Which meant, as you know, that I couldn't, either. You were the way I forgave myself. You were the way I told myself I could be better, or at least that I had better things inside of me. I didn't ask for that, it just came with the territory. You became the place where I put my better self.

So now I'm gifted with this sense of who I am, or could be, but there's no way I can get to it. You've shown me a better world and then walked off with the key. It's all right for you, you have your books, your desk, all the places you can be when you're alone. I have only you. That's my equivalent. You are my books, my private space, my chance for something better. Not because I think you're so great (God forbid!), but just because I find myself with you. What you found in New Mexico I find in your arms.

Plain and simple.

But not fair. Because you can go to New Mexico anytime you choose. But I can't take myself to you. And if I do, it takes me weeks-months-to recover from the devastation. Or recover from the missing you. So I'm screwed either way, if I have a good time or a bad one.

Which leaves me alone, with my heart in another town, in the safekeeping of someone who's off reading poems. It's unfair and unequal. What did I do to deserve this? Fall in love with you?

You know I wish you well. But I feel like I'm alone here, in the dark. You were the best thing that ever happened to me. Until it stopped happening.

Miss me lots- Love (even if you don't want it),

Camilla

The next day, he took himself up into the hills. It wasn't what he'd expected to do, and he still had to be careful to drive along streets he'd never driven along with her. But this predated all that: the first place he'd discovered in Santa Barbara, out on the southern edge of town, in the hills, near a grove of oak trees, the sky always unnaturally blue above the thin, deserted road.

Off to one side was a seminary, and on the other a sign in elaborate calligraphy announcing the "Church of I AM." Farther up, the community of nuns, belonging to an Eastern order. The first time he had come up here, he'd been amused to find that all the choice real estate was in religious hands: as in some old story in which the king has everything but peace, and so stands ready to give all his wealth to any wise man who can put his heart at ease.

The congregation of sisters worshipped in a great temple set against the mountains, fragrant with sandalwood and incense, and all around it were flowerbeds and fruit trees. Down below, in the far distance, the misty outline of the coast, and the sea, usually deep blue, framed between the eucalyptus trees. On the steps of the temple, looking out at the great distances, he usually felt everything come into clarity.

He parked the car and walked up to the space beside the moss-green bell. She'd given him a present, which perhaps she'd planned to explain to him, but he'd sent her away, and so turned it into a mystery. It might have been a way to pull him back to her (in which case, somehow, it had done all she might have wished). It might have been her ultimate act of generosity-to hand him over to what had always seemed to tug him away from her. It might have just been an attempt to help him in his thesis: in the New World they still believed in giving people what they wanted.

He sat in the summer light, in the silent afternoon, and let the sun wash over him. One time, in Fez, he'd stolen out of the room while Martine was sleeping, and tried to go back to the Old City after dark. She'd admired a pair of amethyst earrings in the suq, and now he was determined to surprise her with them. But of course he'd got lost almost instantly-that's one way locals stay ahead of visitors in Fez-and the more he'd tried to find his way out, or back, or anywhere, the more he'd felt like someone chasing his own past. Even in daylight it would have been hard to find; at nighttime it was impossible. Wild music came out of the stalls, and urchins pulled at him, offering him this place, that one; men in hoods appeared suddenly around corners, and then vanished again into the dark.

It was like, he realized now, being lost inside a piece of music, but one in which there was no melody or rhythm he could make out. And the more he tried to escape, the more he was lost at its heart. "I help you, sir?" "You buy from me?" "Your wife, sir? You want for your wife?" "My sister, sir. My uncle. My friend."

"Quite a long excursion," she'd said when at last he'd found his way back, attaching himself to a pair of Germans who'd had the sense to bring a guide with them. "Got in deeper than you thought?"

Against her ancestral manner he was always helpless. Even the earrings he'd picked up from the Germans' expensive hotel looked hollow now.

"Very nice. Though you still haven't told me what you were doing all this time."

"Looking for these."

"Of course. What else would you be up to?"

Another of the moments to match, like a pendant, the early morning in Istanbul.

