Out on the street, Norton strained to remember where he had parked his rental car. Before prison, these lapses would have been unthinkable. They were coming too early in life. He had turned fifty rather neatly at the turn of the millennium and now he had broken through into a place where he didn’t want to be—just like a drunk, in one of those subdivisions where all the houses look the same, battering down the door of the wrong house.
Norton’s hubris apropos of the I.R.S. had interrupted an arc of life that had been clearly defined since he’d taken Economics 000, as a freshman. Leaving the prison, on a flight from Detroit to Denver, he had awakened from a brief snooze with the distinct feeling that the plane had stopped for a few moments in midair. No one else in the cabin appeared to have noticed it, but he was quite sure that it had happened.