There was a flasher loose in the stacks of Columbia University's Butler Library, my senior year at Barnard. He struck on at least nine different occasions, three of them within the last two weeks of the end of classes. Entrance to the stacks requires a Columbia ID, which meant that the pervert had credentials, but that was hardly a consequence to strain the credulity of a Barnard senior.

There are twelve levels of stacks in Butler Library, and they are murkily lit and largely desolate. Suspended bulbs create puddles of dimness just sufficient for making out the call numbers posted on the ends of the bookshelves. The objects of one's search, the books, can be seen only once one turns the dial of the timed light fixtures that are also attached to the ends of the bookshelves.

The span allotted for illumination is not much. A maximum of ten minutes, and the sizzle of the phosphorescence gives out, the aisle once again plunged into thick gloom.

The possibilities for deviancy that lurk in the twilit obscurity of the stacks had been recognized long before the Butler flasher made his nine (at the least) appearances that spring of my senior year. Several people I knew back then claimed to have had sex in the stacks. This was, in fact, rather a popular thing to claim - perhaps even, for all I know, to do. The secret life that went on in the more Godforsaken areas of that very same building that has engraved on its facade the iconographic names of Western civilization - Homer, Virgil, Aristotle, etc. - was a source of fond amusement and perverse pride, reaching out to embrace even our man in the dirty raincoat.

How quintessentially Columbia, we seniors sentimentally mused. In how many institutions of higher learning could a graduate student reaching for a copy of the Critique of Pure Reason - for so it had reportedly happened on one of the nine occasions - turn at the noise of a strangled apology, to confront the Ding-an-sich? I would soon be moving to Princeton, to pursue my graduate studies there, and I remember half-earnestly entreating a friend whether Princeton's Firestone Library - no doubt well-endowed, no doubt well-lit - would be able to offer me anything in the way of the pure adrenaline rush of paranoid thrill I always experienced upon entering the stacks of Butler.

And still do, for that matter, for it wasn't long before I was back on the campus atop Morningside Heights. Four years after graduating from Barnard, I returned, now as a faculty member in Barnard's philosophy department, subletting an apartment on 110th Street right off of Broadway that belonged to a woman who had graduated with me from Barnard and who had gone off to Europe in search of a subject for her first novel. I arrived in early August and immediately got to work preparing my semester's courses, of which there would be three, a daunting prospect for a newly-hatched Ph.D., especially since one of the courses would be the Senior Seminar, meant to be the culminating academic experience in the philosophy major's undergraduate career.

The fall semester of the seminar is traditionally devoted to an historical philosopher, the spring semester to either a more contemporary thinker or to a topic. I had chosen Descartes for the fall, partly because Descartes has become so utterly unglamorous. Ever since Wittgenstein, he's been everybody's whipping boy. A talented undergraduate philosophy major is just as likely to pronounce glibly upon the "Cartesian fallacy" as to apply to law school after graduation, and this offends me. The whole notion of fashions in thought offends me.

My preparations for the seminar that summer convinced me how very much more subtle Descartes' arguments were than the trendy objections being flung his way. In the service of convincing my students likewise I planned to have them read a book that I admire, Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen: The Defence of Reason in Descartes' Meditations, written by Harry G. Frankfurt, then a professor of philosophy at Yale. Frankfurt's unveiling of the marvelous argumentative machinery moving Descartes' Meditations along, the ingenious strategy that underlies the intricate structure of his attempt to validate reason, had given back to contemporary philosophy's favorite whipping boy at least some of his due.

And so it was that about a week before classes were to begin I made my way over to Barnard's Wollman Library - a far airier structure than Butler, though of course lacking the latter's vast holdings - in order to put Frankfurt's book, among others, on reserve.

However, I was stopped cold near the door by an inexplicably gesticulating librarian. She was pointing, the expression on her face one of outraged disbelief, to a sign that was propped up on a chair placed right inside the open door, boldly stating that the library was closed for this week.

