warrant. She was looking into the matter of a private facility in Sausalito, recommended by the Russian doctor from Paris, that might be the perfect place for some confidential research.
She,d also cautioned him sternly against talking to reporters. With every new revelation concerning the Man Wolf, the reporters grew bolder in their search for a comment from Reuben, even showing up at the door of the Russian Hill house now, or calling the family,s private landline.
Billie wanted some deep reflection on the Man Wolf craze.
Maybe now was the time to offer it. He,d watched as much of the national news as he could endure, and had surveyed enough online to have a feel for the range of public responses.
It was good here, being alone with Laura. The silence, the crackle of the fire, the whispers of the forest beyond the curtains. Why not work? Who said that he couldn,t work? Who said that he could not go on working?
Finally he began.
After passing over the cases to date in some choice detail, Reuben went on to write:
Our way - the Western Way - has always been a "work in progress." Questions of life and death, good and evil, justice and tragedy - these are never definitively settled, but must be addressed again and again as personal and public worlds shift and change. We hold our morals to be absolutes, but the context of our actions and decisions is forever changing. We are not relativists because we seek to re-evaluate again and again our most crucial moral positions.
So why do we romanticize the Man Wolf who seemingly punishes wrongdoing without hesitation in ways that we ourselves cannot countenance?
Why does a noisy public cheer him on in his nocturnal frenzy when in fact his cruelty and violence should repel all of us? Can a monster who embodies the most primal and detestable urge we know as humans - the urge to kill with utter abandon - be hailed as a superhero? Certainly not. And surely if we sleep soundly in our beds during these extraordinary times, it is because we are certain that those upon whom we depend for our daily safety are in fact on the trail of this most challenging of aberrations.
The social fabric no matter how resilient cannot subsume the Man Wolf. And no sustained embrace of the creature by the popular media can alter that fact.
It is perhaps worth remembering that we are all, as a species, prey to dreams and nightmares. Our art is built upon the irrepressible stream of images rising from a secret fulcrum that can never be trusted. And though these images can delight and amaze, they can also paralyze and terrify. There are times when we are shamed by the most fleeting savage fancy.
Surely the Man Wolf seems the stuff of nightmare. But a dream he most certainly is not. And therein lies our responsibility, not only to him, but to all that he seeks to undermine in his unconscionable rampages.
Reuben e-mailed this at once to Billie, and printed out a copy for Laura. She read it in silence, then slipped her arm around him and kissed him. They were side by side then. He was staring into the fire, his elbows on his knees, his fingers running through his hair, as if he could somehow get to the thoughts in his head that way.
"Tell me the truth, if you will," he had said. "Are you disappointed that I am not the Man of the Wild you imagined? I think you saw me as something pure, unburdened by moral constraint. Or maybe, maybe having to live up to an entirely different code because I was something not human."
"Disappointed ..." She pondered. "No, I,m in no way disappointed. I,m deeply in love." Her voice was quiet, steady. "Let me put it to you like this. Maybe you,ll understand. You,re a mystery the way a sacrament is a mystery."
He turned and looked at her.
He wanted desperately to kiss her, to make love to her, right here in the library, or anywhere for that matter, anywhere that she would permit. But it was firmly lodged in his mind that she didn,t want him the way he was now. How could she? She wanted the other. They were waiting for the other, for him to become her lover, not simply "one of the handsomest men" she,d ever seen.
Time can tick when there is no clock.
He started kissing her. The heat was immediate and she slipped her arms around