The People in the Trees (49 page)

The child had his head bent this entire time, and now the man pushed him toward me. “You take him!” he wailed, and then he repeated the same words, this time in a shout, because the plane was swooping overhead, its propellers whirring noisily, readying for its landing.

I turned and began walking toward the plane, and the man followed me, yanking the boy behind him. “He will do anything you want! Anything! You can do anything with him!” The man was yelling now, and something about his voice, its fury mingled with desperation, made me turn and look at him more closely. And there, for just a second—and it really was that brief—I suddenly thought I recognized him. His jawline was fluffed from too much alcohol, his eyes were as yellow as suet, but there, in the lift of his chin, in his still slender arms attached to the puff of his torso like a spider’s legs,
was there not the boy from the a’ina’ina, the one who had held his head so erect and steady, the one who had let his hands skim over me like insects’ wings?

And then, before I knew it, I found myself reaching my arms forward, and the man, with a groan of relief, shoving the boy—still mute, still with his head bowed—into them. The plane’s door was opening, its stairs louvering down, and as I trotted toward them, I could hear the man again, calling after me.

“What do you want now?” I shouted back at him over the din of the engine. “I’m taking him with me!”

“You must give me something for him!”

Even in my haste to leave, I found myself slightly outraged at this—first he was imploring me to take the child from him, and now he was asking for payment? “I don’t have anything,” I told him.

“Please! No-ton! Anything! I must have something for him!”

So I dug into my pockets, setting the boy down on the ground in order to do so, until I found my last penknife, which I gave to him along with a fistful of pistachios. He snatched them from my hand and trotted away, his spear held above his shoulder in apparent triumph. He never turned around to look at the boy. Suddenly I felt very sorry for him; he had not wanted the boy, but the boy was also his only possession, his only thing to sell or trade.

From the plane, the pilot waved—he had already gathered my bags, and now it was time for me to come aboard. “Come,” I said to the child in U’ivuan, and when he didn’t follow me, only stood there staring at his feet, I was made to march back and pick him up. His shirt was glazed with oil and faintly slick to the touch, and his breath on my cheek was hot and unpleasantly yeasty. But he clung to my neck with his arm and turned his face into my shoulder as I climbed the stairs.

I sat at the window and watched the island shrink beneath me. The child had not let go of my neck. Later he would urinate on me, and I would spend the rest of the flight to Hawaii sitting in his waste. I didn’t like him, but I felt pity for him, which is often the first step toward liking anyone. I was fifty-six, I was going home, I had another child. I felt only exhaustion. This trip, I swore, would be my last, my very last.

The child fell asleep and I set him down on the floor on a blanket.
Another one
, I thought, dully.
Another one to name, and feed, and clothe, and raise
.

In Honolulu, I shook the pilot’s hand and thanked him. He had been the copilot on my previous flight from U’ivu, and he told me he was French but had been raised and was still based in Papeete, so he might see me again if I ever flew this route again. His name was Victor, he said.

A good name, I thought, somewhere over California. It was very late; I had been traveling for many hours; I was very tired. Certainly good enough for a boy without a name. Later, much later, I would reflect on how this child I had acquired and named so thoughtlessly should turn out to become the most important of creatures, how he would upset my life and the lives of others beyond recognition.

But back then, of course, I could not have predicted it. Outside my little shell of a window I could see the bank of clouds plumping beneath us. Beside me, the boy—Victor, now—slept. And finally, I closed my eyes as well, and slipped into a sleep without dreams.

⁴⁸
As Norton indicates, the arrangement he enjoyed at Stanford was highly unusual. What is more unusual is that the source of the funding has never been definitively identified, even all these years later. In her book, Katharine Hetherington speculates that there are two possible candidates. The first (and most colorful) is a man named Rufus Gripshaw, a very wealthy and eccentric Stanford alumnus who made his fortune from inventing a vacuum sealer that is now used in numerous food processing plants and who was obsessed with achieving immortality. She speculates that Tallent spoke to the dean of the medical school on Norton’s behalf and asked him to approach Gripshaw as a silent patron for Norton’s research with the dreamers. Although this is a compelling theory—obviously, Gripshaw had a great personal interest in Norton’s project—it assumes that Tallent was much more interested in assisting Norton’s work than Norton himself seems to indicate (or indeed ever believed). This is, of course, another case in which Tallent’s lack of archived papers and journals makes re-creating history, much less his motives, very frustrating. In the years that were to follow, Norton was never quite certain how Tallent felt about him and his work, and it is easy to imagine that Tallent himself was ambivalent about how, and whether, he wanted to collaborate with Norton. (On the other hand, he had essentially abetted Norton in his plan to bring back the dreamers.)
   Besides Gripshaw, Hetherington suggests that Norton was funded out of, as he puts it, “some mysterious slush fund,” one bankrolled by a governmental agency interested in developing new drugs. This theory is actually less cloak-and-dagger than it sounds. It was, of course, 1950, barely five years after the end of the war, and at the time a great deal of money was being invested not only in the relatively embryonic field of virology but also in a very early iteration of biowarfare. It is entirely possible that Stanford was one of the universities given a grant to pursue such studies and experiments and found a worthy recipient in Norton. (Katharine Hetherington,
An Island True and Small
[New York: Pantheon, 1992], 205–18)