It is true that, not noticing the posted warning, I had blithely circumvented it. My capacity for oblivion to the external world is considerable. Only a few days before, I had wandered into freshly laid pavement and totaled a new pair of Italian high heels I had extravagantly purchased in anticipation of the entrance into adulthood that lecturing before a class would entail.

But then, even as we stood there, the peeving librarian and the peeved-upon I, a political scientist I remembered from undergraduate days made his way, unimpeded, past the barricade, heading straight for the reserve desk. Confused, I tried to explain myself to Wollman's gatekeeper.

"I just want to..." I began; put some books on reserve for my classes, was how I meant to finish, but she cut me off.

"Read the sign." Her voice was alarmingly measured, and her expression grim enough to shove me down off my tottering pose of maturity. I am rendered helpless before certain forms of anger, especially when they emanate from an authority figure. To speak precisely, the irate librarian really was not, in any shape or form, my authority, but neither she nor I had any realization of that fact at the moment.

In many ways, I am a craven creature. I might have been, at the age of twenty-six, quite ready to take on the powerful Wittgensteinian cartel in contemporary philosophy. Still, one only needed to have placed me before a glowering librarian shaking a finger in my face, and all thought processes were seized up in fear. I have, with the years, grown somewhat less abject under fire, but not much.

In retrospect, I realized that the librarian had simply mistaken me for an unbelievably nervy student, a brat who would not take no for an answer. That she would mistake me for a student was really, after all, no surprise. Nobody had ever yet taken me for anything else. The only question people usually had for me was whether I was in college or high school, or maybe even junior high. Even though I was dressed that day in a crisp linen sundress and the high-heeled sandals I had just bought to replace the cemented pair, the attempt at sartorial sophistication had not interfered with the automatic response of the librarian.

"I just want to..." I tried once more to get the compelling reason out.

This time her voice was so incensed that several others inside the library - faculty members who looked their parts - glanced over with activated interest. I turned on a high heel and fled.

I slouched across the way to Macintosh Student Center, collapsing with a cup of tea into one of the little booths they used to have there before renovating them away. My hand was trembling so that the wilting white linen of my dress was in danger of being splattered.

This is a bad omen, I heard my innermost voice. which is pre-philosophical and incorrigibly superstitious, declaring. I shouldn't be here, I'm not ready to teach, what do I even know? The librarian with murder flashing in her eyes had been too bizarre not to be a sign.

The voice I was hearing harkened back to my religious childhood, much given over to the search after an immense truth that measured itself out in small signs and innuendoes. Against this voice, I had mounted my own defense of reason, which had been strong enough to carry me this far. I depended upon it. So instead of succumbing to the sense of profound trespass that the librarian's rebuke had brought down on me, I gulped my tea, although my hand still trembled, crossed Broadway, and made my way over to Butler Library.

I entered the stacks, and a vague uneasiness settled over me, thick with associations that constituted a sense of relocated familiarity more comforting to me, at that moment, than even the cup of Macintosh tea had been.

The good old stack-haunting sicko, the phantom flasher, I thought fondly, getting off the rickety elevator on the sixth floor, where most of the philosophy books are shelved. My rate of success at Butler had never been very high, in contrast to Firestone, where I always found my book.

The call number of Demons, Dreamers. and Madmen is B1854.F7, shelved in one of the more desolately isolated areas of Butler. I made my way through the forlorn shadows, trying to muffle the silly clatter of my high heels. Locating the shelf, I turned the dial for my illumination.

There was a man standing there, facing me, no more than two feet away.

I screamed - I believe rather lustily. This being Butler, nobody came running, which in this case was just as well, for there was nothing observably wrong with the man. I determined this reassuring fact even as I screamed. His fly, in particular, was properly zipped. There was not a single noticeable sign of sexual deviancy.

In fact, he was an Orthodox Jew. His was wearing the de rigueur dark trousers and white shirt, and his black silk yarmulke was singularly huge, encasing the upper dome of his head and reaching down to cover his forehead.

It was the sort of yarmulke my own father and brother wore, though in far smaller and more modified versions. This was one of the most serious yarmulkes I'd ever seen.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to startle you. The light had just gone out. Are you okay?"

