(see note on part one. In the REM song they're alligators, not snakes, but that's about the only difference.)
The phone rings and it's the doctor's assistant, calling to confirm your appointment. You wish you had more faith in the treatments. You know the team that's working with you has the best reputation. This is little consolation--they botched the job so badly three months ago, the last time they attempted your cure. It didn't help to find out Matthew Stephens hemorrhaged for hours when his doctors tried the same job. You can hear your doctor's voice. "Be calm," he says. Even picturing such a thing makes your knees buckle. You feel about blood the way you feel about snakes.
One of the knights in Orkin armor comes up the stairs. He has one of his hands behind his back. "Now, be calm," he says, and the way he seems to pluck his words from your imagination startles you. "I haven't even shown'em to you yet," he says with a nervous laugh. He brings his hand into view. He's holding four dead snakes. Long black stripes mark the outlines of their bodies, which are checkerboarded brown and yellow. They must have been so graceful in life...You thought you hated snakes, but the sight of their limp bodies nearly crumples you into tears. And you never cry.
You don't cry. You say, "They're very beautiful, aren't they?"
Pest man looks at you like you have a forked tongue. "You don't need this kind of beautiful in your house."
He's like Matthew Stephens. He's surrendered to the contradictions of the world. The exterminators leave, and soon you leave too, wanting to walk and think.
You pass a church. That's something else that'd be nice to believe in. The sign out front says "God's word doesn't change; God's word changes us." You disagree. It seems to you that every generation of believers decide their scriptures are about different things. Not that this is inherently wrong, it's just you'd love to think this, or anything, is a firm and sure foundation. To know this last stability is as tempest-tossed as the rest fills you with disquiet.
Beyond those buildings ahead is a park. You see a bright line extending into the sky in that direction--someone flying a kite, you think. But it's not quite right. You squint at the line. It is no nylon wire fading from sight--it is thick, and maybe there are two of them, each a mirror to the other. The day is overcast. The line or lines disappear into the sky as into the Cloud of Unknowing.
You get past the buildings and into the field of grass and trees. Your mouth gapes at the ladder. Two possibilities occur to you at once. You prefer the first. There's a UFO up there, you think. But nudging at your memory are old Sunday School classes. You can even recall a coloring book your teacher gave you once. The cover showed Jacob dreaming just of this as he lay on a stone pillow. No--his ladder had angels. "Be calm," you say to yourself. You don't know if the voice is the doctor's or the exterminator's or yours.
You stand and blink at the ladder awhile. It is very white. Now, close, you see the opaque material of its form. There are crisscrossing lines throughout. It is a ladder of tiny diamond shapes. You recognize shed snakeskin.
You touch a rung. Then you grab and pull, then you snatch an upper rung with both hands and let your feet dangle off the ground. The ladder holds your weight, attached as it may be to nothing, or a UFO, or heaven. You're climbing before you have admitted your desire to do so to yourself. "I can look over the whole city if I climb high enough," you think. But you woke up this Friday morning wanting to leave.
Science and religion/myth--religion is mythical to you, and from you that's no insult--neither are sufficient. You wish you could join one to the other, go to the UFO and go to heaven, or use science to make yourself a myth. Scientists have made monkeys who can glow in the dark, haven't they? Couldn't they graft snakes in the place of your hair? You must have climbed fairly high now. Your thoughts are going strange, like you're lightheaded. But no--you feel fine.
You are among the tendrils of mist. You remember watching steam rise from your mother's coffee pot, the way it made you think of Chinese dragons. You smile--the first time you've smiled all day, though you don't know that. Here be dragons.
And then? Then you enter the cloud. And then? I don't know what happens next. Only you know. You've climbed out of this story, into your life.