I do not mean to mock or ridicule your life's work, for in one way at least it mimics my own: We have dedicated our lives to the pursuit of phantoms. The difference is the nature of those phantoms. Mine exist between other men's ears; yours live solely between your own.

Could there be irony crueler than this? How, upon his rescue, the truth had brought him here, to a house for the mad, for only a madman believes what every child knows to be true: There are monsters that lie in wait under our beds.

Then I strip the pants away from each leg, like peeling a banana. That's it, the perfect metaphor: peeling a banana.

The monstrous act by definition demands a monster.

But monsters, I now know, come in all shapes and sizes, and only their appetite for human flesh defines them.

Human beings are remarkably resilient. When you think about it, our species has been teetering upon the edge of the existential cliff since Hiroshima. In short, we endure.

Nothing makes us love something more than the loss of it.