"But no, it's something more than that," the intruder said, and now the room was electric. The rumor had it that he'd been off ever since his trip to Damascus the year before-"under a foreign influence," as the person who knew him best, Alejandro Mazzini, said. It was said he'd stopped handing in chapters to Sefadhi, and was running off in search of manuscripts that didn't exist; he'd taken the Sufi madness all too seriously. "A story has as many secrets as a person does. Hidden implications, shadow meanings, layers that lead to other layers. And the most interesting part of a story is the part we don't see at first, where the clues are all hidden. The princess in the tower asks the gallant knight to save her, say. But maybe the real meaning of the story is that the knight is moved to the quest by pride, or stubbornness. Maybe he's only using the princess as a way of playing out some urge that has nothing to do with her at all. Maybe, as the Gnostics say, she's only a reflection of another part of him, a higher self that is imprisoned, and so his risking his life for her has nothing to do with her, but only him."

The room was silent; he'd plunged off a cliff, and no one else would follow.

"And maybe"-now there was no stopping him-"maybe, when he breaks in on her little room in the tower, he sees that he's really the captive, and she's the one who can release him. That he is carrying the castle with him everywhere he goes, while she, in her tiny chamber, is quite free. And maybe, further, when he carries her down the stairs and out into the world, she's terrified. She doesn't want to leave the castle, everything she knows. She's never been on a horse before. The knight has thrown himself into the story and made it his own. Without even noticing that it's not the story he had thought it was."

"A great burst of eloquence," the chairman noted dryly, not unhappy to be given the chance to exercise his power. "And, to go back to Kevin's thesis-our reason for being here, after all-what do we think of religion as a form of collective, even we might say collectivist, myth-making?"

And Kevin took the reins again, and spoke up for law and order.

By the time the presentation was over, there was very little time for questions, and the buzz that was running through the room clearly had to go outside with its news, to be released. Someone said something about Jung, and Vijay Mishra, from England, asked, as he always asked, about Northrop Frye. Elaine, who had almost completed her dissertation on female shamans in Korea, said, "Maybe we could say that fairy tales are our way-our only way-of privileging the ghosts that our official textbooks marginalize."

"A fine way to conclude a memorable session," said the chair, relieved to have brought the train safely back to its sidings. "We meet again three months from now with"-he discreetly consulted his notes-"Emma, on Hildegard of Bingen."

"Thank you," said Sefadhi, as he brushed past him to the corridor. "I think you've just made my job of telling the Department you need special treatment much easier."

By the time he got home, taking the long way round, she was gone. He looked for a note on the desk, guessing that there would be none. He tried to see if she had left something of hers lying about, but she'd cleaned up before she left. The plates were back in the cupboards, everything was back the way it had been before she'd ever arrived.

Opening the closet, on a sudden impulse, he found it stripped of all her clothes. Previously she'd always kept something there, as a way of laying her claim to the space, and reminding him of her presence; mostly as a way to ensure that she'd always have a reason to come back.

When someone dies-he thought suddenly of Rumi, and all the ecstatic poems that had been keeping him company for years-a part of her disappears, and everything else that is suffused with her, the invisible part, grows more intense than ever. He smelled the ylang-ylang she'd kept for weeks by his bed. He saw she'd forgotten to take away the tea she'd brought for her monthly pains. Under a pillow, a long golden hair as from a fairy tale curled out.

When he went to bed, she was closer to him than she had been for months. He talked and talked to her all night, and when it was light blew out the candle, the blue and gold of Isfahan, that was the ornament of a shared romance.

The next morning, he made a list of all the places he would not go because he had gone before with her: an anti-map of sorts. He even put away all the unread books he had by women, in case one of the novels' scenes had a woman casting an appraising eye on men, and he saw her in the character. Yet whatever in him was taking all the precautions was not the part that might have gained from them. He rode back from the library that evening-the library had always been the safe place for being all alone-and when he saw a light on in the house, he accelerated all the way home; and then remembered it was he who'd left it on, in case she might unexpectedly return. A fool, he thought-maybe this was what she'd really left with him: her bitterness-is someone who longs for the very person he's just banished.

She did come back, a few days later, in mid-afternoon, but it was as if it were someone else, an amateur actress, doing a poor job of impersonating her. She said "Cool!" when she saw the new cups he'd bought-she'd never used the word before-and the cross above her low-necked dress was new, or new to him. The not-so-sure, maybe former lover reads all the same texts as before, but in a different light. She was wearing her hair up, he decided, so she could take out the pins for someone else.

