The People in the Trees: A Novel

by Hanya Yanagihara

  I had assistance in this; I had been assigned a postdoctoral student named Cheolyu Ryu, who was on a visiting scholarship from Seoul. I’m not sure what he’d done wrong to be assigned to me, of all people—other than being a foreigner and, I’m sorry to say, somewhat inscrutable—but he was a great help. He was reluctant to speak English (though when I heard it, his English sounded fine, if heavily accented), but he followed orders closely and without any contradictions and kept fine notes. It was Cheolyu who was responsible for perfecting not only the formula of sedatives we fed the dreamers but the formula of stimuli as well; he knew exactly how much time spent outside their room would upset them and was even eventually able to take them outside the lab entirely for short periods at night, when the electric lights were dimmed and the grass was cool under their feet and the buildings’ other occupants—from whom we kept the dreamers’ existence—had left for the day. Sometimes I would go with him on these night rambles, each of us holding two of the dreamers’ hands, and follow him across the short, well-kept lawns, avoiding the sidewalks and the buildings, waiting as they exploratorily lapped at the bark of a eucalyptus and rubbed their shoulders against a spindly cedar. At these times he reminded me of no one so much as poor Fa’a; they shared the same indulgent patience, the same protective instincts, the ones that made him swerve the dreamers away from concrete and guide them toward a grove of beeches that might as well have been flowers, so little did they resemble manama trees, but were better, I suppose, than nothing.

  The dreamers were deteriorating very quickly now. Indeed, they had become more … well, mo’o kua’au-ish in the first month following our return than they had in the fourteen weeks or so that I had known them on the island. Again, it was impossible to conclude definitively whether this was because of their environment or organic, or whether it was for some other reason entirely—diet, perhaps. Naturally, no manama fruits were available, but with Tallent’s help I had re-created as closely as I could an Ivu’ivuan diet. We had substituted veal for sloth meat (though I fear that that parallel was grounded more in sentiment than anything else; my logic, I seem to recall, was that sloths were slow-moving and fatty and gentle and so were calves, and therefore the latter might make an even swap for the former), small rotisseried chickens for the vuakas, and mangoes for the manamas. Back then it was much harder to find mangoes in northern California than it is today, and a significant percentage of the lab’s expenses was dedicated to the procurement and purchase of the fruit.

  Still, one did not have to be particularly bright to recognize that the culprit was probably the lab itself. The dreamers had gone from wandering the forest—the whole length and width of an island—to being confined in their room, or if not their room, the lab beyond, where they were pricked and poked and swabbed and made to urinate in plastic cups (something they had never seen before) and plucked like birds. I sometimes wondered what the lab represented to them: too much stimulation or not enough? On one hand, there were things that they could not even begin to comprehend—glass, for example, and ceramic countertops, and plastic and metal. But on the other hand, the lab was so arid. It was an albinic landscape, one without any color or sound or smell beyond a chilly metallicism, one with nothing to dazzle and delight an eye that had been dazzled and delighted all its life.

  Whatever the reason, they became deader and deader with each day. Not physically; indeed, the only thing that was remarkable about their X-rays, their reflex tests, the substantial quantities of blood we siphoned from their veins each week was how extraordinarily physically healthy they were—their blood pressure admirable, their pulses thudding as softly and unhurriedly as metronomes, their bones unnibbled by osteoporosis. But as if in compensation for their bodies, which, once exposed to food other than manamas and those shingley mushrooms, grew sleeker and plumper, their minds diminished piece by piece. Soon not even Mua could find the energy to make conversation with Tallent when he came by on his twice-weekly visits.

  “E, Mua,” Tallent would greet him, resting a hand on his shoulder, and Mua, as if from a great depth, would slowly raise first his eyes and then his head to see who was talking to him. He would open his mouth but make no sound. And there they would remain, until finally Tallent would take his hand away and show him the mango he had hidden behind his back. But Mua would only gaze at that too, and at last Tallent would have to cut it and remind him that it was to be eaten and enjoyed, opening his mouth and inserting a fibrous sliver of it, chewing and swallowing until Mua realized that this was something he was still capable of doing.

