Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

I stood with some difficulty and stared at the bowl for many long minutes, listening to the clock ticking its uncaring tock. And then I turned and walked down the hallway to the staircase, where I paused again, waiting for nothing, and up to his room. At the doorway, which was ajar, I stopped and watched him breathing. William was spending the weekend at a friend’s house, and Victor was sleeping in his bed (he had always been convinced that William had the better bed). I watched him breathe for what seemed like a very long time. He was sleeping on his back, his arms above his head, and his pajama top was unbuttoned at the bottom, so I could see a band of his dark, satiny skin, the sad protruding whorl of his navel. Oh, Victor , I thought, what am I to do with you?

I took a step into the room and closed the door behind me. The shutters were open, and I could see an edge of the moon framed in the corner of the window, its sallow light filtered by the curtains. Many thoughts spun through my mind, one following another, as I sat down on William’s bed next to Victor’s feet, but I do not think I would be able to articulate them now. Or perhaps even then; it was a torrent, a dark tumult of arms and legs of thoughts, a hideous, sticky confusion of fused body parts and howls, something one finds only in nightmares.

I stood and picked the pillow off Victor’s bed and sat back down again. For minutes — I’m not sure how long — I held the pillow in my lap and watched him breathe in and out, in and out. I remembered again how I had found him at the field, how his body had been covered with oozing sores, how he had been too weak and exhausted to cry. I noticed a faint sickle-shaped scar just above the bone of his ankle. It glowed there, white against the wood of his skin, like a cartoonish smile, and I all at once felt very sad for him and overcome with emotion. I began to rub his ankle softly, caressing it with my thumb and index finger, and in his sleep he moved and smiled and gave a little sigh.

And then I was climbing on top of him and pressing the pillow against his mouth. His eyes, when he opened them and saw me above him, were bright and clear with fury, and then, as I pulled down his pants, with confusion and fright. I felt him begin to shout, although the pillow muffled the noise, and his voice sounded very far away, like a faint, fading echo.

“Shh,” I told him. “It’s all right.” And then I was stroking his face with my other hand, cooing to him as I sometimes did with the babies. He struggled beneath me, tried to scratch my face, but I was stronger and heavier than he and was able to force his legs apart with my knee even as I caught his arms with my free hand, pressed down hard against the inside of his elbows.

As I forced myself into him — such a feeling: of relief, of hunger, of such a pure simple joy that I cannot adequately describe it — I felt once again that delicious flood of anger. “You broke my bowl,” I whispered, absurdly, into his ear. “The bowl that my brother gave me. You beast. You little monster. You animal.” Faintly I could hear his moans, and then, as I pushed harder, his sharp little yelps. I wondered if he felt as I did, as if my very insides were being scooped out and held aloft, the harsh, cold wind rushing through the cavity of my poor, filthy body, cleansing it and carrying away its impurities, scattering them to the night air.

I had been with many boys over the years, a few of them, I am not ashamed to admit, my own: beautiful Guy, with his long eyelashes and curls the exact shade of copper of his skin; Terrence, with his eloquent arms and legs and ink-drop spatterings of moles; Muiva, my first and in many ways favorite child. I had loved those boys, loved their beauty, their dreamy, resigned compliance. They were lovely, and I was a man who appreciated their loveliness, who taught them that it was their gift, their gift to bestow upon others. But I had never come to one with the same sort of anger, of rage, of terrible love and hate, with which I came to Victor. And he, for his part, never stopped struggling, even when I came to him the next night, and then the night after that, and many more nights after, whispering that I would punish him, that I would break him, that I would force him to behave. And then after, when I lay exhausted atop him, I would find myself uttering words of love and longing and making him promises I had never made before, my voice sloppy with tears. Later, when he accused me, I was shocked. For I loved him, you see, loved him despite everything. At the trial I would say that I had given him exactly what I gave my other children — money, a home, an education. But really what I thought was, I have given him more than I have given anyone else. I have given him what I always yearned to give . That moonlit night in William’s bed, with him squirming under me, I knew what he had been trying to provoke from me, and that night I gave it to him, gave it to him without hesitation. For this is what I whispered to him before I left the room, as the sky outside began to lighten. “Vi,” I told him, the pillow still over his mouth so he would have to listen to me, “I love you. I give you my heart.”

TIMELINE

1924 : Norton Perina born in Lindon, Indiana

1933 : Mother dies

December 1945 : Sybil dies

1946 : Father dies

May 1946 : Graduates from Hamilton College

June 1950 : Graduates from Harvard Medical School

June 21, 1950 : Lands in Ivu’ivu (end of lili’uaka)

Late November 1950 : Returns home from Ivu’ivu; begins work in a lab at Stanford University

Spring 1951 : Begins first experiments with opa’ivu’eke. Group A consists of 50 mice of 15 months of age; 50 percent are given the opa’ivu’eke; the other 50 percent are the control group. Group B consists of 100 newborn mice (50 percent control, 50 percent given the opa’ivu’eke).

April 1951 : Publishes paper on the opa’ivu’eke in the Annals of Herpetology

July 1951 : Begins third experiment. Group C consists of 200 mice of 15 months of age; 50 percent are given the opa’ivu’eke; the other 50 percent are the control group.

December 1953 : Publishes paper in the Annals of Nutritional Epidemiology (the so-called “Eternity Claim” paper)

March 1954 : Adolphus Sereny begins his experiment replicating Group C of Perina’s experiments

April 1956 : Sereny readies his paper for publication

September 1956 : Sereny’s paper is published in the Lancet

February 1957 : Returns to Ivu’ivu

May 1957 : Discloses to Sereny the mice’s deterioration

January 1958 : Returns to Ivu’ivu. Publishes paper discussing subsequent mental deterioration from consumption of opa’ivu’eke in the Annals of Nutritional Epidemiology .

February 1958 : Returns to Stanford; ceases contact with Paul Tallent

1960 : Runs own lab at National Institutes of Health

End of 1961 : Returns to Ivu’ivu; Tallent disappears

1968 : Adopts first child, Muiva Perina

1970 : Ronald Kubodera begins work in Perina’s lab at NIH

1974 : Wins Nobel Prize in Medicine

August 13, 1980 : Adopts Victor Owen Perina

March 1995 : Arrested

December 1997 : Sentenced to 24 months in prison

February 1998 : Begins serving sentence at the Frederick Correctional Facility

GLOSSARY OF SELECTED U’IVUAN WORDS

Note: Vowels in U’ivuan are pronounced as they would be in Japanese or Spanish.