The People in the Trees: A Novel

by Hanya Yanagihara

  Take, for instance, his age. It was no surprise to me that Victor’s father (or whoever he was) did not know or care how old his child was. The first time I was able to hold him and regard him closely—to scrutinize the smeary eyes, the distended stomach, the scrubby scab of dirty hair, the colonies of glistening, plump lice, each as fat and slick as a grain of buttered rice—I guessed him to be six or so, although an early childhood of malnourishment and disease gave him the appearance of a three-year-old. Upon returning to Bethesda, I took him to see the children’s pediatrician, Alan Shapiro, who thought, after examining him and taking into account his obviously stunted growth, that he might be as old as seven or as young as four. Guessing the age of these children is an imperfect art, one I had long ago ceased fretting over too much. Indeed, it is usually beneficial to shave as many months off these children’s lives as one is realistically able to; it gives them a year or two to adjust to the work of being a developing American child and eases their burden to thrive and succeed. (Call it a sort of developmental affirmative action, if you will.) So after a sort of lazy, halfhearted debate, Shapiro and I came to an understanding, and on Victor’s medical files (and all official records thereafter) we listed August 13, 1976, as his birthday, August 13 being, of course, the day I found him. I had entered Shapiro’s office with a mystery of a child; I went home with a certified four-year-old.

  Nineteen eighty, the year Victor entered my household, was unusual for two reasons. For one, there had never been as many children living in the house at one time as there were that year. For another, it turned out to be one of those years in which the population of children fell fairly neatly into two distinct generations. At one end was a gaggle of eighteen-year-olds—Muti, Megan, Gunter, Lani, Lei, Terrence, Karl, and Edith, I believe—all of whom would be leaving for college, followed closely by another group of older adolescents (sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, primarily, with a few slightly younger ones, including Ella, who was twelve at the time, and Abby, who was eleven, tossed in). But the next oldest children to follow them, Isolde and William—the children who would be Victor’s primary peers—were only six. Altogether, there were some twenty-two children living in the house that year. Most of my memories of that time are sensory rather than anecdotal ones—the lugubrious, looping strains of the rock music the teenagers would play hour after hour; the sickly, fruity stench of the alcohol they filched from somewhere; the various sartorial failures that paraded past me in the mornings. In the evenings the girls talked on the phone and the boys stayed in their rooms and, I am sure, masturbated. At times I was certain that several of them were having sexual relations with one another, but it seemed too exhausting a topic even to begin to address. They all spent a great deal of time fighting, and watching television, and loudly declaring how relieved they would be to finally leave the house and go to college and be on their own (with, of course, ample financial assistance from me). Needless to say, I spent as much time as possible abroad, attending conferences, giving lectures. Returning from the airport, I always half expected to turn the corner and find the house a pile of rubble, with all of them waiting impatiently and crossly for me to come home so they could leap on me with their demands and complaints and needs.

  I wonder what Victor must have thought the first time he saw the house and met the strange, populous collection of children whom he would now be expected—if only legally—to regard as his brothers and sisters. I am certain it must have been overwhelming for him; I myself had a difficult time keeping track of the faces that walked by me every morning, asked me for money, thrust report cards and petty injuries in front of my face. At one point one of the older children had even brought a friend of his home to live with us for a week to see if I’d notice an extra setting at the table, an extra permission slip to sign. Naturally, I didn’t notice at all (my time and thoughts being occupied with a multitude of things), and when the prank was finally revealed to me, amid much hilarity, I laughed as well, and shook the hand of the interloper, an angular, handsome boy whose skin was the purplish black of figs. In the mornings children would literally fly past me, leaping off the middle of the flight of stairs toward the front door, or trooping out the back door in dense flanks, clasping hockey and lacrosse sticks and baseball bats like weaponry, like the spears they would once have taken everywhere. (Sometimes I would watch them marching together, their blunt, unfriendly, planar faces brailled with acne, and think involuntarily of Captain Cook’s cloaked advice that I had chosen in my youth to disregard—The fierceness of the Wevooans makes the crew uneasy—and shudder, because was I any more equipped to live with these people who had so unsettled the explorer’s brave crew, who knew more and had seen more than I ever would?)

