The People in the Trees (2 page)

There is little here to do, and, after a certain point, even less to think. I never considered that I might find myself in such a state, so exhausted, really, that I feel exsanguinated, not of blood but of thought. Boredom—I’d always thought, really, that I would treasure a period of unceasing emptiness, that I would easily fill it. But time, I’ve come to realize, is not for us to fill in such great, blank slabs: we speak of managing time, but it is the opposite—our lives are filled with busyness because those thin chinks of time are all we can truly master.
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It seems a wise insight.

But despite the obvious severity of the circumstances in which Norton now finds himself, there are some who have had the temerity to suggest that he should be grateful for what they consider the leniency of his current condition, a suggestion that seems not only obtuse but cruel. One of these people is a man named Herbert West (whose name I have reluctantly changed), another of Norton’s research fellows from the early ’80s, who stopped by to visit Norton in Bethesda while on the way to a conference in London. This was before the trial but after the arraignment, when Norton was under what amounted to house arrest and all of his children had been removed from his care. West, whom I had always considered more tolerable than many of Norton’s previous fellows, visited with Norton for an hour or so and then asked me if I wanted to have dinner at a restaurant with him. I did not particularly want to (and thought it awfully rude that he had invited me in front of Norton, who, after all, was not allowed to leave the house), but Norton told me I should go, that he had some work he wished to complete and would not mind the privacy.

So I was made to go to dinner with West, and although I found it difficult not to think of Norton alone in his house, we did manage to have a surprisingly pleasant talk about West’s work and the paper he would present at his conference, and about an article Norton and I had published in the
New England Journal of Medicine
before he was arrested, and about some mutual acquaintances, until West said, as our desserts were set before us, “Norton’s aged a great deal.”

I said, “He is in a terrible situation.”

“Yes, terrible,” murmured West.

“It is grossly unfair,” I said.

West said nothing.

“Grossly unfair,” I repeated, giving him another chance.

West sighed and blotted the corners of his mouth with the point
of his napkin, a gesture both contrived and effete, as well as ostentatiously, obnoxiously Anglophilic. (West had studied—decades ago, and for two years only—at Oxford University on a Marshall Fellowship, a fact he was unusually talented at alluding to in every social and business interaction.) He was eating blueberry cobbler, and it had stained his teeth the livid purple of bruises.

“Ron,” he began.

“Yes?” I said.

“Do you think he did it?” asked West.

I had by that time learned to expect that question, and also what to say in response. “Do you?”

West looked at me and smiled, and then looked at the ceiling before looking at me again. “Yes,” he said.

I said nothing.

“You don’t,” said West, a little wonderingly.

I had learned what to say to this as well. “It is not relevant whether he did or not,” I said. “Norton is a great mind, and that is all that matters to me and I should say to history as well.”

There was a silence.

At last West said sheepishly, “I’d better get back soon. I’ve got some reading to do before my flight tomorrow.”

“All right,” I said. And we finished our desserts in silence.

I had driven us to the restaurant, and after we paid for dinner (West tried to treat me, but I prevailed) I drove West back to his hotel. In the car he made some attempts at conversation, which infuriated me further.

In the hotel parking lot, after sitting in silence for a few minutes, West expectantly, me angrily, he at last extended his hand, and I shook it.

“Well,” said West.

“Thank you for visiting,” I told him crisply. “I know Norton appreciated it.”

“Well,” West said again. I could not tell if he had appreciated my sarcasm or not; I thought not. “I’ll be thinking of him.”

There was another silence.

“If he’s found guilty—” West began.

“He will not be,” I told him.

“But if he is,” West continued, “will he go to prison?”

“I cannot imagine it,” I answered.

“Well, if he does,” West persisted, and I remembered how unattractively ambitious, how
grabby
West had been as a fellow, and how impatient he had been to leave Norton’s lab and run his own, “that’ll at least be a lot of sea time for him, won’t it, Ron?” I was so appalled by this flippancy that I found myself unable to respond. As I sat there gaping, West smiled at me, said another goodbye, and got out of the car. I watched him enter the hotel through its double doors and walk into the brightly lit lobby, and then I started the car again to return to Norton’s, where I spent most nights. In the months after, the trial began and ended, and then the sentencing began and ended, but needless to say, West never again came to visit Norton.

But as I was saying, no, people are not sympathetic to Norton’s current situation. Indeed, people condemned and dismissed him before he was officially condemned and dismissed, legally, by a jury of his supposed peers—what must it feel like to be a man of Norton’s intellect and have your character determined and your fate writ by twelve incompetents (one juror, as I recall, was a tollbooth clerk, another a dog-washer), whose decision renders virtually every one of your previous accomplishments insignificant, if not entirely meaningless? From that perspective, then, is it any mystery that Norton should now find himself depressed, bored, and unstimulated?

