Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

“Oh, I’d love to, Papa,” Ella lied, “but …” And then she detailed a quantity of schoolwork she would have been lucky to complete in three years, much less three weeks. Apparently the brief period of intense, heartfelt gratitude, which often translated directly into compliance, that Ella had experienced after her lachrymose confession had come to an end, without my having benefited from it in the slightest.

These children of mine , I thought, and not for the first time. But as usual I was uncertain how I dared end my thought.

And so in the end I was forced to complete the majority of the work on my own. Mrs. Lansing had picked, of all times, the first week in December as the date to have her hysterectomy, which meant that my time at home was quickly filled with all sorts of dreary errands and tasks: I drove to the dreadful mall in Bethesda; I spent thousands of dollars on crackly silver foil wrapping paper, and plastic robots that, with a touch of a button, fired little plastic torpedoes from their arms, and yellow-haired baby dolls with bubbling eruptions of lace at their cloth throats, and scraps of dresses made from shiny, slippery fabrics that smelled of cooked vinyl. There were other errands and chores too, of course — I made heaps of cookie dough, most of which I ended up shaping myself, late at night, dousing the cookies with lashings of glittery colored sugar before burning them in the oven; I had the housecleaner, Mrs. Ma, come three times a week instead of twice, but not an hour after she had left found the house littered with debris and the walls waxy with smears of crayon. I think it is enough to say that I resented spending my time on the many conversations and tasks I was forced to have and do in a day. I was quickly and continually reminded of the wisdom of spending the month occupied with work and conferences (as I had every year previously), and I passed most days wondering why I had chosen to subject myself to such inanities and irritations.

I suppose part of the reason I stayed home was in anticipation of Owen, whom I was very excited to see; in November we had made up after a significant argument we had had the previous July, and there were moments during the intervening months when I had missed him so purely and profoundly that my chest would feel empty and cavernous. Then there was the fact that of late I had begun to feel very old and very alone, as well as exhausted, and I craved the companionship of someone who had known me earlier in my life, when I was unfettered and the only responsibilities facing me were my own. Sometimes I would look at Eloise, the youngest child, and feel a sort of despair. Oh god , I would think, what have I been playing at? In those moments I would suddenly see myself as a fraud, a charlatan whose joke had gone too far without his even realizing it. I would look at the children clustered around the table, eating and eating and eating, and suddenly find the scene both repulsive and unnatural. It was not the first time I had been struck by the fundamental absurdity, the excess, of the situation I had brought on myself, but it was the first time such feelings had been accompanied by such pure, unfiltered despair.

And then there was another, troubling development, as recently I had found my thoughts returning, again and again, to the boy, and how I had felt when I was with him, and how fervently I had hoped and tried to recapture that sensation, to make that joy part of my daily life— that was why I had brought them here. That was what I had wanted from them. And yet with each one, the feeling of pleasure I craved was ever-briefer, more elusive, more difficult to conjure, and I was lonelier and lonelier, and finally they were evidence only of my losses, of my unanswerable sorrows. Sometimes I wondered — had I adopted them to punish myself? And if so, for what? For Ivu’ivu? For Tallent? It was not a happy speculation, but it was at least logical in its way. Surely I have done this to myself for a reason, I would think; surely this is not for nothing; surely this is not just a folly; surely I have not imprisoned myself with these children as I had once been imprisoned by their parents and uncles and grandfathers, in a place that had taken from me everything I had loved. In these moments, I would watch the children dispassionately, almost as if they were monkeys in a lab and I would be able to leave them at the end of the day.

But of course there was no leaving them. I sometimes had dreams in which I was a traveler stranded in a land densely populated by strange, unknowable creatures. I had a notebook with me in which I recorded the sights I had seen during my travels, but the creatures were hard to describe, and harder still to draw. They were not pleasing, but neither were they beastly. They looked similar, but each had some feature that distinguished him from his brother: one had a great beak, massive and hard and cruel, the pale pink of milky blood, another a set of mud-colored wings that when lifted revealed a gorgeous riot of scarlets and lilacs. They were essentially benign, but sometimes one would jump on my face without provocation, its clumsy claws gripping at my nose, my eyeglasses, and squawk. Their home — which was in one direction a thickly bubbling swamp, in another impregnable forest, its endless columns of trees vanishing into an eggy mist, in another a parched stretch of livid orange dirt — was no less strange or understandable. But what was most notable about the landscape (which was beset with strange cycads, from which hung clumps of bananalike fruits, grossly swollen and smelling of sugar and peat) was its sounds: the air was thick with whoops and cackles and purrs and hoots, all of them so loud that the sounds seemed almost tactile and seemed, like invisible creatures, to fall from the sky and creep upward from underneath the tall, striped grasses. Sometimes I felt I could almost distinguish the calls and wondered how the creatures were able to separate one sound from another amid the din. And then I noticed that the creatures had no ears; they were making noises simply to feel the vibrations in their gleaming, scaly throats, to feel their frightening, imperturbable land echo with their sounds.

I experienced this dream often enough to become resigned to it. Initially its exoticism, its mystery, scared and thrilled me and left me full of awe. But later I found myself simply eager for my time there to be over. In the dream I would find a rock, furred with a soft fungus the color of eggplants, and sit quietly and wait to be transported elsewhere, out of this land whose mysteries had long since failed to move me with wonder. Above me, an unkindness of ravens, the only animal I could identify, flew in tight, swooping, mournful arcs. They flew back and forth, back and forth, their eyes glinting, sharp and beady, but although I listened closely, they never made a sound.

III.

By the time Christmas Eve arrived, I was so eager for the holiday to be over that I had, the day before, accepted a last-minute invitation to a conference at Stockholm University that began on the thirty-first and lasted until the fifth of the new year.

It had been an awful week. The day before, I had had a conversation with Owen that had degenerated into a shouting match. Over the years, Owen — despite not having any children of his own — had come to determine that he was far more of an authority on them than I was, given his years of service educating undergraduates on the oeuvres of Whitman, Cavafy, and Proust. Even then, when we were old men, Owen’s naïveté continued to astound me: after his infrequent visits, he would call to tell me that he had interpreted the children’s complaints to him about the tidy and disciplined household I ran as “cries for help,” as if I were a despot running a small slave state and he were a crusading United Nations envoy who had been sent to bear witness to their lives of misery and injustice. I did not care for Owen’s behaving as an anthropologist in my own house, and I told him so. Still, he persisted, dispensing unwanted advice and even less wanted admonishments about a practice — the successful ferrying of children into adulthood — that I had been engaged in for more than thirty years and he for none.