When he went back to his desk now, he knew where he was going. "Camilla," he said, after picking up the phone, dialing the number that led to her answering machine in Los Angeles. "I did open your present, and I'm astonished. I don't know what to say. Honestly, I'm speechless in every way. Can you tell me anything about it?"

It was useless waiting for her call-she might not get the message for weeks, and even if she did, she might rejoice in his discomfort. The person who responded to him might be in hiding, or (this was Camilla) might have become someone quite different. Wanting to feel he was doing something, he drew out a long piece of clean paper, and wrote.

Nigel: Can you help me with something? Something stupid. I won't bore you with all the details, but I want to make contact with someone, in Spain, and, for reasons that are complicated but not entirely dishonest, I don't want him to know I'm contacting him from California. I know it sounds utterly mad, but take it from me that it's what this mad field entails.

So could you please just sent the attached fax-a cover letter, and these four pages of poems-to him, as from yourself, and ask him to reply to you? If he sets the Revolutionary Council on you, I'll make it up in some way to Arabella.

Thank you, really and truly: whatever you want from California will be yours, and I'll still be in your debt.

Warmest wishes,

John

Then, lighting his candle again, and drawing out the book, he returned to the desert. It felt as if night winds were blowing around the flimsy house, perched so precariously at the edge of the cliff- "the far edge of the world," as he'd once called it to Nigel-that it was all he could do to keep himself upright. The nightly ritual under candelight began to seem some private act of worship, performed each night for a God he couldn't name.

The drunk in the street

Sees two bottles where there is only one.

This drunk in my house

Sees one bottle where there are two.

You say you are in love,

But all I see is you.

True lovers become flame,

Become smoke, become ash.

These ones, if possible, seemed even more resistant than the earlier ones, more knotty; there was less and less of Rumi-or of obvious Rumi-as the book proceeded, and he thought of a ship passing through headlands and then moving out into the open sea. He was being drawn deeper and deeper into what he couldn't understand- as if someone was deliberately drawing him on, placing a familiar sign, a well-known quatrain, just at the place where he might be tempted to give up. And so leading him farther and farther into the light of what he didn't understand.

Had Rumi not written sixty-five thousand couplets in his intoxication, had concordances not all been in a Farsi that was still something of a stretch for him, perhaps he could have turned to a source in the library-or at least a foreign library-and quickly isolated the poems that were known to be by the master. But he didn't have the resources for that, or the time, and something else told him that to attempt to unriddle the meaning of the book in that way would be a kind of profanation-like making word counts of the Bible.

Leave yourself at home,

The Beloved has no need of you.

Who does he want to see?

No one.

The poems were growing more curdled, more obscure: farther and farther from the rounded clarity of Rumi, which made him think now of the richly painted low doors of Damascus in the near dark. The phone on his desk was the only silent thing in the room. "You're far away even when we're in the same room," she'd said once, on his sofa. "You remove yourself inwardly, I remove myself physically. It comes to the same thing."

In the morning, when he awoke-or pulled himself out of a crowded and confused sleep-he saw a piece of paper hanging out of his fax machine, and tore it out.

Dear Mr. Nigel Carpenter, I thank you for your enquiry of this afternoon. I further thank you for thinking to solicit my opinion as what you so orientally call the "leading expert in this ancient field." I read the poems you sent and feel obliged to tell you that the book you have discovered, if this is an indication of its contents, is worthless. These are pathetic falsehoods that mock the work they steal. You will notice, for example, in the third one, that the poet writes like a copy of the great Sufi, yet his "turning," his "drinking," and his "love" have the stink of the daily. They take what is sacred and make it cheap.

I regret this bluntness and hope you understand that honesty is better than politeness in such a matter. I hope you will not trouble anyone else with these copyist's works. They are foolish things that laugh at the originals.

I do not know your name and I do not know where or how you study. I have every reason not to answer your fax at all. If I do so, it is only to ask you please to desist from what you are doing. For us, these poems are holy works. They do not need your coquetry.

Sincerely,

Rene Guzman Espinoza

You are the violation of my vows,

My apostasy, my faith.

I shatter myself and you,

I bend to pick up the pieces.

You move me