He was smiling as he approached. He recognized me. It was a stroll in the park to him; he had met an acquaintance on the street.

I knew him but I could not make myself speak. I needed all my energy to focus on believing I was not under his control again.

"Hey, girl," he said. "Don't I know you from somewhere?" He smirked at me, remembering.

I did not respond. I looked directly at him. Knew his face had been the face over me in the tunnel. Knew I had kissed those lips, stared into those eyes, smelled the crushed-berry smell on his skin.

I was too afraid to yell out. There was a cop behind me but I could not scream: "That's the man who raped me!" That happens in movies. I put one foot in front of the other. I heard him laughing behind me. But I was still walking.

He had no fear. It had been nearly six months since we'd seen each other last. Six months since I lay under him in a tunnel on top of a bed of broken glass. He was laughing because he had gotten away with it, because he had raped before me, and because he would rape again. My devastation was a pleasure for him. He was walking the streets, scot-free.

I turned the corner at the end of the block. Over my shoulder I saw him walking up to the redheaded policeman. He was shooting the breeze, so sure of his safety that he felt comfortable enough, right after seeing me, to tease a cop.

I never question why I went to tell Wolff I couldn't attend his class. It was my duty. I was his student. I was the only sophomore in the class.

I walked to the Hall of Languages at the top of the hill and checked my watch. I had time before Wolff's class to make two phone calls from the phone booth on the bottom floor. I called Ken Childs, told him what had happened, asked him to meet me at the library nearby in half an hour. I wanted to make a sketch of the rapist and Ken was in art school. Then, as soon as I hung up the phone, I called my parents collect.

They both got on the phone.

"Mom and Dad," I said, "I'm calling from the Hall of Languages."

My mother was attuned now to any waver in my voice.

"What is it, Alice?" she asked.

"I just saw him, Mom," I said.

"Saw who?" my father asked, as always two beats back.

"The rapist."

I don't remember their reaction. I couldn't. I was calling because I needed them to know, but, once I told them, I did not wait, I rushed at them with facts. "I'm going to tell Professor Wolff I can't come to class. I've called Ken Childs, he's meeting me to walk me home. I want to make a sketch."

"Call us when you get there," my mother said. I remember that. "Have you called the police?" my father asked.

I did not hesitate. "Not yet," I said, which meant to all of us that it was not a yes-or-no question. I would call them. I would pursue this.

I went up the stairs to where my workshop was held, and ran into Wolff as he was about to enter the English office.

The other students were filtering inside. I approached him. "Professor Wolff," I said, "can I talk to you?"

"It's class time, we'll talk after."

"I can't make it to class, that's what it's about."

I knew he would not be happy. I did not know how not happy he would be. He proceeded to tell me how lucky I was to be in the class, and that missing this one class was equivalent to missing three classes of a regular undergraduate course. All this I knew. All this had been why I walked blindly up to Humanities Hall instead of returning directly to my dorm.

I begged Wolff to give me just two minutes of his time. To talk to me in his office, not the hall. "Please," I said. Something in the way I said it called to that place inside him beyond the formal rules of the classroom, which I knew he valued. "Please," I said, and he responded-still it was a concession-with, "It will have to be brief."

I followed him down the short hall, turned the corner after him, and stood there while he unlocked the door. Looking back, I can't believe how calm I remained from the moment I saw my rapist on the street to that moment, inside Wolff's office, with the door closed. Now I was with a man I knew would not hurt me. For the first time, I thought it was safe to exhale. He sat facing me while I hovered over and then sat in the student chair.

I burst.

"I can't come to class. I just saw the man who raped me. I have to call the police."

I remember his face and I remember it vividly. He was a father. I knew this vaguely at the time. He had little boys. He came near me. He wanted to comfort, but then, instinctually, he pulled back. I was a rape victim; how would I interpret his touch? His face fell into the recesses reserved for the pure confusion one expresses when there is nothing on this earth that he or she can do to make something better.

He asked if he could make a call, if I had a way home, what, if anything, he could do. I told him I had called a friend who would meet me at the library and walk me home, where I would phone the police.

Wolff walked me back out into the hall. Before he let me go-my mind already working on putting one foot in front of the other, thinking of the phone call to the police, repeating over and over again in my head maroon windbreaker, blue jeans rolled at cuffs, Converse All-Star sneakers-Wolff stopped me and put both hands on my shoulders.

He looked at me and when it was clear to him that for that second he held my attention, he spoke.

"Alice," he said, "a lot of things are going to happen and this may not make much sense to you right now, but listen. Try, if you can, to remember everything."

I have to restrain myself from capitalizing the last two words. He meant them to be capitalized. He meant them to resound and to meet me sometime in the future on whatever path I chose. He had known me for two weeks. I was nineteen. I sat in his class and drew flowers on my jeans. I had written a story about sewing dummies that came to life and sought revenge on dressmakers.

So it was a shout across a great distance. He knew, as I was later to discover when I walked into Doubleday on Fifth Avenue in New York and bought This Boy's Life, Wolff's own story, that memory could save, that it had power, that it was often the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed, or the brutalized.

The walk to the library, only two hundred yards across the front of the quad and on the other side of the street fronting the Hall of Languages, was a walk I made on automatic. I became a machine. I think it must be the way men patrol during wartime, completely attuned to movement or threat. The quad is not the quad but a battlefield where the enemy is alive and hiding. He waits to attack the moment you let your guard down. The answer-never let it down, not even for a second.

With every nerve ending pushing out against the edges of my skin, I reached Bird Library. Although I was still wary, I allowed myself to exhale here. I walked through the fluorescent light. It being still early in the semester, the library was not busy. The few people I passed, I did not look at. I didn't want to meet anyone's eyes.

I could not wait for Ken; I was too afraid to stop. I kept walking. Bird was constructed so that by walking through the building, I could exit on the other side of the block, no man's land. It was a street populated by old wood frame houses, many of them used by fraternities and sororities, but it was no longer the sanctified quad. The streetlights were fewer here and in the time it had taken me to walk from Marshall Street to tell Wolff I couldn't come to class, it had grown dark. I had only one goal: to get back to my dorm without injury and to write down everything he'd worn, to detail the features of his face.

I got there. I don't remember seeing anyone. If I did, I brushed by them without comment. Inside my small single, I called the police. I explained my situation. I had been raped in May, I said, I was now back on campus and had seen my assailant. Would they come?