The People in the Trees: A Novel

by Hanya Yanagihara

  One very hot afternoon, after his peers had gone galloping off toward the other end of the village, I realized that the boy had fallen asleep against me. I had been hoping to make one final sally uphill to look for the lake before the day passed, but something—maybe the deep contentedness of his breath—stopped me from moving, and I instead maintained my position and let him sleep. I could have a child like this, I thought. And then, But I do not want a wife. It was an impossibility, and even here, so far from home and its leaden social demands, I could not think of a way in which I might have one and yet not the other. I did not know a great deal about women then, but even my limited exposure to them had taught me that they were simply not for me. A wife! What would I discuss with her? I imagined days sitting around a plain white table and sawing away at a piece of meat burned crisp as toast, hearing the clop of her shoes as she walked across a shining linoleum floor, her hectoring conversations about money or the children or my job; I saw myself silent, listening to her drone on about her day and the laundry and whom she had seen at the store and what they had said. And then I also saw a different set of images: me lifting a sleep-heavy child and placing him in a bed, me teaching him about insects, or the two of us hunting beetles or butterflies together, visiting the sea together for the first time.

  But that night, awake on my mat, what I mostly thought of was the heat of that young body next to mine, the smallness of his hand. I felt both as if they were still upon me, and then mourned for what I had never had and what I probably would never have a chance to have again.

  III.

  Nothing had changed; everything had. Back at the lab, the mice were still alive (dopier and less mouselike than ever; they had developed a new habit of falling on their sides and kicking and screeching, apparently unaware of how to flip back onto their feet, that was fascinating and alarming to witness), as were the dreamers. I showed them the opa’ivu’ekes in the hopes of extracting some sort of reaction, but they merely blinked at them and then ignored them.

  But those—and Cheolyu, of course—were the only things that remained from the life I had left not six weeks before. And here marks the beginning (although I was not to recognize it until much later) of my new life, and of a sustained period of time that was marked by both horrors and wonders. Every day, it seemed, so many things happened at once that it is very difficult for me to chart the events of the next few years in any linear fashion. What I can say, however, was that Tallent was proven correct.

  It took me some time to realize that I was in a race, one that I was simultaneously unaware of entering yet had also begun. I heard through Sereny that this pharmacologist was trying desperately to get to Ivu’ivu, and that physiologist too. There was no question of Sereny himself going; he was too old, he said, and not eager to make such an arduous trip. But he was in the minority. Every day brought new letters—some beseeching, some sly, some vaguely threatening, some opaque—to both me and him, all asking for further information, trying to inquire what I planned to do with the information I had already acquired, or more or less announcing the writer’s intention to best me at my own research. It says much about my innocence that none of this worried me, at least initially; in fact, I was a little giddy about it all—I even found it amusing. Part of this misguided confidence, I suppose, came from my trust in the king, in his apparent unwillingness to let anyone but Tallent (and those associated with him) onto the island. And then I also felt that since it had taken me so many days to find the lake of turtles—I, who had been there twice before—it would surely demand many weeks of frustrating stops and starts for the few people who might someday be allowed to set foot on Ivu’ivu. Certainly they could not ask for help in their mission; the Ivu’ivuans’ (not to mention the U’ivuans’) taboo against disturbing the turtles’ peace was too great.

  By this time everyone had surmised that the secret lay with the opa’ivu’eke. Eternal life! It was no wonder that schools and companies were willing to spend anything, do anything, to get to the island first. It was no wonder that they thought I was working on isolating the element myself. But I knew what they did not, and so it was easy to remain silent in the face of their questioning and suspicions: I knew that this form of eternal life was horribly compromised. I knew that if it were to be pursued, a solution, an antidote, would have to be found first.

  It did not take Sereny long, however, to discern that something was amiss. “You’re not telling me something,” he accused me in one of our increasingly frequent phone conversations.

  I am not skilled at playing the ignoramus, and never have been. Still, “What do you mean?” I asked stupidly.

  “There’s something wrong with those mice,” he said, and gave me a full description of his mice’s deteriorating conditions. (A full 79 percent of his were still alive. I had retained 61 percent of mine from the third experiment,66 although my oldest batch, from the first group, were now ninety months to his group’s fifty-three months.) I was excited to hear that their symptoms matched those of mine almost exactly.

  And so I was forced to tell him how what we’d observed in our mice was merely a replica of what I had first seen in the dreamers. He listened with growing astonishment as I told him of what I had encountered on Ivu’ivu and of the state—and alleged age—of those I had brought back with me.

