It was my last day and I was leaving for the field to catch my flight. As always, I had packed sample boxes to secrete and protect any interesting clippings I might encounter, and as had been the case for the past several years, I left with them empty.
As always, I walked down the main street — stickier than ever with mud after a sudden rainfall — through a phalanx of outstretched hands, the corps of U’ivuans appearing suddenly and mutely before me, ready to take whatever I might have to give them. I had grown used to this as well and was prepared with pocketsful of things I thought they might use: not money, but dried scraps of mango, handkerchiefs (which they could use to clean their spears or diaper their babies), nuts, and penknives for the ones who seemed particularly pitiable.
At the field I waited. Some company — Merck, I had heard — had, in a last burst of investor’s optimism, paid to have a runway constructed but had abandoned it before its completion, and so it, like much of the island, was left half finished and half not, of less use to anyone in this state than it had been before. Now weeds and tiny, furly trees thrust through the tarmac, buckling the surface into a series of blackened soufflés.
A man came slowly toward me. For whatever reason, very few islanders lingered about the field — maybe from habit, since it had once been the king’s hunting grounds, or maybe from fear, as they did not like the airplanes — and I watched him, fanning myself in the heat, as he approached. As he drew nearer, I saw at once that he was Ivu’ivuan. You could always distinguish the Ivu’ivuans: they were slightly smaller than the U’ivuans, and darker, and something about them seemed permanently nonplussed, disoriented, no matter how long they had lived on their new island.
This man was older, maybe in his early forties, and seemed more defeated than most; his spear was gouged at its tip, and its shaft was thorny with splinters. He wore a sarong that had once perhaps been dark blue, and I could smell the alcohol sweating off him, as sweet as rotting roses. But for all that, he was oddly confident, and when he beckoned me, I found myself following him.
On the edge of the field was a clutch of ragged and dispirited-looking guava trees, and the man pointed to a bundle of cloths, as colorless as his sarong, secreted between them. When I did not move to collect them, he gave them a kick with his toe and the cloths turned over and I saw that it was a child. The man barked a command and the child stood. He wore only a T-shirt, one more holes and rips than actual fabric, and his hair was so magnificently snarled that I remember thinking, almost reflexively, that I would have to shave it off and begin anew.
But then I remembered myself and told the man that I didn’t need any more children.
The man gaped at me in apparent disbelief. I had said no to parents before, of course — especially when the children were noticeably deformed — but they usually accepted my rejection quietly, resignedly, and nodded at me before returning to their perch at the edge of the road. But this man, it appeared, would be different. I must take the child, he told me, and then when I refused, he repeated it again: I must take him. I didn’t want the child, I told him. I had no more room for children.
“But he is such a small boy!” he told me, and then, when he saw me unmoved, his tone changed and he became placating: Would I not please take the child? He knew I was a rich man, and a good man. He even knew my name. “No-ton,” he said. “No-ton, please take the child.”
The child had his head bent this entire time, and now the man pushed him toward me. “You take him!” he wailed, and then he repeated the same words, this time in a shout, because the plane was swooping overhead, its propellers whirring noisily, readying for its landing.
I turned and began walking toward the plane, and the man followed me, yanking the boy behind him. “He will do anything you want! Anything! You can do anything with him!” The man was yelling now, and something about his voice, its fury mingled with desperation, made me turn and look at him more closely. And there, for just a second — and it really was that brief — I suddenly thought I recognized him. His jawline was fluffed from too much alcohol, his eyes were as yellow as suet, but there, in the lift of his chin, in his still slender arms attached to the puff of his torso like a spider’s legs, was there not the boy from the a’ina’ina, the one who had held his head so erect and steady, the one who had let his hands skim over me like insects’ wings?
And then, before I knew it, I found myself reaching my arms forward, and the man, with a groan of relief, shoving the boy — still mute, still with his head bowed — into them. The plane’s door was opening, its stairs louvering down, and as I trotted toward them, I could hear the man again, calling after me.
“What do you want now?” I shouted back at him over the din of the engine. “I’m taking him with me!”
“You must give me something for him!”
Even in my haste to leave, I found myself slightly outraged at this — first he was imploring me to take the child from him, and now he was asking for payment? “I don’t have anything,” I told him.
“Please! No-ton! Anything! I must have something for him!”
So I dug into my pockets, setting the boy down on the ground in order to do so, until I found my last penknife, which I gave to him along with a fistful of pistachios. He snatched them from my hand and trotted away, his spear held above his shoulder in apparent triumph. He never turned around to look at the boy. Suddenly I felt very sorry for him; he had not wanted the boy, but the boy was also his only possession, his only thing to sell or trade.
From the plane, the pilot waved — he had already gathered my bags, and now it was time for me to come aboard. “Come,” I said to the child in U’ivuan, and when he didn’t follow me, only stood there staring at his feet, I was made to march back and pick him up. His shirt was glazed with oil and faintly slick to the touch, and his breath on my cheek was hot and unpleasantly yeasty. But he clung to my neck with his arm and turned his face into my shoulder as I climbed the stairs.
I sat at the window and watched the island shrink beneath me. The child had not let go of my neck. Later he would urinate on me, and I would spend the rest of the flight to Hawaii sitting in his waste. I didn’t like him, but I felt pity for him, which is often the first step toward liking anyone. I was fifty-six, I was going home, I had another child. I felt only exhaustion. This trip, I swore, would be my last, my very last.
The child fell asleep and I set him down on the floor on a blanket. Another one, I thought, dully. Another one to name, and feed, and clothe, and raise.
In Honolulu, I shook the pilot’s hand and thanked him. He had been the copilot on my previous flight from U’ivu, and he told me he was French but had been raised and was still based in Papeete, so he might see me again if I ever flew this route again. His name was Victor, he said.
A good name, I thought, somewhere over California. It was very late; I had been traveling for many hours; I was very tired. Certainly good enough for a boy without a name. Later, much later, I would reflect on how this child I had acquired and named so thoughtlessly should turn out to become the most important of creatures, how he would upset my life and the lives of others beyond recognition.
But back then, of course, I could not have predicted it. Outside my little shell of a window I could see the bank of clouds plumping beneath us. Beside me, the boy — Victor, now — slept. And finally, I closed my eyes as well, and slipped into a sleep without dreams.
48 As Norton indicates, the arrangement he enjoyed at Stanford was highly unusual. What is more unusual is that the source of the funding has never been definitively identified, even all these years later. In her book, Katharine Hetherington speculates that there are two possible candidates. The first (and most colorful) is a man named Rufus Gripshaw, a very wealthy and eccentric Stanford alumnus who made his fortune from inventing a vacuum sealer that is now used in numerous food processing plants and who was obsessed with achieving immortality. She speculates that Tallent spoke to the dean of the medical school on Norton’s behalf and asked him to approach Gripshaw as a silent patron for Norton’s research with the dreamers. Although this is a compelling theory — obviously, Gripshaw had a great personal interest in Norton’s project — it assumes that Tallent was much more interested in assisting Norton’s work than Norton himself seems to indicate (or indeed ever believed). This is, of course, another case in which Tallent’s lack of archived papers and journals makes re-creating history, much less his motives, very frustrating. In the years that were to follow, Norton was never quite certain how Tallent felt about him and his work, and it is easy to imagine that Tallent himself was ambivalent about how, and whether, he wanted to collaborate with Norton. (On the other hand, he had essentially abetted Norton in his plan to bring back the dreamers.)