《渺小一生》:劳伦斯没查到任何资料

　 Of course, I also knew, without knowing for certain, without any real evidence, that something had gone very wrong for him at some point. That first time you were all up in Truro, I came down to the kitchen late one night and found JB sitting at the table, drawing. I always thought JB was a different person when he was alone, when he was certain he didn’t have to perform, and I sat and looked at what he was sketching—pictures of all of you—and asked him about what he was studying in grad school, and he told me about people whose work he admired, three-fourths of whom were unknown to me.

当然，我也知道（虽然不确定，也没有任何实际证据）他小时候发生过非常糟糕的事情。他们四个第一次来特鲁罗时，有天夜里很晚我下楼到厨房，发现杰比坐在餐桌前画画。我一直觉得杰比独处时，确定自己不必表演了，就会变成另外一个人。于是我坐下来看他画什么，都是你们其他三个人，我又问他在研究生院上些什么课。他还告诉我他欣赏哪些人的作品，其中四分之三我都没听说过。

　 As I was leaving to go upstairs, JB called my name, and I came back. “Listen,” he said. He sounded embarrassed. “I don’t want to be rude or anything, but you should lay off asking him so many questions.”

我正要离开上楼时，杰比喊了我的名字，我又回来。“听我说，”杰比的口气很难为情，“我不想没礼貌或什么的，不过你别再问他那么多问题了。”

　 I sat down again. “Why?”

我又坐了下来：“为什么？”

　 He was uncomfortable, but determined. “He doesn’t have any parents,” he said. “I don’t know the circumstances, but he won’t even discuss it with us. Not with me, anyway.” He stopped. “I think something terrible happened to him when he was a kid.”

杰比很不自在，同时也很坚决。“他没有父母。”他说，“我不知道情况，但他跟我们都不肯谈。总之没跟我谈过。”他停了一下，“我想他小时候发生过一些很可怕的事情。”

　 “What kind of terrible?” I asked.

“哪种可怕的事？”我问。

　 He shook his head. “We’re not really certain, but we think it must be really bad physical abuse. Haven’t you noticed he never takes off his clothes, or how he never lets anyone touch him? I think someone must have beat him, or—” He stopped. He was loved, he was protected; he didn’t have the courage to conjure what might have followed that or, and neither did I. But I had noticed, of course—I hadn’t been asking to make him uncomfortable, but even when I saw that it did make him uncomfortable, I hadn’t been able to stop.

杰比摇摇头：“我们不确定，不过我们觉得一定是非常糟糕的身体虐待。你没注意到他从来不脱衣服，也不让任何人碰他？我想一定有人毒打过他，或者……”杰比停了下来。杰比从小备受关爱和保护，他没有勇气去想那个或者之后会是什么，我也没有勇气。但我当然注意到了。我之前问他问题，并不是故意要让他不安，但即使我看到那些问题确实让他不安，还是没法停止。

　 “Harold,” Julia would say after he left at night, “you’re making him uneasy.”

“哈罗德，”晚上他离开后，朱丽娅会说，“你搞得他很不安。”

　 “I know, I know,” I’d say. I knew nothing good lay behind his silence, and as much as I didn’t want to hear what the story was, I wanted to hear it as well.

“我知道，我知道。”我会说。我知道他的沉默背后不是什么好事。我不想听那些故事，却又想听听看。

　 About a month before the adoption went through, he turned up at the house one weekend, very unexpectedly: I came in from my tennis game, and there he was on the couch, asleep. He had come to talk to me, he had come to try to confess something to me. But in the end, he couldn’t.

大约在去法院办收养手续的一个月前，某天周末他突然跑到我们家，我们完全没料想到。当时我打完例行的网球赛回来，发现他躺在沙发上睡着了。他是来找我谈的，想设法跟我坦白一些事。但到最后，他还是说不出口。

　 That night Andy called me in a panic looking for him, and when I asked Andy why he was calling him at midnight anyway, he quickly turned vague. “He’s been having a really hard time,” he said.

那一夜安迪打电话给我想找他，非常恐慌。我问安迪为什么半夜12点打给他，他只是含糊其词地带过：“他最近很不好过。”

　 “Because of the adoption?” I asked.

“因为收养的事情吗？”我问。

　 “I can’t really say,” he said, primly—as you know, doctor-patient confidentiality was something Andy adhered to irregularly but with great dedication when he did. And then you called, and made up your own vague stories.