Both his voice and his manner presented a great deal of material for analysis, confounding me with contradictions, both internal and in relation to pre-formed views. It was apparent, for example, that he did not come from the areas of Brooklyn that the size of his yarmulke suggested. His enunciation was impeccable, as pure as almost any I had ever heard at, say, Princeton.

The size of his yarmulke ought to have precluded, as well, the nature of the ambiguous smile he was bestowing on me, a young woman in a sleeveless dress. He looked to be about the age that I would have looked had I looked my age. There was the slightest sardonic edge to his smile: it contained a judgment of me, or so I judged. Though I could not see his eyebrows beneath the oversized yarmulke, I drew them in as raised.

Was his judgment of me prompted by my having screamed? Who wouldn't have screamed under the circumstances?

His gaze was too direct, too interested, given the size of the yarmulke. Quite frankly, it would have been too interested even with no yarmulke at all.

"Are you okay?" he repeated, as I stood there rapidly analyzing.

"Yes, I'm okay. Of course I'm okay. I was just startled."

"Who wouldn't be? I almost screamed myself."

But you didn't, I thought. I was almost positive, in fact, that he had been smiling at the moment of illumination.

"I ought to introduce myself," he said - perhaps to further reassure me? "I'm Zachary Syke."

I had little choice but to tell him my name, which, given the nature of that name, yielded him information that could hardly have been neutral to him, again judging by the size of his yarmulke.

His ambiguous smile returned, its sardonic undertones grown slightly stronger with the increase in his knowledge. I thought I detected the presence of yet more judgment: perhaps on my dress, which was, in addition to being immodestly sleeveless, cut well-above my knees? A yarmulke of those dimensions brought out certain well-defined areas of my paranoia. It signaled a world I had rejected, a world I had come to regard just as harshly as it regarded me.

The books on either side of us were philosophical, and this fact, too, confuted my pre-conceptions. The size of Syke's yarmulke ought to have kept him away from the stacks of this section. My own family, to cite a non-random example, had vigorously balked when I had first announced my intention of studying philosophy - as well they should have, for I had gone on to realize a great number of their worst fears. (They were still awaiting the announcement of an intermarriage, the grandchildren who wouldn't know that they were Jewish.)

What, I wondered, would my family have made of Zachary Syke, standing there in the stacks of Butler Library, with a philosophy book in his hand?

"What's the book?" I asked him out of curiosity.

He held up Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen: The Defence of Reason in Descartes' Meditations.

"Amazing," I said.

"An amazing book?" He looked down at it. "I haven't read it."

"Well, it's extremely good. But what I had meant by 'amazing' is that, believe it or not, that's the very book I came here to get."

"Not so amazing," he said.

"No?"

"No. I had a feeling."

"A feeling?"

For one off-guarded moment I had falsely attributed rationality to the Orthodox Jew in the stacks.

"Take it," he said, holding out Frankfurt's book to me.

His smile was at once so inscrutable and so radiant that I was at a loss. Was he demon, dreamer, or madman?

"I'm not a madman," he said in answer to my unvoiced question. "And I'm not a demon, either. I am a dreamer, though. A Jewish dreamer. And so are you. A Jewish dreamer, if ever I saw one."

He smiled - dreamily, demonically, madly. I grabbed the book from his hand, and, for the second time that day, I turned and fled.

I didn't see Syke again until near the end of that fall semester. It was the last week of classes and the anteroom of our department was overflowing with students registering various levels of anxiety. When I opened my door in order to show one of them out and the next one in, I saw him sitting there, deep in conversation with Dolores Delillo, one of my weaker students from Introduction to Philosophy.

I had spent more time with Dolores than with any other student that semester. I had, more than likely, spent more time with Dolores than with any other person, for not only did the demands of those three courses leave me very little time for friends and such, but I was also nursing a confused and broken heart - well, in any case, it was confused. I taught my classes, met with my students, and when I left it was to go back to my apartment to prepare for my teaching.

