The People in the Trees (59 page)

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
.

Compounding the mystery is the simultaneous disappearance of Dr. Ronald Kubodera of Palo Alto, California, Perina’s longtime colleague and friend. At the end of last year, Perina reportedly transferred most of his assets to Dr. Kubodera, who was a scientist in Perina’s lab for many years and was most recently a professor at Stanford University. The university reported Dr. Kubodera missing on January 3, after he had failed to report for classes for two days. His apartment has apparently been abandoned
.

Perina, 76, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1974 for his identification of Selene syndrome, an acquired condition that granted its victims extended lifespans while causing their mental decay. He was equally well known in Bethesda for his adoption of 43 children from U’ivu, the Micronesian country where the condition was first observed by Dr. Perina in 1950
.

“We are determined to locate Dr. Perina,” said a spokesperson for the Montgomery County Police Department. “Anyone with any tips as to his whereabouts should call the police immediately.”

EPILOGUE

We have traveled far, Norton and I. I do not mean this in some vulgar, sentimental way but literally: we have traveled far. But I am afraid that is almost all I can say on the matter.
⁸³

What else? I can tell you that the air here is overwhelming, so full of scents that I sometimes cannot stand it and must retreat indoors, and that there has been no rain for the past ten days. In the kitchen, Norton likes great shaggy arrangements of flowers, so I spend a few mornings a week with P., our gardener, gathering armfuls of molting flowering plants, the names of which I still do not know. One is a stalky stem at the end of which is a bonnet-shaped cluster of individual buds, each as yellow as a Japanese pickled radish. Another is a branch from a tree, bristling with tiny flowers shaped like cracked pistachio shells. And still another seems to be a succulent of some sort, with thick, viscous leaves and stiff, turretlike petals. P. helps me cut them down, and I put them in a large glass jar; the sight of them never fails to delight Norton. We are very happy here, the two of us.

Sometimes, though, I will admit, I miss the life I left behind. I think often of my lab and my colleagues, and occasionally, of my children, whom I know I will never see again. There are times when
I wish I could speak again to people from my past, or when I crave my old life and wonder whether I have made the correct decision. But these moments never last long, for I am always able to search out Norton—the reason I am here, after all—for a conversation, and listening to him talk reminds me that my decision, while perhaps one with its own set of imperfect realities, was the correct one. And at any rate, I am convinced that these feelings will diminish with time.

When I first came here, I yearned for information, for news, about the life I had left behind. Actually, I yearned for news of any kind. I could not help seeing my new life through the lens of my old. The second day here, I wondered,
What are they saying about me back home? What are they saying about Norton? What must they think?
I’d imagine my phone at the lab ringing, my mailbox stuffed with envelopes and pieces of paper. I had written a few notes before leaving, but kept my missives to a minimum: one to my ex-wife, explaining that I had left some money for the children in an account I had established at my bank, and since I would not be returning, they would be her responsibility; one to my sister, thanking her for her many kindnesses over the years; and one to the president of the university that did not say much of anything at all. I began (and rebegan) letters to my two children but was unable to find words to express what I needed to (and in truth was unable to determine exactly what it was I hoped to articulate), so I eventually gave up. Their mother, I know, will be able to tell them something convincing; she was always better at that than I.

Although these cravings have lessened, they do sometimes reappear, often at night, while I am trying to sleep. The first time it happened I thought I was hungry—after all, I had not eaten dinner. Careful not to wake Norton, I ventured down to the kitchen, where I stood in front of the open refrigerator, examining the dishes that M., P.’s wife and our part-time cook, had left there that morning. I sat down at the table with a plate of boiled chicken, cubes of cheese bathed in olive oil, and buttered zucchini and ate until the sun rose, after which I was violently ill. This gluttony unfortunately repeated itself several more times before I realized that my cravings were not for food but for something far away and unattainable. Understanding this, I am certain, will make withstanding these episodes easier,
and at any rate, I fully expect them to disappear entirely with time. Any new life, no matter how long dreamed of and desired, demands a period of adjustment.

My story—Norton’s story—is almost over, but I have two more things to share with you; one will follow the other, and it is not necessary to read them. Our story could end here, and it would be, I hope, as satisfying a conclusion for you as it is for the two of us.

There is one—entry, I suppose, of Norton’s writing that I have withheld throughout this story, and I must admit that I am including it now with great ambivalence. I am not sure at all whether it is the correct thing to do. I am also cynical enough, I suppose, to understand that although it should not make a difference, it may. Therefore I can say only that I hope that it will stand as a curious little footnote (for that, really, is what it is; the story is no more or less without it) and that the many qualities that have been displayed to their best effect in Norton’s writings—his wit, his intelligence, his passion and compassion—will be the things the reader remembers from this account, will be the things that define him in history. But after great consideration, I have chosen to include this fragment for no reason other than I think it remarkable for its awkward expressions of tenderness, for its openheartedness, for its proud expressions of love and its admissions of fallibility. It reminds us that love, at least the sort of pure love that so few of us will admit to feeling, is a complicated, dark, violent thing, an agreement not to be entered into lightly. One can disagree with Norton’s opinions on the matter and still think him a whole, and a good, human being. At least this is what I hope, though it is ultimately for the reader to decide for himself; I have already made my decision, long ago.

The second thing I have to share with you—for I am as frustrated as you that I am not able to share more details of my life here, though discretion is of course a matter of necessity, not whim—is what happened that day, one year ago almost exactly, when I went to retrieve Norton from prison. It was a day that I had been awaiting for some time, and I had flown to Bethesda several days in advance in anticipation. For those three days I was able to think of little else but Norton. When Norton had first suggested his plan to me in a rare phone conversation, I had replied cautiously, even warily, but a few hours later I knew: of course this is what I would do. I had
been waiting for it my entire adult life, after all, and could not find any misgiving serious enough to keep me from doing what I knew I would never regret. After all, I have always been loyal to Norton. I saw no reason that I should abandon that instinct now.