But as it turned out, of course, I was wrong. I overestimated how much my magnanimity would mean. In the end it meant nothing — not in the face of the charges, at least. Against the charges, my Nobel could have been a plastic trophy I won for bowling, so little did it matter.
I saw Owen one last time. It was the day Victor came to testify against me. On that day the courtroom was quiet, and as I watched him walk to the stand, I felt, despite myself, a flash of something resembling pride: Who was this lean, handsome boy? He was wearing a suit I had not seen before and later assumed Owen must have purchased for him, and as he sat in the box, I could see on his left wrist the watch I had bought him. For a second I thought it might be a sign — surely he hadn’t worn it thoughtlessly? Surely he could not feel its weight on his arm and fail to think of me, and consequently of what he might be doing to me?
He put on a good show, Victor did, and as he spoke — his answers brief and intelligible, his voice low, his eye contact with the prosecutor steady — I saw that I had raised him well. He was a monster, of course, but I had socialized him, I had taught him how to conduct himself, I had given him everything he needed to ruin me. After he stepped down, he looked in my direction and smiled, a beautiful smile full of expensive white teeth, and as I was deciding what he could mean by this, I realized he was looking not at me but past me, and I turned to see who could be the recipient of Victor’s signal and saw Owen, sitting in the spectators’ seats just a few feet behind me. He was next to Xerxes and smiling back at Victor like an idiot or a conspirator, and then his gaze shifted and he was looking at me, and in that moment, before his face could react and recompose itself into a glare, he was smiling at me, my onetime joy echoed in him, a mirror of my own past happiness.
That night my lawyer came to meet with me. “Change your plea,” he urged me, but I would not.
“I don’t care,” he said after I’d explained to him why it was so unjust, why it was so unfair, and then he stopped himself and began again, his voice gentler. “The jury doesn’t care, Norton,” he said. “I’m telling you to change your plea.”
But I didn’t, and we know what happened next.
I have been told more times than I can tally how lucky I am: for the brevity of my sentence, for the fact that I have been placed in isolation, for my placement in this prison, which is considered one of the “better ones.” I sometimes feel that I am a cretin who has been miraculously admitted into a top-tier school and is never to be allowed to forget my odd good fortune.
Now my days here are almost at an end. In my more optimistic moods, I tell myself that this place will soon be just another of the many I have occupied and left: Lindon, Hamilton, Harvard, Stanford, NIH, the house in Bethesda. But in my more sober state, I realize that this is not so: all of those places (with the exception of Lindon) are destinations I aspired to and won entry to, each one researched and chosen, each one a place where I took and took what I needed in order to move on to the next. They were all places I wanted and dreamed of, and when I was ready to leave each, I did.
This place, however, is the opposite: I was made to come here, and I will leave it only when they have decided they are done with me.
I consider myself fortunate always to have had very vivid dreams. Once, when I was a young man, I expressed this to Owen, and he said that my dreams were wild and improbable and bright-spangled because my mind in its conscious state was not; he said that no person could live without wonder and that my dreams were my mind’s way of correcting my own literalness, of coloring my life with something of the fantastic. He meant it partly humorously, of course, but he was also serious, and we began a lazy sort of argument, one pitting the scientist’s intellectual rigor against the poet’s self-indulgence.
But since I have been here, I have had no dreams. They have disappeared exactly when I yearn for them, when I need them to fill my waking hours with their peacock extravagance. And in their absence I have begun to return more and more frequently to Ivu’ivu, which is, oddly, the place that this place resembles the most. Not in appearance, of course, but in its implacability, in its capture of me: it will decide when it is through with me, and apparently it isn’t yet satiated.
And so I spend my days allowing my mind to flit among a flickering film reel of images: I see the vuaka, its fur glimmering in the soft air as if lit by stars, and the peachy pink of the manama fruit. I see the fire smoldering beneath a charred creature, its skin slubbing off in jigsawed patches. I see the tornado of birds shrilling above a kanava tree and the opa’ivu’eke’s rising head breaking the horizon line of the lake. I see the boy, his hands as bright as flowers in the dark night, moving over my chest as if he were washing off my sadness, as if it were something that clung to my body like a scum. And of course I see Tallent, walking through the trees still, his movements as silent as a sloth’s, his long hair painting his back a river of gold and wood. Sometimes when I fall asleep in the middle of the day, dozing despite my best efforts to wait until the lights clunk off and I know it is night, I imagine myself walking alongside him. In these moments I have never left Ivu’ivu, and the two of us are companions, wandering the island together, and although it is small, it feels limitless, as if we could walk its forests and hills for centuries and never find its boundaries. Above us is the sun. Around us is the ocean. But we never see them. The only things we see are the trees and the moss, the monkeys and the flowers, the ropes of vines and the scuff of bark. Somewhere on the island is a place where we can rest. Somewhere on the island is a place where we belong, where we will lie down next to each other and know we will never have to look again. But until we find it we are searchers, two figures moving through a landscape while outside and around us the world is born and lives and dies and the stars burn themselves slowly into darkness.
A. Norton Perina
December 1999
~ ~ ~
January 13, 2000
Renowned Scientist, Recently Paroled, Is Missing
BY ASSOCIATED PRESS
Bethesda, Md. — Dr. Abraham Norton Perina, the Nobel Prize — winning scientist who was recently released from the Frederick Correctional Facility, is missing.
Dr. Perina was convicted on two counts of sexual assault in 1997 and sentenced to twenty-four months in jail; he was released in January. Earlier this month he failed to report to his parole officer. Now county police report that Perina’s home has been vacated and that none of his former colleagues have been in communication with him since before his release.