Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

He stood and walked to the other side of the table and began to lift various beakers at random, peering into them and placing them back approximately where he’d gotten them. I would have thought an anthropologist, with his avowed fetish for leaving things where he’d found them, would have been a little more conscientious, but I was apparently incorrect in this assumption. “But this,” he said, “this is different.” He stopped and began fiddling with a stray pipette that Cheolyu hadn’t put away. It is amazing and vexing how sloppy and invasive nonscientists are in a lab; to them, the entire space is like a boutique, and our instruments are mere stuff to be handled and fondled and played with like gadgetry. “When we were back this past time — I just returned last week — we were waiting on the shore at U’ivu for the boat to take us to Ivu’ivu when the king’s messenger came jogging toward me holding a piece of paper that the king wanted me to see. Who were these people, the king wanted to know, and should he grant them the right to visit the island? And what had I to say about the letter writer’s claims about me?

“It was a letter from another anthropologist — someone at Columbia, someone I know. It was written in U’ivuan, but very crudely — he’d obviously had to look up every word and translate the sentences from English literally — but in it he claimed that we were former colleagues and that he had his own journeys he wanted to make in U’ivu. He praised the king — clumsily, as I’ve said, but deeply — as a great monarch, and said that the West had much to learn from his civilization. And with the king’s permission, he’d like to come to the islands so he might educate the West.

“At the end of the letter were, perhaps not surprisingly, a few lines about how my work had portrayed the king and his people as madmen and idiots, and how, thanks to my writings, the rest of the world was laughing at them and, worse, preparing to attack them. He advised the king that if he wanted to protect his people, he should ban me from the islands immediately and make certain I was not able to return.”

He put the pipette down and picked up a stack of my correspondence and started flicking through it unseeingly. “I had thought something like this might happen, but I hadn’t thought it would happen so … baldly, I guess. I wanted to get on the boat and leave — the guides were already waiting for us on Ivu’ivu — but this was too important to ignore. So I told Esme to go ahead and accompanied the messenger back to the king’s palace.”

“Was he very angry?” I asked.

“The king is … the king is difficult to understand. Conversations with him are full of silences, and you have to learn how to wait through them. I spent the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening there with him. He’ll say something, something impossible, like ‘Why are you telling people bad things about my country?’ and then you have to explain that you’re not and that you’re being misrepresented, and he just sits there, staring at something you can’t quite see, until the silence almost feels torturous, and then his next question—‘How long are you staying?’—feels like both a benediction and a test. Are you being approved to go ahead? Is all being forgiven? Or is it purely a factual question? Do you answer, as I did, ‘Six months, Your Highness,’ or do you humble yourself further and say only, ‘As long as Your Highness will have me’?

“In the end he let me go, and I made it to Ivu’ivu only a day later than I’d planned. But before I left, he told me he had received many, many letters from people asking to come to the islands. So far he had not responded to any of them. And was that a warning? Or simply a statement of fact?”

“Wait,” I said. “How’s the mail even getting to them?”

He blinked. “There’s an outpost — an unofficial embassy of sorts — in Papeete, on Tahiti. The consul there travels back and forth to Tavaka once a month. All international correspondence is routed to him.”

“Oh,” I said.

“The point is, Norton,” he said, walking about once more, “at some point someone will offer the king something he’ll want, and once that happens, the island will no longer be yours or mine, insofar as it is. It’ll belong to whoever tempts him most. And then your research will stop, and so will mine.”

“But won’t he want to protect Ivu’ivu?”

“Not necessarily. The king doesn’t care about Ivu’ivu. It’s something of an embarrassment to him, and its people are of little consequence to him.”

“But what if he realizes it can make him money?”

He shook his head. “The king doesn’t care for money. It won’t make a difference to him.”

And then I thought of something, and the knowledge domed up inside me, frightening in its possibilities. “Tallent,” I asked him, “what did you offer the king to make him give you access?” 62

He turned and stared at me. Once again I thought I saw, under his beard, something like a smile. “I can’t tell you, can I?” he said. “Otherwise everyone will know.”

I didn’t know what to say to this. Did he mean I was a gossip? Or was he making a joke? Why did Tallent always have to be so maddeningly elusive? But before I could formulate my next question, he was walking toward the room where we kept the dreamers, shaking the paper bag over his shoulder at me. “Dried hunonos, fresh from Ivu’ivu,” he said. “A special treat.”

Tallent’s visit disturbed me more than I thought, more than it should have. He had been angry about the dreamers. “Norton, what happened to them?” he demanded after trying and failing to excite them with the hunonos, which not so long before would have inspired fits of salivating and anticipatory teeth-clacking, and before I had a chance to answer, he said, “Mua doesn’t even speak anymore. Eve won’t even stand up! And they’re obese — what on earth have you been feeding them?” I will admit now that I had not been spending anywhere near the amount of time with the dreamers that I ought to have, but at the time I mostly thought it very unjust that Tallent should be holding me responsible for their decline. Would he have been able to do any better in such an environment? (I thought briefly of the dreamers we had left behind tied to the manama tree; were they in better health, livelier, than the ones we had taken with us? Were they even alive?)

He left in a fury, and I found myself abruptly devastated. Of course it was ridiculous; I had moved far past the point where I needed Tallent’s help, much less his approval, not to mention the fact (I had to remind myself) that I didn’t even much respect his field of study. And yet I did crave from him something he seemed unwilling or unable to give.

However, this did not stop the elation I experienced when I heard shortly thereafter that I was to return to Ivu’ivu. Along with bestowing on me instant and permanent legitimacy, Sereny’s paper had the added benefit (or, if you asked Tallent, detraction) of making every medical school in the country eager to send its own research team to Ivu’ivu, this time for the sole purpose of retrieving as many turtles as possible and bringing them back to its laboratories. Although I had nowhere near official or permanent status at the university — a fact I made sure to remind the president of at every opportunity — I was, as the school’s “honored guest,” being respectfully asked to go on Stanford’s behalf. I would be accompanied, I was told, by someone I knew well: Tallent. And, unfortunately, Esme.

I wasn’t quite sure how to react to this news. My attraction to Tallent, my desire to be near him when even I could see that the feeling was not mutual, was something that had grown out of my control: I thought of it as a gigantic mushroom, puffy and misshapen and tumorous, ploofing out into strange and fantastic formations. I also feared, from our last interaction, that he must have been made to agree to this arrangement somehow and that it would not be a welcome pairing for him. (Less conflicted were my feelings for Esme, but when I asked the president if it was wholly necessary that she should go, he frowned and looked confused and I hurriedly decided to drop the matter.)