Dolores, pale and solemn, hadn't missed a single one of my office hours. Her doggedness clashed with her diffidence, with the soft and breathless way she had of speaking. But soft and breathless, she never failed to show up. A freshman who had come to Barnard from a Catholic high school upstate, she responded to the purifying properties of clear thinking and bracing rationality with an appreciation that had touched me. She always sat in the front row in class, right in the middle, and I liked to watch her face as I lectured. Her eyes, behind the round glasses that gave her the look of a very pretty owl. seemed often to glow in response to some point I had made, and this was certainly encouraging to the terribly inexperienced teacher that I was. Dolores, just like me, saw philosophy as the natural foe of the dark forces of fanaticism (represented by our respective families and the parochial schools we had both attended), and that's why she, like me, fell hopelessly in love with the discipline.

Dolores' case was significantly more hopeless than mine, however, for, though she was extremely bright and articulate, she really didn't have much philosophical talent.

The gift for philosophy is a peculiar sort of intelligence, which has often seemed to me (cantor's daughter that I am) analogous to a gift for music. If it's arguments that have to be sung in tune, Dolores Delillo was tone-deaf.

The week before, she had thoroughly discombobulated me by announcing that she intended to declare philosophy as her major. As I tried to talk her out of it - both on the general grounds that philosophy is a terribly impractical major for anyone to pursue and on grounds more peculiar to Dolores - I suddenly saw, in horror, that her eyes, stricken behind the owl-like glasses, were over-running with tears.

I hadn't seen her since then. Dolores, my most devoted pupil, had absented herself from class, including the final lecture that I had delivered only that morning. Of course, I was concerned, and was planning to ask an older member of the department for advice.

Many times, over the course of that first semester, I had felt desperately inadequate in dealing with the psychological needs of my undergraduates. I often found myself wishing I had picked up yet one more graduate degree-in clinical psychology - before hazarding pedagogy. The powers of wisdom, with which the students, not much younger than myself, insisted on infusing me, were unnerving in their radical non-existence.

Syke and Dolores were sitting side by side on one of the orange couches in the anteroom, facing one another in what looked like well-established intimacy. Dolores was in the middle of saying something when I emerged. She stopped mid-sentence, and both she and Syke gaped up at me.

Dolores still seemed to me to have the aggrieved. or perhaps even grief-stricken, expression with which she had departed my office the week before. Syke, on the other hand, was smiling, broadly and beneficently.

To say that I was shocked to see him sitting there in the sanctity of the philosophy department anteroom hardly does justice to my state.

"You remember me," Syke announced, rather unnecessarily. The students crowding the room all seemed to be staring up at me with strangely devouring expressions. What wouldn't I have done to provoke such universal avidity during one of my lectures? I could barely even begin to imagine what they might be thinking about me and the man with the huge shiny yarmulke bisecting his forehead.

"I see that you're very busy. You're a popular professor." He looked like one of my doting family members would have looked had any been inclined to dote. "But it's important that I speak to you. Today. I must speak to you today."

Despite the mad insistence of his words, his tone was relatively easy-going, his expression relatively sane. But what the hell was he saying and why the hell was he saying it to me, here, within the sanctity of the philosophy department's anteroom?

"It's not possible," I said.

There were various ways to interpret that statement, and I meant them all.

"I'll wait in one of the classrooms until you have a moment to spare. Now go teach your students," and he gave me the full baffling beatitude of his smile.

I found him in room 328, where, earlier that morning, I had delivered my final lecture in Introduction to Philosophy, which had been on Hume's coruscating arguments for a skepticism as impossible to maintain as it is to undermine.

He was sitting in the center seat in the very first row: Dolores' place. I still hadn't spoken to her. She had left before I'd gotten to see her this afternoon.

"Look," he said, pointing a finger at the board. "There's a message for you."

It was the phrase "necessary connections." I had been discussing with my class Hume's argument that we never perceive any necessary connections in nature, the argument that forms part of his skeptical conclusions regarding the justifiability of causal reasoning.

However, I had not come to room 328 to engage in the search after truth with the madman from the stacks. I was there for one reason only. I sat down on the desk and stared him down, as severely as my face would allow.

