The Second Coming

approximately another fifty or sixty years. What to do? One good sign: I can already feel myself coming down to myself. From giant red star Betelgeuse, Dr. Duk’s favorite, trying to expand and fan out and take in and please the whole universe (that was me!), a great gaseous fake of a star, collapsing down to white dwarf Sirius, my favorite, diamond bright and diamond hard, indestructible by comets, meteors, people. Sirius is more serious than beetle gauze.
    Two: Memory. It’s coming back. I can say sentences if I write them because I am writing to myself. Speak memory. Why? Only because I have to know enough of where I’ve been to know which way I’m going.
    I remember my father: passing me in the downstairs hall on his way out to play golf Saturday morning. He’s forgotten I’m home to stay. Now he remembers I didn’t finish school, I didn’t get a job, I didn’t get married, I didn’t get engaged, I don’t even go steady. I didn’t move on like I was supposed to. I made straight A’s and flunked ordinary living. My father’s expression: surprise and a quick frown: Hi. (What are you doing here?) He sees my failure and feels sorry for me but wants no part of it or me and just forgets.
    My mother finding me sitting in closet of my apartment on Front Street (where I was first trying to go down to it, my white dwarf), bends over me, the little push of air carrying her Shalimar perfume, cashmere sleeves pushed up 1960 coed style, showing her tan too tan even a little branny arms, shimmer of gold, gold jewelry, gold-streaked hair, heavy clunk of bracelets (the real thing, like the chunk of a Cadillac door closing, not a Chevy). Now now, now now, this won’t do, what are you doing sitting in there? Going, go-on, Gawain, go-way, gong, God, dog, I said, not knowing what I meant—do I have to mean something?—maybe just go way, maybe dog-star = Sirius = serious = God—but she as usual insisting on making her own strong sense of everything even my nonsense (leave me my nonsense, that’s the way, the only way I’m going to get out and through — okay, Ducky, Dr. Duk, maybe you’re right, maybe I will collapse into a black hole, but if that’s the case then I have to and I will). My mother: thinking I was saying going going gone, so she said: going going gone my foot (I like her old Alabama slang coming out), you’re not going anywhere but out of there, and the only thing that’s going to be gone around here is all this dust, get a rag.
    Stop trying to make sense of my nonsense.
    My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
    Sarge: spending week with him at Nassau doing what I pleased or what I thought of as doing as I pleased. Sarge, a thin mustachioed blond Balfour salesman (fraternity and sorority jewelry) from Durham, who knew his catalogue of pins and drop letters and crests so well he had won a salesman-of-the-month trip to Nassau. Tickets for two. I, not a sorority sister, Sarge not a fraternity man, but he “pinned” me with four different pins, Chi O, Phi Mu, KD, Tri Delt, and we thought that was funny. Sarge always going by the book, Sarge and I in bed looking at a picture book and he doing the things in the book with me he thought he wanted to do and I doing the things I thought he wanted me to do and being pleased afterwards then suddenly knowing that the main pleasure I took was the same as doing well for my father: look at my report card, Daddy, straight A’s, A Plus in music.
    But what do you do after you get your straight A’s for Daddy and Sarge?
    Drugs: not bad. In my bed in Front Street apartment or in closet, getting out of it with yellowjacks and going down down down toward it, Sirius or the black hole, but not really, only seeming to, because when you come out of it you’re nowhere, not an inch closer to Sirius, not out the other side of the black hole but just back where you were, only worse, like dreaming that the plane has taken off and it never does. But drugs not bad if you don’t have to come off drug and come back. Because: drugs = illusion of going down down down to it, and if there is no it, the illusion is better than nothing.
    One thing is sure. Never again will they lock me up and buzz me.
    The sun shone straight down the cellar steps, warming her back. While she ate a sandwich of rye bread and cheese and sliced luncheon meat, her gaze wondered from the stove to the