The Second Coming

here too. A knob of rock the size of a hassock rose from the stone floor at the smaller blind end of the pod. It looked a little like the great flattened head of a tiger. One could even imagine the lip of bone on each side where the massive jaw muscle attached. Could the tiger’s skull have fused into rock over the years, dripped on by jeweled drops and turned calcareous and huge? But no, it was a rock shaped vaguely like a tiger’s skull, enough to allow the cave operator to call it the Sleeping Tiger. Lewis said the tiger had died here thirty-two thousand years ago.
    Water dripped on one side of the chamber and filled a saucer of stone. Good! It would be uncomfortable and unnecessary to die of thirst. It was quite comfortable sitting against the curving wall. Head high, he found a dry alcove for the flashlight. Next to it he stood the four fresh batteries. Emptying his pockets of Placidyl capsules, he carefully lined them up on the floor and counted them. Ninety-six. The roll of aluminum foil fitted on the shelf. He could piss down the chimney but feces must be deposited on a square of foil, packaged, and put away, else he’d foul his own den. What had the tiger done?
    He smiled. Here I am, he thought, folding his arms and nodding and smiling. Now. Now we’ll see.
    Who else but a madman could sit in a pod of rock under a thousand feet of mountain and feel better than he had felt in years, feel so good that he smiled again and snapped his fingers as if he had made a discovery? I’ve got you both, he said aloud, God-seekers and suicides, I’ve got you all, God, Jews, Christians, unbelievers, Romans, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Yankees, rebs, blacks, tigers. At last at last at last. It took me a lifetime, but I’ve got you by the short hairs now. One of you has to cough it up. There is no way I cannot find out.
    Even if worst comes to worst, he thought with a smile, to suicide, it will turn out well. My suicide will represent progress in the history of suicide. Unlike my father’s, it will be done in good faith, logically, neatly, and unobtrusively, unobtrusive even to the Prudential Insurance Company. Moreover, I shall arrange to be found.
    What is more, it will advance knowledge.
    His plan was simple: wait. The elegance of it pleased him. As cheerfully as a puttering scientist who hits on a simple, elegant experiment which will, must, yield a clear yes or no, he set about his calculations. The trick was to devise a single wait which would force one of two answers, not more, not less. If a yes, then to be able to leave and act on the yes. If a no, then to act on the no and at the same time euchre the Prudential Insurance Company out of the money he felt coming to him, to leave Sutter one million richer, and so to be found with the Placidyl gone from the floor of the cave but gone also from his blood. Lewis would find him eventually—
    â€”Ah, to make doubly sure, drop a note down the chimney. He did: Help! he wrote. With tiger, fifty feet above. He frowned. That’s confusing. They might not know which tiger. He wrote another note. I’m fifty feet above this place and can’t move. I think I’ve had a small stroke or an arterial spasm.
    Vance Battle had told him about arterial spasms. They could mimic a stroke yet an autopsy would show nothing.
    The second note he folded and dropped down the shaft.
    Ninety-six capsules. Three a day could give him tranquillity for thirty-two days. Then he’d be too weak to move anyhow and yet live long enough to get rid of the drug.
    This way everybody wins. God, if he exists, is not affronted. If he doesn’t, Sutter gets the one million.
    There will be plenty of time for asking God—that is called prayer!—between knockout drops. I am no hero! to sit here for a month and starve without a drug is too much of a bore to consider.
    Speak, God, or be silent. And if you’re silent, I’ll understand that.
    O ye mystics who go out in the desert and see visions, o ye old men who dream dreams, who believes you?
    O ye suicides who go not so gently into that good nothing, you can’t tell me either. But I’ve beat you both. In either case I’ll know.
    Speak, God, and let me know if the Jews are a sign and the Last Days are at hand.
    If the Last Days are at hand, one shall know what to do. I shall go to Megiddo with Sutter and wait for the Stranger from the East.
    If you do not speak and the Jews are not a sign,