Dark Rivers of the Heart

ocean would not be changed.
        Plastic, however, would take more than three hundred years to completely disintegrate. And throughout that period, toxic chemicals would leech from it into the suffering sea.
        He should have dumped the Tupperware in one of the trash cans that stood at intervals along the pier railing.
        Well. Too late. He was human. That was always the problem.
        For a while Roy leaned against the railing. He stared into an infinity of sky and water, brooding about the human condition.
        As far as Roy was concerned, the saddest thing in the world was that human beings, for all their ardent striving and desire, could never achieve physical, emotional, or intellectual perfection. The species was doomed to imperfection; it thrashed forever in despair or denial of that fact.
        Though she had been undeniably attractive, Guinevere had been perfect in only one regard. Her hands.
        Now those were gone too.
        Even so, she had been one of the fortunate, because the vast majority of people were imperfect in every detail. They would never know the singular confidence and pleasure that must surely arise from the possession of even one flawless feature.
        Roy was blessed with a repetitive dream, which came to him two or three nights every month, and from which he always woke in a state of rapture.
        In the dream, he searched the world over for women like Guinevere, and from each he harvested her perfect feature: from this one, a pair of ears so beautiful that they made his foolish heart pound almost painfully; from that one, the most exquisite ankles that it was within the mind of man to contemplate; from yet another, the snow-white, sculptured teeth of a goddess. He kept these treasures in magic jars, where they did not in the least deteriorate, and when he had collected all the parts of an ideal woman, he assembled them into the lover for whom he had always longed. She was so radiant in her unearthly perfection that he was half blinded when he looked upon her, and her slightest touch was purest ecstasy.
        Unfortunately, he always woke from the paradise of her arms.
        In life he would never know such beauty. Dreams were the only refuge for a man who would settle for nothing less than perfection.
        Gazing into the sea and sky. A solitary man at the end of a deserted pier. Imperfect in every aspect of his own face and form.
        Aching for the unattainable.
        He knew that he was both a romantic and a tragic figure. There were those who would even call him a fool. But at least he dared to dream and to dream big.
        Sighing, he turned away from the uncaring sea and walked back to his car in the parking lot.
        Behind the steering wheel, after he switched on the engine but before he put the car in gear, Roy allowed himself to withdraw the color snapshot from his wallet. He had carried it with him for more than a year, and he had studied it often. Indeed, it had such power to mesmerize him that he could have spent half the day staring at it in dreamy contemplation.
        The photo was of the woman who had most recently called herself Valerie Ann Keene. She was attractive by anyone's standards, perhaps even as attractive as Guinevere.
        What made her special, however, what filled Roy with reverence for the divine power that had created humankind, was her perfect eyes.
        'They were more arresting and compelling than even the eyes of Captain Harris Descoteaux of the Los Angeles Police Department.
        Dark yet limpid, enormous yet perfectly proportioned to her face, direct yet enigmatic, they were eyes that had seen what lay at the heart of all meaningful mysteries. They were the eyes of a sinless soul yet somehow also the eyes of a shameless voluptuary, simultaneously coy and direct, eyes to which every deceit was as transparent as glass, filled with spirituality and sexuality and a complete understanding of destiny.
        He was confident that in reality her eyes would be more, not less, powerful than they were in the snapshot. He had seen other photographs of her, as well as numerous videotapes, and each image had battered his heart more punishingly than the one before it.
        When he found her, he would kill her for the agency and for Thomas Summerton and for all those well-meaning others who labored to make this a better country and a better world. She had earned no