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Kohler down the hall, the long Divinity School hall lined with frosted classroom doors and floored with a strip of chocolate-brown linoleum. He reaches the broad stairs of carved oak, turns on the landing underneaththe tall arched window, almost a slit, of bevelled granite and gray lozenge glass, and walks, in his rustling camouflage jacket, along the main hall downstairs. From behind the classroom doors arises, in binary fashion, laughter or silence. The walls are dotted with the tacky residue of old posters, with bits of Scotch tape and tinted Xeroxed paper. New, competing posters overflow the appointed display boards, advertising rallies to protest pollution in Maine and interference in Central America, and discussion groups concerning “hunger awareness” and “goddess thealogy.” Lightheaded with momentary relief that his encounter with me—me, the monster—is over, Dale proceeds back to the front offices, that warren of desks and low partitions where he has already inquired as to the whereabouts of my lair. He talks again to the receptionist; she is petite and black, with hair done up in corn rows as regular and tightly shiny as small magnetic coils. Her name is Noreen Davis, but I and not he know this. Her broadly smiling lips have been painted an electric red unexpected and lurid against the mat purplish brown of her skin. For make-up she also wears eyeshadow and blusher of a dragonfly violet. He is stirred. (I do not envision him as gay.) Regretfully he perceives that her smile has nothing to do with him but instead with some joke still hanging in the air of this large room, where everyone—a bald man by the wall, a frizzy-haired woman sorting a tray of folders—is smiling, waiting for him to leave so their nameless fun can resume. Someday, Dale thinks, this black girl will marvel at this moment, remembering his shyness and shabbiness and acne and air of confusion. For in the years to come she will live within a world he has discovered and proclaimed, the world of the evident God, Whose elusive surfaces will have been relaxed into their rightful, right-angled obviousness. Standing aboveher, accepting the applications she offers with so mocking and yet inviting a diffident mortal smile, he sees them both enclosed in this future perspective, in the transparency of the revelation he will bring, like two tiny plaster figures within a ball of glass.
    My mind reversed current: I saw him in swift replay retrace his steps down the hall, up the stairs, toward my office, and as he opens the door I see myself as he must have seen me, my gray hair and gray jacket, my half-moon reading glasses flashing double-barrelled light and the sky behind me crammed with blinding clouds, silver dissolved in silver, I the obscure portal to money and, if his ideas prove true, immortality.
    ii
    And, walking home in the dusk, my seminar and a conference with a troublesome student behind me, I had the sensation of following in his steps. Leaving Hooker Hall (the often joked-about name of our main building—Thomas Hooker being, of course, a distinguished Puritan divine whose relatively liberal views upon baptismal efficacy and inward preparation for grace caused him to be exiled from Massachusetts into the wilderness of Connecticut), Dale would have walked the same streets as I, the streets of my own neighborhood. I live three shady blocks from my place of work, on a relatively secluded and increasingly expensive small residential street called Malvin Lane. The sidewalks are brick and, in a few stretches, slate, slabs pleasantly heaved by the swelling roots of trees that, at this early-evening hour, existed overhead as fanning depths rendered alternately brilliant and cavernous by the rays of the streetlamps—islands of light in a jagged arborealocean. The neighborhood consists of large wooden houses, many of them behind eight-foot wooden fences, none of them sitting on more than a fraction of the acreage that, in a suburb, would have