  In order to prove my theory—that ingestion of the opa’ivu’eke was responsible for the dreamers’ superannuated lives and eventual decline—I had to try to re-create their condition in animals. But owing to various administrative difficulties (that is, the perpetual twin problems of funding and space), I was not able to begin my experiments until the spring of 1951.49

  My homemade curing seemed to have worked very well, but I guarded the packets of meat, still wrapped in palm leaves, almost maniacally, storing them first in plastic containers and then in the lab’s freezer, the temperature of which I checked daily. I cursed myself for being too cowardly to rip off the creature’s shell and save the meat within; now I had only the four legs and head and the flap of tail, and who knew how much turtle the mice would have to consume in order to experience its effect? Who knew how carefully I would have to ration my remains? There was no way of getting more opa’ivu’eke; I was committed to the lab, and although Tallent was already planning his return to Ivu’ivu for the summer, I couldn’t ask him to get me another—he didn’t even know I had this one.

  So I was very careful with the amount of turtle I fed the first group of twenty-five mice. I made Cheolyu cut a section of the foreleg into twenty-five snippets, each no larger than a thumbtack. I had to hope that it would be enough. I was working under the assumption that the results would be apparent—or not—from only one feeding; either it would work or it wouldn’t. The other twenty-five mice I fed similar-sized portions from a box turtle I had bought from an animal supply company.

  The maximum lifespan for a lab mouse is about a year and a half. If my theory was correct, the first group of mice would be alive not only three months from now (I had specified that all fifty be fifteen months old, to best re-create the age at which an Ivu’ivuan would ingest his opa’ivu’eke) but after two years, three years, perhaps even five years. At some point they would begin to behave in a disoriented manner, even as their physical condition remained essentially unchanged. I had also replicated, somewhat prematurely and almost as a lark, the experiment on a second group of one hundred mice, half of whom were fed the opa’ivu’eke, and the other half, the box turtle. These mice, however, were newborns and would essentially come of age in a controlled experimental environment.

  The days churned by. Cheolyu took excellent care of the mice, and excellent care as well of the dreamers. I had somehow expected Tallent to be a more frequent presence in the lab, but aside from his weekly visits—which were spent mostly in the company of the dreamers—I seldom had reason or opportunity to speak with him, and when I was in his presence, I felt more, not less, awkward. After we began the experiment, I was grateful for his brief visits and his apparent lack of interest in what I was doing; explaining my intentions would mean revealing my theft of the opa’ivu’eke. Part of me suspected that Tallent was somehow aware of what I’d done, and another part of me argued that he wouldn’t care—we were off the island, back in civilization, and he no longer had any jurisdiction over me. But in the end, neither of those arguments proved compelling enough to convince me, and I found myself making excuses and scuttling away whenever he stopped by. At least he came alone, unaccompanied by Esme, whom I hadn’t seen since our return. I knew she was somewhere on campus, doing something or other, but as long as I didn’t have to see her or contemplate further her still unresolved (at least to me) relationship with Tallent, I was satisfied.

  A life in the l
ab is a lonely one, especially when you have only one colleague and your position is tenuous and you are sneaking around your suspected benefactor and concealing from him the true nature of your work and you are in the period of your experiment when you are simply waiting for something to happen. Oh, of course there are other things to do—life in a lab is nothing if not busy, with its dozens of essential little chores and tasks to be completed each day, but it is often less than stimulating. Out of desperation I was even driven to try to make small talk with Cheolyu, which became something of its own experiment in absurdist theater. I would say something, and then perhaps five minutes would pass, and he would reply with something that might be considered a response to what I had said … but might just as well have been a non sequitur. By that point, it would hardly seem worth the effort and mutual embarrassment to continue the conversation, and both of us would slip into a silence that might be maintained for hours, or days.

