn as a patient. She had to wait two hours. She liked him, though he was too busy and groggy from overwork and thought she was a patient despite her telling him otherwise, sizing her up in a fond dazed rush, not listening, eyes straying over her, coming close (was he smelling her?). His hand absently palpated her shoulder, queried the bones, tested the ball joint for its fit and play. Unlike Dr. Duk he didn’t bother to listen, or rather he listened not to your words but your music. He was like a vet, who doesn’t have to listen to his patients. There were other ways of getting at you. He saw so many patients that it was possible for him to have a hunch about you, a good country hunch, the moment you walked in the door. Better still, it was possible for her to subside and see herself through his eyes, so canny and unheeding, sleepy and quick, were they.
    Well then, how did she look to him? Is my shoulder human? He cocked an ear for her music. The fond eyes cast about to place her, then placed her. She was classifiable then. She was a piece of the world after all, a member of a class and recognizable as such. I belong here!
    He looked at her boots. “You just off the trail?”
    â€œWell no, though I’ve been walking quite a bit.”
    â€œAnd you’re feeling a little spacy.”
    â€œA little what?”
    â€œSpaced