The People in the Trees: A Novel

by Hanya Yanagihara

  Did any of this bother me? No, it did not. I was certain I was correct—more and more certain, in fact, when, with each passing month, the opa’ivu’eke-fed mice lived on, their little lives stretching out, a thin elastic line, longer and longer—and as I have said, it was not in my nature to listen to the chatter of others, especially others for whom I had no particular regard.

  However, I was also not impractical. The one, the only frustrating thing about my paper’s less-than-enthusiastic reception was that it would retard my ability to make for myself the kind of life I had decided I wanted. I have spoken before about my fundamental ambivalence about lab life, and this was still true. But if the rhythms of the lab were not necessarily always the most stimulating, the rhythms of my own lab were. Being left alone—without oversight, without having to report to anyone, without having to manage someone else’s pointless projects—was a glorious freedom, and one I realized very quickly I wanted for myself. I wanted to perform my own experiments. I wanted to write what I wanted, to answer what I wanted, to follow my every passion and curiosity. In order to do that, I would need my own lab. And in order to have my own lab, I would need funding, which meant I also needed to be proven, very quickly, legitimate.

  I spent much of my time brooding over this apparently insurmountable problem, gazing at nothing while Cheolyu fed the mice and made notes and dealt with the dreamers (with whom I was working less and less). And then, beginning in late February of 1954, two things happened in quick succession that would change my fate. The first came in the form of a letter from, of all people, Adolphus Sereny. In his short note, Sereny congratulated me on my successful return from U’ivu and—revealing himself a secret herpetologist—my essay on the opa’ivu’eke. More important, though, he admitted himself intrigued by my paper in Nutritional Epidemiology and expressed interest in re-creating my experiments. I of course immediately responded. Sereny was a respected scientist with a well-organized lab. If he could successfully replicate my findings (and I had no doubt that he would), it would confer on me an almost instant and absolute acceptance and validity, which would in turn lead to the sort of life and intellectual freedom I craved. Even I could not help but appreciate the irony of my situation: Sereny, who I had thought hated me! I had Cheolyu carefully pack one of the opa’ivu’eke’s legs,54 along with complete copies of my data and detailed instructions on dosing, etc., and sent it off to Cambridge.

  The second thing that happened was that the mice from both the first and, to a lesser extent, the third study began demonstrating dramatic signs of mental decay. At this point, the mice from the first group were fifty-one months old and those from the third group forty-six months old. I was not exactly unprepared for this; even as I had readied the paper for publication the previous summer, Cheolyu had noticed that the mice in the first group had been behaving oddly: they would run in tight circles, so quickly and crazily that their feet would tangle up in one another and they would fall onto their backs, kicking their paws in the air and chirping. Or they would press their noses into a corner of the cage and make strange, unrodentlike gulping gestures, opening their little mouths and closing them again and again. They would do this for hours sometimes, their azalea-pink eyes wide open and unblinking. This made sense to me; after all, they had at that point been alive slightly longer than twice their natural lifespan, the same point at which the dreamers had begun to demonstrate their first symptoms of mo’o kua’au-ness. What was truly exciting was the behavior that they were demonstrating as they reached the point at which they would be alive for three times as long as their natural lifespan, or about the equivalent of Eve’s age. And indeed, as I had hoped, their deterioration had become suddenly more profound. Seven months before, they had experienced periods of lucidity, when their behavior was still recognizably mouselike: they ran in their wheels, they burrowed in their snowfalls of shredded paper, they picked up the pieces of food we gave them with their two front paws and nibbled away. Now, however, the twenty-three mice who remained had lost even those basic behavioral reflexes.

  Later I would be asked how and why I had decided not to reveal these findings. But it was hardly a decision that was mine to make. As I have said, no one was exactly clamoring for my thoughts on anything, much less mice with extended lifetimes who were displaying progressive dementia. Even if I had wanted to say something, no one would have listened. However, I must admit that something else—I hate to use such a term as precognition, but there it is—also kept me silent. I knew even then that one day soon my discoveries would be legitimized and appreciated for what they were, and that in the mice’s behavioral deterioration was not only the next step in the narrative but my next challenge. I had already proven that the opa’ivu’eke could prolong life; now I had to discover how it might do so without delivering in tandem its terrible punishment.

  Never had twenty-four months felt as long as the ones I endured after Sereny began his experiment, which replicated my initial one exactly.55 And yet now of course I realize that twenty-four months is nothing: two million breaths, a slur of vision-blurred nights, a series of meals eaten and books read. Twenty-four months—exactly the time I will spend in this place—is brief, so brief that its days vanish before one can even record them.