“我真的不能说。”他一本正经地回答——你也知道，安迪不见得遵守医生和病人之间的保密协议，但如果他要遵守，那就会坚持到底。然后你也打来了，讲了你自己的含糊说法。

　 The next day, I asked Laurence if he could find out if he had any juvenile records in his name. I knew it was unlikely that he’d discover anything, and even if he did, the records would be sealed.

次日，我问劳伦斯能不能帮忙查一下，看是否有他名字的未成年犯罪记录。我知道不太可能发现什么，就算发现了，档案也是封存的状态。

　 I had meant what I told him that weekend: whatever he had done didn’t matter to me. I knew him. Who he had become was the person who mattered to me. I told him that who he was before made no difference to me. But of course, this was naïve: I adopted the person he was, but along with that came the person he had been, and I didn’t know who that person was. Later, I would regret that I hadn’t made it clearer to him that that person, whoever he was, was someone I wanted as well. Later, I would wonder, incessantly, what it would have been like for him if I had found him twenty years before I did, when he was a baby. Or if not twenty, then ten, or even five. Who would he have been, and who would I have been?

那个周末我跟他说的话，都是认真的：他以前做过什么，我都无所谓。我了解他。对我来说，重要的是他现在的样子。我告诉他，以前他是什么样子对我来说都没区别。但当然，这个想法太天真了，我收养了当时的他，就连带收养了以前的他，只不过我不认识以前的他。后来，我很后悔自己当时没跟他讲得更清楚：以前的他，不管是什么样，也是我想要收养的。后来，我越来越纳闷，如果我早个二十年、在他还是婴孩的时候就发现他，那他会怎么样？如果不是二十年，那么早个十年、甚至五年呢？后来他会变成什么样，我会变成什么样？

　 Laurence’s search turned up nothing, and I was relieved and disappointed. The adoption happened; it was a wonderful day, one of the best. I never regretted it. But being his parent was never easy. He had all sorts of rules he’d constructed for himself over the decades, based on lessons someone must have taught him—what he wasn’t entitled to; what he mustn’t enjoy; what he mustn’t hope or wish for; what he mustn’t covet—and it took some years to figure out what these rules were, and longer still to figure out how to try to convince him of their falsehood. But this was very difficult: they were rules by which he had survived his life, they were rules that made the world explicable to him. He was terrifically disciplined—he was in everything—and discipline, like vigilance, is a near-impossible quality to get someone to abandon.

劳伦斯没查到任何资料。我松了一口气，但也觉得失望。我们办了收养的法定手续；那天很棒，是我人生中最开心的日子之一。我始终没后悔过。但身为他的父亲从来不容易。几十年来，他为自己制定出各式各样的规则，而且一定是根据某个人的教导——他没有资格做什么，不能享受、期盼或奢望什么，不能渴求什么。我花了好几年才搞清这些规则，又花了更长的时间去说服他这些规则的谬误。他极度自律，各方面都是；而自律这种特质就像警惕性，要让某个人放弃几乎是不可能的。

　 Equally difficult was my (and your) attempts to get him to abandon certain ideas about himself: about how he looked, and what he deserved, and what he was worth, and who he was. I have still never met anyone as neatly or severely bifurcated as he: someone who could be so utterly confident in some realms and so utterly despondent in others. I remember watching him in court once and feeling both awed and chilled. He was defending one of those pharmaceutical companies in whose care and protection he had made his name in a federal whistle-blower suit. It was a big suit, a major suit—it is on dozens of syllabi now—but he was very, very calm; I have rarely seen a litigator so calm. On the stand was the whistle-blower in question, a middle-aged woman, and he was so relentless, so dogged, so pointed, that the courtroom was silent, watching him. He never raised his voice, he was never sarcastic, but I could see that he relished it, that this very act, catching that witness in her inconsistencies—which were slight, very slight, so slight another lawyer might have missed them—was nourishing to him, that he found pleasure in it. He was a gentle person (though not to himself), gentle in manners and voice, and yet in the courtroom that gentleness burned itself away and left behind something brutal and cold. This was about seven months after the incident with Caleb, five months before the incident to follow, and as I watched him reciting the witness’s own statements back to her, never glancing down at the notepad before him, his face still and handsome and self-assured, I kept seeing him in the car that terrible night, when he had turned from me and had protected his head with his hands when I reached out to touch the side of his face, as if I were another person who would try to hurt him. His very existence was twinned: there was who he was at work and who he was outside of it; there was who he was then and who he had been; there was who he was in court and who he had been in the car, so alone with himself that I had been frightened.

