The People in the Trees: A Novel

by Hanya Yanagihara

  I was in such a state of enchantment that I did not even hear the knocking on the door, did not hear the doorbell’s insistent chime. So when the two men came through the back door to the garden, I was surprised, and quickly stood. One was black and one was white, one older, one younger. “Who are you?” I asked them.

  The young white one answered me with a question. “Abraham Norton Perina?”

  What could I do? I nodded.

  “Detective Matthew Banville, Montgomery County Police Department,” said the man, and coughed, as if embarrassed. “I’m afraid, Dr. Perina, we have some questions we need to ask you down at the station.”

  Above me a butterfly, the first of the season, had suddenly appeared, flapping its clean white wings near my face in such a frenzy that I thought for a moment it was trying to beat out a warning, a message only I would be able to understand.

  But there was nothing. And when I turned back to the men, they were still there, waiting for me silently, their faces stern and blank and dispassionate—not the kind of faces I was used to seeing at all.

  “I need to get my pills,” I was finally able to say, and Detective Banville looked at the other, who nodded, and the three of us walked into the house together. They let me go into the bathroom by myself, and I stood in front of the mirror for a long moment, staring at my face and wondering what was going to happen to me. I realized then that I had not asked them on what grounds I was going to be questioned. I have done nothing, I told my reflection, which stared back at me blandly. I will ask them why they are here, I thought, and it will be nothing and this will be over and it will be as if it had never happened. So I did go out to ask them, but as you know, it was not nothing, I was not let go, and my life, as it was, was forever changed. And had I known then how profoundly difficult things were soon to become, I think I would have endeavored to remain in the bathroom for much longer, staring at my face as if for answers, while outside the men waited, and the earth twirled lazily on.

  77 Actually a twenty-two-year-old man who was enrolled in graduate school at Syracuse University.

  78 In the lab, of course. There is invariably a gourmand—or, if one is being less charitable, a budding alcoholic—among the staff of any lab who spends his leisure time developing various liquors in the beakers and decanting them at impromptu office parties. Some of these brews are actually quite respectable.

  79 Much of Norton’s work throughout the 1980s concentrated on the Karée people, a small tribe (its total population was less than six hundred) who live in northern Brazil off a particularly narrow and treacherous Amazonian tributary. The Karée were encountered in 1978 by a botanist from the University of California, Santa Cruz, named Lucien Feeney, who stumbled on their society by accident while searching for a rare fern (Microsorum coccinella) that he speculated was an early cousin of the modern palm tree and that had been harvested to near extinction throughout the rest of the basin some two hundred years prior. When he observed the tribe, Feeney knew that there was something strange about them, but he was unable to determine what, exactly, made them unique. Upon his return to Santa Cruz, he contacted Norton through an acquaintance at Johns Hopkins, and Norton made his first visit to the tribe shortly thereafter (I accompanied him on this trip as well as subsequent ones). Tests and other fieldwork revealed that the Karée experienced an unusually delayed adolescence; indeed, neither boys nor girls displayed any signs of secondary sex organs until, on average, the age of twenty-five. The puberty that followed was an intense and brutal eighteen-month ordeal that culminated in marriage. After, their biological lives proceeded as normal, which meant that the women had a relatively brief two decades of fertility before undergoing menopause. As a result, there was a great urgency to have as many children as possible, and many of the Karée women died as a result of excessive pregnancies and collectively experienced a remarkably high rate of gynecological complications.

  In an echo of the Opa’ivu’eke people, the cause of this abnormality was originally attributed to an endemic rodent (Hydrochoerus feenius) that all Karée children grow up eating (it was favored for its succulent, sweetish meat). This was of course highly exciting, especially given Norton’s earlier groundbreaking work, but later studies revealed that the culprit was not in fact an external element but something specific to the Karée’s biology. Nevertheless, Norton tried to bring back a number of the Karée to his lab for further study but was prevented from doing so by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, which had kept him under unnaturally strict surveillance ever since he had appealed the removal of the dreamers in 1976. Various political struggles forced Norton to abort his work with the Karée in 1990, and today it is Harvard University that maintains a satellite lab—and therefore controls which scientists might be granted access—on the tribe’s land. Norton, understandably, remains bitter about how these events unfolded, which is probably why he fails to mention his work with the Karée in this account. Those interested can find an evenhanded rendering of the situation in Anna Kidd’s excellent Of Stone and Sun and Everything In-Between.

  80 Sonia Alice Perina, arrived 1970. She now goes by the name SoAP and is a performance poet and artist of some renown in New York.