  I do admit that I had trouble remembering everyone’s name. I would call for the girl I thought was Lani and in her place would appear someone I had always thought was Megan (that is, if anyone heeded my call at all). Sometimes this was not my failure but an intentional bit of trickery; they would try to play games like this—one person standing in for another, trying to confuse me—but quickly learned not to do this after I began playing some games of my own: giving money to the person who answered my call, for example, or requesting that he or she complete a particularly odious chore. Squabbles would break out, confessions would be made, mistaken and deliberately confused identities would be righted. It was this generation of children who had instituted the prohibition against, as they said, “infants” at the dinner table, which meant that Isolde and William (and thereafter everyone younger than seven) were consigned to the “baby table,” a squat, white-laminated wooden toy of a thing that was used primarily for quick, slapdash breakfasts eaten in the kitchen, to take their evening meal with Mrs. Tomlinson an hour before everyone else ate. There was, of course, much crying and screeching from Isolde and William over this decision and an equal amount of not quite logical but self-righteous screaming from the elders (“Majority rules! Majority rules!” shrieked Fred, one of the sixteen-year-olds, who was studying the Constitution in high school; you could always ascertain their school syllabus by observing the realpolitik they tried to apply to various household regulations), but in the end the amendment was passed. Even I had to admit it was an inspired solution; at any rate, it made dinnertime less of a spectacle than it had been.

  Into this household, then, came Victor, whom I introduced to them on a weekend evening when poor weather had kept everyone indoors. He did not make a very good impression on them. The older children gawped at him silently for a long moment. The more polite ones gave him nervous, useless smiles; a few of them reached out to touch him and then withdrew their hands quickly, as if Victor might leap out of my arms and gobble them whole. Isolde and William stood in the doorway and stared. Victor, for his part, turned his face into my shoulder and remained completely silent. After I had had Mrs. Tomlinson take him away, they began pecking at me with questions.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Why does he look like that?”

  “Is he sick? Why is he that color?”

  “How old is he?”

  Hearing their reactions upon the introduction of a new child always amused me. How quickly they forgot what they had looked like when they had arrived in this country! They came, most of them, accompanied only by lice and disease and wearing scraps of filthy cotton that could only aspire to be called proper clothing. The nature of their infections varied from cholera to dysentery to gangrene to conjunctivitis to malaria, as did the rate of their recovery, but they were all malnourished and undersized and (it must be said) notably unattractive, with large, pulsing, delicate heads and curled, flaccid limbs; they looked like oversized fetuses, things born too unformed and monstrous to be allowed among humans, mistakes never meant to be seen.

  “You should be embarrassed,” I told them. “Don’t you think you looked like that, Megan, when you first came? Or you, Owen?” I was always made to rebuke them in this way after their initial reaction to a new child: the o
lder ones would be ashamed, the younger ones defiant.

  But this time they were unmoved. “We didn’t look like that,” they chorused.

