The Dybbuk in Love

The color of his eyes had not changed, neither their depth nor their focus; his voice was as relaxed and nasal as the first time he spoke to her in the library. But he was looking through his eyes now, not with them: panes of stonewashed stained glass, and she said, dead-end recognition, ¿Menachem.¿ Something like ice and brandy sunfished up into her throat, sluice and burn past her heart; she put it from her, as she had weeks ago put away her surprise. Wondering for how long this time, she gave her greeting to this new face. ¿I was wondering when you¿d turn up.¿ Dybbuk: plural, dybbuks or dybbukim; from the Hebrew levadek, to cling or cleave. In Eastern Europe, at the end of the nineteenth century, a restless spirit that possesses a living person until exorcised. On the East Coast, at the beginning of the twenty-first, a dead man with a thousand faces and a single desire . . .