Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

76So thorough was the various pharmaceutical companies’ and universities’ removal of the mo’o kua’aus who were allegedly discovered on Ivu’ivu that it is thought highly unlikely that any of them were actually ever transplanted to U’ivu. Naturally, both of the aforementioned parties had their own reasons for not allowing any of the dreamers to migrate there, but it is also highly unlikely that the U’ivuans — given the mythology and fear surrounding the mo’o kua’au — wanted any of them in their midst. (Later several of the pharmaceutical companies would claim that they took the dreamers who were discovered back to the States for their own protection, because they would surely be ill-treated or ostracized if they were displaced to U’ivu.) Consequently, the dreamers, as well as the vaka’ina ceremony, remain as exotic and incredible on U’ivu as they do in the States — perhaps even more so: a particularly vivid ghost story, never to be definitively disproved.

I.

He was difficult from the beginning. Difficult is such a useful, vague word, but in this situation its lack of specificity is intentional. This is because almost everything about Victor — every interaction, every exchange, every rite of childhood — seemed particularly fraught, and even the basic facts about him that should have been easy to ascertain became the subjects of labyrinthine explorations and investigations. There are children who make life difficult for themselves through their bad behavior or lack of personality or common sense, and there are others for whom — through genetics or circumstances — life is already difficult. It should be said that although Victor eventually became a member of the former category, he began life with me as a member of the latter.

Take, for instance, his age. It was no surprise to me that Victor’s father (or whoever he was) did not know or care how old his child was. The first time I was able to hold him and regard him closely — to scrutinize the smeary eyes, the distended stomach, the scrubby scab of dirty hair, the colonies of glistening, plump lice, each as fat and slick as a grain of buttered rice — I guessed him to be six or so, although an early childhood of malnourishment and disease gave him the appearance of a three-year-old. Upon returning to Bethesda, I took him to see the children’s pediatrician, Alan Shapiro, who thought, after examining him and taking into account his obviously stunted growth, that he might be as old as seven or as young as four. Guessing the age of these children is an imperfect art, one I had long ago ceased fretting over too much. Indeed, it is usually beneficial to shave as many months off these children’s lives as one is realistically able to; it gives them a year or two to adjust to the work of being a developing American child and eases their burden to thrive and succeed. (Call it a sort of developmental affirmative action, if you will.) So after a sort of lazy, halfhearted debate, Shapiro and I came to an understanding, and on Victor’s medical files (and all official records thereafter) we listed August 13, 1976, as his birthday, August 13 being, of course, the day I found him. I had entered Shapiro’s office with a mystery of a child; I went home with a certified four-year-old.

Nineteen eighty, the year Victor entered my household, was unusual for two reasons. For one, there had never been as many children living in the house at one time as there were that year. For another, it turned out to be one of those years in which the population of children fell fairly neatly into two distinct generations. At one end was a gaggle of eighteen-year-olds — Muti, Megan, Gunter, Lani, Lei, Terrence, Karl, and Edith, I believe — all of whom would be leaving for college, followed closely by another group of older adolescents (sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, primarily, with a few slightly younger ones, including Ella, who was twelve at the time, and Abby, who was eleven, tossed in). But the next oldest children to follow them, Isolde and William — the children who would be Victor’s primary peers — were only six. Altogether, there were some twenty-two children living in the house that year. Most of my memories of that time are sensory rather than anecdotal ones — the lugubrious, looping strains of the rock music the teenagers would play hour after hour; the sickly, fruity stench of the alcohol they filched from somewhere; the various sartorial failures that paraded past me in the mornings. In the evenings the girls talked on the phone and the boys stayed in their rooms and, I am sure, masturbated. At times I was certain that several of them were having sexual relations with one another, but it seemed too exhausting a topic even to begin to address. They all spent a great deal of time fighting, and watching television, and loudly declaring how relieved they would be to finally leave the house and go to college and be on their own (with, of course, ample financial assistance from me). Needless to say, I spent as much time as possible abroad, attending conferences, giving lectures. Returning from the airport, I always half expected to turn the corner and find the house a pile of rubble, with all of them waiting impatiently and crossly for me to come home so they could leap on me with their demands and complaints and needs.

I wonder what Victor must have thought the first time he saw the house and met the strange, populous collection of children whom he would now be expected — if only legally — to regard as his brothers and sisters. I am certain it must have been overwhelming for him; I myself had a difficult time keeping track of the faces that walked by me every morning, asked me for money, thrust report cards and petty injuries in front of my face. At one point one of the older children had even brought a friend of his home to live with us for a week to see if I’d notice an extra setting at the table, an extra permission slip to sign. Naturally, I didn’t notice at all (my time and thoughts being occupied with a multitude of things), and when the prank was finally revealed to me, amid much hilarity, I laughed as well, and shook the hand of the interloper, an angular, handsome boy whose skin was the purplish black of figs. In the mornings children would literally fly past me, leaping off the middle of the flight of stairs toward the front door, or trooping out the back door in dense flanks, clasping hockey and lacrosse sticks and baseball bats like weaponry, like the spears they would once have taken everywhere. (Sometimes I would watch them marching together, their blunt, unfriendly, planar faces brailled with acne, and think involuntarily of Captain Cook’s cloaked advice that I had chosen in my youth to disregard— The fierceness of the Wevooans makes the crew uneasy —and shudder, because was I any more equipped to live with these people who had so unsettled the explorer’s brave crew, who knew more and had seen more than I ever would?)

I do admit that I had trouble remembering everyone’s name. I would call for the girl I thought was Lani and in her place would appear someone I had always thought was Megan (that is, if anyone heeded my call at all). Sometimes this was not my failure but an intentional bit of trickery; they would try to play games like this — one person standing in for another, trying to confuse me — but quickly learned not to do this after I began playing some games of my own: giving money to the person who answered my call, for example, or requesting that he or she complete a particularly odious chore. Squabbles would break out, confessions would be made, mistaken and deliberately confused identities would be righted. It was this generation of children who had instituted the prohibition against, as they said, “infants” at the dinner table, which meant that Isolde and William (and thereafter everyone younger than seven) were consigned to the “baby table,” a squat, white-laminated wooden toy of a thing that was used primarily for quick, slapdash breakfasts eaten in the kitchen, to take their evening meal with Mrs. Tomlinson an hour before everyone else ate. There was, of course, much crying and screeching from Isolde and William over this decision and an equal amount of not quite logical but self-righteous screaming from the elders (“Majority rules! Majority rules!” shrieked Fred, one of the sixteen-year-olds, who was studying the Constitution in high school; you could always ascertain their school syllabus by observing the realpolitik they tried to apply to various household regulations), but in the end the amendment was passed. Even I had to admit it was an inspired solution; at any rate, it made dinnertime less of a spectacle than it had been.