  And they were not, it must be said, entirely incorrect. I have commented earlier on the depravity of Victor’s previous situation, the physical shock one felt upon seeing him. But here, if I am to be honest, I must also say that one was not merely astonished when regarding him but rather repelled. I have, over my years, been privileged to see some of the worst ravages disease can wreak on the human body, and while Victor was not—not by a very long measure—one of the most impressively diseased specimens I had encountered, he was certainly one of the most pitiable. Not because it was clear that he possessed a great natural beauty or native attractiveness that had been deadened or distorted by his illnesses, but rather because of the thoroughness of the infections. Indeed, nothing that I could see or feel had managed to escape the marks of disease—no part of him appeared healthy. Looking at him, I felt, not for the first time, a sort of admiration for the multitude of viruses and bacteria, the distinct and creative marks they had left on even the smallest, most forgettable parts of his body, how they had mapped his skin with furrows of hot, bubbling welts, each capped with a snowy peak of pus, how they had moved across the whites of his eyes, leaving them as yellow as fat and secreting a mysterious slime that was as thick as wax. Various bacteria appeared to have successfully conquered even the most inconsequential parts of his anatomy: even his toe- and fingernails were as opaque as bone, the tips ossified into jagged arrowheads. Every orifice wept liquids, some thin and rust-colored that bore the sharp, steely stench of menstrual blood, others clear and jellylike that oozed to the surface only reluctantly. He was fascinating, a home to thousands of visitors. Shapiro and I spent a few pleasant afternoons examining him, naming the diseases we could (ringworm, conjunctivitis, eczema) and arguing over the ones we could not. It was a great, thrilling puzzle, and Victor—who sat quietly, breathing adenoidally through his mouth as Shapiro and I poked and prodded and ran our fingers over his body—was, I must say, very patient. But of course most of his infections, no matter how alarming or intimidating in appearance, were in fact quite treatable, and after his nightly bath I would settle him in my lap, rub cream into his sores, and give him antibiotics secreted in a plug of honey cake. Over the days I’d watch his skin smooth as a crunchy scab of blisters that had annexed his inner thigh slowly dissolved, like salt disintegrating into a dark puddle of liquid. So while his initial appearance was unsettling, it was certainly not permanent, and in fact easily rectified. No, the greater problem with Victor was his almost complete lack of socialization, his fundamental—and the word is intentional—savagery. For very shortly after I acquired Victor, I realized that I was going to have to teach him how to be a human.

  There are people—even otherwise logical and clear-minded people—who believe that we are born with a predisposition to behave as, well, humans. That is, that we are born with a certain set of desires or tendencies—the tendency, say, to be sociable with others, or to share with others, or to communicate with others. (These are also the people who believe in such concepts as good and evil and enjoy debating whether man is one or the other.) But although this is a pretty notion, it is fundamentally untrue. For proof, one need look no further than my own children, and especially Victor, who seemed to have little understanding of what it meant to behave like a human being. His body fulfilled its basic needs, of course—he ate, he slept, he defecated—but he was not, it appeared, capable of doing anything else. To begin with, he was almost wholly unemotive. Once, as an experiment, I pricked the sole of his foot lightly with a pin, and although he twitched his head, he remained mute, and his blank, dumb look did not change. I devised other tests as well. At mealtimes he would open his mouth, eat whatever was placed within (he had no idea even how to feed himself; if I set a plate in front of him, he would only gaze at it fixedly, as if it were some precious thing he had been assigned to guard), his jaws opening and closing with a steady rhythm, his teeth coming together with an exaggerated, steely tap. Once I slipped into a spoonful of cooked carrots a small square of newsprint, which he imperturbably chewed away at until I reached into his mouth and retrieved the pulpy mash of inky paper. In these moments I would look at his face and be able to see only Eve’s echoed back to me, and his presence would seem a punishment, and a reminder of how I would never escape what I had seen and been and done on that island. At night he would be placed in his bed, but by morning either Mrs. Tomlinson or I (or William, with whom he shared a small knuckle of a room on the third floor, under the sloping eaves of the attic) would find him curled into a knot in the corner of the room, dark and silent and still, clutching his genitals with his hands.

  There were other, less tidy puzzles as well. It became clear that he was obsessed with his feces; he would leave woody lengths of them on the carpets, in the yard, on the table. The strange thing was that he did not seem unfamiliar with the toilet itself; Mrs. Tomlinson reported to me that upon his introduction to it, he had pressed the lever with a manual dexterity and confidence that had yet to manifest itself in any other noticeable way and had watched the water swirl away. One night I watched him leave his bedroom and walk toward the bathroom, only to stop a few feet from it, almost lazily undo the strings of his pajama pants, and squat directly above the hallway carpet’s centerpiece, a large faded fuchsia rose. He had in the previous day or so acquired a facial expression that he interchanged (often, and for no discernible reason) with his usual automaton’s gaze: a ghastly facsimile of a smile, in which he spread his long mouth into a wide crescent and revealed his few dust-colored teeth. When I called out his name, he turned to me unhurriedly and gave me this smile. Even after I smacked him across his bottom and groin, he continued to smile, as if his facial muscles had seized themselves into a rictus from which they could not relax.

