The Second Coming

shirt, and tie, laced up the plain-toed Florsheims he hadn’t worn since he left New York.
    A pang struck suddenly at his heart. He had not taken his acid for twelve hours! What with the two fights and the movie, he had forgotten to go to the lab. His pH was up and the old heavy molecules were on the move again. Again the past rose to haunt him and the future rose to beckon to him. Things took on significance.
    Parking at the club, he walked hands in pockets down the eighteenth fairway, feeling odd in his city clothes, kicking leaves like a businessman walking home across the Great Meadow in Central Park on a fine fall day. The soft-buttoned collar felt snug around his neck but he felt the cold through his thin socks. The fresh cold air felt good in his face.
    When he came to the fence, he stretched up the top strand of wire to hear the guitar sound. He let it go slack, stretched it again harder, cocked an ear. The wire sang again, creaked, and popped against the musical bridge of the post. He let go. It sounded like a wire stretching against a fence post, no more. The near post was rotten. It broke and swayed toward him. He kicked it down and walked over the fence.
    The girl and the dog were sitting on the stoop of the copper-roofed porch. The girl, holding her hand against the sun, didn’t recognize him at first, but the dog did. Over he came grinning, broad tail swinging his body like an alligator. The dog grinned, swallowed, his lip caught high on a tooth embarrassing him. He looked away. The girl touched her cheek with her fingers as he looked down at her. She was thin and sallow. Perhaps it was the man’s olive-drab parka she wore which looked as if it had been worn in the Aleutians in World War II.
    â€œIt’s you irregardless of who,” she said.
    He laughed. “Irregardless of who what?”
    â€œOf who I thought you were.”
    â€œWho did you think I was?”
    â€œThat you were an Atlantean but taller, yet I also knew you by the glancing way, you know, of your face here.” She touched her temple.
    â€œAtlantean or Atlantan?”
    â€œBoth. Atlantan businesswise with your suit, as I once saw Sarge come down the bullet in the Hyatt with attaché case and suit like that. But Atlantean also because of the way you came through the woods like you were coming from elsewhere not there.”
    â€œNot where?”
    â€œThere. The golf links and the players. You were not one of them, you never were. I mean it is a question of where you are coming from, a consideration of the reality of it.”
    â€œYou mean where I actually came from this morning, don’t you?” He laughed and she nodded. He laughed because he knew this was her own expression even though it sounded like local gypsy talk: like man, where are you coming from? “I came here from the hospital.”
    She stood up and touched his forehead like a mother checking a child for fever. “You seem fine. Are you?”
    â€œYes. Are you?”
    â€œYes. But I’m going back and down again, I think, but that’s all right.”
    â€œNo, it’s not. I want a good look at you.” He took off her Aleutian parka and stood her in the sunny warm corner of the porch.
    For a while she gazed straight ahead at his necktie like a child. Then not like a child she put her head to one side in order to see his eyes from the corner of hers.
    â€œI’m so—” she said, shaking her head. Nothing else moved about her except her hands at her side, which turned out like the beginning of a shrug.
    â€œYes,” he said and he was kissing her mouth, she flying up at him and cleaving to him, leaving the ground surely.
    â€œThere is something I need,” he told her.
    â€œMoi aussi,” she said. “Entirely apart from the needs of society and the family as a unit, or the group.”
    â€œYes, apart from that.”
    â€œThe truth is,” he said when they were sitting together in the sun, “I wish to speak to you of several things. To begin with, my pH has been corrected and I feel fine. Secondly, I am in love, I think.”
    â€œMe too.”
    They kissed again. Her mouth was sweet and tart. His tongue went in her. Her tongue, surprised, was taken aback, then ventured forward, parting his lips shyly. Kissing her was like entering a new and happy land.
    â€œWhat have you been eating?” he asked her.
    â€œPawpaws. They’re best after a