Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

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

83I 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.

(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.”