"The deadline's coming up," she said.

"Five or six weeks. More, if I get the extension."

"And if you don't?"

She wanted him to help her, he suspected, and to make it easier for her to leave.

"If I don't, I have to leave the country. Abandon the thesis, as likely as not, and make another life elsewhere."

"Leaving me where exactly?" She was looking for things that would hurt her, and this time he obliged.

"Leaving you anywhere you want to be. You've got time, money, you can do anything."

He slept on the sofa that night-as if, again, he'd picked up her habit of coming upon the right gesture only after the occasion for it had passed-and the next day, seeing her lying in bed, unsleeping, waiting for something that would spring the lock, he came and sat beside her on the bed. "That park you were always mentioning? Did you ever go there?"

"How could I? I've been away." Her sister had told her about a place at the foot of the hills which no one knew about; they'd resolved to go there, long ago, and make it part of the private map they were drawing up in their heads.

The sun had come up by the time they went outside, struggling through the early-morning fog, and by the time they reached the empty parking lot on the far side of town it was hot. A small trail, hardly kept up, led back through the trees; insects of some kind whirred and jittered all around. They took the narrow path up into the woods, and after a few minutes came to a stream, thin and silver, running up towards the mountains. Large boulders, logs, and branches damming and redirecting the flow.

It was a smudgy, sultry, listless afternoon, the day seeming to twitter and whine around them, and as they dandled their legs in the water, walked along the bank, the gnats, or whatever they were, buzzed and swooped. It was sticky and scratchy and hot; the day pricked at them, at their faces, the exposed parts of their skin. She put on a summer hat to protect her from the sun, and when he saw her walking down to the stream in front of him, in the long white dress and hat he'd last seen in New Mexico, he came up behind her, and kissed the back of her neck.

Hands caught hands, released; the day was hot and the water cool.

She'd brought a book of Indian love poems to read him-less to draw him in, he felt, than to shut him out in some way, to remind him of all he was closing the door on-and when she sat down on the rock, as if to read to him, he went off exploring in the woods, deeper and deeper towards their darkness. The day drowsed on, dawdling and slow, a twitter everywhere, as she paged through the gold volume with its green inscription, reading the love poems to herself.

He walked back, crackling, over twigs and leaves, and when he came back through the trees there was nothing on the rock but the book, turned over, and the fancy white pumps she'd brought. He looked along and saw her upstream, holding her dress in the way he remembered from the very first night on the beach; the water splashed against her legs, and wet spots appeared on the dress. Then, as she stumbled against a rock, her hat fell off and her hair was all loose, in her eyes, in her mouth, across her neck, a broken angel's nest.

She came back, walking slowly, to where he sat, occasionally jumping when she hit her foot against a jagged point, or when the water suddenly grew too deep or cold. When she got back to the rock, he could see abrasions on her legs, small red cuts here and there, and when she leaned forward to kiss him, he tasted salt, sweat, hair; her legs left wet shadows on the rocks.

Her feet, her legs were cool and bare; her mouth had all the collected warmth of the drowsy afternoon. The flies, the gnats, were chattering, and from the far side of the trees they heard a car starting up, a truck perhaps, idling, footfalls, a scuttling dog. The water where it came off her legs was cool on him, her face cool and warm at once where she rested on his chest. The rock against his back warm on the naked skin, and the sun high above the trees hot in the bright afternoon.

They didn't say anything as they lay against the rock, in the small sanctuary of the riverbed, but when she leaned over to kiss him again, loose hair, wet mouth, cool legs, warm lips, he felt her thigh urging at his in the way he recognized. Her eyes were closed; her pale face was open to the sun. She made room for him in what she called her home, and when he was there, she just said, "Whatever you do, just stay there. Don't move." And as he did, she began to cry again, silently, as if to force out the last vestiges of whatever remained.

She left of her own accord a little later, and as he walked her out to her car, he found a letter sticking out of his mailbox, a blue airmail envelope of the kind he knew from England. It was Hussein, of all people, thanking him fulsomely (and on an Indian time-scale) for his help of many months before, and "the authoritative insight of your scholarship." Someone had come over from Paris, he was writing to say, also to look at the manuscript, and he, too, was a good man who understood the value of such things; but all he had done was confirm him in the wisdom of what the "English pandit" had said.

