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 youd 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 . . .