Выбрать главу

But I am digressing. One of the primary difficulties of incarceration for Norton has been battling the intense monotony that has inevitably come to define his situation. I must admit, I was a little surprised when he began, less than a month into his term, to complain of crippling boredom. It had always been one of Norton’s fondest dreams — the dream, I think, of many brilliant and overextended men — that one month, or one year, he’d find himself in a warm place with absolutely no commitments. There would be no speeches to give, no articles to edit or write, no students to instruct, no children to look after, no research to conduct; only a blank, flat expanse of open time, which he would be free to clutter with whatever he wished. Norton had always spoken of time as a sea, a mirrorlike, endless stretch of emptiness, and indeed this dream—“sea time,” he called it — became a sort of joke, a shorthand for talking about subjects he hoped one day to pursue but had no way of engaging in at the present moment. And so he would make vows: he would breed tropical ferns in sea time. He would read biographies in sea time. He would write his memoirs in sea time. No one, least of all Norton, ever thought he would actually ever have sea time, but now, of course, he does, minus the warm location and pleasant, lazy torpor that one associates with hard-earned idleness. But unfortunately, it appears that Norton is perhaps simply not equipped for leisure; indeed, it has been torturous for him (although of course I admit that a great deal of this may be attributable to the unfortunate circumstances under which this leisure was granted him). In a recent letter, he wrote:

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.2

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?