Walker Percy - The Second Coming

Nothing is really forgotten.

The smell of chalk dust on the first day of school, the feel of hot corduroy on your legs, the shape of the scab on the back of your hand, is still there if you have the means of getting at it.

Instead of the brilliant autumn-postcard Carolina mountains, he seemed to see a weedy stretch of railroad right-of-way, but no more than a wedge-shaped salient of weeds angling off between the railroad tracks and the back yards of Negro cabins. It was shaped like a bent triangle, the bend formed by the curve of tracks. Perhaps it was owned by the railroad or perhaps the utility company, because in one corner there was a small fenced and locked enclosure which contained an even smaller metal hut. Or perhaps it was owned by the city, because at the end of this narrow vista of weeds rose the town water tower. Or perhaps it belonged to no one, not even the Negroes, a parcel of leftover land which the surveyors had not noticed on their maps.

Only once in his life had he ever set foot on this nondescript sector of earth. It was shortly after he had seen Ethel Rosenblum. As he took the shortcut home after school, walking the railroad tracks which ran behind the football field, he saw Ethel Rosenblum practicing her cheerleading. She was in uniform, brief blue skirt flared to show gold panties. She was short, her hair was kinky, her face a bit pocked. But as if to make up for these defects, nature had endowed her with such beauty and grace of body, a dark salinity of skin, a sweet firm curve and compaction of limb as not easily to be believed. She was smart in algebra and history and English. They competed for four years. She won. She was valedictorian and he salutatorian. She could factor out equations after the whole class was stumped, stand at the blackboard, hip hiked out, one fist perched cheerleaderwise on her pelvis, the other small quick hand squinched on the chalk, and cancel out great a 2-b 2complexes zip zip slash, coming out at the end: a/a= 1. 1 = 1! Unity!

No matter how ungainly the equation, ugly and unbalanced, clotted with complexes, radicals, fractions, zip zip under Ethel Rosenblum’s quick sure hand and they factored out and canceled and came down to unity, symmetry, beauty.

Would not life itself prove so?

No, as it turned out.

They knew each other, had sat in the same class for four years. Not twenty words had passed between them.

Once in his life had he set foot on this unnamed unclaimed untenanted patch of weeds and that was when he saw Ethel Rosenblum and wanted her so bad he fell down. So keen was his sorrow at not having his arms around her, his fingers knotted in her kinked chalk-dusted hair, that he flung himself down in a litter of algebra books, ring binders, Literature and Life, down into the Johnson grass and goldenrod, onto the earth smelling of creosote and rabbit tobacco.

Ah, that was the smell of the pied weed on the golf course, the acrid smell of rabbit tobacco!

Ethel, why is the world so designed that our very smartness and closeness keep us apart? Is it an unspoken pact? Is it an accursed shyness? Ethel, let’s me and you homestead this leftover land here and now, this non-place, this surveyor’s interstice. Here’s the place for us, the only place not Jew or Gentile, not black or white, not public or private.

Later a doctor raised the possibility of a small hemorrhage or arterial spasm near the brain’s limbic system, seat of all desire, a location which would account for the sexual component of his disorder.

“What sexual component?” he asked. “Doc, that was Ethel Rosenblum and I was fifteen.”

“Yeah, but you’re talking about her now.”

Now in the middle of this pretty Carolina fairway in the sweet high mountain air, as the sky darkened and the acrid smell of rabbit tobacco rose in his nostrils, he fell down again, but only for an instant. Or perhaps he only stumbled, for the next thing he knew, the electric cart hummed up behind him and there was Vance.

No, he did fall down, because he seemed to see and smell the multicolored granules of chemical fertilizer scattered in the bent Bermuda.

I wonder, he said to himself nose down in the bent Bermuda, what would my life have been like if I had had four years of Ethel Rosenblum instead of four years of a dream of Ethel Rosenblum — and the twenty words between us:

“How you doing, Ethel?”

“I’m doing fine, Will. How are you?”

“Fine. Did you have a good summer?”

“Fine. I didn’t do a thing. Well—”

“Well, I’ll see you, Ethel.”

“Yeah, I’ll see you, Will.”

Ethel, give me your hand. I know a place.

On the other hand, how could his life have turned out better if things had fallen out otherwise between him and Ethel Rosenblum, for had he not succeeded in his life in every way one can imagine? The only sign of something wrong was that he was thinking about a girl (and a place) whom he had known in high school thirty years ago.

What if he and Ethel had followed their inclinations, assuming she was of like mind (and she might have been! On commencement day after she had given her valedictory and he his salutatory, he had taken her small hand in his and told her goodbye.

She had held his hand for a second and shaken her head and said in a fond sorrowful exasperation: “Oh, Will—!”), and fallen down together in the Johnson grass or wherever, whenever — what then? Would he have been better off? Would he have become more like the young people and not so young he saw in town who lay about at their ease, good-humored and content as cats but also somewhat slack-jawed and bemused, who looked as if they could be doing the same thing ten years from now and not discontented then either — would he have been better off? Who knows?

At least he probably would not be falling down on golf courses and recalling odd bits and pieces of the past.

Lately he remembered everything. His symptom, if it was a symptom, was the opposite of amnesia, a condition as far as I known unnamed by medical science.

Everything reminded him of something else.

A whiff of rabbit tobacco in North Carolina reminded him of Ethel Rosenblum and a patch of weeds in Mississippi.

An odd-shaped cloud in the blue Carolina sky reminded him of a missing tile in the Columbus Circle subway station, which marked the spot where he often stood to catch the Eighth Avenue Express to Macy’s. The tile had been broken out except for a strip at the top, which left a grayish concrete area shaped like Utah.

Yes, he must have fallen down in the fairway, for now Vance had him by the arm in some kind of expert doctor’s double grip which holds you erect without seeming to.

“That was quite a shot.”

“Did you see the ball?”

“It’s a gimme. I been meaning to talk to you.”

“Okay. Talk.”

“Not here. Come see me at my office.”

“Why?”

“I think something is wrong with you.”

“Why?”

“People don’t fall down in the middle of the fairway.”

“I was thinking of something.”

“You thought of something and fell down.”

“That’s right.”

“You been acting a little off your feed. You worried about anything?”

“No.”

“Did those sleeping pills I gave you help?”

“Yes. No, I didn’t take them.”

“You haven’t been with us for some time.”

“Us?”

“Us. Your family, your friends.”

“How’s that?”

“You don’t say anything. And what you say is strange.”

“Such as?”

“You asked me if I remembered a movie actor named Ross Alexander. I said no. You let it go at that. Then you asked me if Groucho Marx was dead. Then you asked me if the tendency to suicide is inherited. Do you remember?”