  It seems foolish to admit this now, but at the time I allowed myself to be surprised by Victor’s behavior. He had been so quiet, so defeated when I discovered him that I mistook his wanness for a certain promise of tractability, a willingness to learn and be taught. The fact that he initially had little discernible personality of his own only assured me that my job with him would be easy; I would instill in him the properties I had always wished to bestow on my children—he would be inquisitive, and polite, and obedient, and reasonable. But over his first month I came to see that he was more stubborn and altogether less pliable than I had assumed; indeed, his very impassivity began to seem a sort of spiky defiance. I began to think of him, with his masklike mien and terrible smile and graceless, stiff-limbed walk, as a golem, something I had unfairly and unreasonably awakened and let loose to totter through my household, wrecking it with its inhuman, robotic, indecipherable movements, its impulses ungovernable by man. Indeed, he was difficult not because the problems that he presented were so insurmountable but simply because I was unsure how to go about addressing them. I had had other children who were monstrous—Muti, during her first month in the house, had tried to kill the cat by gouging out its eyes with a pair of chopsticks; Terrence had torn the head off one of the older children’s gerbils with his pointy little teeth (that had caused quite an uproar)—but I had at least understood them. They had liked screaming and shrieking and throwing loud, sustained fits. Moreover, they were excited to be screamed back at, to have someone with whom to engage. Such episodes were, of course, wearisome, and frequently messy, but they were at least the beginnings of conversations, or at the very least of exchanges.

  But such interactions seemed to have no effect on Victor. Over the months I tried approaching and then punishing him in every way I could. I praised him and cursed at him. I kissed him and hit him. I gave him extra portions of pasta (he seemed particularly fond of various carbohydrates, unlike the others, who had craved meat) and withheld food entirely. I sang to him and slapped his face, murmured nonsense into his ear and pulled his hair, but he remained spectacularly indifferent to my various
attentions, only sat grinning like a skull.

  After several months I grew to regret ever bringing him home with me. The various infections that had written themselves on his skin had vanished (and indeed, he was pronounced by Shapiro to be in excellent health), but the transformation from a sick child to a well one was not as dramatic as I had expected. Some of the children, after making inauspicious first impressions, revealed themselves to be delightful creatures: their skin smoothed and their cheeks became fat and shiny, and their peculiar, rootlike hair grew in thick and faintly sweet-smelling, like mesquite wood. The restoration of good health (if, that is, he had ever been in good health to begin with) to Victor revealed no such pleasant surprises. He did not become a gleaming-eyed boy with an infectious laugh and a steady, focused gaze. Indeed, he was, once healthy, much what he had been before: neither a winning nor an attractive child, he remained stubbornly unlikely to inspire any feelings of affection or endearment, even from those in whom such emotions were expected.

  Eventually it became clear to me that Victor was not the sort of child with whom a behavioral threshold could be reached and crossed. Rather, his socialization would be a long and tedious process, full of infinitesimal, unnoticeable bits of progress and lengthy, discouraging periods of regression. I spent an evening watching him, taking note of what he did and did not know, what he might be easily taught, what bad habits I might have to break first. He had, predictably, no language—although when forced or suitably inspired, he would let loose a series of terse, simian grunts—but he seemed to be able to understand timbres. A rebuke conveyed in a tone that cracked the air like a slap would still him, and a voice pitched to a high register, singy and false, seemed to comfort him. But in general he seemed to have learned not to react to things at all; hence the frightening, inappropriate smile, the weird, frozen blankness.