The People in the Trees: A Novel

by Hanya Yanagihara

  It was the smile that bothered me most. I offered twenty dollars to the first child who could teach Victor to successfully mimic acceptable facial reactions, and for several nights after they spent their evenings in the living room ringed around him. They tickled him, told him jokes (which he of course could not understand), danced about him, funneled cake bits into their mouths, making expressions of delight. Naturally, though, there was no response from him, and after a week or less the children lost interest and returned to their aforementioned after-dinner activities. Still, I did not think the week a waste, for I had seen him turning his veiny head from one eagerly beaming child to another, his mouth slightly open, as if curious to learn the rules of some complex and bewildering game, one whose skillful mastery would determine his ultimate happiness. I’m not sure, then, that he understood this consciously or not—or that he would even have known how to begin to comprehend the idea of happiness—but he seemed, after a period of many weeks, to consciously devote himself to his studies. A few months later, I found him watching a talk show on television one morning. It took me some minutes to realize that he was looking at the newscasters’ faces, their bright, clownish smiles. After a while he stood and padded over to the hallway bathroom. I followed, silent as a specter, and stood for a very long time, watching him pull his mouth into odd and imperfect expressions of joy, gazing at himself in the mirror as if trying to memorize the exact angle at which his lips should curve upward, puzzling over the many muscles that such an apparently simple gesture seemed to require.

  By the next year he had learned first how to approximate and then how to truly engage in appropriate human behavior. Although he never became a particularly captivating child, he managed to do well enough for himself: he grew, and ate, and acquired language and apparently genuine human emotions. On a more mundane level, he learned how to use the bathroom correctly, and how to eat with a fork and spoon, and how to tie his shoes. It was also revealed that he had certain easily indulged interests; he was very fond of simple mechanisms—anything that involved pulleys or levers fascinated him—and he could spend literally hours playing with the old dumbwaiter outside the kitchen, watching the box silently glide up on its twirled, shiny ropes and then lowering it back to the basement again, where it would come creaking into sight like some archaic spacecraft. Eventually he was sent to school, where he learned to read and write and even made a few friends.

  After a few years he was, in every respect that mattered or was noticeable, a perfectly average boy, one who smiled and frowned and raged and laughed. His transformation had occurred so slowly, and over such a long period of time, that I was able to recognize it only long after it had ended. Indeed, I began to think of his initial years in the house as his sort of chrysalis phase—I could remember (and would, often) the child he had been when I discovered him, but I soon found that it was very difficult to recall exactly how he had metamorphosed into what sat before me at the dinner table or behind me in the car, eating or chattering or merely watching the scenery slide by. The future I imagined for him, when I did so at all, was remarkable only for its haziness: he would, I suppose, go to high school, then perhaps college, would find a job (and I was unable to imagine what that might be, whether he would be a tradesman or perhaps work in an office in a white shirt, a tie wrapped around his throat, his diction perfect and deracinated), would marry and have a family. I would see him and worry over him less and less frequently until he became as pleasantly remote as a memory.

  And really, that should have been the end of my story with Victor. Over the months his problems began to seem less exciting, less mysterious, less vivid, than they had at first. For one, there were new children, who would prove challenging in different, more understandable ways. A year after I adopted Victor, I added to my family another child, a boy, whom I named Whitney. He, like Victor, was underfed and undersocialized, but unlike Victor, he was wild—a screecher and a tantrumer. In other words, he was easy to discipline and swift to improve. Still, after Whitney, I decided to take a break from adopting children. (It is curious to me now that I thought of my decision in exactly those terms: I would, I resolved, take a break from children, but I was somehow unable or unwilling to admit the truth: that I had long ceased to derive that joy I so desired from a new child’s arrival, that I should simply stop adding them to my life.)

  Consequently, those years, between, say, 1982 and 1985, were very pleasant ones for me. A batch of the children went away to college, and suddenly the house was empty (or at least emptier than it had been in a long time), and I was able to travel, often and for extended periods, both to places I’d long wanted to go and to places I hadn’t visited in years. One weekend I left the children at home under Mrs. Lansing (after more than fifteen years of tending to my children, Mrs. Tomlinson decided to retire, giving me the telephone number of her sister-in-law, a similarly capable woman named JoAnne Lansing, before she did) and went to see Owen at Bard, where he had just begun teaching. We spent a very nice few days together, Owen and I, as well as a boy77—one of his students, I believe—whom he was dating at the time.

  But in 1986 I was seized by—what? A sort of boredom, I suppose, or else a madness (or was it simply my old yearning?), and traveled once more to U’ivu, where I spent a few listless days trekking over the island and charting its ongoing decline. And when I returned to Maryland, I found myself doing so with a set of twins, Jared and Drew, as well as a girl, Kerry. Suddenly my life once again seemed to elude my grasp, and three years later I was almost horrified to find myself with an entire new generation of children; it was almost as if they had multiplied one night when I was asleep. Indeed, it seemed a far more plausible explanation than the truth: that I had, for some inexplicable set of reasons I could not quite articulate to myself, repopulated my life with a dozen new existences, all of whom I would have to witness trundling through the multitudinous steps of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. I began to wonder seriously whether I had something of a tic. How was it, I thought, that I found myself now with more children, when only a few years before I had been anxiously waiting for the house to empty of them so that my life, alone, unburdened, might finally begin anew? Why was I incapable of stopping? What was I hoping each new one might provide me that the previous thirty-odd had not? What was it that I wanted?