"How did you find me?"

He laughed softly.

"I could tell you that I have powers. I could tell you that I, like you - " he gestured toward the blackboard - "receive messages. I could tell you all that, and far more, and it would all be true. But it's also true that I was able to discover who had checked out Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen on an officer's card that allowed her to keep it out for an entire semester."

"I didn't keep it. I put it on reserve," I shot back, absurdly defensive.

"I know that," he said softly.

I stared at him, pondering.

"I don't understand," I finally said.

"You will. You were made for understanding. It's your deepest attribute. Truth is your calling. You were born with a big soul. You were born with a great knowledge of truth and beauty and goodness. No, wait a moment." He closed his eyes, his expression one of concentrated attendance. "At least a great knowledge of truth and beauty," he amended.

It was that elision that made me crack up at last, and I laughed a good bit of a while, covering my face with my hands.

When I looked again, there was Syke staring up at me with his large and liquid eyes, the look on his face one which I can only describe as luminously tender. Really, I had never seen anything quite like that expression before. Men had stared up - or, more commonly, down - at me with faces sufficiently involved, even moved. But it may very well require the element of pure lunacy to produce a gaze quite like that one.

The absolute vulnerability of the madman who would offer me its sight astounded. I began to feel vaguely frightened - not of, but rather for, Zachary Syke.

"Why is that a message for me?" I asked, in the momentary confusion of my softening mood, pointing to my own chalk marks.

"We'll get to that in a moment. There's something I have to discuss with you first. It's Dolores. I'm very concerned about her. I'm sure you are, too, of course. What are you going to do about her? What are you going to do to help Dolores?"

"Well, I already told her, in the strongest possible terms, what a mistake it would be for her to major in philosophy."

Now it was his turn to stare at me as if barely able to take in the senselessness of my words.

"Not to major in philosophy? What are you talking about?" He shook his head in disbelief. "Dolores Delillo is in love with you. She's infatuated with you. She's not a very strong person and I don't think that her obsession is good for either of you."

"Do you know Dolores? I mean did you ever meet her before today?" I didn't ask him how he even had the concept of women loving women. Such an idea would never have occurred to anyone in my family. Come to think of it, it had been rather slow in occurring to me. The man was one confoundment of pre-conceptions after another, and I felt correspondingly impressed.

He shrugged in a way that indicated that the answer to my voiced questions were both no and irrelevant.

"But you know she's not a very strong person. You know she's infatuated with me."

"I could tell you that I have powers. I could tell you that get messages..."

"And it would all be true..."

"And it would all be true. But I could also tell you that I spent a good hour speaking to her outside your office today, and supernatural powers were redundant. Anyone with half a brain could see the girl is in trouble. I'm concerned about her, but more concerned, quite frankly, about you. Think about it very carefully. And be very gentle with her. This is a frighteningly fragile young woman. But you can't allow her to sustain any delusions about you. You have to nip her obsession in the bud. You have to be very firm."

"Gentle but firm," I said. I had already realized that Syke was, in fact, entirely right about Dolores, and I meekly acknowledged the implication about my missing brain-half as justified. Astonishingly, the man was absolutely right.

"Gentle but firm," he repeated, gently but firmly. "But not with me," he added and then grinned.

"And what is it that I'm supposed to be with you pray tell?"

"What you're supposed to be with me is my bride."

This couldn't have been more matter-of-factly spoken.

I took a few beats.

"So you're a madman, after all. A shame. I was beginning to like you. Or in any case, I was preparing to overlook some of the reasons I have for not liking you."

"You don't like madmen."

"I don't like madmen whose lunacies make claims on me. What in God's name is going on underneath that ridiculously over-sized yarmulke, the likes of which, I have to tell you, I have never before seen."

"It's the yarmulke you don't like," he said amiably. "I think it's entirely a matter of the yarmulke. I'll change the yarmulke and you'll be my bride."

"Do, by all means, change the yarmulke. Definitely change the yarmulke before you try this out on the next girl." I thought of something. "Wait a minute. Did my parents set you up to do this? Is this some sort of crazy match my parents dreamed up?"

