Dark Rivers of the Heart

sixteen, Roy Miro understood that Ackblom's paintings were not about the artist himself, but about the world as he perceived it. Ackblom had no need to cry out for help or to warn anyone, for he didn't see himself as demonic. Taken as a whole, what his art said was that no human being could ever achieve the perfect beauty of even the humblest object in the inanimate world.
        Ackblom's great paintings helped young Roy to understand why he was delighted to be alone with the artistic works of human beings, yet was often unhappy in the company of human beings themselves. No work of art could be flawless, because an imperfect human being had created it.
        Yet art was the distillation of the best in humanity. Therefore, works of art were closer to perfection than those who created them.
        Favoring the inanimate over the animate was all right. It was acceptable to value art above people.
        That was the first lesson he learned from Steven Ackblom.
        Wanting to know more about the man, Roy had discovered that the artist was, not surprisingly, extremely private and seldom spoke to anyone for publication. Roy managed to find two interviews. In one, Ackblom held forth with great feeling and compassion about the misery of the human condition. One quotation seemed to leap from the text: "Love is the most human of all emotions because love is messy. lend of all the things we can feel with our minds and bodies, severe pain is the purest, for it drives everything else from our awareness and focuses us as perfectly as we can ever be focused."
        Ackblom had pleaded guilty to the murders of his wife and forty-one others, rather than face a lengthy trial that he couldn't win. In the courtroom, entering his plea, the painter had disgusted and angered the judge by saying, of his forty-two victims: "They were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died."
        Roy began to understand what Ackblom had been doing in those rooms under the barn. In subjecting his victims to torture, the artist was trying to focus them toward a moment of perfection, when they would briefly shine-even though still alive-with a beauty equal to that of inanimate objects.
        Purity and beauty were the same thing. Pure lines, pure forms, pure light, pure color, pure sound, pure emotion, pure thought, pure faith, pure ideals. However, human beings were capable of achieving purity, in any thought or endeavor, only rarely and only in extreme circumstances which made the human condition pitiable.
        That was the second lesson he learned from Steven Ackblom.
        For a few years, Roy's heartfelt pity for humanity intensified and matured. One day shortly after his twentieth birthday, as a bud suddenly blossoms into a full-blown rose, his pity became compassion.
        He considered the latter to be a purer emotion than the former.
        Pity often entailed a subtle element of disgust for the object of pity or a sense of superiority on the art of the erson who felt for another.
        But compassion was an unpolluted, crystalline, piercing empathy for other people, a perfect understanding of their suffering.
        Guided by compassion, acting on frequent opportunities to make the world a better place, confident of the purity of his motivation, Roy had then become a more enlightened man than Steven Ackblom. He had found his destiny.
        Now, thirteen years later, sitting in the back of the executive helicopter as it carried him toward Utah, Roy smiled at the photograph of the artist in swarming shadows.
        Funny how everything in life seemed connected to everything else.
        A forgotten moment or half-remembered face from the past could suddenly become important again.
        The artist had never been so central a figure in Roy's life that he could have been called a mentor or even an inspiration. Roy had never believed that Ackblom was a madman-as the media had portrayed him-but saw him as merely misguided. The best answer to the hopelessness of the human condition was not to grant one moment of pure beauty to each imperfect soul by the elevating effect of severe pain, That was a pathetically transient triumph. The better answer was to identify those most in need of release-then, with dignity and compassion and merciful speed, set them free of their imperfect human condition.
        Nevertheless, at a crucial time, the artist had unknowingly taught a few vital