  “Norton,” he said at last, “this is … this is incredible.” But it was not, for proof existed only a few yards away from me, in the small fake Ivu’ivu I had created. We talked for a while about how I might be able to prove my theory on humans, and the impossibility of doing so; no one would be willing to undergo such a risk. Sereny asked if I might be able to perform the experiment on some Ivu’ivuans, whom I could later bring back with me to the States, and I had to remind him that it might take decades for the turtles’ effects to become apparent; even if we could find subjects in their forties or fifties, we might be waiting another forty or fifty years—at least—for them to manifest any symptoms. No, I told him, the more important and pressing matter was to find an antidote, one that counteracted the turtle’s effects.

  “And have you spoken to anyone else about this?” Sereny asked. His voice was mild, but I had learned never to trust a rival who feigns a lack of interest or ambition or who pretends to be engaged only in an intellectual exchange for purely academic reasons. Therefore, I was somewhat triumphant (although I did my best to keep it out of my voice) to inform Sereny that I had submitted a paper announcing the mice’s decline to the Annals of Nutritional Epidemiology just before I left and that it had been (of course) accepted for publication.

  “Ah,” said Sereny after a long silence, and I could not tell if he was angry or disappointed or both. At any rate, he was not happy. “Well, Norton,” he said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.” He got off the phone quite quickly after that.

  Of course I did not know what I was doing. I had sent the paper to the journal in something of a panic, trapped as I was between two unfortunate outcomes. If I waited too long, Sereny would no doubt make his own conclusions about the mice and write his own paper. His would have been much more speculative in nature, but it wouldn’t have mattered—he would still be first, and anything I might write later would be seen as a furtherance of his discovery, not my own. But if I published too early, then I would alert the various buzzards circling the island and my work that there was a serious problem with their plans to bottle and sell eternal life. The opa’ivu’ekes would become more hunted than ever, and I would be racing against the others to solve the very problem that they would know nothing of had I not told them of it. It was one bad choice or the other. Either way, I would have no one to blame but myself.

  And then, as many others after me would later recount, things got very bad. On my next trip to Ivu’ivu, about eight months later, things remained the same: this time it was only me, my visit preceded by another brief, unilluminating interview with the king. This was the last time I would be granted an audience with him, although I did not know
it then. In fact, there would be many things about that visit that in retrospect would be for the last time: the last time I would be the only Westerner on Ivu’ivu, much less in the village; the last time I would be able to make my way unmolested to the lake of turtles, see its surface scummed with their air bubbles, be able to watch them drift so trustingly and peaceably toward me; the last time I would feel that the villagers would pay no heed to their visitor and that a foreign presence would not interrupt even the smallest of their routines. It would be the last time I would see them make and store food in the way they had doubtless been doing for centuries, the last time they would have a diet free from tinned meats and packaged biscuits and cans of sugary cubed fruit, the last time that I would see them wholly naked and be able to watch the switch of the women’s breasts as they bent over a hill of seedpods or hear the light slap of the men’s genitals against their thighs as they strolled back from a late-night hunt.

  But on that visit I knew none of this, and I remember thinking—somewhat smugly, somewhat with relief—that Tallent had been wrong after all, that changes, if they came here, would be halting and incremental but not life-altering. I had already noticed that the bases of several of the trees were wrapped with red twine, and that small areas around them had been staked with thin lengths of rope, and that little placards with Latin names in an indecipherable hand had been affixed to the trees: Meyers’s work, of course. If this was the sort of change that would come to the island, I thought, then it was nothing to worry about. I was able to visit the turtles again (my map proved itself useful) and even sought out the young friend I had made the last time, who willingly followed me on my walks deeper and deeper into the forest. On hot afternoons we napped there, and in the early mornings we explored (I found numerous clusters of fungi that would have made Meyers frantic with desire and made some shavings and drawings to take back to him). I saw the chief and Uo and Lawa’eke and many others I had grown to recognize by sight, if not by name.

  Later I would ask myself if I had perhaps subconsciously timed this visit to coincide with my next paper’s publication,67 so that I might be able to avoid having to think about the consequences that would arise from it. I do not believe this to be true, although many others do, and I cannot dissuade them from that opinion. What I do know is that by the time I returned to Stanford six weeks later (two more opa’ivu’ekes accompanying me), the scientific world was in an uproar. Accusations were made, counterpapers were being written, the Annals was being sent more letters than it had received about any other paper it had ever published. The news of my two discoveries had even infiltrated the popular press, and I was interviewed by writers from both the Times and Time. It was around then too that Tallent ceased further contact with me, although I was never to know why. Was it because he felt (as others later would) that I had finally, conclusively, doomed the island? Was it because I had ruined the lovely dreamy image of a never-dying people? Was it simply because I had achieved a level of fame that he had not? Cheolyu told me that while I was gone, someone had tried to break in to our labs; he had arrived one morning to find the lock scored with scratch marks and the bottom of the door origamied into a deep pleat. He thought it was another scientist or perhaps a pharmacological team, and while I agreed with him outwardly, part of me wondered whether it might have been Tallent, although again, I could only guess at his motives: To destroy my evidence? To liberate the dreamers? In the months that followed, I tried every way I knew to speak to Tallent—I wrote him letters, I called him, I waited for hours outside his office and then outside his shockingly bleak apartment building. I begged the provost and the dean to intervene. I even tried to speak to Esme. I was like a lovesick girl. I did not even know what I might say to Tallent when I reestablished contact. I only knew that I needed to see him, to gain from him some sort of absolution. The discoveries were mine, as I had to keep reminding myself, but were it not for Tallent, there would be no discoveries to have been made in the first place. (And were it not for you, a small voice in my head said when I heard that the first team of pharmacologists, a group from Pfizer, had convinced the king to allow them entry, the island would still be safe.)