  However, this period was not a total waste, as I decided to fill the long blank days with a study of U’ivuan. Tallent brought me a primer he and Esme had assembled (most of it handwritten in her strangely bubbly schoolgirl cursive), with a few hundred words and phrases translated into U’ivuan and, where applicable, the Ivu’ivuan dialect. Unfortunately, even as I was learning their language, the dreamers were forgetting it, and I was left to repeat the words to myself late into the night, their thick glottal clumps fattening the air.

  I was surprised, after several weeks of my new routine, to get a letter from Owen. It turned out that he was nearby, teaching freshman English at, of all places, Mills (a situation that he later told me he knew even then was a complete waste).

  We made plans to meet for dinner. Owen had a friend with a car and drove down to Palo Alto. Why we decided to remain near campus and not go into San Francisco eludes me now. But my world had by that time shrunk to such a narrow locus—the lab, my on-campus apartment—that it is simply likely I was unable to think beyond its borders.

  It felt pleasantly familiar (a strange sensation, after months of aggressive unfamiliarity) to see Owen, although he now had a beard and was fatter than I remembered.

  “Hi,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “Hi,” I said, and shook it. “You got fat.”

  He shrugged and grunted irritatedly. I remembered that he had never had a very good sense of humor. “Let’s go.”

  We had drinks, and I asked him about his work. “Are the students smart?”

  “What do you think?” He grunted again. “They’re silly girls. They spend most of their time here, actually”—meaning Stanford—“and at Cal, trying to meet husbands.” He sighed. “I feel like a cow in a henhouse.”

  “You mean a fox,” I said.

  He looked annoyed. “No,” he said, “I mean a cow. Cows are herbivores. They eat grass. They’re not interested in eating chickens. To them, they’re just smelly and stupid birds.”

  I suppose this was Owen’s way of telling me he was homosexual, for we never discussed his preferences again, and yet the next time I saw him, it was in the company of a very young man who laughed nervously at Owen’s every weak joke. Many years later, when people began to discuss such topics publicly, I heard him recount to someone how he had “come out” to me. It was clear that he was (still) quite pleased with his cleverness, but hearing it again only reminded me of what a tortured and unsuccessful metaphor it was.

  Over dinner, as I half listened to Owen drone on about the college and how much he hated California, and some long explanation about something that seemed to have happened to my winter coat when he had had to use it to put out a fire in his room, I reflected upon how fundamentally naive he was, how small and plebeian his concerns were, and how he never could have endured what I had, and how profoundly changed I now was. I had no disdain for him, however, and indeed, it was soothing to be with someone for whom life was a series of the familiar, whose every problem was solvable, who could find such pleasure in the everyday. It was startling to remember that I had once been one of those people as well. Now, however, I no longer was.

  II.

  Of all the emotions to describe in retrospect, happiness is perhaps the most dull, but awe is the most difficult. Years later I would be asked (and asked and asked) how I felt when the fourth month and then the fifth month and then the sixth month passed and the mice I had fed the opa’ivu’eke lived on, burrowing into their shredded-paper caves, spinning vapidly on their wheels, sucking at their cages’ water bottles, even as the control group became an ever-vaguer memory, incinerated long ago after they all died, one after the next, in the seventeenth through twentieth months of their lives.

  “I was amazed,” I would say, and while this was true, it also was not. Although I could not say so until much later (I was still endeavoring back then to be humble, as it was notable displays of humility that won young researchers grants), any initial shock I might have felt was eclipsed by a quiet sense of vindication. As I watched the mice live on and on, I felt no excitement of discovery; in fact, the whole thing seemed a bit anticlimactic. My theory had always made sense to me, and I had never doubted it, but now I would have to go through the necessary (and tedious) steps of proving it to everyone else.

  I had the second group of mice (the ones I had procured as pinkies) already started on the regimen, but in July of 1951 I began a third experiment, this time on a group of 200 fifteen-month-old mice. If my theories were correct, the 100 mice who ingested the opa’ivu’eke would live, on median, at least twice as long as their natural lifespan.

