The Second Coming

name. Sometimes I, you, forget after a buzz.
    Take a hot bath. Eat and sleep for twenty-four hours. You’ll be very hungry after the buzz (remember?) and tired and sore. You’ll feel like a rape victim in every way but one.
    I wonder how you’re feeling now. It varies so much, remember?
    There will also be something good about having gone through the bad experience, the buzzing, for the last time and having survived—the bad maybe even being the condition of the good, I don’t know. Like that man who crawled out of the plane crash in West Virginia last summer, remember? Everybody else dead or dying and he with a cut lip and, realizing he didn’t even have to crawl, not knowing what he was doing, not even remembering it later, simply walked away like a man getting off a streetcar, walked into the woods. They found him hours later two miles from the plane sitting on a highway culvert calm as you please, but saying nothing. In a state of shock, they said. Sitting there blinking and only mildly bemused. Yes, but also, in another way, in his right mind, as if he had crossed a time warp or gone through a mirror, no, not gone through, come back, yes, the only question being which way he went, from the sane side to the crazy side like Alice or back the other way. They took him to the hospital, sewed up his lip, and let him go. Do you remember thinking about him getting on the bus and going on into Huntington, and walking home, hands in his pockets (no suitcase)?
    The only question is how the buzz job will go this time, how much of the feeling will be bad, the real done-in rape-victim feeling, and how much of the feeling of the good, the survivor.
    STOP YOUR CUBICLE READING HERE . CONTINUE YOUR READING AFTER YOU ’ VE RESTED IN LINWOOD AND FEEL STRONG .
    A bareheaded policeman stood on the corner. Feeling stiff, she rose, stretched, and walked down the block a short distance. Her knapsack was hanging from the back of the bench. From time to time she turned to keep it in sight. Leaving the bench was for her a foray. The bench was home base. She could venture halfway down the block, keeping the knapsack in sight, before turning back. The knapsack was for saving her place on the bench. Could one “save a place” on a public bench? She couldn’t remember. Soon it was possible for her to observe people as well as clothes. Though she could still not be certain of their ages, she began to notice that there were two kinds of people. There were those who had plans, whose eyes and movements were aimed toward a future, and those who did not. Some youngish people, that is, between twenty and thirty-five, sat on the sidewalk in silence. Though they sat or lay in relaxed positions, time did not seem to pass easily for them. They looked as if they had gone to great lengths to deal with the problem of time and had not succeeded. They were waiting. What were they waiting for?
    Another group of people, older and better dressed, stood at the window of a real estate office looking at photographs of homes for sale, mountain cabins, expensive condominiums. They talked, took notes, compared prices. Their eyes glistened. In their expressions she could see the pleasure of the prospect of moving, of the exhaustion of the possibilities of an old place and the opening of the possibilities of a new place. Perhaps they lived in places like Richmond or Atlanta or Washington. Undoubtedly they had plans to buy a mountain cabin for vacations or a condominium for retirement. They had plans and the plans took up their time.
    It was as if she belonged to both groups. It was not clear which was better off or which she would join if she had the chance. It seemed that she had plans for the immediate future, but she didn’t know what to do with the rest of her life.
    The old tightness came back and clenched under her diaphragm. She turned back to the bench. For her, too, it was a question of time. What would she do with time? Was there something she was supposed to do?
    Her body was sore. Her arms and legs hurt, one side of her jaw was swollen, her ribs felt as if she had taken a beating. But there was also the feeling that she was over the worst of it. Perhaps, she thought, it was like the pain one feels after being in a fight and winning. It was the kind of soreness the sun cures. The bench and her position on the bench had been arranged so that the morning sunlight hit the sore parts of her body. She felt like a snake