  And it is not as if I was not kept informed. Sereny wrote me letters—sometimes long and detailed, sometimes brief and perfunctory—keeping me abreast of the experiment. I made a chart so I could follow its every development, track which mice had died and which seemed sluggish, note how many days, weeks, months they had lived beyond their natural lifespan. Even so, even with Sereny’s information and my own endeavorings to discover why the opa’ivu’eke’s gift of prolonged youth and life soured so spectacularly and what might be done to reverse it, I felt time pressing against me. Each day passed under the thunk of a remorselessly ticking clock, each second in my mind as loud and hollow as a slap. I turned thirty, then thirty-one, and around me my colleagues, all younger,56 all arguably no more talented than I, hurried toward grand appointments and glory and recognition, while I sat in a lab and waited for the day’s packet of mail to thud to the ground before hurrying to it as the mice hurried toward their feed, desperate for a letter from Sereny.

  But then, finally, came the day I had been waiting for: in early April of 1956, Sereny sent me a note saying that he was readying his own paper for submission. Eighty-seven percent57 of his mice that had ingested the opa’ivu’eke were alive at forty months;58 the control group was long dead. Sereny, being much more respected and distinguished than I, had already spoken to his friend who was the editor of the Lancet; the paper would be appearing in the September issue.

  Was I to know what kind of reaction Sereny’s paper would receive?59 No, of course not. I suspected, naturally, but it was as if overnight I had gone from being a pariah to being something of a god: I had become my own opa’ivu’eke, a creator of life and a granter of miracles, someone who had discovered something that made the impossible possible. In those days news did not travel as quickly as it does now, and so in the two weeks or so between the publication of Sereny’s paper and the journal reaching its Stateside readers, there was a period of silence; it was almost as if Sereny had not written the paper at all. I had received an early copy of his report—which was quite satisfactory and essentially reiterated everything I had already said or otherwise knew, albeit from a much more trustworthy source—and in the days immediately following its publication, I called him and telegrammed him and wrote to him at what I will admit was an obnoxious rate, demanding to know what kind of reaction he had received and what it might mean for me. Sereny was, I can now see, rather good about the whole thing, and even before the paper had been submitted he had been kind enough to begin introducing me to various people at universities and institutes who might be able to give me some sort of permanent position. I talked, finally, to the head of Stanford’s medical school, and to the head of Cal’s, and took a trip back east to meet with the Neurology Department at Harvard
(Sereny was mysteriously out of the country when I visited and was unable to see me) and assorted others at Johns Hopkins, Rockefeller, Yale, etc. While I was there I stopped to visit Owen, who was fatter and more bearded than ever and now lecturing at Amherst, which was apparently much more to his liking than Mills. We sat on the steps of the English Department building (it was late spring but still bitter cold), drinking tea that tasted as if Owen had left a shard of bark in some hot water and swirled it around a bit, and I watched as Owen watched the parade of undergraduates shuffle by, his eyes narrowed into greedy little slits. He was feeling particularly victorious as his first book of poetry, The Nautilus Sky, had just been published by some obscure press60 to slavering reviews. It was a very low moment for me, feeling him sitting next to me as hot as a radiator with his triumph, while I had nothing to show for my now many years spent in the lab with my silent Oriental assistant except Sereny’s promise and his paper, all my hopes suspended somewhere between Cambridge and London.

  But after the paper was read! Suddenly the flow of telegrams and letters and telephone calls reversed, and I hurried to the lab to find daily new accolades and inquiries and notes of praise, many of them from the very people who three years before had mocked me (not included in this group were any of my former colleagues from Smythe’s lab or my new neighbors, whose visits to Cheolyu abruptly stopped after the Lancet article). The only people I might have heard from but did not were Tallent and Esme; they were in Ivu’ivu, where they had been for the past six months—their paper had, I heard, won them an instant new round of funding—and I was glad of this. I was a scientist and in a different field altogether, and there was nothing to be done besides, but I still dreaded the day when I would have to have the inevitable conversation with Tallent about my theft of the opa’ivu’eke.

  And then it was almost 1957, and once again events pressed up against one another and all became a flurry. I was in the lab late one night working on answering some of the many letters that were arriving daily when I heard a knock on the door and a tall, bearded man carrying a rattling paper bag walked in.

  It took me a few moments to realize that it was Tallent. He had had a beard in Ivu’ivu, of course—I had as well—but it was somehow disorienting to see it trimmed and clean as it was now, not to mention out of context.

  “So,” he said, after we’d shaken hands and he’d sat down across from me on one of the high stools. “I hear that congratulations are in order.”

  The beard made it difficult for me to discern his facial expression. I thought I heard—or perhaps I was just being hopeful?—something like amusement in his voice, but I wasn’t certain.

  I immediately began talking, apparently thinking that if I spoke fast and long enough I might be able to make him—what? forgive me? forget about the turtle?—until he finally held up his hand. “Norton,” he said, and I heard something of the old weariness enter his voice, a particular sort of tiredness that he seemed to express only around me, “I had more or less already suspected you did this.”

  “You’re not mad?” I asked him, greatly relieved.

  His mouth twitched a bit. “I didn’t say that,” he said. “You know I don’t agree with what you did. But I understand why you did it.”

