Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

So. What can I say about the accusations, the investigation, the articles, the trial? What can I say about the institute placing me on administrative leave (after assuring me that I had its full support), about the quotes from unnamed personnel that began appearing in the articles in the New York Times , the Washington Post , the Wall Street Journal ? What can I say about how my remaining children were taken from me, how I was denied access to Victor, how when I showed up at his dorm room — I wanted only to talk to him, and he had not returned my calls or my letters — I was arrested like a criminal, even though I had every right to speak to him? It was my money that had paid for the room he hid in, laughing at me, and my money that had brought him here to begin with.

But although all of these things were awful, unbearable, the worst moments were not when I learned of my rapidly diminishing rights — each day seemed to bring a new betrayal, a new humiliation, a new insult — but when I learned of Owen’s involvement: how after Victor had called him one night, it had been he who had urged him to speak to the police, he who had helped him find a lawyer, he who wrote the checks to his college after I no longer would. My own brother, my twin, my constant, choosing a child over me. I could not fathom it, cannot fathom it still.

Then there were more details. Victor had become friends with Xerxes, Owen’s companion (how, I wanted to know — for did not that relationship, between a grown man and a college-age boy, seem suspicious in itself?), and it was Xerxes who had presented Victor’s accusation to Owen, and Xerxes, presumably, who had convinced Owen of its veracity. This information I learned in shreds — an unhelpful piece here, an upsetting bit there — from the few children who had decided that they would believe me, the man who had paid for and raised them for these many years, over Victor. I was happy for their loyalty, of course, but there were very few of them, very few — far fewer than I would have assumed or expected — and at times I found myself outraged that I should even have to be grateful to them at all, that I should have to consider exceptional what should have been the only proper response.

In the end, though, it is not Xerxes whom I blame but Owen. “Who are you?” I asked him in my last conversation with him, one of the few we’d had between my arraignment and my trial, after which we never spoke again.

“Who are you ?” he hissed before hanging up.

That was a bad day, one of the worst. On that day I crashed about my house looking for something to irrationally break, someone to irrationally kick. This was during the period when I was imprisoned in my own house, my occasional fantasy ironically having come to life: there were no children, no sounds, none of their possessions and odors and noises, although every now and again I would come upon one of their toys or an item of their clothing — a domino, which I mistook for a square of chocolate; a sock frilled with lace and ripped at the heel — that had been dropped in the state’s haste to remove them from my oversight. For the first time in many decades, the bathtub drains were not clogged with deposits of their boiled-wool hair and the windows were not smeared into vellumy greasiness from the imprints of their many hands. I had always felt that the house seemed to vibrate, just subtly, as if a ghost train were making its rounds far beneath the bedrock, but with the children gone, I realized that that trembling was the collective presence of so many lives being lived in one place — what I had sensed was the shivering of speakers as a guitar was plugged into an amplifier, the crashes made from jumping from the top of a bunk bed onto the thinly carpeted floors, the tremor of a huddle of boys shoving and grabbing one another on their way to the bathroom in the morning. Poor house! I thought, and at moments I would find myself stroking one of its white-painted doorframes as if I were petting a horse’s nose: gently, slowly, trying to soothe it back to calmness.

In those days I was convinced that nothing would befall me. I certainly did not think there was any good chance I would go to prison. For were not any mistakes I may have made with my children far overruled by the very fact of their existence? Later, during the trial, the lawyers would show the jury a family picture, with some of the younger children’s faces blotted out with gray thumb-prints, but even so you could see that they were well dressed, that the lawn behind them was an electric, almost assaultive green, that their skin against it shone like polished rosewood. One of the faceless children — I think it might have been Grace, as a very young girl — was holding a popsicle, her arm flung out in an expression of obvious joy, the popsicle staining the inside of her wrist a merry crimson. I wished then that I had documented what they had been before I had saved them, back when they were as skinny as dogs and their skin the dusty chalk of rubble, back when it would never have occurred to them to make such a carefree gesture, back when they never would have let food melt away because they knew that there was always more, always another they could retrieve from the freezer. I thought often of Victor and of his special patheticness, and at night when I lay awake in bed, the only noise the refrigerator cycling through its monklike drone, I would wonder what my life would be like now if I had done as I ought and simply turned away from the man and boarded the plane, leaving Victor behind to live his tiny life.

But as it turned out, of course, I was wrong. I overestimated how much my magnanimity would mean. In the end it meant nothing — not in the face of the charges, at least. Against the charges, my Nobel could have been a plastic trophy I won for bowling, so little did it matter.

I saw Owen one last time. It was the day Victor came to testify against me. On that day the courtroom was quiet, and as I watched him walk to the stand, I felt, despite myself, a flash of something resembling pride: Who was this lean, handsome boy? He was wearing a suit I had not seen before and later assumed Owen must have purchased for him, and as he sat in the box, I could see on his left wrist the watch I had bought him. For a second I thought it might be a sign — surely he hadn’t worn it thoughtlessly? Surely he could not feel its weight on his arm and fail to think of me, and consequently of what he might be doing to me?

He put on a good show, Victor did, and as he spoke — his answers brief and intelligible, his voice low, his eye contact with the prosecutor steady — I saw that I had raised him well. He was a monster, of course, but I had socialized him, I had taught him how to conduct himself, I had given him everything he needed to ruin me. After he stepped down, he looked in my direction and smiled, a beautiful smile full of expensive white teeth, and as I was deciding what he could mean by this, I realized he was looking not at me but past me, and I turned to see who could be the recipient of Victor’s signal and saw Owen, sitting in the spectators’ seats just a few feet behind me. He was next to Xerxes and smiling back at Victor like an idiot or a conspirator, and then his gaze shifted and he was looking at me, and in that moment, before his face could react and recompose itself into a glare, he was smiling at me, my onetime joy echoed in him, a mirror of my own past happiness.

That night my lawyer came to meet with me. “Change your plea,” he urged me, but I would not.

“I don’t care,” he said after I’d explained to him why it was so unjust, why it was so unfair, and then he stopped himself and began again, his voice gentler. “The jury doesn’t care, Norton,” he said. “I’m telling you to change your plea.”