The Second Coming

then that too is an answer of sorts. It means that what is at hand are not the Last Days but only the last days, my last days, a minor event, to be sure, but an event of importance to me.
    2
    Unfortunately for the poor man awaiting the Last Days and raving away at God and man in the bowels of Sourwood Mountain directly below thousands of normal folk playing golf and antiquing and barbecuing and simply enjoying the fall colors—for on the following day at the height of his lunacy the cloud blew away and the beautiful days of Indian summer began, the mountains glowed like rubies and amethysts, and leafers were out in force—unfortunately things can go wrong with an experiment most carefully designed by a sane scientist. A clear yes or no answer may not be forthcoming, after all. The answer may be a muddy maybe. In the case of Will Barrett, what went wrong could hardly be traced to God or man, Jews or whomever, but rather to a cause at once humiliating and comical: a toothache. So in the end not only did he not get a clear answer to his peculiar question, not a yes or a no or even a maybe—he could not even ask the question. How does one ask a question, either a profound question or a lunatic question, with such a pain in an upper canine that every heartbeat feels like a hot ice pick shoved straight up into the brain? The toothache was so bad it made him sick. He vomited.
    There is one sure cure for cosmic explorations, grandiose ideas about God, man, death, suicide, and such—and that is nausea. I defy a man afflicted with nausea to give a single thought to these vast subjects. A nauseated man is a sober man. A nauseated man is a disinterested man.
    What does a nauseated person care about the Last Days?
    Whether it was God’s doing or ordinary mortal frailty, one cannot be sure. What happened in any event, happened after seven or eight days.
    It began well enough.
    He swallowed three capsules. A complex comfort took root in his stomach and flowed along his spine and into his throat. A simple chemical taste, both bitter and reassuring, rose at the back of his tongue. He fancied it was the taste of the cave. He lay down happily in a hollow of rock and closed his eyes.
    Now came a different taste and smell. The smell of a warm Negro cabin in the winter, the walls papered by layers of the rotogravure section of the Atlanta Constitution thick as quilt and everywhere the close clean smell of coal oil and cornbread and Octagon soap. When he had knocked, the woman had come to the screen door and looked at the blood on his face. She opened the door without a word. The boy John Washington whom his father had cursed was standing behind her, his eyes so big that white showed all around his irises.
    Will Barrett, feeling the same dead calm and certainty he had felt when he knelt beside the man:
    â€œI need some help. My father has been hurt in an accident. I would appreciate it, Mrs. Washington, if you would send your son John to get the sheriff.”
    The woman’s steady eyes flicked only once as he spoke. Not taking her eyes from him when he finished, she told the boy: “John, you go get High Sheriff Thompson,” and to him after John took off: “You come on over here, boy, and I’ll wash your face.” He, following her and thinking of nothing in particular except the smell of newspaper and coal oil. “You gon be all right.” On his cheek he felt the wet rag in gentle but firm wipes like his mother washing his face.
    Thirty-two thousand years ago the tiger had come here to die. Why? Had he grown old and lain down in darkness? Had she come here wounded or to whelp and died instead?
    Thirty-one thousand nine hundred years later, some country boys dressed in butternut found a good place to make gunpowder, in Lost Cove and in the very cave where the saltpeter was mined.
    â€œThey gon find us in here sure’n hell.”
    â€œNo, they ain’t,” said the sergeant.
    â€œI heard they was coming up the valley.”
    â€œLet them come. We got the magazine mined. They can come right on and get their asses blown back to New York.”
    â€œThen how we gon get out?”
    â€œI know another way out,” said the sergeant, who didn’t seem to care much one way or the other beyond a flicker of pleasure in having it both ways, escaping from the intruders and blowing up the same intruders.
    He became his father. He was walking down Sunset Boulevard. Here came