By this point, Nora’s quest for identity, both literal and figurative, has reached its final stages. She’s looked past the happy exteriors of those around her to see that everyone is a little fucked up by what happened (the salesman). She’s realized that, despite few having as much pain associated with the Sudden Departure, others are just as determined to get answers (the intruder). And after speaking with the author, she’s come to terms with her own, current status as a broken person snared in her own misery, like an animal in quicksand.
It’s at that point that she’s finally ready to answer the creepy guy who has been hanging around and asking, “Do you really want to feel this way?” Now, she knows that the answer is no. And following that guy up a long staircase into a seedy apartment complex (life lessons, kids!), she encounters Holy Wayne. What’s this guy doing in New York? That’s anyone’s guess – I’d imagine there are people all across the nation who are “ready to feel better” – but he’s happy to speak with Nora, who he immediately pegs as someone who envelops herself in her grief, as if it’s a familiar blanket, although that grief is so abrasive one could almost compare it to a blanket woven from barbed wire. Wayne can see that her pain is crushing her downwards.
When Nora meets Wayne, she learns that this would-be prophet took the author’s pain away, which lends weight to Nora’s assessment that the guy no longer mourns his losses. He’s ready to do the same to her. “You believe that you will always feel that pain, and if it starts to slip away, you seek it out again, don’t you?” Wayne says, summing up practically everyone in Mapleton. “But you won’t let it kill you, and you won’t kill yourself,” he says of Nora. “For whoever is joined with all the living, there is hope. And surely a live dog is better than a dead lion. Hope is your weakness, you want it gone because you don’t deserve it. Nora, you do deserve hope.”