A momentary dip in intelligence, entirely understandable. My parents, quite obviously, hadn't planted Zachary Syke in the stacks of Butler Library. I was simply snatching at explanatory straws.

"You and I dreamed it up. Our souls dreamed it up long before you and I even entered this life. You are my bride and I am your groom. That's the plan. I'm simply informing you of the plan. But there's always Plan B. I would be less than honest if I didn't tell you that there's always Plan B."

"Plan B?"

"The other plans tucked away in the metaphysical folds. There always have to be other plans, because we always have free will. You don't have to worry about that. Free will is a fact."

"Thank you, Zachary. I'm glad to hear that. It's a concern I often have."

He smiled.

"You are my bride. Every word, every achingly ironic nuance convinces me. Irony is the language of the jilted truth-lover. You've been jilted by the truth because it was the wrong truth for you."

His metaphor may have had its merits, but its choice of words glanced a raw nerve. Taylor, I cried out in the jagged pain that followed. It was Taylor, not truth, who had been my jilting, or maybe jilted, lover.

"And now I'm jilting you," I said. In the fullness of my heartache, I turned a cold eye on this minor demented drama.

"For the time being," he smiled. I was certain his eyebrows were raised.

"Tell me something, Zachary. You have any eyebrows under there?"

He picked up the yarmulke, clean off his head. The effect was large and all for the good.

"I'll change the yarmulke," he said.

"It won't make any difference to me. You have to know that, Zachary. I'm being gentle and firm. Look at me," I demanded. I was clad in black suede: a short skirt, a vest and turtle neck: almost thigh-high boots. I had kept my legs uncrossed out of concern of offending him by showing even more leg. Now I emphatically crossed them. "Do I look like your bride?"

There was that luminous gaze again.

"You look exactly like my bride," he said softly. "We've seen one another before."

"In the stacks. I remember it only too well."

"Before the stacks. So very long before the stacks. Listen to your inner voice. It's trying so hard to speak to you, to get through all that worldliness you've piled on top of it. Listen." His voice was low and insistent, almost - dare I use the word?-seductive.

"You couldn't be more wrong about me. You don't know the first thing about me. But you're right about the yarmulke," I added, marvelling.

"We'll see," he said, dropping the yarmulke back down onto his head, so obliterating any sex appeal that I had to figure I had only dreamed it - Jewish dreamer that I am.

"Well," he said, getting up from my poor Dolores' seat. "I think I've given you a few things to think about."

"Well, thank you for that. I have such a dearth of subjects to occupy my mind." I threw an arm back to indicate the blackboard, closely covered with my analysis of Hume's skeptical conclusions. He laughed one more time. his eyes doing that thing again, then disappeared out the door.

It was true enough, though, that I had been given a few new things to think about. That night I didn't devote the last moments of wakefulness to the details of my Taylored confusion, but instead considered issues of Syke. There were unanswered questions that I was annoyed with myself for not having posed when I had the chance, back in Milbank's 328 - which room, I was fairly certain, had been chosen by him because its digits add up to thirteen, the number of God's attributes.

But why, I wondered, had Syke been so insistent on speaking to me on precisely that day? Was it some sort of Kabbalistic thing? I was no student of Jewish mysticism and wasn't certain to what extent astrological signs are woven into the complex madness. Had Syke been awaiting the right alignment of planets before coming to annoy the hell out of me? As soon as the semester ended, and I had a little time to myself. I'd go check out some books by Gershom Sholem. Suddenly, I was curious. How absurd that I, without really thinking about it, had continued to avoid the Kabbalah as intellectually off-limits, hearing the echoes of my father and other teachers I'd had growing up, admonishing that the power of Kabbalistic knowledge is so great that it can rip the mind away from its very moorings in sanity.

However, something happened the very next day to displace all thoughts of Kabbalah-maddened demons dreaming in Butler's stacks.

Taylor called me from London. He said he wanted to come and be with me in New York.