  II.

  In retrospect—when it is so easy to blame oneself for everything that has gone wrong—I realize that I should not have been so complacent about, so accepting of, Victor’s apparent maturation without first finding a way to properly control him, a way of exerting my authority that he would understand and respect. But something had changed. Once I would have wanted to discover why Victor behaved the way he did, but that was no longer true; by the time he had begun to behave appropriately, I was merely relieved that he had learned to be manageable and that he had left certain behavior behind. I began to realize that I was bored, or rather, that I had lost my taste for the whole occupation of child-raising. I was no longer interested in solving the formerly intriguing puzzles of my children’s psyches. I no longer cared why one shrieked hysterically when confronted with coffeepots or why another cowered at the sight of the orange juice in its sweating, frosted bottle. Before, I would have spent many contented days mulling over the (usually unhappy) possible events and narratives that had resulted in such reactions; I often thought of them as bright, snappy little mindbenders, rubber bands to mentally stretch and tease when I was taking a break from the real work that filled my day. And such petty quandaries were in their own way immensely fulfilling, for they satisfied much of what I considered the romance of child-rearing: that it should at times be puzzling and elusive and problematic, that each child was a being who could be understood and, if need be, led in one direction or another. Indeed, when I had adopted Muiva, in 1968, the prospect of raising a child had seemed both tantalizing and rich with wonder: to have as one’s charge something both knowable and not, at once predictable and full of startling surprises,
seemed to promise unimaginable adventure, dozens of daily revelations wrought in miniature.

  And for many years, for decades even, it had. But then (again, in creeping stages I would not recognize until they were long past) things began, inevitably, to change. For one thing, I found myself growing old. In 1984 I turned sixty, and the lab threw me a small birthday party, something that, given my frequent and sustained absences, I had been able to avoid every year previously. Still, it was not so awful. Two of the institute’s emeritus professors came, both offering me ironic congratulations (they were both past eighty, after all), and there was a Lady Baltimore cake with buttercream frosting and some not terrible brandylike liquor that one of the more refined fellows had been developing in his idle time.78 One of the techs wove around the desks with a camera, taking pictures of the festivities, and I found myself, unexpectedly, having an enjoyable time.

  The next week, a plain brown envelope was left on my desk, and inside it was a picture of a man whom I at first could not identify. He looked familiar, and for an instant I wondered if he was someone I had encountered not long before and liked despite myself: he had a slant of marrow-colored hair, a simpering smile, and huge, bready hands, each finger as yeasty as a rolled pastry. But of course the picture was of me, and I stared at it, teetering between dismay and a sort of clinical curiosity, for some minutes. I had never had the inclination or the freedom to spend a great deal of time considering my appearance, but there was, I realized, something obscene and horrific about my girth, the rind of fat that had grown around my midsection, about the way my lips appeared thickened and oddly mauve, the way the folds of fat at my neck lay in heavy pleats as if I were some clumsy, flightless bird. What was most striking to me was the apparent absence of any bone structure at all; indeed, it looked as if I had been fashioned from a soft block of sweating lard. Age—and the thought of aging—had never particularly upset me, but I was depressed upon seeing that picture and contemplating the decay of my body and my knowledge of its apparently disgusting appearance. Of course I had noticed that I was growing old, that memories were no longer as crisp as they had been, that I found myself breathing through my mouth after mounting the stairs to my room, that my sleeping patterns had grown erratic. But it was not until I saw that picture that I was able to understand how stealthy and cruel age’s progress was, how noticeable and irreversible the decay. Oh god, I thought, there will be another fifteen or twenty years of this, and every year will grow worse. Suddenly the thought of my life, its relentless march forward, seemed almost unbearably oppressive. And I could not forget that were I somewhere else, I would have been feted not with cake but with an opa’ivu’eke of my own, and I imagined myself at the fire’s edge, Tallent beside me, the turtle’s mounded back being slowly dragged into view, moving ever closer to me.

  I suppose, though, that I was lucky in other ways. In 1989, when I turned sixty-five, I should have, according to various governmental regulations and so forth, been asked to retire, or at least accepted the position of director emeritus. Such a demotion would have left me somewhat emasculated but still able to participate in the daily life of the lab. But to my surprise, there was no letter from some bureaucrat reminding me of the imminent diminishment of responsibilities and inviting my retirement. I was, it seemed, an exception. Not that it would have bothered me terribly had I been asked to adhere to the rules. By that time, after all (as had been the case for some years), I scarcely needed NIH’s name or association to support me; had they insisted on holding me to the same standards they did everyone else, I simply would have accepted one of the offers from Johns Hopkins or Georgetown that were extended to me annually. If I am to be honest, I would not have minded going to a private institution elsewhere, but of course my movements were restricted by the children and the care I was obligated to provide for them.

