The Second Coming

to go crazy to do it. Why was the discovery so difficult? Because it is the very nature of the thing to be discovered and the very nature of the seeking that it could not be found by asking somebody or by reading a book. Imagine being born with gold-tinted corneas and undertaking a lifelong search for gold. You’d never find it.
    What was my (your, our) discovery? That I could act. I was free to act. Is this something everyone knows or thinks he knows or, if he knows, knows in the wrong way? With gold-tinted corneas everything looks like gold but it’s fool’s gold.
    Here was the kind of gold-tinted corneas I had: Dr. Duk told me many times I should be free to act for myself. I believed him. Just as I believed him when he suggested I take up bird-watching. So, clever straight-A student that I was, I set forth to act for myself. Which, of course, is not doing so at all. I was following instructions. Then how does one ever make the discovery that one can actually be free to act for oneself? I don’t know. I don’t even know how many people, if any, do it.
    In my case I had to go crazy to make the discovery. It’s like that man in West Virginia who walked away from the airplane crash. He walked through the woods until he came to a highway. Do you know what I think? That he felt absolutely free to turn right or turn left or sit down on the culvert.
    At any rate, I acted for myself and here you are, we are, doing it.
    Good luck.
    For some reason she felt a need to count her money. Her wallet contained $326. There was seventy-six cents in change in the pocket of her new jeans. She folded her wallet and put it and the notebook and the knife in the deep pocket of her camouflage jacket. After thinking a moment, she packed the candles and the can of neat’s-foot oil in her knapsack, between the sleeping bag and the wedge of cheese. She hung the knapsack on the back of the bench. Now only the map remained on the bench.
    Drumming her fingers on her knees, she watched the ants carrying their little green sails toward the policeman. Rising suddenly, she took half a dozen steps and tapped him on the shoulder and in the same moment (this was wrong) asked him a question. He did not give a start but turned, his head already inclined and nodding as if he were prepared for her question. Many people must ask him questions. His eyes were darting around the concrete of the sidewalk.
    â€œWhat’s that?” he said, putting his great hairy ear close to her mouth.
    She had asked her question too soon and in too much of a rush. Yet before she could repeat it, it seemed to her that he was backtracking and listening to her first question again.
    â€œWhose place?” he asked.
    â€œMiss Sally Kemp” She wanted to ask him to come to the bench, sit down, and look at the map. Instead, she found that she was giving a tug at his sleeve. “Would you—”
    It was surprising how quickly he understood. In an instant they were sitting on the bench with the map between them. He went on nodding and gazing down at the map instead of the sidewalk. It was not a good map. A few trails crisscrossed. In the blank spaces between the trails were drawings of chipmunks and whiskey stills and mountaineers carrying jugs of “mountain dew” and wearing overalls with one shoulder strap.
    In his eagerness to be helpful and even before he knew where she wanted to go, his forefinger began tracing the trails on the map. His fingernail was as large and convex as a watch crystal and, surprisingly, polished. The nail made a slight sound on the paper as it passed up and down the trails. As their heads bent close over the map, she could not hear him breathe in but his exhalations came out whistling and strong as a bellows. The sight of his large polished nail on the map and the sound of his breathing so diverted her that she could not collect her thoughts.
    â€œI know where old Judge Kemp’s summer place used to be. He used to come up here when I was a boy. I even worked in his greenhouse.”
    â€œGreenhouse?” she said drowsily.
    â€œHis daddy got the idea a long time ago of growing orchids and selling them to the rich people at the old Grove Park Inn where they used to have dances every night.”
    â€œThat’s him,” she said but not really remembering.
    â€œThis is where it used to be.” The gleaming watch-glass fingernail strayed off a trail into a blank space.
    â€œUsed to