Taylor and I had been together pretty much all through our graduate years at Princeton. He was the golden boy of my year, so brilliant he'd made grown professors all but weep with collective pride in the glorious possibilities of human intelligence. He did our species proud. No one I had ever heard could speak as Taylor, in his Oxbridge accent, could. The sentences Taylor spun, oh God, the sentences. Worlds rose up to glisten with a manner of being far superior to mere reality within the sweeping syntax of his breath defying sentences.

And though Taylor spoke as great musicians play, he was a gifted listener as well, especially to me, enwrapping me in a generosity of attention that had made me feel as nothing on earth had ever made me feel, there within the worlds that rose and fell in Taylor's words, in the clouds of glory stirred up by Taylor's sentences.

The problem - or at least a small part of it as it gradually emerged - was that the sentences, incomparable in spoken form, went all puffy and ineffective when they were put down on paper. It was of the essence of their magic that they be fugacious and in flight. Pinned down and examined, they revealed themselves as flailingly imperfect. Taylor himself had come to know, by way of inference, of this dismaying disparity, so apparent to others but not to him. between Taylor heard and Taylor read. So he talked on and on, spellbinding us all, and found ingenious ways to avoid handing in his course papers, able to anticipate only too well the disappointment these would bring upon his admirers. The professors continued to beam, far longer than one would have anticipated, for he would go to them to discuss his ideas, and to listen to Taylor was to be swept up in enchantment. Still, a dissertation had to be produced, and this Taylor could not manage. Eventually, the beams went to dim and finally to black, and the gold leached out of the golden boy.

The last year of graduate school our relationship also darkened, as an agonized Taylor began to insinuate, with ever more nastiness, that the very progress of my own dissertation was a sign of the shallowness of my thought, while I, reading those puffy sentences that never seemed to go anywhere, demanded if he had any idea at all what it was to construct a bloody valid argument.

Things eventually turned ugly between us, too ugly for me to dwell upon. We parted - for the best, we both agreed, though the pain was a long time dissipating. I still wasn't even half way at the goal of caring nothing more for Taylor.

And now here he was, Taylor - his voice, in any case, which was undeniably his very best body part, in my ear, telling me precisely how it was that I was feeling, for he always could wonderfully describe my inner states to me, far better than I could describe them to myself. This was a feature of his eloquence I particularly adored.

What to do? I resisted the inflaming properties of his long transatlantic sentences, telling him I needed time to think, that it might be disaster for us to start it up all over again; I'd made some significant progress in separating, and surely he had as well.

"But why ought we to do all this work in separating from one another, when the very intensity of the effort is a measure of our love?"

It was one of the simplest utterances I'd ever heard him form, and, for that very reason, piercing. And besides, it very nearly amounted to a bloody valid argument.

We spoke every day for the next two weeks and at the end of that time, the day after I'd told him that no, I didn't want him to come to New York, Zachary Syke showed up at my office door.

"Not today, Zachary, I've just been through a rough time."

"I know," he said. "You've been through a great spiritual cleansing. I couldn't come to see you until it had been resolved. It was very important that I not influence you at all. I just want to tell you that you decided the right thing."

"Go away, Syke. Just go away."

I'd told Taylor, of course, all about my Kabbalistic suitor. He was enormously intrigued, asking me, among other things, whether I'd ever confirmed the spelling of the extremely suggestive last name.

"Okay, I'll go away. But here's my phone number. Call me when you want to. I won't answer unless I'm told to, but you can always try calling me."

"What exactly do you mean that you won't answer unless you're told to? Whose telling you what to do?"

"My inner voice. I listen to my inner voice."

"And have you always had an inner voice?"

Once again, I was regretting my not having paused long enough in my ascending academic career to collect that degree in clinical psychology.

"No. It came to me out of my despair. I had reached a point when all I could do was to fall to my knees before God, to crawl before Him on my knees without any shred of ego left and beg Him to do with me what He would. I gave my will, my life, over to Him. Soon after that I met someone who taught me how to hear my inner voice, how to distinguish it from all the false and deceitful ones. You have an inner voice, too, a very strong one, even though you constantly struggle against it."