The light that was flashing on the answering machine would be Sefadhi, he thought, with some oblique reminder of the deadline, or Alex, asking him to a movie that would only bring her back into their company again; and when, towards nightfall, he pushed it, sure enough he heard the Argentine polish. "I will be away for a few weeks," his friend announced, "I find I have a hunger for the old," though as the words came out his listener saw someone very young, Sophie, in the sun, throwing her arms around and seeing where she might fall. Someone else was calling, a "friend of a friend," she said, about information she had on a lost manuscript-California the home now of imported hopes-and then there was a surer voice, as from a former life: Nicki, back in West Hollywood, "rather at loose ends," as she put it, "and wondering if you might have time for a visitor." He remembered the last time she'd come up to look in on him and, dialing the number she'd left, said, "Why don't I come and visit you there? Save you the drive and get myself out of the house?"

He'd caught her off-balance-done a Nicki on her, in effect-and all she could say in her surprise was, "Brilliant. I'm sure there's room enough for two."

She was staying in one of those bright new metallic places designed to consecrate L.A.'s status as a postcard, a fashion statement for Europeans, and the room was all white, with a hot tub on a terrace and a view of the hills through the smog. He took her out for sushi in the Valley, and as they talked he saw she wasn't acting only on her sister's behalf: somewhere along the way, she'd stepped out of the costume drama that is English life, and now she couldn't find her way in again.

After dinner was over, he took her up to Mulholland, to see the lights-Los Angeles always most enticing from a distance-and then they went down to the coast and followed it around, distant shouts reaching them as they drove past the arcade, the distant Ferris wheel, in Santa Monica. "It's always most attractive if you treat it as a playground," he said, and she looked over at him as he drove, not sure of what was coming over him.

He took the long way back, giving her the Anglo tour of Angeleno curiosities-the graveyards, the pink mansions and baroque leather bars-and when they pulled into the underground garage again, a liveried bellboy nodded them in, and the desk clerks, deft with this kind of situation, said "Miss Chancellor," as if she were returning with a takeout meal. She yawned in the elevator, but it was a yawn that didn't say "Leave me alone" so much as "Look at what I'm trusting you with."

"I for one am not going to waste the tub," she said when they got back into her suite, and he started to make himself busy with something he didn't need to do. He heard her changing in the bathroom, and as she came out, "It'd be a crime not to use it. When I'm back in London, no one will believe . . ." and then the rest of it was lost as she stepped out onto the terrace.

He'd taken pains to say nothing about Camilla over dinner- Martine knew already, in any case, and it was too complex a story even for him to figure out-but now, as he saw she'd left the door open behind her, he thought of the small figure in her white dress somewhere in the city, asleep and at peace, hardly guessing that another woman, in her stoical way, was crying out for his company.

He went out onto the small deck-she smiled up at him, wide awake-and the warm night hit him after the artificial cool inside.

"Coming in?"

"I don't think I should."

"Really? Just for a minute?"

"I think I should be getting to sleep. I have to leave early in the morning."

"Don't be a spoilsport." She was on the verge of asking right out.

"Martine," he said, though it was another name he was thinking of. "I don't think your sister would approve."

She looked away-explanations were a worse blow to pride than the rejection, especially when they said, so flagrantly, that they were taking your pride into consideration. A little later, as he lay on the couch, he heard her coming in, bare feet walking heavily on the plush carpet, and the door to the bedroom closing with surprising force.

In the morning, she was quick to remind him that his presence was no longer required-"I ought to be calling Martine for her birthday," she said, as he kissed her goodbye-and to tell him that he wasn't what her sister wanted, either. As he walked out into the corridor, he saw himself, a year before, opening his address book and seeing the date written out in a boy's hopeful hand. It would be one year to the day this weekend.

Sitting at his desk, he thought again about what the poems said: Give up on hope and you might as well give up on life. Give up on hope- this their shadow meaning now-and you were betraying what you claimed to hold. Doing, in fact, what he had always found so saddening in her: accepting defeat as a fact of life.

