Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

The legs stopped then, a few feet from me. “Boy,” I hissed. “Open the door right now. Do it now.” I was about to threaten him, but then I realized how weak and pathetic it sounded: I was the one outside in the cold, with only my bathrobe for cover. He was inside, in the house, in my house. In the windowpanes I could see the reflection of the tree, its lights blinking meaninglessly. On and off, on and off. “Victor!”

And then he came suddenly very close to the glass, and I am sorry to say I took a short step backward, which he of course noticed. He smiled, and for a moment, with his fierce grin and sharp, bright, pointed teeth and his dark eyes — so moth-dark that it was difficult to determine where the pupil met the iris — he looked like a demon, and I was frightened of him.

“My name,” he said, and I could hear him through the glass, “is Vi!”

“Victor,” I said slowly, in a tone I knew was frightening, “you are to open this door right now. Then you are to go to bed. If you do not open this door right now, I will beat you so hard that you will be unrecognizable.” To myself I thought, I will anyway, whether he opens the door now or five minutes from now .

But he just tilted his head and stared at me. Nor did he drop his ferocious smile, which stretched his mouth into a long, thin, evil-looking shape, like the blade of a scythe. It was, I realized, the same awful smile I thought I had rid him of all those years before, and I felt a shiver run through me. “I would have,” he said, in a voice that was meant to mimic my own. “But you called me Victor. After you said you would not.”

I knew he was not finished. “Victor!” I hit the door again. “Victor, you animal!”

But he was not shaken. “And so,” he continued, “I’m afraid that makes you a liar. And what is it that you’ve always taught us about lying? That it is a degradation of one’s integrity. But I don’t believe that. I believe that it damages the person you lied to as much as the person who told the lie. And so I am going to punish you.” He took a step back, so his face was lost again to shadows. Still, I could hear his voice. “I’m afraid,” he said, in that cold voice, “that I will have to leave you there to think about what you have done.” Another step back, so I could see him only from his chest down. And now his voice was fainter too. “It’s never too late”—another step back; only his waist and legs were visible—“to learn a lesson.” Another step back. “Papa.” The word felt like no more than a whisper. And then he turned, and I could see the whites of his soles as he walked away from me.

I realized then that I had remained frozen during the last part of Victor’s speech, and suddenly I saw my reflection in the glass: my palm, crepey and lined, scratching against the door, my mouth gaping and mute, my eyes startled and wide with the helpless confusion of the elderly. My god , I thought. My god. Who is he? Who is this child I have living in my house? I thought again of how I had found him, curled on the ground, covered with a layer of soot so dense it was like a pelt. Like an animal, I had thought, and had been outraged. But now I thought it again. Like an animal . And my outrage, though no less real, was not directed at his circumstances but at myself. I should have left him, I thought. It was never my place to try to save something that no one else had wanted.

But I continued to call. “Victor!” I shouted, as loudly as I could. I clawed at the door. “Victor! Victor!” I continued to bang against the door and call for minutes, hours. “Victor!” While upstairs, I knew, he lay curled up in the bed I had given him, in the room I had given him, and slept.

It was Gregory, one of the adult children, who found me the next morning, slumped against the doorframe. It seemed as if I had eventually succumbed to sleep, and when I was awoken by his cry, I was made to experience anew both the indignity of my situation and my physical dishevelment — a long sparkling floss of saliva stretched from lip to chin, and once inside, I began to shake with such ferocity that I could hear my teeth clicking against one another like castanets.

“Papa, what were you doing outside?” he asked me. I assumed he had already opened his envelope, for he was particularly solicitous, scurrying around me, handing me his cup of coffee, draping a blanket around my shoulders.

“What time is it?” I asked him, and my voice was hoarse; the words scraped against my throat.

“Eight,” he said.

Eight. How long had I been outside in the cold? Five hours? Six? Only anger, the taste of it hot in my mouth like blood, had kept me from freezing.

Gregory led me through the kitchen and into the living room, where I saw that all the children had gathered and were busy palming handfuls of candy into their mouths, laughing and talking and fighting.

“Look who I found outside,” Gregory announced loudly (he had always craved attention), and the others looked. And then at once there was a great sound, not unlike the sound of a flock of large birds rising from the beach, and a good many of them (the older and the very young ones only; the adolescents merely gazed at me stupidly) came charging at me, their arms open and expressions of great, elaborate pity wrought on their faces.

“Papa, we were looking for you!”

“Where were you?”

“Are you shaking?”

“You’re so cold!”

“I didn’t get as many candies as Jared did.”

But I wasn’t listening; instead, I looked among them for Victor. But he wasn’t there.

And then suddenly he came whooping into the room, holding high in one hand a couple of batteries and tucked under his other arm the remote-controlled car that he had begged for and that I had bought and wrapped for him not a week before. “I’ve got them!” he was shouting, sliding across the carpet to land near Jack. “It’ll work now.” He had not yet seen me.

That little beast , I thought. That wretched monster . I wished fervently that he was dead, or that I might be able to kill him.

“Victor,” I said, and I kept my voice icy. “Victor.”

Naturally, he did not look up.

“Victor!”

There was no response. But by now a sort of murmuring, wondering disapproval was wending its way through the room. The adults, some of whom were not familiar with the battle that had been fought (and surrendered) over Victor’s name change, scowled openly at him. “Answer Papa when he talks to you, Victor,” I heard someone say, and a tiny voice, a girl’s, responding, “It’s Vi now.”

Then I was walking over to him. “Stand up,” I commanded him. “Stand up.” He looked down, his mouth disobedient and wide and flat and ugly as a sand dab’s, and would not. I grabbed him by his arm and brought him to his feet. He was only a few inches shorter than I, but scrawny, and I could feel the sharp, complicated bones of his elbow underneath my hands. And then I hit him, in the face, as hard as I could. His head jerked backward, then snapped forward. I hit him again. Both times I used the flat of my palm, and after, my hand stung in the same needley way it had when I had been slapping the glass, yelling after him. “How dare you?” I asked him, keeping my voice low and awful. “How dare you, you beastly insect, you thing, you nothing . How dare you come down here, partake in my kindness, my generosity. How dare you open the gifts you’ve done nothing to deserve but that I bought you — I bought you — out of kindness?

“Do you know,” I heard myself continue, “why I took you in? I took you in because I pitied you. Because you were less than a human, less than a child. Your father would have sold you to me for a piece of rotting fruit. I could have done to you anything I wished. I could have taken you with me and kept you chained in the basement and no one would have known or cared. I could have sold you to a man who would first have mutilated you and then chopped you into bits for pigs’ feed. There are people who would have done this, too, and your father was perfectly willing to sell you to any of them. It only happened that he sold you to me first.