The Second Coming

news?
    No—ah—I just thought praps you might do with a light massage of your neurones. Not even a major ECT series. A small refresher course. To get you ready for the big world out there.
    You’re going to buzz me again. (Her unfamiliar voice sounded loud and crackly like the intercom.)
    Only a refresher course. I would imagine it to be your last.
    Why?
    Why what?
    The asking in this case is like the answering, she said. I mean—she stopped.
    Yes?
    She had trouble talking. It was like walking out on a stage. She could answer questions, play straight man to his knock-knock routine, even ask questions. But to make a statement on your own, surely you had to know what you were talking about.
    No buzzin cousin, she said. (A lame statement and she saw what she was doing, trying to slip in a statement in his joking style, by cockney rhyming Southern-style.)
    You’ll feel much better.
    I feel bad? Which I? It was the lilt at the end of a question that let her say it, freed her up. She did not want to go down just yet the way a statement goes down flat and hard, ends. Isn’t there a difference between the outside-I, the me you see, the meow-I and the inside deep-I-defy? Back to the old meow-I.
    I’m talking to the deep-I or the I-defy—only I thought we had agreed it became the I-define. Your I as you want to define it.
    Okay, she said, what what what.
    Okay, you want my reasons for suggesting a little refresher course.
    Yes. Yes, that is, sir.
    Don’t be afraid. No, it’s just that you don’t eat. You won’t talk to the others, staff or patient. You’ve stopped participating in group. You have stopped functioning.
    I don’t eat?
    Only the morsels you smuggle back to your room in a napkin, like a chipmunk.
    Morsel. She liked the word. It was folded on itself and had a taste. It was dark and nourishing, better than a snack. She also liked his rubbish. It was cleaner and firmer than our trash.
    How about group?
    Group? she said, meaning: I still go to group.
    He understood.
    Yes, you go to group, but you sit under the table.
    Knees are easy. Faces are defacing.
    Ha. I like that. I quite know what you mean. I’d prefer to look at knees rather than some of the defaced faces in staff conference and seminars. All the same, we’re stuck with these faces and we have to make the best of it.
    I’ll take the knees.
    There you go.
    Now he was trying to sound like Dennis Weaver and didn’t. She was embarrassed for him. How could he stand to speak himself? You’d have to be crazy to make such a fool of yourself. How could he stand to be so out-of-focus? a bogus Englishman doing knock-knocks. I’d rather be crazy. Or maybe the question was, why did she have to know everything before she could say anything?
    I—she began and stopped.
    Yes?
    (Here came her statement because this was the one thing she knew.)
    I have to go down first. You’re trying to keep me up.
    Down?
    I have to go down down down before I go up. Down down in me to it. You shouldn’t try to keep me up by buzzing me up.
    Down and down I go, round and round I go. He twirled around, keeping hands in pockets. God, she thought, if I were him I’d be crazier than me.
    Tacky-tacky, she said. I need to go down to my white dwarf.
    White dwarf?
    You know stars? He did know stars, often spoke of the constellations. To stay sane, learn about wrens, mums, Orion.
    What about stars?
    A red giant collapses into a white dwarf. Hard and bright as a diamond. That’s what I was trying to do when my mother found me in the closet going down to my white dwarf.
    Ah. Quite a speech, although I suspect you meant going down to become my white dwarf, I think.
    I have to get down to it, to me. And you won’t let me. You want me up before going down.
    Ah, but what if the star collapses all the way into a black hole? (This pleased him.) How will we find you in a black hole? (The more he thought about it, the more pleased he was.) I’m not up to a time warp.
    No buzzin cousin.
    Your parents are coming this afternoon.
    A bang by the gang.
    There you go.
    When’s the buzzing?
    Oh, tomorrow. Ninish.
    Now she wanted him to leave. One advantage to being crazy is that one is given leave to be rude. Had she gone crazy so people’s feelings wouldn’t be hurt? She turned her face into the wing of the chair until he left.
    When she heard the door close, she put the binoculars in her lap and watched