The Second Coming

hers came from.”
    Tod and Tannie were sitting slumped in their wheelchairs between two beds. The television was mounted on a steel elbow high above them, too high to see. The Crosswits was on without sound. Tod was nodding and both hands in his lap were rolling invisible pills. Tannie was no bigger than a child. Her back was bowed into a semicircle so that she faced her knees. Her eyes were closed. But her bed jacket was a cheerful pink, all silk and ribbons and lace, and her soft white hair was as perfectly combed and curled as a Barbie doll’s.
    â€œWill,” said Jack Curl loudly. “I want you to meet Tod and Tannie, our first resident couple.”
    Tod went on nodding. Tannie did not open her eyes. A sound like a soft whistle came from her.
    â€œThey’re this week’s winners on the dating game,” said the chaplain, winking at him. “So they’re shacking up with us. Right, Tod?”
    Tod nodded, had not stopped nodding.
    He gazed down at Tannie’s little stick arms. The skin was white and paper dry but a vein, thick and powerful as a snake, coiled on her wrist.
    â€œNow watch this,” said Jack in a lower voice but not minding if Tod and Tannie overheard him. “This is what I mean by an ongoing couple relationship. Tod!”
    Tod went on nodding and rolling pills.
    â€œTannie!” cried the chaplain.
    Tannie went on snoring, chin on her chest.
    â€œTod and Tannie! Give us a little song!”
    Tod did not stop nodding but one hand seemed to rise of itself and give Tannie a poke in the ribs. “Sing, Mama!” said Tod in a hoarse whisper.
    As if he had pressed a button, Tannie’s head flew up, her eyes opened, showing milky-blue, and she began to sing in a high-pitched girlish voice. Tod’s hand conducted and his head lilted from side to side instead of nodding. He came in on every third word or so.
    Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true.
    I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.
    It won’t be a stylish marriage,
    I can’t afford a carriage,
    But you’ll look sweet upon the seat
    Of a bicycle built for two!
    â€œFor two,” said Tod.
    The instant the song was finished, Tannie’s head sank to her chest and she began to snore. Tod stopped conducting and went back to nodding and pill rolling.
    â€œWell?” asked Jack Curl in the hall.
    â€œBeats television,” he said vacantly, moving his head to make the yellow light race around the beveled glass of the front door.
    â€œYou better believe it. Now, Will.”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œNow. What I want you to imagine is the two of them, Tod and Tannie, and two hundred couples like them, from sixty-five on up, each with their own little rustic villa, coming back after evensong and lifting up their eyes to the hills. What do you think?”
    â€œOkay,” he said, unable to move his eyes from the sunlit door.
    â€œOkay?” Jack Curl rounded, came closer, in excitement. “You mean—”
    â€œI mean I will do as you say. I will imagine them.”
    â€œOh. Good. I think.”
    When an old person died at St. Mark’s, often there was no one to claim the body. Marion would go to great lengths to trace the family and arrange the funeral. Yamaiuchi would chauffeur them in the Rolls, leading the way for the hearse to distant Carolina towns, Tryon or Goldsboro, where after the funeral in an empty weedy cemetery they would head for the nearest Holiday Inn in time for the businessman’s lunch. Marion, animated by a kind of holy vivacity, would eat the $2.95 buffet, heaping up mountains of mashed potatoes and pork chops, and go back for seconds, pleased by both the cheapness and the quantity of food. Like many rich women, she loved a bargain. All the while he gazed in bemusement at the ragged Southern cemetery, empty except for the Rolls, the hearse, Yamaiuchi, and three Asheville morticians (he was usually the fourth pallbearer for the casket light with its wispy burden), and then gazed around the bustling new Holiday Inn and the local businessmen come to eat. Live men and dead men.
    The shotgun lay beside the man on the wet speckled leaves. In his father’s eyes he saw a certitude. He had come into focus. How does it happen that a man can go through his life standing up, not himself and dreaming, eating business lunches and passing his wife in the hall, that it is only when he lies bleeding in a swamp that he becomes as solid and