The People in the Trees (60 page)

Finally, after three days of wandering around the town, with its expensive little boutiques crowded with useless bric-a-brac I couldn’t imagine anyone ever buying (designer olive oils and vinegars; woven-rush baskets shaped like ceramic vases and ceramic vases glazed to look like woven-rush baskets), I drove to the Frederick Correctional Facility to collect Norton. I had run a few errands at his request: to the store, to fetch some supplies I knew he would need, and to his accountant and his lawyer. His lawyer met me with an expression I could not interpret and silently handed me the materials that Norton had asked me to retrieve. I had not seen him since the hearing, and we spoke only a few words. I did not visit the lab—indeed, did not desire to see anyone from our old lives.

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.

And then suddenly, just when I was about to throw him into the street or to have him institutionalized (such things are not as difficult as one might think if one knows the right people), he would improve, become compliant and almost meek, would seem once again to recede. But I soon grew to fear and mistrust these periods of fake calm most of all, for it meant that he was conjuring something particularly nasty; he would wait for me to be soothed into complacence and then, when I was fat and sleepy and unaware, would come
flying at me, his inexplicable rage as sharp and dangerous as talons. At these times I wondered if he might be ill in some way, although really Victor’s fury was too purposeful, too controlled, to be attributable to mental disease; rather, it was part of a concerted campaign to make me—what? Kill him? Kill myself? Even today I am not sure what it was he was hoping to make me do. Perhaps it was merely a game for him, a series of feints and withdrawals, each time more serious and potentially dangerous than the previous one. Naturally, I was able to dispense with him rather quickly; after all, I was the adult, and smarter and stronger besides, and he the child. But he was also a boy, and indefatigable, and had hours and hours in which to perfect his cunning, in which to sharpen his mischief as cleanly and carefully as another would whittle a blade.

One night I came home late from the lab and found on the floor of my study a neat little hill of shards. Stepping closer, I found it to be the ruins of a large crystal bowl that Owen had given me when I had won the Nobel. The crystal had been heavy and as pure as water, saturated with color, liquid lozenges of aqua and green the color of serpents. The bowl was one of the few gifts Owen had given me, and one of the most meaningful, for it had originally been his. Seeing it one day at his apartment, I had exclaimed over it and held it wonderingly to the light, watching the reflections of color it made slide around the room in circles. Owen had snatched it out of my hands, screeching that I would break it, and an argument had begun. But then that year a package, huge and bulky and wrapped in layers of brown butcher paper, had arrived, and inside, wrapped in cloth and tied with waxed red twine inside a wooden crate, was the bowl, as perfect and weighty and jewel-bright as I remembered it.

And now it had been destroyed. Victor—for I knew it was he—had pounded its lovely fluted base to smithereens, so all that remained was a fine pile of sharply glinting dust. The sides of the bowl had been broken into large, uneven pieces, and each had been scratched (with a stone, perhaps) so deeply that the lines seemed like decorations, inexpertly rendered etchings in glass. Underneath the remains of the bowl was a note, printed awkwardly on my stationery: “Oops.”

I stood with some difficulty and stared at the bowl for many
long minutes, listening to the clock ticking its uncaring tock. And then I turned and walked down the hallway to the staircase, where I paused again, waiting for nothing, and up to his room. At the doorway, which was ajar, I stopped and watched him breathing. William was spending the weekend at a friend’s house, and Victor was sleeping in his bed (he had always been convinced that William had the better bed). I watched him breathe for what seemed like a very long time. He was sleeping on his back, his arms above his head, and his pajama top was unbuttoned at the bottom, so I could see a band of his dark, satiny skin, the sad protruding whorl of his navel.
Oh, Victor
, I thought,
what am I to do with you?

I took a step into the room and closed the door behind me. The shutters were open, and I could see an edge of the moon framed in the corner of the window, its sallow light filtered by the curtains. Many thoughts spun through my mind, one following another, as I sat down on William’s bed next to Victor’s feet, but I do not think I would be able to articulate them now. Or perhaps even then; it was a torrent, a dark tumult of arms and legs of thoughts, a hideous, sticky confusion of fused body parts and howls, something one finds only in nightmares.

I stood and picked the pillow off Victor’s bed and sat back down again. For minutes—I’m not sure how long—I held the pillow in my lap and watched him breathe in and out, in and out. I remembered again how I had found him at the field, how his body had been covered with oozing sores, how he had been too weak and exhausted to cry. I noticed a faint sickle-shaped scar just above the bone of his ankle. It glowed there, white against the wood of his skin, like a cartoonish smile, and I all at once felt very sad for him and overcome with emotion. I began to rub his ankle softly, caressing it with my thumb and index finger, and in his sleep he moved and smiled and gave a little sigh.

And then I was climbing on top of him and pressing the pillow against his mouth. His eyes, when he opened them and saw me above him, were bright and clear with fury, and then, as I pulled down his pants, with confusion and fright. I felt him begin to shout, although the pillow muffled the noise, and his voice sounded very far away, like a faint, fading echo.

“Shh,” I told him. “It’s all right.” And then I was stroking his face with my other hand, cooing to him as I sometimes did with the babies. He struggled beneath me, tried to scratch my face, but I was stronger and heavier than he and was able to force his legs apart with my knee even as I caught his arms with my free hand, pressed down hard against the inside of his elbows.

As I forced myself into him—such a feeling: of relief, of hunger, of such a pure simple joy that I cannot adequately describe it—I felt once again that delicious flood of anger. “You broke my bowl,” I whispered, absurdly, into his ear. “The bowl that my brother gave me. You beast. You little monster. You animal.” Faintly I could hear his moans, and then, as I pushed harder, his sharp little yelps. I wondered if he felt as I did, as if my very insides were being scooped out and held aloft, the harsh, cold wind rushing through the cavity of my poor, filthy body, cleansing it and carrying away its impurities, scattering them to the night air.