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crawl on top of the stacked cartons; he saw ghostly movements in the corners of his eyes and heard whispers and laughter; he even smelled hair oil, he claimed, of “another era.” Yet, he insisted adamantly he “did not succumb” to such ghosts. He did not “believe” in ghosts—“Do you?”
    “No! What a silly question.”
    “Good. We have in common the rationalist’s belief in this world only. ”
    How appealing Wystan was, in his clumsy way. He reminded me of my brother when Harvey was being sweet and charming and not sarcastic or mean to me—a rarity.
    And I saw that Wystan was attracted to me. The curious way he peered at my face.
    Maybe noting my swollen lower lip, that had been bitten and bloodied.
    Gallantly Wystan helped me carry some of the books I’d selected from the Religion/ Anthropology shelves. (Lesser-known titles by Margaret Meade, Gregory Bateson, and Clifford Geertz; provocatively titled trade paperbacks Totem, Taboo and Mother-Child Rituals in Africa and A Cultural History of Infanticide , grimy mass-market paperbacks on many topics including, for Harvey, Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Unbelief and Forbidden and Denied: Apocryphal Books of the Bible as well as a half-dozen back issues of Journal of Early Christian Studies .) Each time I selected a book to buy, Wystan marveled at my “judicious taste.” His feeling for me, a mysterious young Caucasian woman who was clearly well educated, who’d entered the run-down secondhand Book Bazaar out of nowhere on a weekday morning, was touchingly clumsy as an oversized beach ball Wystan was obliged to carry in his arms, unable to pass on to another, or to set aside. For a dreamy hour I wandered the aisles of the store feeling as Harvey claimed to feel—that somewhere in all these thousands of books there was a singular book that would speak intimately to me, and change my life—but where was it?
    Or maybe, I’d bought it.
    Finally I told Wystan that I had to leave.
    “So soon? You haven’t seen the third floor—sci-fi, dark fantasy, poetry, women’s studies, gay and lesbian, New Age.”
    “Thank you. But I have to leave.”
    “The basement! The ‘book mausoleum’ that contains unknown treasures . . .”
    “Thank you, Wystan. Not today.”
    “Next time, then! That’s a promise.”
    Clearly there was no one else in the store, since it was Wystan who checked out my books at the cashier’s counter. In his eagerness to stay at my side he’d ignored another, single, male customer who’d drifted in, and out, of the store without a purchase.
    My precious armload of paperback books came to just thirty-two dollars and ninety-eight cents. This, I paid with cash, but Wystan pressed me to give him my address so that Book Bazaar could send out notices of store events and sales—“It’s a service to our favored customers.”
    When I looked dubious Wystan said, “Ten percent discount to our favored customers. Regular book sales.”
    But mutely I shook my head no.
    No thanks .
    “Or an e-mail address, then.”
    But I was feeling cautious . No thanks!
    Wystan opened the door for me with a show of gallantry. I had to pass close by his extended arm, and I could smell his particular odor—book-dust, papery-dry-dust, long melancholy afternoons shading into night. Suddenly with a quizzical smile he asked me if I knew Harvey Selden?—and quickly I shook my head no.
    “You remind me of Harvey. Around the eyes, I think. And the nose—you both have a kind of ‘patrician’ nose.”
    My heart beat strangely. Why I felt such alarm, I don’t know. As if I were about to receive a profound and irrevocable revelation, and did not know if I was ready for it.
    Wystan said, with a look of regret, “Harvey is the most remarkable person I’ve met. Not that I know Harvey well—I don’t. Never did. He can read all kinds of crazy languages of ‘antiquity.’ He was translating something from the Bible, he thought would ‘transform’ the world. He used to come