Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

A life in the lab is a lonely one, especially when you have only one colleague and your position is tenuous and you are sneaking around your suspected benefactor and concealing from him the true nature of your work and you are in the period of your experiment when you are simply waiting for something to happen. Oh, of course there are other things to do — life in a lab is nothing if not busy, with its dozens of essential little chores and tasks to be completed each day, but it is often less than stimulating. Out of desperation I was even driven to try to make small talk with Cheolyu, which became something of its own experiment in absurdist theater. I would say something, and then perhaps five minutes would pass, and he would reply with something that might be considered a response to what I had said … but might just as well have been a non sequitur. By that point, it would hardly seem worth the effort and mutual embarrassment to continue the conversation, and both of us would slip into a silence that might be maintained for hours, or days.

However, this period was not a total waste, as I decided to fill the long blank days with a study of U’ivuan. Tallent brought me a primer he and Esme had assembled (most of it handwritten in her strangely bubbly schoolgirl cursive), with a few hundred words and phrases translated into U’ivuan and, where applicable, the Ivu’ivuan dialect. Unfortunately, even as I was learning their language, the dreamers were forgetting it, and I was left to repeat the words to myself late into the night, their thick glottal clumps fattening the air.

I was surprised, after several weeks of my new routine, to get a letter from Owen. It turned out that he was nearby, teaching freshman English at, of all places, Mills (a situation that he later told me he knew even then was a complete waste).

We made plans to meet for dinner. Owen had a friend with a car and drove down to Palo Alto. Why we decided to remain near campus and not go into San Francisco eludes me now. But my world had by that time shrunk to such a narrow locus — the lab, my on-campus apartment — that it is simply likely I was unable to think beyond its borders.

It felt pleasantly familiar (a strange sensation, after months of aggressive unfamiliarity) to see Owen, although he now had a beard and was fatter than I remembered.

“Hi,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Hi,” I said, and shook it. “You got fat.”

He shrugged and grunted irritatedly. I remembered that he had never had a very good sense of humor. “Let’s go.”

We had drinks, and I asked him about his work. “Are the students smart?”

“What do you think?” He grunted again. “They’re silly girls. They spend most of their time here, actually”—meaning Stanford—“and at Cal, trying to meet husbands.” He sighed. “I feel like a cow in a henhouse.”

“You mean a fox,” I said.

He looked annoyed. “No,” he said, “I mean a cow. Cows are herbivores. They eat grass. They’re not interested in eating chickens. To them, they’re just smelly and stupid birds.”

I suppose this was Owen’s way of telling me he was homosexual, for we never discussed his preferences again, and yet the next time I saw him, it was in the company of a very young man who laughed nervously at Owen’s every weak joke. Many years later, when people began to discuss such topics publicly, I heard him recount to someone how he had “come out” to me. It was clear that he was (still) quite pleased with his cleverness, but hearing it again only reminded me of what a tortured and unsuccessful metaphor it was.

Over dinner, as I half listened to Owen drone on about the college and how much he hated California, and some long explanation about something that seemed to have happened to my winter coat when he had had to use it to put out a fire in his room, I reflected upon how fundamentally naive he was, how small and plebeian his concerns were, and how he never could have endured what I had, and how profoundly changed I now was. I had no disdain for him, however, and indeed, it was soothing to be with someone for whom life was a series of the familiar, whose every problem was solvable, who could find such pleasure in the everyday. It was startling to remember that I had once been one of those people as well. Now, however, I no longer was.

II.

Of all the emotions to describe in retrospect, happiness is perhaps the most dull, but awe is the most difficult. Years later I would be asked (and asked and asked) how I felt when the fourth month and then the fifth month and then the sixth month passed and the mice I had fed the opa’ivu’eke lived on, burrowing into their shredded-paper caves, spinning vapidly on their wheels, sucking at their cages’ water bottles, even as the control group became an ever-vaguer memory, incinerated long ago after they all died, one after the next, in the seventeenth through twentieth months of their lives.

“I was amazed,” I would say, and while this was true, it also was not. Although I could not say so until much later (I was still endeavoring back then to be humble, as it was notable displays of humility that won young researchers grants), any initial shock I might have felt was eclipsed by a quiet sense of vindication. As I watched the mice live on and on, I felt no excitement of discovery; in fact, the whole thing seemed a bit anticlimactic. My theory had always made sense to me, and I had never doubted it, but now I would have to go through the necessary (and tedious) steps of proving it to everyone else.

I had the second group of mice (the ones I had procured as pinkies) already started on the regimen, but in July of 1951 I began a third experiment, this time on a group of 200 fifteen-month-old mice. If my theories were correct, the 100 mice who ingested the opa’ivu’eke would live, on median, at least twice as long as their natural lifespan.

While I was watching mice and getting bored stupid with the dreamers, however, Tallent was becoming famous. In October of 1951 (the opa’ivu’eke-eating mice from the first group were by then twenty-three months old and as frisky as ever), he published a report entitled “The ‘Lost Tribe’ of U’ivu: An Ethnological Study of the Village Peoples of Ivu’ivu” in the Journal of Ethnography . A fevered skim of the article revealed page after page of highly pointillist renderings of the tribe’s family structures, rites, rituals (not, notably, the a’ina’ina), philosophies, origin myths, taboos, notions of time, and social workings but relatively little — shockingly little — about their extended lifetimes. There was a long section about the opa’ivu’eke, and an excessively granular description of the vaka’ina (so granular that it managed to convey none of the wonder and terror one felt while watching it), and, buried in an endnote, this comment:

I have spoken of the tribe’s fascination with immortality. Although this is a preoccupation central to the U’ivuans’ mythology as well, it would not be overstating the case to call it a subject of obsession among the villagers. Indeed, they believe that the ingestion of the opa’ivu’eke 50— the turtle devoured during the vaka’ina ritual by those reaching or having surpassed the age of sixty o’anas — confers eternal life. There is, of course, no conclusive scientific proof of these claims, although there is evidence that certain members of the tribe are unusually long-lived .

Reading this, I felt three things. First, amusement at Tallent’s timidity; was it not he who had been so quick to insist that Ika’ana was centuries old? Second, an odd sort of relief at his uncharacteristic circumspection: not only had he not revealed what was fundamentally my discovery, but he had left room for me to enrich and emboss his account with my own. And third — and following those initial two reactions — a niggling suspicion that Esme, not Tallent, had been responsible not only for the note (its poor delivery, its bland writing) but also for Tallent’s apparently newfound wariness.