  While I was watching mice and getting bored stupid with the dreamers, however, Tallent was becoming famous. In October of 1951 (the opa’ivu’eke-eating mice from the first group were by then twenty-three months old and as frisky as ever), he published a report entitled “The ‘Lost Tribe’ of U’ivu: An Ethnological Study of the Village Peoples of Ivu’ivu” in the Journal of Ethnography. A fevered skim of the article revealed page after page of highly pointillist renderings of the tribe’s family structures, rites, rituals (not, notably, the a’ina’ina), philosophies, origin myths, taboos, notions of time, and social workings but relatively little—shockingly little—about their extended lifetimes. There was a long section about the opa’ivu’eke, and an excessively granular description of the vaka’ina (so granular that it managed to convey none of the wonder and terror one felt while watching it), and, buried in an endnote, this comment:

  I have spoken of the tribe’s fascination with immortality. Although this is a preoccupation central to the U’ivuans’ mythology as well, it would not be overstating the case to call it a subject of obsession among the villagers. Indeed, they believe that the ingestion of the opa’ivu’eke50—the turtle devoured during the vaka’ina ritual by those reaching or having surpassed the age of sixty o’anas—confers eternal life. There is, of course, no conclusive scientific proof of these claims, although there is evidence that certain members of the tribe are unusually long-lived.

  Reading this, I felt three things. First, amusement at Tallent’s timidity; was it not he who had been so quick to insist that Ika’ana was centuries old? Second, an odd sort of relief at his uncharacteristic circumspection: not only had he not revealed what was fundamentally my discovery, but he had left room for me to enrich and emboss his account with my own. And third—and following those initial two reactions—a niggling suspicion that Esme, not Tallent, had been responsible not only for the note (its poor delivery, its bland writing) but also for Tallent’s apparently newfound wariness.

  Fairly or not, I found myself disappointed with Tallent. As I have said, I did not and do not consider anthropologists the most creative and disarming of thinkers—though they do take superlative and meticulous notes—but I had come to admire what I had grown to see as his single-mindedness. But he was also to be my first lesson in the strange phenomenon that besets all of us who travel to strange places and find our own assumptions and lessons proven not just wrong, but opposite. It is very easy to be
intellectually brave in such locations, where the academy, one’s peers, and the entirety of Western history and religion feel not only irrelevant but misguided. But unlearning things is much more difficult than learning them, and even the most courageous of minds will find itself tempted to retreat back into the known at the first opportunity. It is astonishing and a little sad to realize how many discoveries, how many advancements, have been delayed for years, for decades, not because the information was unavailable but because of sheer cowardice, fear of being laughed at, of being ostracized by one’s colleagues.

  Luckily, I was never limited by such worries or constrained by such fears (being ostracized by my colleagues seemed something to covet, not avoid). And so in 1953, I published a brief postulative paper51—really nothing more than an announcement, the medical equivalent of Martin Luther posting his theses on the church’s wooden door52—in a small, now-defunct journal called the Annals of Nutritional Epidemiology. In it I revealed my findings: not only were a significant percentage of the mice from the first group that had eaten the opa’ivu’eke still alive, but so were the mice from the second and third groups.53

  It is very difficult for my biographers and for younger scientists to comprehend when I tell them with what ridicule, what scorn, what hatred this paper was received. The Annals of Nutritional Epidemiology was at best an obscure publication, but somehow my essay seemed to be read by people who would not normally have troubled themselves with such journals, and in the coming months the Annals (rather pantingly, I thought) published all manner of letters from various doctors and scientists outraged that this sort of “childish fiction and robust fantasies” should be taking the place of real science, etc., etc. The fellows in the adjoining lab—still bitter at my youth, my space, and my mysterious funding—took to dropping by under the pretense of talking to Cheolyu, whom they’d update with fresh insults about my work that they’d recently overheard from this chemist or that biologist. (The fact that Cheolyu would only gape at them and every now and again blink his small eyes behind his glasses until they triumphantly flounced out seemed not to register with them at all.)