  But whereas a few years before I would have been quite accepting of this fact—I had, after all, adopted them of my own free will, fully conscious that I had chosen the responsibility—I had come to feel inexplicably and unfairly resentful, as if I should somehow be exempted from the tedious selflessness of parenthood. For a period shortly after it became clear that I was not to be asked to vacate my position at the lab, I found myself at dinner glaring at the children, all of them forking great quantities of food into their mouths with a greed and vigor that struck me as repellent. As I have said, I knew even then that I was being unreasonable—they were, after all, healthy American children with healthy American appetites, appetites that I had created and encouraged—but still, the sight of their enthusiastic consumption (and all they seemed to do, in the end, was consume and consume) invoked in me something close to anger. Things that had normally been merely dull (their constant questions, their numerous demands, their lack of perspective) or even charming became over those years almost unbearable. I had experienced these feelings before, and sometimes for quite prolonged periods, but I had always been able in the end to resume my usual, basically affectionate feelings before the children were able to notice my temporary distaste for them. No matter what they may say now, their mental health was of some importance to me, and I did not think it fair for them to feel apologetic or indebted to me or responsible for my moods. Not, I should add, that there was ever any danger of that.

  Such then was my state of mind in 1989, when there began to unfold a chain of events that has led me to my present state. I have spent many months mentally replaying the circumstances I am about to relate, wondering what I might have done differently, wondering if I could have foreseen the path of my destruction. In some moments I found myself thinking that perhaps there was something inexorable about the way events unfolded, as if my life—which had begun to seem something not my own but rather something into which I found myself blindly toppling—was indeed something living, that existed without my knowledge but that pulled me along in its strong, insistent undertow.

  But after many months of consideration, I find I still lack an adequate explanation for what happened, as well as for any way I might have prevented it. Indeed, such is my continued bewilderment at the velocity and ferocity with which my life was changed that I have found that contemplating the events of that year becomes tolerable only when I consider them as things that happened long ago and to someone else—some series of misfortunes and tragedies that befell someone I once admired and had read about in a dusty book in a grand, stone-floored library somewhere far away, where there was no sound, no light, no movement but for my own breath, and my fingers clumsily turning the rough-cut pages.

  Soon after realizing that I was to be mysteriously spared from the government’s knife and would be allowed to continue life much as before, I was forced to admit to myself that I had been—secretly, so secretly I had not quite allowed myself to believe it—longing for some sort of excuse to curtail my professional activities.

  I was tired. It sounds such a plain and ordinary thing to say, but it is true. I was now at an age when one often finds more pleasure in reflecting on one’s past triumphs—which, along with mistakes, I had in great number, of course—than in plotting future ones. I sometimes wondered if in continuing to present myself at the lab, in continuing my lecturing, in continuing my searching, I was somehow defying the natural arc of human life: early life is made for exploring, and middle life is made for reaping the benefits of that exploration. But should I not, in my sixties, simply stop? Should not the next few decades be spent keeping myself from future problems and troubles (and, yes, from future successes)? Was there a finite number of accomplishments one person might be granted in his life, and if so, hadn’t I surely reached my quota?

  And then I would think I was being ridiculous, and lazy, and impractical as well, for what would I do without my work? Would I sit at home and help Mrs. Lansing raise the children and vacuum the floors? Would I become (as I inevitably would) one of those emeritus professors with which the institute seemed particularly well stocked, the sort who take to making impromptu visits to thei
r old labs, embarrassing and irritating everyone with their doddering and countless questions about what everyone is working on and incessant stories of what they did twenty, thirty, forty years ago, back when people cared? Sometimes a few of them would come over to my lab, and although there would invariably be some banter about my advanced age and when I was going to leave all these headaches behind and move on, I could see always the greed in their eyes as they flickered across the room and the way that they caressed even the most everyday objects—a beaker, a flask, the fabric cover of one of the pistachio-green journals in which we wrote our notes—and know that they envied me and regretted ever having left.

  “What are you doing with yourself these days?” I’d always ask politely, even after I had long discerned that the question was not a kindness but a small cruelty. Oh, this and that, would be the answer, and although the replies were always long ones, they were in the end old men who could not conceal what their lives had become: days abuzz with little flecks of industry, trips with the wife to the grocery store, hours spent reading scientific journals that they had once allowed to accumulate in the corner of the lab in a large sliding heap, back when they were scientists themselves and too busy with their own studies to worry about reading someone else’s.79

  So I could not leave. But I did begin spending more time at home. Not because I wanted to be at home, necessarily, but because it was either being there or being in the lab, and I was finding that I could no longer be at the lab indefinitely. Sundays, for example, I used to spend all day there; by the time I got home it would be dark and the children long to bed. But I began to come home earlier and earlier, until I was there more of the afternoon than not.