Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

It seems foolish to admit this now, but at the time I allowed myself to be surprised by Victor’s behavior. He had been so quiet, so defeated when I discovered him that I mistook his wanness for a certain promise of tractability, a willingness to learn and be taught. The fact that he initially had little discernible personality of his own only assured me that my job with him would be easy; I would instill in him the properties I had always wished to bestow on my children — he would be inquisitive, and polite, and obedient, and reasonable. But over his first month I came to see that he was more stubborn and altogether less pliable than I had assumed; indeed, his very impassivity began to seem a sort of spiky defiance. I began to think of him, with his masklike mien and terrible smile and graceless, stiff-limbed walk, as a golem, something I had unfairly and unreasonably awakened and let loose to totter through my household, wrecking it with its inhuman, robotic, indecipherable movements, its impulses ungovernable by man. Indeed, he was difficult not because the problems that he presented were so insurmountable but simply because I was unsure how to go about addressing them. I had had other children who were monstrous — Muti, during her first month in the house, had tried to kill the cat by gouging out its eyes with a pair of chopsticks; Terrence had torn the head off one of the older children’s gerbils with his pointy little teeth ( that had caused quite an uproar) — but I had at least understood them. They had liked screaming and shrieking and throwing loud, sustained fits. Moreover, they were excited to be screamed back at, to have someone with whom to engage. Such episodes were, of course, wearisome, and frequently messy, but they were at least the beginnings of conversations, or at the very least of exchanges.

But such interactions seemed to have no effect on Victor. Over the months I tried approaching and then punishing him in every way I could. I praised him and cursed at him. I kissed him and hit him. I gave him extra portions of pasta (he seemed particularly fond of various carbohydrates, unlike the others, who had craved meat) and withheld food entirely. I sang to him and slapped his face, murmured nonsense into his ear and pulled his hair, but he remained spectacularly indifferent to my various attentions, only sat grinning like a skull.

After several months I grew to regret ever bringing him home with me. The various infections that had written themselves on his skin had vanished (and indeed, he was pronounced by Shapiro to be in excellent health), but the transformation from a sick child to a well one was not as dramatic as I had expected. Some of the children, after making inauspicious first impressions, revealed themselves to be delightful creatures: their skin smoothed and their cheeks became fat and shiny, and their peculiar, rootlike hair grew in thick and faintly sweet-smelling, like mesquite wood. The restoration of good health (if, that is, he had ever been in good health to begin with) to Victor revealed no such pleasant surprises. He did not become a gleaming-eyed boy with an infectious laugh and a steady, focused gaze. Indeed, he was, once healthy, much what he had been before: neither a winning nor an attractive child, he remained stubbornly unlikely to inspire any feelings of affection or endearment, even from those in whom such emotions were expected.

Eventually it became clear to me that Victor was not the sort of child with whom a behavioral threshold could be reached and crossed. Rather, his socialization would be a long and tedious process, full of infinitesimal, unnoticeable bits of progress and lengthy, discouraging periods of regression. I spent an evening watching him, taking note of what he did and did not know, what he might be easily taught, what bad habits I might have to break first. He had, predictably, no language — although when forced or suitably inspired, he would let loose a series of terse, simian grunts — but he seemed to be able to understand timbres. A rebuke conveyed in a tone that cracked the air like a slap would still him, and a voice pitched to a high register, singy and false, seemed to comfort him. But in general he seemed to have learned not to react to things at all; hence the frightening, inappropriate smile, the weird, frozen blankness.

It was the smile that bothered me most. I offered twenty dollars to the first child who could teach Victor to successfully mimic acceptable facial reactions, and for several nights after they spent their evenings in the living room ringed around him. They tickled him, told him jokes (which he of course could not understand), danced about him, funneled cake bits into their mouths, making expressions of delight. Naturally, though, there was no response from him, and after a week or less the children lost interest and returned to their aforementioned after-dinner activities. Still, I did not think the week a waste, for I had seen him turning his veiny head from one eagerly beaming child to another, his mouth slightly open, as if curious to learn the rules of some complex and bewildering game, one whose skillful mastery would determine his ultimate happiness. I’m not sure, then, that he understood this consciously or not — or that he would even have known how to begin to comprehend the idea of happiness — but he seemed, after a period of many weeks, to consciously devote himself to his studies. A few months later, I found him watching a talk show on television one morning. It took me some minutes to realize that he was looking at the newscasters’ faces, their bright, clownish smiles. After a while he stood and padded over to the hallway bathroom. I followed, silent as a specter, and stood for a very long time, watching him pull his mouth into odd and imperfect expressions of joy, gazing at himself in the mirror as if trying to memorize the exact angle at which his lips should curve upward, puzzling over the many muscles that such an apparently simple gesture seemed to require.

By the next year he had learned first how to approximate and then how to truly engage in appropriate human behavior. Although he never became a particularly captivating child, he managed to do well enough for himself: he grew, and ate, and acquired language and apparently genuine human emotions. On a more mundane level, he learned how to use the bathroom correctly, and how to eat with a fork and spoon, and how to tie his shoes. It was also revealed that he had certain easily indulged interests; he was very fond of simple mechanisms — anything that involved pulleys or levers fascinated him — and he could spend literally hours playing with the old dumbwaiter outside the kitchen, watching the box silently glide up on its twirled, shiny ropes and then lowering it back to the basement again, where it would come creaking into sight like some archaic spacecraft. Eventually he was sent to school, where he learned to read and write and even made a few friends.

After a few years he was, in every respect that mattered or was noticeable, a perfectly average boy, one who smiled and frowned and raged and laughed. His transformation had occurred so slowly, and over such a long period of time, that I was able to recognize it only long after it had ended. Indeed, I began to think of his initial years in the house as his sort of chrysalis phase — I could remember (and would, often) the child he had been when I discovered him, but I soon found that it was very difficult to recall exactly how he had metamorphosed into what sat before me at the dinner table or behind me in the car, eating or chattering or merely watching the scenery slide by. The future I imagined for him, when I did so at all, was remarkable only for its haziness: he would, I suppose, go to high school, then perhaps college, would find a job (and I was unable to imagine what that might be, whether he would be a tradesman or perhaps work in an office in a white shirt, a tie wrapped around his throat, his diction perfect and deracinated), would marry and have a family. I would see him and worry over him less and less frequently until he became as pleasantly remote as a memory.