I should also like to say a few words about the media coverage surrounding Norton’s trial, for it seems foolish to ignore both its tenor and its scope. I will first say that given the nature of the crimes of which Norton was accused, it has not surprised me in the least that the media has wasted pages and pages on stories that embroider, elaborately and with a shocking disregard for the truth, upon the few facts of Norton’s personal life known to the public. (Admittedly, the stories did, rather begrudgingly, detail some of his considerable accomplishments, but only to throw into sharper relief his purported wickedness.)

I recall that in those days I stood vigil with Norton in his house while he awaited his trial (outside, a group of television reporters
spent their days congregating on the curb at the edge of Norton’s lawn, eating and chatting in the buzzy, insect-thick summer air as if at a picnic), of the many (unfulfilled, naturally) requests we received for interviews, only one—regrettably,
Playboy
—invited Norton to write his own defense instead of dispatching some salivating young writer to interpret his life and alleged misdeeds for the reading public. (I had originally thought the offer a good idea, despite the forum, but Norton was worried that whatever he wrote would be manipulated and used against him as a confession. He was correct, of course, and that was the end of that idea.) But I also knew that the realization that he must not allow himself to speak in his own defense infuriated and saddened him.

The ironic thing about this was that shortly before he had been arrested, Norton had in fact been planning to write his memoirs. By that time—1995—he was semiretired and no longer forced to contend with the various administrative duties and hassles of the lab. This is not to imply that he was not still the most vital and indispensable mind there—simply that he had begun to allow himself to organize his time in different ways.

However, Norton was not to have the opportunity to record his remarkable life, at least not under the conditions I know he would have preferred. But as I have always said, his is the sort of mind that can surmount any challenge. And so in April, two months after he began serving his sentence, I asked in my daily letter to him whether he might not consider writing his memoirs anyway. Not only, I told him, would they make a great contribution to the worlds of letters and science, but he would at last have a chance to prove to anyone interested that he was not what the world had been so eager to make him. I explained that I would be honored to type and, if he might let me, lightly edit his writing, as I had done before for various papers he had submitted to journals. It would be, I wrote, a fascinating project for me, and one that might keep him entertained.

A week later, Norton sent me a brief note:

Although I can’t say I wish to spend what may be the final years of my life trying to convince anyone that I am not guilty of the crimes they have decided I am, I have chosen to begin, as you say, the “story of my life.” My trust [in you] is … [very] great
.
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I had the first installment a month later.

There are a few things I suppose I should say by means of introduction before I invite the reader to learn of Norton’s extraordinary life. For it, after all, is a story with disease at its heart.

Norton, of course, will say it all better than I, but I will here give the reader some details about the man at hand. He once remarked to me that his life did not begin in any meaningful way until he left the country for U’ivu, where he would make discoveries that would transform modern medicine and lead to his receipt of the Nobel Prize. In 1950, when he was twenty-five, he made his first trip to the then obscure Micronesian country, a trip that would change his life—and revolutionize the scientific community—forever. While in U’ivu, he lived among a “lost tribe” that would come to be called the Opa’ivu’eke people on what was then known (among U’ivuans, at least) as the “Forbidden Island” of Ivu’ivu, the largest in the country’s small formation. It was there that he discovered a condition—an undocumented condition, one never before studied—that was affecting the native population. The U’ivuans were known (and to some extent still are known) for the brevity of their lifespans. But while on Ivu’ivu, Norton encountered a group of islanders who were living far beyond a normal lifespan: twenty, fifty, even a hundred years longer. There were two other components that made this discovery even more remarkable: first, that while the affected persons did not physically age, they did mentally deteriorate; and second, that their condition was not congenital but acquired.

Never had men gotten closer to eternal life than they did with Norton’s discovery. And yet never had such a wonderful promise slipped away so quickly: a secret found, a secret lost, all within the space of a decade.

But Norton’s work among the Opa’ivu’eke reflected seismic shifts in fields beyond medicine: his nearly two decades spent among the tribe all but spawned a new field of modern medical anthropology, and his writings from his years there are now staples of many college curricula.

But it was also in U’ivu
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that his troubles began. Of the many things that defined Norton’s travels through U’ivu, one was the origins of what would become his enduring love for children. Ivu’ivu, for those readers who are unfamiliar with it, is a daunting landscape, as beautiful as it is intimidating. Everything there is larger and purer and more awesome than imaginable, and in every direction lies a vista more spectacular than the last: to one side, an endless stretch of water, so motionless and intensely colored that one is unable to look at it for any significant length of time; to the other, long, deep folds of mountain, its peaks disappearing into a froth of fog. From his initial visit to Ivu’ivu, Norton hired U’ivuans to be his guides, to lead him in search of sights and objects he had never before seen. Decades later, he would—at their pleading—take back with him to Maryland their children and grandchildren and raise them as his own, offering them the sort of upbringing they would have had no means of experiencing in U’ivu. He also brought back with him many orphans, toddlers and young children living in appalling conditions with no hope of ever changing their lives.