同样困难的是我（和你）尝试要让他抛开某些关于他自己的想法：他的外貌、他应得的事物、他的价值，以及他这个人。我至今没碰到过一个像他这么两极化的人：他可以在某些领域这么充满自信，在其他领域却又毫无信心。我还记得有回看到他出庭，让我心存敬畏又胆寒。他帮一间大型制药公司辩护，之前他帮这些大药厂处理了吹哨人举报的联邦起诉案，已经建立了名声。那是个大案子、一个重要的案子——现在已经成了法学院里的重要案例——但他非常非常冷静，我很少看到这么冷静的辩护律师。证人席上就是那位内部吹哨人，是个中年女性。他表现得十分冷酷、顽强、一针见血，因而整个法庭都安静下来，专心看着他。他从头到尾没有提高嗓门，毫无冷嘲热讽，但我看得出他很享受。我看得出他在法庭上逮到那个证人前后说辞不一致，让他精神大振，而且从中获得满足。其实说辞不一的程度非常轻微，轻微到换成另一个律师可能就会忽略。他平常是个温和的人（对他自己则不是），举止和声音都很温和，但是在法庭上，那种温和却自行烧毁，只留下了残忍和冷酷。这是在凯莱布事件过后约七个月，后续事件的五个月前，当我看着他把那个证人讲过的证词念给她听、完全不必低头看面前的笔记本，他的脸平静、英俊又充满自信。而我却总是看到那个可怕的夜晚他坐在车上的样子，当时我伸手要摸他的侧脸，他躲开，举起双手护着头，好像我只是另一个想伤害他的人。他的存在是双重性的：有工作中的他以及工作外的他；有当时的他以及平常的他；有法庭上的他，以及车子里那个孤立得令我害怕的他。

　 That night, uptown, I had paced in circles, thinking about what I had learned about him, what I had seen, how hard I had fought to keep from howling when I heard him say the things he had—worse than Caleb, worse than what Caleb had said, was hearing that he believed it, that he was so wrong about himself. I suppose I had always known he felt this way, but hearing him say it so baldly was even worse than I could have imagined. I will never forget him saying “when you look like I do, you have to take what you can get.” I will never forget the despair and anger and hopelessness I felt when I heard him say that. I will never forget his face when he saw Caleb, when Caleb sat down next to him, and I was too slow to understand what was happening. How can you call yourself a parent if your child feels this way about himself? That was something I would never be able to recalibrate. I suppose—having never parented an adult myself—that I had never known how much was actually involved. I didn’t resent having to do it: I felt only stupid and inadequate that I hadn’t realized it earlier. After all, I had been an adult with a parent, and I had turned to my father constantly.

那一夜，我待在上城的公寓，不断兜着圈子踱步，想着我所了解的他，我眼中看到的一切，还有我听到他说起自己经历的事情，要多么努力才能忍着不要咆哮。比凯莱布以及凯莱布说的话还要糟的，就是听到他所相信的就是那样，他对自己的判断这么大错特错。我想其实我一直知道他是这么想的，但听到他这么赤裸裸地说出来，比我原先想象的更糟糕。我永远忘不了他说的：“长得像我这样，你就没得挑了。”我永远忘不了他说这句话时，我感到的绝望和愤怒。我永远忘不了他看到凯莱布，还有凯莱布在他一旁坐下时，他脸上的表情。我的脑筋转得太慢，一时搞不清楚是怎么回事。如果你的小孩对自己有这样的看法，你怎么能算是称职的父母？那是我永远无法重新调整的。我从来没当过成年人的父母，我猜想我始终不了解要花多大的力气。这么辛苦，我并不怨恨，我只觉得自己愚蠢又不够格，居然没有更早了解这一点。毕竟，我也是个有父母的成年人，以前也常常去找我父亲求助啊。

　 I called Julia, who was in Santa Fe at a conference about new diseases, and told her what had happened, and she gave a long, sad sigh. “Harold,” she began, and then stopped. We’d had conversations about what his life had been before us, and although both of us were wrong, her guesses would turn out to be more accurate than mine, although at the time I had thought them ridiculous, impossible.

我打电话给朱丽娅，她当时正在圣塔菲参加有关新疾病的学术会议，我跟她说了发生的事情，她难过地长叹一声：“哈罗德……”她开口，然后又停下。我们以前谈过认识我们之前他是什么样。我们两个都猜错了，但结果证明她猜得比我准确，尽管当时我觉得太荒谬、太不可能了。

　 “I know,” I said.

“我知道。”我说。

　 “You have to call him.”

“你得打电话给他。”