At the facility I was frisked and made to walk through the metal detectors twice. I had left my bag, as well as the one I had packed for Norton, in the car. I was directed to a window where I signed several documents, and then made to wait in an evil-smelling concrete room. I watched the second hand of the clock tick past the minutes and waited. I had waited so long, I did not mind.
After two hours or so, an officer came into the little room to tell me that owing to a bureaucratic mistake, Norton had been processed earlier that morning and was apparently waiting for me at his lawyer’s office. Of course I put up a ruckus, not because I was particularly annoyed for my own sake but because I hated the idea of Norton leaving without anyone to greet him and somehow finding his way to his lawyer’s office by himself, all his belongings in tow. But then the guard told me that the lawyer had come to fetch Norton himself (a detail, may I add, that he might have told me when I visited his office) and that the entire process had gone smoothly. Still, I continued (simply out of my own velocity, I suspect) to berate the officer, who remained irritatingly serene and entirely unapologetic. Finally, sensing that the guard was of limited intellectual capabilities as well as apparently immovable, I was defeated. It was beginning to occur to me that it was the last time I would ever have to visit the prison, any prison, and I was suddenly anxious to leave.
At that very moment, I knew, Norton would be sitting with his lawyer, listening to him drone on about his parole and his obligations. He would nod, by all appearances be in total agreement: Yes, yes, of course. Of course he would submit to an outpatient program for committed pedophiles. Of course he would agree to see a psychiatrist. Of course he would agree to respect the terms of the restraining order Victor had requested. Nothing was too much, nothing was too constraining; he wanted to show he was a reformed man, wanted to be as accommodating as possible. He would sign documents, agree to meeting times and responsibilities that would, in a matter of hours and as long as we were careful, lose meaning. The lawyer, who had become strangely distant after losing Norton’s case, would be condescending, but Norton would not mind; the charade would almost be over, and he would be feeling generous.
I was in a hurry. I know I have said that I was determined to be patient, having waited so long, but then, knowing that Norton was so close, that our new life together was about to begin, I was nervous and, for the first time in very many years, excited. I waited impatiently as I was patted down by an officer, and then finally there were only a hundred or so yards of hallway and a short drive left before I would see Norton once more. We would have a night together in a hotel, and then the next day we would be gone, and all of this — the years, our careers, our families, the trial, the humiliation — would be forgotten. Ahead of us lay something shining and clean and so new that I could not quite see it. And then I was walking down the hallway toward the exit, my heart beating faster with each step, and it was all I could do to keep myself from flinging open the doors, from running down the prison’s steps and shouting, an unformed, squawking syllable of noise. Norton was waiting; soon I would see him. What would he want to do first, in his new free life?
Outside, as I approached my car, a flock of crows that had been congregating on its roof rose at once, a flapping, screeching rustle of black, and for a second I wanted to laugh. They seemed glorious, scattering into the toneless sky, which was as white and grainy as silt: I felt as if I could have seen forever.
Ronald Kubodera
December 2000
83 I know the reader is probably wondering how we have managed to successfully avoid detection. All I can say on the matter is that such things can, under the right circumstances, be arranged without too much trouble.
Also, I would like to apologize in advance for the regrettable coyness of this epilogue. I loathe it myself but am sure the reader will understand that anything more candid could lead to unpleasant consequences.
POSTSCRIPT
(This is the missing fragment from Norton’s account of his difficulties with Victor, from this page.)
I would like to tell you that things became markedly easier after this episode, but they did not. Or rather, they both did and did not. In the days immediately following his release from the basement, it is true, Victor seemed willing to admit defeat: he was quiet and obedient and lowered his eyes shyly, almost flirtatiously, when he passed me in the hallways. Indeed, what was most noticeable about him was his new quietness. Victor had never been a particularly noisy child, but neither could he be called taciturn; he, like the others, liked to hear himself talk and make all sorts of pronouncements. He had been, I suppose, social, and soon after ceased to be.
I do not wish to give the impression, though, that he became a recluse after his punishment. Rather, he seemed to mature somewhat; there were no more curls of the lip when I asked him to do the dishes on a night other than his usual one, no more scowls when I instructed him to do his homework, no more heavy sighs when I reminded him to use his manners or modulate his voice or when I corrected his grammar. Instead there was a sort of blankness, an absence, almost as if he had been given a sort of benign, bloodless lobotomy. Still, he was not an automaton; he continued to do the things the other children did — fight, play, talk, argue, laugh. He never cried, but he had never cried. It was something I had always respected about him.
And I too played my part. He was a proud boy, and I understood that and could be sympathetic to it. So I never reminded him of his humiliation, never used his behavior as a lesson to the others. And I never called him Victor again. I wanted him to maintain his dignity.
But then, after a month or so of this new calm, he once again became beastly. He skipped school and lied about it. He pushed Drew down a flight of stairs and broke his wrist. He shaved — carefully, and with great artistry — an extremely vulgar word into the plush fur of our neighbors’ cat. I walked into the room he shared with William one night and caught him doing this. For a minute, though, I could only stare at the tender way one arm encircled the cat while in his right hand, the razor—my razor — purred through the soft landscape of the animal’s hair. He was murmuring to it in a low comforting way, but what was most startling when he finally turned was his expression: in his flat eyes were the expected defiance and rage but also a sort of genuine bewilderment, as if he were unable to stop himself from misbehaving, as if his hand, moving silkily through the cat’s fur, was manipulated by demons over which he had no control.
After that, relations between us once again grew sour and dark. At dinner he would shout at me without provocation, hurl terrible accusations my way. Of course I was not hurt by them, but I was growing weary of these fights, of hitting him, of thinking of new ways to punish him, to force him into obedience. I dreamed one night that Victor was a particularly large and aggressive spider, with tough, sinewy legs and cruelly glittering red eyes. For some reason I was trying to guide him into a small and flimsy woven basket. I tried tricking him, forcing him, and even enticing him with a smudge of grainy honey, but he escaped me again and again, and I woke up with my hands, still in fists, sticky with sweat and frustration.