The Second Coming

stretched out on a rock in the sun, shedding its skin after a long hard winter.
    Her hands were open on her knees. She turned them over. There were fingernail marks in both palms, not severe enough to break the skin but deep enough to cause bruising. They were the sort of marks one might make waiting a long time, fists clenched, for something frightening to happen.
    At that moment something inside her relaxed. A muscle, which had been clenched so long she had forgotten it, suddenly unclenched. It let go and she closed her eyes and took a breath of air into a new part of her lungs.
    It became possible, she noticed, to look at things rather than watch out for things. A line of ants crawled past her foot. She picked out one ant which carried a neatly cutout section of a green leaf, holding it vertically aloft like a sail, and followed it as it made its way over the coarse granules of the sidewalk. As the sun warmed her, she studied the clothes of the passersby. Many people, she noticed, seemed to dress as they pleased. Nobody paid much attention. Had this always been the case? Surely it had been different the last time she was in a street, one, two, three years ago.
    What year was it? Nineteen seventy-nine? eighty? eighty what?
    The sidewalk was crowded. When she made her forays, she was afraid of running into someone. Then she realized that she was not accustomed to seeing people going somewhere or doing something. It seemed more natural for people to be sitting silently or standing and gazing or being taken somewhere. What if she ran straight into someone? But oncoming people seemed to know without looking at her exactly when to veer slightly and miss her. The veering occurred when the other person was about five feet away, a turn of a degree or so to the right or left. It must be a trick, an exchange of signals which she must learn. Otherwise, she might find herself confronting a person, step to the right with him, to the left, and so on. What then? What she feared was a breakdown in the rules of ordinary living which other people observed automatically. What if the rules broke down? Suddenly she remembered that she had once been an A student. But what if she flunked ordinary living?
    Just before she reached home base, the bench, a young woman approached and did not veer. They stopped, facing each other. Oh my, she thought, this is it. But the woman was smiling, for all the world as if she knew her. Oh my, she thought, perhaps she does and I am supposed to know her. Indeed, she seemed to belong to a past almost remembered. She was dressed in the old style, skirt, blouse, cardigan sweater, shoulder bag, penny loafers. Her long black hair was parted in the middle and framed her oval face like a madonna’s. Seen close, she was not so young. Her face was chapped. Evidently the woman had something to say to her or expected her to say something, for she did not step aside. As she watched the woman’s radiant smile and cast about in her mind for where she might have known her, she noticed that the woman held a sheaf of pamphlets in one hand and that her fingers were ink-stained. From the pressure of the strap of the shoulder bag on the wool of the sweater, she judged that the bag was heavy. Perhaps it was filled with more pamphlets. The woman, still smiling, was handing her a pamphlet. Anxious to make up for not being able to recognize the woman, she began to read the pamphlet then and there. The first three sentences were: Are you lonely? Do you want to make a new start? Have you ever had a personal encounter with our Lord and Saviour? While she was reading, the woman was saying something to her. Was she supposed to listen or read?
    Later, from the bench, she observed that other people dealt with the woman differently. Some ignored her, veered around her. Others took the pamphlets politely and went their way. Still others stopped for a moment and listened (but did not read), heads down and nodding. But for her, questions asked were to be answered, printed words were to be read.
    Facing the woman, she considered the first sentences of the pamphlet. “Yes,” she said, “there is a sense in which I would like to make a new start. However—”
    But the woman was saying something.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI said, are you alone? Do you feel lonely?”
    She considered the questions. “I am alone but I do not feel lonely.”
    â€œWhy don’t you come to a little get-together we’re