He picked up the phone, the madness still alive in him, and said, "Camilla: there's a special occasion coming up and I wondered if you'd be interested in joining me for it. A first anniversary of sorts. An achievement. I'll be marking the historic moment at seven p.m. this Sunday: I'm inviting a lot of people, but all of them are you." A year ago he'd have thought this pure insanity: masochism, or stubborn blindness, a refusal to learn from the mistakes of the past. But why had he come to California if not to step out of the range of such a voice?

He spent the next day making up a map-their map, the one they'd superimposed upon the world-and he drew up a kind of treasure hunt, as if a personal version of the Sufi metaphor. If she followed the instructions, she would start at the CD player and activate the song of Zanzibar (the second drive in the hills, the mist coming in and out of the car as they drove past turns), then open the refrigerator to take out the mango juice akin to what she'd given him in her sister's kitchen. Step 3 would lead her to the bed, where Yeats lay beside the candle with the colors of Isfahan. Step 4 would lead to what lay beside the candle and the book, which was him. Step 5-or so his instructions put it-would lead to herself, and the better person she always longed to find.

In other circumstances he would have shuddered at the foolishness of this; not long ago, he'd have looked at it with Nigel's eyes, or Alex's. But part of the point of the whole exercise was to show how "foolishness" could be redeeming sometimes: "You know 'silly' comes from the Old English saelig, meaning 'blessed,' " she had said once, with her unfailing gift for surprise, and he had replied, "As 'idiot' comes from the Greek for 'private person.' "

He pinned the note on the door at six-forty-five, and though the wind was up, the piece of paper was secure. It was still light, as it had been on the early drives, and the new candles he'd bought would keep on burning for several hours. He hadn't rung her to confirm she was coming; this was about a leap of faith, after all, a venturing of something in spite of everything that had passed. Die to expectations, and abandon your petty pride.

He waited and waited, and at nine o'clock-the light had faded over the ocean now, and the night sounds had begun-he got up and took the note down from the door. He pushed the PAUSE button down on the CD player, he blew out all the candles. Deja-vu, he thought, can sometimes mean "twice shy."

A little before dawn, though it seemed several lives had passed through his head as he lay in the bed, the sentiments of the poems blurring into the life that was actually unraveling, and the arguments in his head gaining force and persuasiveness, as if they could put disappointment in a box-he heard a tapping at the window. A soft tap, unmistakable-it brought back taps and taps of many months before. He buried himself deeper in the sheets, and then he realized he was turning into her again: inviting someone to come and hiding when she arrived.

"Hello? Anybody home?" It was, as ever, her sweetest and most hopeful voice, the one she knew he couldn't turn away from.

"Hello? Johno? Are you there? It's me; I'm sorry I'm late."

To close the door on her was, in a sense, to give in to her, and admit that all her "monsters," as she often called them, were right; he'd put himself in a position in which he had to open up.

"Johno-you must be here. I saw your car outside. I'm bringing a surprise."

The high, sweet voice kept calling and calling, the tapping went on against the screen door, and finally he went over and opened the door.

"Thank you. I've brought everything."

In one great leap she collapsed onto the sofa, and books, brochures, tapes, and packages spilled out. She'd even brought a bottle for the party of ten hours before.

"I hope you don't mind. I wanted to get everything just right." What could he say?

"At first I was scared," she went on, "and then I thought, 'He doesn't like me to be scared. I'll give him a present he'll never forget.' "

"Why should you be scared? I invited you."

"I know. But"-she looked at him, as if surprised-"you're mad, aren't you?"

"Not mad. Just defeated. You win. I give up."

"What do you mean?" For the first time something else came out of her voice, from behind the cheer. "What are you saying?"

"Nothing. You're right. I was stupid to think otherwise. You win."

"I brought you this," she said, and pulled out, fumbling at the bag, what looked to be a coffee-table book, in wrapping the color of imagined stars.

"Thank you."

"You're not going to open it?"

"Later, perhaps. At some more propitious moment." He took it over to the bedroom closet, and put it away in a corner.

"I wanted everything to be perfect."

"I'm sure you did. I know." The fight was out of him, and his very lack of temper terrified her.

"I knew you'd be mad at me. It's what Greg said, too."

He handed over, without a word, the present he'd bought for her-a small dime-store ring in which two waves intertwined so you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. "I'm really tired. I hope you'll excuse me." Politeness in him meant distance: it was the wall he put up that was more resistant than any locked door. If he didn't leave now, the thought came, they'd burn so many bridges they wouldn't even be able to say hello again.

