If I am guilty of anything, I suppose, it is the fact that I was secretly quite contented with Victor’s new state. And yet I knew too that it was not healthy, that it was not something I should desire for one of my children. But I could not help myself. He had been so horrible for so long that I almost allowed myself to believe that this was in fact who Victor had been before he had been seized by the furies of adolescence, before he had been transformed into a defiant, willful, uncontrollable creature, as different from the toddler I remembered as a beast was to a human. And besides, he was not a zombie; he took pleasure from many things in life: he competed with his high school’s track and field team, for instance, and joined the school choir. (Listening to them sing at a concert, I could distinguish his flat, toneless tenor from the others’ and wondered why he had not been dismissed.) His grades were mediocre, but he had never been a stellar student. Still, I told him — as I told all the children — that I would gladly send him to the best college that would accept him, and when that proved to be Towson State, I wrote the first tuition check straightaway and bought him a brushed-steel watch, just as I had done for both William and Isolde two years before when they had graduated from high school. Later I helped him pack his clothes and books and various knickknacks into boxes and garbage bags and left him at his dormitory room with his new sheets and towels Mrs. Lansing had bought him. After that I saw him less frequently, although of course he was always welcome in the house. Like the other children, he liked college, or rather I assumed he did, for I never heard from him. Really, only the bill from the bursar’s office and the intermittent report cards (which told me that his major was something called sports ideology and that he was making Cs and, in a couple of classes, Bs) told me that he was still where I pictured him, attending classes or not, reading or not, perhaps going to parties or sleeping with pretty girls, the sort who found his elusive national origin exciting. At times I found myself wondering idly, as I had not done with the other children, what he had done the previous night or what he was doing at that moment. I pictured him in class, his legs stretched out in front of him, throwing back his head on his long neck and yawning, his mouth opening wide to reveal his fleshy salmon tongue and his white, white teeth, each topped with a tiny, pricey porcelain cap.
One day during the spring of Victor’s sophomore year of college, I was sitting at home in the garden. It was a beautiful, damp day, the kind of early-spring day in which everything becomes, as if at once, a hundred unnameable shades of startling green, and I was gazing at the trees, their new leaves so tender and young and light that they were as translucent and resplendent as if fashioned from thin sheets of gold. I had come home early from work because I had been suffering from an intestinal flu, and my head felt cottony, my saliva tangy with bile. But I remember feeling grateful to be at home and in my garden, with the world quiet around me.
I was in such a state of enchantment that I did not even hear the knocking on the door, did not hear the doorbell’s insistent chime. So when the two men came through the back door to the garden, I was surprised, and quickly stood. One was black and one was white, one older, one younger. “Who are you?” I asked them.
The young white one answered me with a question. “Abraham Norton Perina?”
What could I do? I nodded.
“Detective Matthew Banville, Montgomery County Police Department,” said the man, and coughed, as if embarrassed. “I’m afraid, Dr. Perina, we have some questions we need to ask you down at the station.”
Above me a butterfly, the first of the season, had suddenly appeared, flapping its clean white wings near my face in such a frenzy that I thought for a moment it was trying to beat out a warning, a message only I would be able to understand.
But there was nothing. And when I turned back to the men, they were still there, waiting for me silently, their faces stern and blank and dispassionate — not the kind of faces I was used to seeing at all.
“I need to get my pills,” I was finally able to say, and Detective Banville looked at the other, who nodded, and the three of us walked into the house together. They let me go into the bathroom by myself, and I stood in front of the mirror for a long moment, staring at my face and wondering what was going to happen to me. I realized then that I had not asked them on what grounds I was going to be questioned. I have done nothing, I told my reflection, which stared back at me blandly. I will ask them why they are here, I thought, and it will be nothing and this will be over and it will be as if it had never happened. So I did go out to ask them, but as you know, it was not nothing, I was not let go, and my life, as it was, was forever changed. And had I known then how profoundly difficult things were soon to become, I think I would have endeavored to remain in the bathroom for much longer, staring at my face as if for answers, while outside the men waited, and the earth twirled lazily on.
77 Actually a twenty-two-year-old man who was enrolled in graduate school at Syracuse University.
78 In the lab, of course. There is invariably a gourmand — or, if one is being less charitable, a budding alcoholic — among the staff of any lab who spends his leisure time developing various liquors in the beakers and decanting them at impromptu office parties. Some of these brews are actually quite respectable.
79 Much of Norton’s work throughout the 1980s concentrated on the Karée people, a small tribe (its total population was less than six hundred) who live in northern Brazil off a particularly narrow and treacherous Amazonian tributary. The Karée were encountered in 1978 by a botanist from the University of California, Santa Cruz, named Lucien Feeney, who stumbled on their society by accident while searching for a rare fern (Microsorum coccinella) that he speculated was an early cousin of the modern palm tree and that had been harvested to near extinction throughout the rest of the basin some two hundred years prior. When he observed the tribe, Feeney knew that there was something strange about them, but he was unable to determine what, exactly, made them unique. Upon his return to Santa Cruz, he contacted Norton through an acquaintance at Johns Hopkins, and Norton made his first visit to the tribe shortly thereafter (I accompanied him on this trip as well as subsequent ones). Tests and other fieldwork revealed that the Karée experienced an unusually delayed adolescence; indeed, neither boys nor girls displayed any signs of secondary sex organs until, on average, the age of twenty-five. The puberty that followed was an intense and brutal eighteen-month ordeal that culminated in marriage. After, their biological lives proceeded as normal, which meant that the women had a relatively brief two decades of fertility before undergoing menopause. As a result, there was a great urgency to have as many children as possible, and many of the Karée women died as a result of excessive pregnancies and collectively experienced a remarkably high rate of gynecological complications.
In an echo of the Opa’ivu’eke people, the cause of this abnormality was originally attributed to an endemic rodent (Hydrochoerus feenius) that all Karée children grow up eating (it was favored for its succulent, sweetish meat). This was of course highly exciting, especially given Norton’s earlier groundbreaking work, but later studies revealed that the culprit was not in fact an external element but something specific to the Karée’s biology. Nevertheless, Norton tried to bring back a number of the Karée to his lab for further study but was prevented from doing so by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, which had kept him under unnaturally strict surveillance ever since he had appealed the removal of the dreamers in 1976. Various political struggles forced Norton to abort his work with the Karée in 1990, and today it is Harvard University that maintains a satellite lab — and therefore controls which scientists might be granted access — on the tribe’s land. Norton, understandably, remains bitter about how these events unfolded, which is probably why he fails to mention his work with the Karée in this account. Those interested can find an evenhanded rendering of the situation in Anna Kidd’s excellent Of Stone and Sun and Everything In-Between.