  We talked for a while longer then, he asking semi-informed but surprisingly intelligent questions about my work (it seemed that he had read the paper and actually made sense of it).

  “Well,” he said at last, his voice sad, “it’s over for them.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked him.

  “If you’re correct, Norton—and even if you’re not—then every pharmaceutical company is going to go over there and try to capture those turtles. Not to mention every anthropologist and every botanist, herpetologist, you name it. Ivu’ivu as we know it is over.”

  It seemed unfair to be solely blamed for this, and I said so. Hadn’t his own paper exposed the island already? They were already no longer lost.

  “Oh, you’re correct that I’m to blame as well,” he replied. “But my paper revealed nothing but a small group of people, of no real use or consequence to anyone. Certainly of no profit to anyone.”61

  He stood and walked to the other side of the table and began to lift various beakers at random, peering into them and placing them back approximately where he’d gotten them. I would have thought an anthropologist, with his avowed fetish for leaving things where he’d found them, would have been a little more conscientious, but I was apparently incorrect in this assumption. “But this,” he said, “this is different.” He stopped and began fiddling with a stray pipette that Cheolyu hadn’t put away. It is amazing and vexing how sloppy and invasive nonscientists are in a lab; to them, the entire space is like a boutique, and our instruments are mere stuff to be handled and fondled and played with like gadgetry. “When we were back this past time—I just returned last week—we were waiting on the shore at U’ivu for the boat to take us to Ivu’ivu when the king’s messenger came jogging toward me holding a piece of paper that the king wanted me to see. Who were these people, the king wanted to know, and should he grant them the right to visit the island? And what had I to say about the letter writer’s claims about me?

  “It was a letter from another anthropologist—someone at Columbia, someone I know. It was written in U’ivuan, but very crudely—he’d obviously had to look up every word and translate the sentences from English literally—but in it he claimed that we were former colleagues and that he had his own journeys he wanted to make in U’ivu. He praised the king—clumsily, as I’ve said, but deeply—as a great monarch, and said that the West had much to learn from his civilization. And with the king’s permission, he’d like to come to the islands so he might educate the West.

  “At the end of the letter were, perhaps not surprisingly, a few lines about how my work had portrayed the king and his people as madmen and idiots, and how, thanks to my writings, the rest of the world was laughing at them and, worse, preparing to attack them. He advised the king that if he wanted to protect his people, he should ban me from the islands immediately and make certain I was not able to return.”

  He put the pipette down and picked up a stack of my correspondence and started flicking through it unseeingly. “I had thought something like this might happen, but I hadn’t thought it would happen so … baldly, I guess. I wanted to get on the boat and leave—the guides were already waiting for us on Ivu’ivu—but this was too important to ignore. So I told Esme to go ahead and accompanied the messenger back to the king’s palace.”

  “Was he very angry?” I asked.

  “The king is … the king is difficult to understand. Conversations with him are full of silences, and you have to learn how to wait through them. I spent the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening there with him. He’ll say something, something impossible, like ‘Why are you telling people bad things about my country?’ and then you have to explain that you’re not and that you’re being misrepresented, and he just sits there, staring at something you can’t quite see, until the silence almost feels torturous, and then his next question—‘How long are you staying?’—feels like both a benediction and a test. Are you being approved to go ahead? Is all being forgiven? Or is it purely a factual question? Do you answer, as I did, ‘Six months, Your Highness,’ or do you humble yourself further and say only, ‘As long as Your Highness will have me’?

  “In the end he let me go, and I made it to Ivu’ivu only a day later than I’d planned. But before I left, he told me he had received many, many letters from people asking to come to the islands. So far he had not responded to any of them. And was that a warning? Or simply a statement of fact?”

  “Wait,” I said. “How’s the mail even getting to them?”

  He blinked. “There’s an outpost—an unofficial embassy of sorts—in Papeete, on Tahiti. The consul there travels back and forth to Tavaka once a month. All international correspondence is routed to him.”

  “Oh,” I said.

&n
bsp; “The point is, Norton,” he said, walking about once more, “at some point someone will offer the king something he’ll want, and once that happens, the island will no longer be yours or mine, insofar as it is. It’ll belong to whoever tempts him most. And then your research will stop, and so will mine.”

  “But won’t he want to protect Ivu’ivu?”

  “Not necessarily. The king doesn’t care about Ivu’ivu. It’s something of an embarrassment to him, and its people are of little consequence to him.”

  “But what if he realizes it can make him money?”

  He shook his head. “The king doesn’t care for money. It won’t make a difference to him.”

  And then I thought of something, and the knowledge domed up inside me, frightening in its possibilities. “Tallent,” I asked him, “what did you offer the king to make him give you access?”62

  He turned and stared at me. Once again I thought I saw, under his beard, something like a smile. “I can’t tell you, can I?” he said. “Otherwise everyone will know.”