Up in the hills, the sun was just rising over the farthest mountain, and by the time he'd reached the spot below "their house," there was nothing but a sea of clouds below. Truly one could feel a god here, dangerously far from everything that aged or died.

"Maybe you're late," he said to himself, more vocal alone than he could be with her, "because you're late. Not because of what your parents did to you twenty years ago. Not because of any elaborate psychological mechanisms and a fear of intimacy, and a stubborn determination to destroy what you love. Not even because you want at some level to make things go wrong so that you can hide inside the comfort of your fears. Maybe you're late just because you're not good with time. As people have been late for centuries."

What the absent spirit might have said, he could not hear. When he got back to the house, the early morning already feeling exhausted, she was seated in the bed, bent over, writing a message of some kind on a large paper towel (the letters already blearing on the rough surface). She'd let down her hair and changed into her white nightdress; he could see the gloss she'd applied with her thin pencil. The strand of pearls around the pale neck said this was a person he couldn't hurt.

"Are you coming to bed?" she said, as if the world had just begun.

"Sorry. That's the last place I want to be."

"Is there anything I can do to make you feel better?"

"I don't think so. The part you probably want to touch went into cold storage sometime late last night."

"I wrote you this." She presented the paper towel to him as a little girl might show her parents the text on which her teacher had written "A." Already the words were wavering, almost blotched beyond his comprehension.

"I can understand if you never want to see me again. I'd never want to see me again if I were you. I never want to see me again even though I'm not you. I bet it feels like you've gone to all this trouble for nothing. It's not for nothing, but there's nothing I can say to make you believe that. I think I've used up all my IOUs. You've tried so hard to get the better of my demons, and I don't think anyone could try harder. But they've been in there a long time, and they don't give up easily. I could get down on my knees and say, 'Please, please, please don't give up on me.' But I'd only disappoint you again before long, and then I'd have to watch your heart break over and over. I guess the only thing I can say is 'I'm here if you want me.' "

Someone crying out for help, and yet, if he extended a hand to help her, he'd be pulled into the dark swamp, too. The Sufis never dealt with someone from a culture that hasn't had a chance to grow up or lay down roots.

"I wish it were different," he said, "but I've only got a few weeks left, and the fellowship . . ."

"I know. If we go on like this, we won't even be friends any more."

"See you in a few weeks, maybe."

"Maybe," she said, and when she walked to the door a little later, in her scruffiest clothes, she took even the candle by the bedside.

IV.

Almost as soon as he heard the sound of the huge car turning the far corner, he threw himself into his poems with a cold fury, and though some of what he wanted to say, and what they said to him, sounded flat now, as remote as another man's prayer, some of it came to sudden life. The words came out in one impersonal rush, and he congratulated himself on having mistakenly destroyed the strange final chapter. "It's your way of being personal, I suppose," Martine had said in Paris, "returning to the impersonal. But it doesn't help much with the washing up."

The chapter he wrote now was on "Metaphor and Coincidence," and it was about how, if you live far enough away from the world, everything you do is a symbol, because the person who is doing it is not the person who will die. You enter a mythic space of sorts-a place where there aren't any clocks-and everything carries a resonance deeper than itself. You aren't yourself, but something more, and so everything you do, everywhere you go, takes on a different meaning. An abandoned house becomes an emblem of a future of which you can make anything you choose. The desert becomes the place where there are no props or signs or coordinates and the only protectors are wind and silence and space. The person you love becomes a hope.

The chapters came quickly now, and for a moment he felt himself back in the very space that Rumi had admitted him to: the rarefied, charged space where a door means an opening, and the city walls speak for the defenses you've built up. Metaphor was critical to the Sufis, he found himself thinking, because it was itself a metaphor: it said that behind the things we see, behind the people who speak, there lies another dimension, and that other person sees even the things of the world in the light of the eternal. "The nature of growth-of love or faith or anything-is that the person who thinks in terms of appointments and plans and dates gives way to the person who thinks of something deeper. The literal world cedes to the allegorical, and the geometric box from the marketplace becomes an emblem of God."

Occasionally, carried away by his chapter, he thought back to the first Persian poem he'd ever read-FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam, the most popular translation in the English language other than the Bible, so they said-and tried to imagine how some unknown Victorian might take the sentiments of the Persians and organize them into tidy quatrains.

If, with the fire of love I burn,

Away, away, I hope you'll turn,