Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

Once I had reached the manama tree at the back of the ninth hut, I crouched behind it and waited for the last of the light to leave the sky; Esme and Tallent had, on this trip or the previous one, finally been invited to join the dinnertime feasts by the fire, and they could spend hours there without looking around them. Meyers generally spent his evenings back at the camp, dusting his precious fungi with one of the many stiff-bristled brushes he had brought and breathing humidly through his mouth. I crept around the back of the storage houses and toward my old tree, where I piled small branches and handfuls of moss on top of the boxes to conceal their presence. I had brought with me some turtle-food pellets I’d bought at an animal supply store back in California, and when I placed some before the opa’ivu’ekes, they stared at them for a moment or two before eating them and I sat back, relieved.

Later, herpetologists would write papers detailing the species’ many unusual traits and characteristics, but all neglected to mention the one I found most appealing and singular about them, which was how they could project an almost canine friendliness combined with a feline centeredness. After eating, they padded about me for a few minutes, and when I stroked their carapaces, they did not retreat or take offense but merely shut their eyes and enjoyed it, much as their predecessor had done all those years before.

As I sat there with them, my thoughts turned to that conversation I’d had with Tallent about children. Over the past two weeks, some of the only comfort (and certainly the only amusement) I’d found had been with the village’s children. I would encounter them playing on the borders of the village as I slumped back to the camp from yet another unsuccessful day of hunting for the lake of turtles, and after watching them, I began to see games and playacting emerge from what I’d previously been able to view as only a chaotic ruckus. They had one trick they especially enjoyed performing, in which two children would face each other, each with a bit of plant husk balanced on a finger. Then they’d twirl them around faster and faster, and whoever managed to find just the right speed so the husk remained on his finger would win.

There was one child in particular whom I particularly enjoyed speaking with and watching. He was maybe seven or eight, and in his stillness and attentiveness he reminded me somewhat of the boy. He wasn’t a social outcast or anything of the sort, but he did seem apart from the others; when they played throwing games, or chased one another around the village, or dared one another to go another foot and then yet another past the manama tree behind the ninth hut, shrieking with fear and triumph as they ran back downhill, he would instead watch, a finger at the edge of his mouth and a worried expression on his face. I was moved by this frown of his, which was so adult and sad and somehow wise on a person so young. As he grew to know me and trust me, he would sometimes place a small hand on my arm or sit next to me and press his body against mine, and I would find myself babbling on to him, telling him about my life and the lab and Owen, none of which he could understand and all of which he listened to quietly, as if my words were a warm rain, so comforting that he felt no need to seek shelter.

One very hot afternoon, after his peers had gone galloping off toward the other end of the village, I realized that the boy had fallen asleep against me. I had been hoping to make one final sally uphill to look for the lake before the day passed, but something — maybe the deep contentedness of his breath — stopped me from moving, and I instead maintained my position and let him sleep. I could have a child like this , I thought. And then, But I do not want a wife . It was an impossibility, and even here, so far from home and its leaden social demands, I could not think of a way in which I might have one and yet not the other. I did not know a great deal about women then, but even my limited exposure to them had taught me that they were simply not for me. A wife! What would I discuss with her? I imagined days sitting around a plain white table and sawing away at a piece of meat burned crisp as toast, hearing the clop of her shoes as she walked across a shining linoleum floor, her hectoring conversations about money or the children or my job; I saw myself silent, listening to her drone on about her day and the laundry and whom she had seen at the store and what they had said. And then I also saw a different set of images: me lifting a sleep-heavy child and placing him in a bed, me teaching him about insects, or the two of us hunting beetles or butterflies together, visiting the sea together for the first time.

But that night, awake on my mat, what I mostly thought of was the heat of that young body next to mine, the smallness of his hand. I felt both as if they were still upon me, and then mourned for what I had never had and what I probably would never have a chance to have again.

III.

Nothing had changed; everything had. Back at the lab, the mice were still alive (dopier and less mouselike than ever; they had developed a new habit of falling on their sides and kicking and screeching, apparently unaware of how to flip back onto their feet, that was fascinating and alarming to witness), as were the dreamers. I showed them the opa’ivu’ekes in the hopes of extracting some sort of reaction, but they merely blinked at them and then ignored them.

But those — and Cheolyu, of course — were the only things that remained from the life I had left not six weeks before. And here marks the beginning (although I was not to recognize it until much later) of my new life, and of a sustained period of time that was marked by both horrors and wonders. Every day, it seemed, so many things happened at once that it is very difficult for me to chart the events of the next few years in any linear fashion. What I can say, however, was that Tallent was proven correct.

It took me some time to realize that I was in a race, one that I was simultaneously unaware of entering yet had also begun. I heard through Sereny that this pharmacologist was trying desperately to get to Ivu’ivu, and that physiologist too. There was no question of Sereny himself going; he was too old, he said, and not eager to make such an arduous trip. But he was in the minority. Every day brought new letters — some beseeching, some sly, some vaguely threatening, some opaque — to both me and him, all asking for further information, trying to inquire what I planned to do with the information I had already acquired, or more or less announcing the writer’s intention to best me at my own research. It says much about my innocence that none of this worried me, at least initially; in fact, I was a little giddy about it all — I even found it amusing. Part of this misguided confidence, I suppose, came from my trust in the king, in his apparent unwillingness to let anyone but Tallent (and those associated with him) onto the island. And then I also felt that since it had taken me so many days to find the lake of turtles — I, who had been there twice before — it would surely demand many weeks of frustrating stops and starts for the few people who might someday be allowed to set foot on Ivu’ivu. Certainly they could not ask for help in their mission; the Ivu’ivuans’ (not to mention the U’ivuans’) taboo against disturbing the turtles’ peace was too great.

By this time everyone had surmised that the secret lay with the opa’ivu’eke. Eternal life! It was no wonder that schools and companies were willing to spend anything, do anything, to get to the island first. It was no wonder that they thought I was working on isolating the element myself. But I knew what they did not, and so it was easy to remain silent in the face of their questioning and suspicions: I knew that this form of eternal life was horribly compromised. I knew that if it were to be pursued, a solution, an antidote, would have to be found first.