Dark Rivers of the Heart

futures tethered to that damned chair. How much better now."
        Without saying a word, Eve turned away and walked to the Honda.
        Roy got out of the Dodge van and, after one last look at the loving couple, closed the sliding door.
        Eve was waiting behind the wheel of her car, with the engine running.
        If she had been frightened of him, she would have tried to drive away without him or would have run back to the restaurant.
        He got in the Honda and buckled his safety harness.
        They sat in silence.
        Clearly, she intuited that he was no murderer, that what he had done was a moral act, and that he operated on a higher plane than did the average man. Her silence was only indicative of her struggle to translate her intuition into intellectual concepts and thereby more fully understand him.
        She drove out of the parking lot.
        Roy took off his leather gloves and returned them to the inside coat pocket from which he had gotten them.
        For a while, Eve followed a random route through a series of residential neighborhoods, just driving to drive, going nowhere yet.
        To Roy, the lights in all the huddled houses no longer seemed to be either wartii or mysterious, as they had seemed on other nights and in other neighborhoods, in other cities, when he had cruised similar streets alone. Now they were merely sad: terribly sad little lights that inadequately illuminated the sad little lives of people who would never enjoy a passionate commitment to an ideal, not of the sort that so enriched Roy's life, sad little people who would never rise above the herd as he had risen, who would never experience a transcendent relationship with anyone as exceptional as Eve jammer.
        When at last the time seemed right, he said, "I yearn for a better world.
        But more than better, Eve. Oh, much more."
        She didn't reply.
        "Perfection," he said quietly but with great conviction, "in all things.
        Perfect laws and perfect justice. Perfect beauty. I dream of a perfect society, where everyone enjoys perfect health, perfect equality, in which the economy hums always like a perfectly tuned machine, where everyone lives in harmony with everyone else and with nature. Where no offense is ever given or taken. Where all dreams are perfectly rational and considerate. Where all dreams come true."
        He was so moved by his soliloquy that his voice became thick toward the end of it, and he had to blink back tears.
        Still she said nothing.
        Night streets. Lighted windows. Little houses, little lives. So much confusion, sadness, yearning, and alienation in those houses.
        "I do what I can," he said, "to make an ideal world. I scrub away some of its imperfect elements and push it inch by grudging inch toward perfection. Oh, not that I think I can change the world. Not alone, not me, and not even a thousand or a hundred thousand like me. But I light a little candle whenever I can, one little candle after another, pushing back the darkness one small shadow at a time."
        They were on the east side of town, almost at the city limits, cruising into higher land and less populated neighborhoods than they had traveled previously. At an intersection, she suddenly made a U-turn and headed back into the sea of lights from which they'd come.
        "You may say I'm a dreamer," Roy admitted. "But I'm not the only one. I think you're a dreamer too, Eve, in your own special way. If you can admit being a dreamer… maybe if all of us dreamers can admit it and join together, the world could someday live as one."
        Her silence was now profound.
        He dared to look at her, and she was more devastating than he had remembered. His heart thudded slow and heavy, weighed down by the sweet burden of her beauty.
        When at last she spoke, her voice was quavery. "You didn't take anything from them."
        It wasn't fear that made her words shimmer as they passed along her elegant throat and across her ripe lips but, rather, a tremendous excitement. And her tremulous voice in turn excited Roy. He said, "No.
        Nothing."
        "Not even the money from her purse or his wallet."
        "Of course not. I'm not a taker, Eve. I'm a giver."
        "I've never seen…" She seemed unable to find the words even to describe what he had done.
        "Yes, I know," he said, delighted to see how completely he had swept