  81 Norton had named previous children Owen. There was Owen Ambrose (arrived ca. 1969), Owen Edmund (arrived ca. 1969), and Richard Owen (arrived ca. 1971). By 1986 or so, around which time Norton was busy adopting what was to be his final generation of children, Owen had become the de facto middle name regardless of gender: I clearly remember, besides Victor, a Giselle Owen, a Percy Owen (there was also a Percival Owen in an earlier generation), a Drew Owen, a Jared Owen, and a Grace Owen. Whether this was a result of Norton’s forgetfulness or distraction or was in fact a sort of homage to his brother was never clear.

  82 There is a section following this that I have, as an editor, elected to excise.

  PART VII. AFTER

  Now begins a very upsetting and difficult time of my life, on which I would rather not (but suppose, in the interest of honesty, must) dwell, if only briefly.

  I have to admit that I remember very little of the initial interrogation and rather less of the arrest, which is strange, for I recall feeling extraordinarily alert and almost painfully engaged in the activity at hand (which was, unfortunately, a recounting of the events leading to my undoing). I remember looking about me at the colors and shapes sharpening and deepening in tone and line before my eyes, and finding the world oppressive, with its needlessly aggressive colors and strange objects and harsh, jangling sounds. Sometimes I would have to take my glasses off simply so the world would smudge and recede for a moment and cease to seem so relentlessly present tense. In particular, I remember waiting in an interrogation room at the police station, and even in the blandness of that space—the dreary, dimpled sea-gray brick walls, the stone-gray floors, the gray aluminum table with its silvery filaments like threads in silk—I felt attacked, as if the gray itself might gather into a great wave and drown me under its weight.

  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.”

  But I didn’t, and we know what happened next.

  I have been told more times than I can tally how lucky I am: for the brevity of my sentence, for the fact that I have been placed in isolation, for my placement in this prison, which is considered one of the “better ones.” I sometimes feel that I am a cretin who has been miraculously admitted into a top-tier school and is never to be allowed to forget my odd good fortune.

  Now my days here are almost at an end. In my more optimistic moods, I tell myself that this place will soon be just another of the many I have occupied and left: Lindon, Hamilton, Harvard, Stanford, NIH, the house in Bethesda. But in my more sober state, I realize that this is not so: all of those places (with the exception of Lindon) are destinations I aspired to and won entry to, each one researched and chosen, each one a place where I took and took what I needed in order to move on to the next. They were all places I wanted and dreamed of, and when I was ready to leave each, I did.

  This place, however, is the opposite: I was made to come here, and I will leave it only when they have decided they are done with me.

  I consider myself fortunate always to have had very vivid dreams. Once, when I was a young man, I expressed this to Owen, and he said that my dreams were wild and improbable and bright-spangled because my mind in its conscious state was not; he said that no person could live without wonder and that my dreams were my mind’s way of correcting my own literalness, of coloring my life with something of the fantastic. He meant it partly humorously, of course, but he was also serious, and we began a lazy sort of argument, one pitting the scientist’s intellectual rigor against the poet’s self-indulgence.

  But since I have been here, I have had no dreams. They have disappeared exactly
when I yearn for them, when I need them to fill my waking hours with their peacock extravagance. And in their absence I have begun to return more and more frequently to Ivu’ivu, which is, oddly, the place that this place resembles the most. Not in appearance, of course, but in its implacability, in its capture of me: it will decide when it is through with me, and apparently it isn’t yet satiated.

  And so I spend my days allowing my mind to flit among a flickering film reel of images: I see the vuaka, its fur glimmering in the soft air as if lit by stars, and the peachy pink of the manama fruit. I see the fire smoldering beneath a charred creature, its skin slubbing off in jigsawed patches. I see the tornado of birds shrilling above a kanava tree and the opa’ivu’eke’s rising head breaking the horizon line of the lake. I see the boy, his hands as bright as flowers in the dark night, moving over my chest as if he were washing off my sadness, as if it were something that clung to my body like a scum. And of course I see Tallent, walking through the trees still, his movements as silent as a sloth’s, his long hair painting his back a river of gold and wood. Sometimes when I fall asleep in the middle of the day, dozing despite my best efforts to wait until the lights clunk off and I know it is night, I imagine myself walking alongside him. In these moments I have never left Ivu’ivu, and the two of us are companions, wandering the island together, and although it is small, it feels limitless, as if we could walk its forests and hills for centuries and never find its boundaries. Above us is the sun. Around us is the ocean. But we never see them. The only things we see are the trees and the moss, the monkeys and the flowers, the ropes of vines and the scuff of bark. Somewhere on the island is a place where we can rest. Somewhere on the island is a place where we belong, where we will lie down next to each other and know we will never have to look again. But until we find it we are searchers, two figures moving through a landscape while outside and around us the world is born and lives and dies and the stars burn themselves slowly into darkness.