"Did your inner voice tell you that about my inner voice?"

He ignored my impertinence to stare at me intently.

"You keep hearing a Hebrew phrase in your head, don't you. You're hearing it right now."

The tears started to my eyes, a chill descending my length. This time, he'd managed to spook me far more profoundly than he had even back in the stacks.

"What is it?" he whispered. "Tell me what the phrase is."

"Tikkun neffesh," I whispered back. The phrase means, literally, healing or reparation of the soul. "I've never heard it before, not that I remember. I've heard the expression tikkun olam but never tikkun neffesh."

"It's a very fundamental phrase in the Kaballah. It has to do with one's past lives, what one came into this life in order to rectify. So that's the phrase that you keep hearing. I should have known. And you still insist on denying the existence of your inner voice, your Jewish soul, the destiny that we two compacted in the most joyful moment of our souls' long quest?"

"I still insist, Zachary. There's always Plan B. You assured me of that yourself. Free will. I depend upon it."

"That would be the only thing I succeed in convincing you of."

He smiled, one final luminously loopy smile. and he was gone.

It took some years for Zachary Syke to disappear altogether from my life. He used to show up at times that were often, I have to admit, uncannily significant. He came to pay a shiva call when my father died in the spring semester of that first year of my teaching, tracking me down in my parental home in White Plains, God only knows how. I stopped asking him his deductive methods. He spent a very long time speaking alone with my mother, the two tete-'a-tete, as if they had known each other for years. I don't know what they said to one another; for some reason, she didn't want to share it with me. But she told me that he was the only one who had been able to console her, "and not only about your father."

"How is it that you come to know such a person as Rabbi Syke?" she asked me, clearly impressed.

"Is he a rabbi, Mom?"

"I don't really know. I just assumed it, from the way he spoke."

He called me the week that I learned that I was getting tenure, to wish me mazel toy, he said, but he didn't get in touch with me to wish me mazel toy when Taylor and I got married.

The last time I saw him I was pushing a baby carriage down Broadway, with my firstborn, a girl, bundled up inside. This time it was she who received the gift of all the light of Syke's smile.

"Plan B," I introduced her to him.

"I see. It's also a beautiful plan."

"And you? Where's your Plan B?"

"I'm moving to Jerusalem. That's my Plan B. I leave tomorrow. I just came by to say good-bye to you."

"You came by here?"

We were standing on the corner of 89th St. and Broadway, a good fifteen blocks from my apartment. We were near the organic food store where I used to go to do most of my grocery shopping. My daughter was gumming an organic pretzel.

"Try to bring her up Jewish," is what he said to me. I stood there watching him make his way down Broadway, following the big black yarmulke until it finally disappeared from sight.

I look around for Syke, now and then, unable to convince myself that he'll stay irrevocably detached. I've become a sometime student of the Kabbalah, and I always think that I might just happen upon him in Butler Library, in the most forsaken of all its areas, where the books of Jewish mysticism are stacked.

I had a strong premonition he'd show up last spring, when Taylor and I, after years that had brought out the worst in each of us, finally decided to call it quits. Taylor's gone back to London, none of his "works-in-progress" - the various books he'd talked publishers into a frenzy over - carried to any satisfactory result, with the exception of the two quite fantastic daughters we brought into the world together. in those two girls, I see the immensities of Taylor's promise undimmed. Zachary Syke, I can only hope, is well along now on his own Plan B.

"There's always a Plan B," I hear that voice inside me quietly saying. At the oddest junctures, it will speak to me. "Tucked away in the metaphysical folds. There always have to be other plans because we always have free will."

There are times when I almost believe that. There are times when I almost believe that the life I have freely chosen has displaced a destiny I once compacted with another, so long ago, in a joyful moment of our souls' long quest.

Rebecca Goldstein is a former philosophy professor who became a fiction writer. She is the author of five books, including The Mind-Body Problem and Mazel, and became a MacArthur Fellow in 1995. © Rebecca Goldstein. All rights reserved.