Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

Never had twenty-four months felt as long as the ones I endured after Sereny began his experiment, which replicated my initial one exactly. 55And yet now of course I realize that twenty-four months is nothing: two million breaths, a slur of vision-blurred nights, a series of meals eaten and books read. Twenty-four months — exactly the time I will spend in this place — is brief, so brief that its days vanish before one can even record them.

And it is not as if I was not kept informed. Sereny wrote me letters — sometimes long and detailed, sometimes brief and perfunctory — keeping me abreast of the experiment. I made a chart so I could follow its every development, track which mice had died and which seemed sluggish, note how many days, weeks, months they had lived beyond their natural lifespan. Even so, even with Sereny’s information and my own endeavorings to discover why the opa’ivu’eke’s gift of prolonged youth and life soured so spectacularly and what might be done to reverse it, I felt time pressing against me. Each day passed under the thunk of a remorselessly ticking clock, each second in my mind as loud and hollow as a slap. I turned thirty, then thirty-one, and around me my colleagues, all younger, 56all arguably no more talented than I, hurried toward grand appointments and glory and recognition, while I sat in a lab and waited for the day’s packet of mail to thud to the ground before hurrying to it as the mice hurried toward their feed, desperate for a letter from Sereny.

But then, finally, came the day I had been waiting for: in early April of 1956, Sereny sent me a note saying that he was readying his own paper for submission. Eighty-seven percent 57of his mice that had ingested the opa’ivu’eke were alive at forty months; 58the control group was long dead. Sereny, being much more respected and distinguished than I, had already spoken to his friend who was the editor of the Lancet ; the paper would be appearing in the September issue.

Was I to know what kind of reaction Sereny’s paper would receive? 59No, of course not. I suspected, naturally, but it was as if overnight I had gone from being a pariah to being something of a god: I had become my own opa’ivu’eke, a creator of life and a granter of miracles, someone who had discovered something that made the impossible possible. In those days news did not travel as quickly as it does now, and so in the two weeks or so between the publication of Sereny’s paper and the journal reaching its Stateside readers, there was a period of silence; it was almost as if Sereny had not written the paper at all. I had received an early copy of his report — which was quite satisfactory and essentially reiterated everything I had already said or otherwise knew, albeit from a much more trustworthy source — and in the days immediately following its publication, I called him and telegrammed him and wrote to him at what I will admit was an obnoxious rate, demanding to know what kind of reaction he had received and what it might mean for me. Sereny was, I can now see, rather good about the whole thing, and even before the paper had been submitted he had been kind enough to begin introducing me to various people at universities and institutes who might be able to give me some sort of permanent position. I talked, finally, to the head of Stanford’s medical school, and to the head of Cal’s, and took a trip back east to meet with the Neurology Department at Harvard (Sereny was mysteriously out of the country when I visited and was unable to see me) and assorted others at Johns Hopkins, Rockefeller, Yale, etc. While I was there I stopped to visit Owen, who was fatter and more bearded than ever and now lecturing at Amherst, which was apparently much more to his liking than Mills. We sat on the steps of the English Department building (it was late spring but still bitter cold), drinking tea that tasted as if Owen had left a shard of bark in some hot water and swirled it around a bit, and I watched as Owen watched the parade of undergraduates shuffle by, his eyes narrowed into greedy little slits. He was feeling particularly victorious as his first book of poetry, The Nautilus Sky , had just been published by some obscure press 60to slavering reviews. It was a very low moment for me, feeling him sitting next to me as hot as a radiator with his triumph, while I had nothing to show for my now many years spent in the lab with my silent Oriental assistant except Sereny’s promise and his paper, all my hopes suspended somewhere between Cambridge and London.

But after the paper was read! Suddenly the flow of telegrams and letters and telephone calls reversed, and I hurried to the lab to find daily new accolades and inquiries and notes of praise, many of them from the very people who three years before had mocked me (not included in this group were any of my former colleagues from Smythe’s lab or my new neighbors, whose visits to Cheolyu abruptly stopped after the Lancet article). The only people I might have heard from but did not were Tallent and Esme; they were in Ivu’ivu, where they had been for the past six months — their paper had, I heard, won them an instant new round of funding — and I was glad of this. I was a scientist and in a different field altogether, and there was nothing to be done besides, but I still dreaded the day when I would have to have the inevitable conversation with Tallent about my theft of the opa’ivu’eke.

And then it was almost 1957, and once again events pressed up against one another and all became a flurry. I was in the lab late one night working on answering some of the many letters that were arriving daily when I heard a knock on the door and a tall, bearded man carrying a rattling paper bag walked in.

It took me a few moments to realize that it was Tallent. He had had a beard in Ivu’ivu, of course — I had as well — but it was somehow disorienting to see it trimmed and clean as it was now, not to mention out of context.

“So,” he said, after we’d shaken hands and he’d sat down across from me on one of the high stools. “I hear that congratulations are in order.”

The beard made it difficult for me to discern his facial expression. I thought I heard — or perhaps I was just being hopeful? — something like amusement in his voice, but I wasn’t certain.

I immediately began talking, apparently thinking that if I spoke fast and long enough I might be able to make him — what? forgive me? forget about the turtle? — until he finally held up his hand. “Norton,” he said, and I heard something of the old weariness enter his voice, a particular sort of tiredness that he seemed to express only around me, “I had more or less already suspected you did this.”

“You’re not mad?” I asked him, greatly relieved.

His mouth twitched a bit. “I didn’t say that,” he said. “You know I don’t agree with what you did. But I understand why you did it.”

We talked for a while longer then, he asking semi-informed but surprisingly intelligent questions about my work (it seemed that he had read the paper and actually made sense of it).

“Well,” he said at last, his voice sad, “it’s over for them.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“If you’re correct, Norton — and even if you’re not — then every pharmaceutical company is going to go over there and try to capture those turtles. Not to mention every anthropologist and every botanist, herpetologist, you name it. Ivu’ivu as we know it is over.”

It seemed unfair to be solely blamed for this, and I said so. Hadn’t his own paper exposed the island already? They were already no longer lost.

“Oh, you’re correct that I’m to blame as well,” he replied. “But my paper revealed nothing but a small group of people, of no real use or consequence to anyone. Certainly of no profit to anyone.” 61