  All I can say is this: I did try. I did what I thought was best. Today I am often torn, when telling this part of the story, between making apologies and not. I did not go to the island, as so many later did, to make money, or to try to convince one group of people to live and eat and believe as I did. I went for adventure, and with the pure hope of exploration. I did not go to destroy a people or a country, as I am so often accused of doing, as if such things are ever as frequent or intentional as assumed. Did I, however, end up doing so? It is not for me to decide. I did what any scientist would have done. And if I had to—even knowing what would become of Ivu’ivu and all its people—I would probably do so again.

  Well, that is not wholly true: I would do so again. I would not even have to consider it for a moment.

  Two years later, then: I had my own lab in the Virology Department at the National Institutes of Health, where I would serve for the rest of my career. Cheolyu had returned to Korea, where he would eventually run his own lab at Seoul National University. I still had the dreamers under my care, although I saw less and less of them. They were forever supervised by those running various tests on them: bloodwork and physical and mental and reflex exams.68 The institute had converted a spare lab into a very nice, snug space and outfitted it with trees and a leafy floor, and they were given attendants to help wash and clothe them, because although the space was windowless—we didn’t want such a foreign view, of the trees’ bare black limbs, to worry or distress them—the lab could be chilly at night and it wasn’t practical for them to go naked. We had also slowly converted them to a Western diet, and there was much to learn there about the effects of weaning a primitive group of people off a fully hunted-and-foraged diet and putting them on a more processed one. I am sorry to say that they were nearly insensate by this point, and the first time I saw Mua in a wheelchair being pushed back to their sleeping quarters after a day of tests—his head lolling back stupidly, his arms arranged slackly in his lap, his eyes open but skidding about—I felt a pang, remembering how quickly and purposefully he had once walked through the forest, how he had stretched his short legs into splits in order to straddle the enormous tree roots that calved from the ground. It was necessary, this work, and their decline was inevitable, but I still sentimentally wished it could have gone better for them.69

  The opa’ivu’ekes had not fared much better, and I admit now that I had underestimated how important their context was to their survival and well-being. There were many failed attempts to encourage them to mate, and still more to make them adhere to a regular diet. It occurred to me (belatedly) that I had never thought to properly investigate exactly what the opa’ivu’ekes ate, and so much time was lost in trying to find the right combination of food—the closest we got was a mix of sardines and various lettuces and fiddleheads—that would both tempt them and help them maintain their equilibrium. But as time went by they grew steadily more listless, and finally we killed the two older ones—one we preserved,70 one we dissected—and concentrated our efforts on the younger ones, although the results were not encouraging.

  I was more and more away from the lab, giving lectures here and there, writing papers, and so on, and therefore it was not until the end of 1961 that I was able to make my next visit to Ivu’ivu. Stories had reached me from different sources about how the number of researchers on the island at any time now surpassed the population of villagers themselves, about how a small settlement of tents had gone up for the roving brigades of Pfizer and Lilly scientists who traveled to and fro on their own planes and own motorized boats and who glared at one another across their self-imposed demarcation lines, each group determined to beat the other, about how swaths of the jungle had been trampled and cleared and the lives of animals and plants disrupted. Meyers called me from Cal one night, his stammer worse than ever; he had just
returned from the island, he said, and described a scene that sounded like something out of a hellish version of Brueghel: a filthy village square, dirt-smeared and fetid, and choking black fires and people everywhere.

  I hoped Meyers might be exaggerating—I did not consider him wholly reliable on non-fungus-related matters—but it was with some trepidation and even reluctance that I set out on my journey. Now that I was a government employee, there was no waiting about for a transport to the island on which I might be able to beg a spot, and I sat in my seat at the back of the tiny plane, waiting for the jouncy landing that greeted one’s arrival on U’ivu. But to my surprise, our touchdown was smooth, silken almost, and when I stepped out of the plane, I saw the first major change: a runway, albeit just a length of perfectly planed dirt, but with all the bumps and stones and bits of shrubbery I remembered from the past removed. Indeed, the whole field had been razed and was now just a great acreage of emptiness: no grass, no little white flowers, just dirt so flat and clean it looked swept. I could feel something shift deep inside me: the first stirrings of dread.