⁴⁹
In the meantime, Norton kept himself busy with a number of extracurricular projects, the most important of which was a paper, published in April 1951 in the
Annals of Herpetology
, in which he identifies the opa’ivu’eke as a previously unknown salt- and freshwater turtle. The paper, while brief, is surprisingly charming; with it, Norton reveals that he too had been taking copious notes on the island, and indeed, his observations of the opa’ivu’eke’s (or
Chelonia perinia
, as it is now formally known) activities and behaviors have been cited countless times in the decades since. Aside from producing the satisfaction that comes from discovering and naming a new life form, this paper also laid necessary groundwork for Norton’s future paper, the famous “Eternity Claim,” which he would publish nearly two years later.
   The
Herpetology
paper garnered Norton a great deal of attention in zoological circles, and for a brief time he even considered moving into the field; the only thing that stopped him, as he later realized, was his fundamental lack of passion for reptilia. Not everyone was happy with Norton’s report, however; in her memoir, Duff claims that she and Tallent were the true discoverers of the opa’ivu’eke and that credit should be given to them. Even if that could have been proven, however, all scientists know that—fairly or not, although fairness seems somewhat beside the point at this level—it’s the person who actually reports the finding to the scientific press who gets the credit for the discovery, not the person who merely makes note of it in his logbooks or journals.
   It is unknown what Tallent thought of Norton’s report about the opa’ivu’eke. His few existing papers include no mention of it, and Norton has never revealed whether the two of them ever spoke of it.

⁵⁰
Norton’s earlier study about the turtle was of course cited in Tallent’s paper.

⁵¹
Norton Perina, M.D., “Observations on Prolonged Human Longevity Among the Ivu’ivu People,”
Annals of Nutritional Epidemiology
(December 1953), vol. 42, 324–28.

⁵²
Norton’s revolutionary paper (commonly known as the “Eternity Claim” paper) was not the only gauntlet thrown down to the mainstream medical and scientific establishment that year. In April, James Watson and Francis Crick had published
their
brief postulative paper in
Nature
, “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” which first described the double-helical nature of DNA. This, coupled with Norton’s discovery, has led numerous scientific historians to identify 1953 as the “year of miracles”—ironically, of course, as miracles were exactly what these scientists strove to disprove with their research.
   Although Norton was naturally highly impressed by Watson’s scholarship, he was not in general impressed by Watson the man, whom he found far too obsessed with his pursuit of women (a quest detailed by Watson himself in his memoir
Genes, Girls, and Gamow
[New York: Knopf, 2002]) and his hunger for fame, which continues unabated to this day.

⁵³
The purpose of Norton’s initial three experiments was to prove that the mice who were fed the opa’ivu’eke would, after a single feeding of the turtle, live on median significantly longer than their natural lifespan of eighteen months. Of Group A (the twenty-five fifteen-month-old mice), 81 percent of the animals were still living, making the median survival age in September 1953, when Norton submitted his paper for publication, forty-six months, which meant that their lifespans had been almost trebled. Of Group C, the hundred mice who were also fed the opa’ivu’eke at fifteen months, 79 percent were still alive at forty-one months, which meant their lifespans had increased by 150 percent. The control groups from experiments A and C—that is, the mice who had been fed the box turtle placebo—had a median survival of 17.8 months—in other words, their typical lifespan. Not discussed in Norton’s initial paper were the subjects of Group B (the fifty newborn mice fed the opa’ivu’eke in their infancy). All of them were, astonishingly, still alive at the time the paper was written, at thirty-one months old. But because their lifespan had not yet been proven to have been doubled by eating the turtle, Norton decided that publishing their results was still too premature.
   The scientific importance of Norton’s experiment was twofold. First, he proved that an organism’s lifespan could be controlled or manipulated by a foreign element. Second, he established that this extended lifespan—what he termed “imaginable immortality”—could be achieved by the ingestion of this element. In just over two years, he had solved the riddle that has preoccupied every culture since the beginning of time. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that his findings were greeted with such passion and anger, because it is only fear that can provoke such responses.

⁵⁴
Norton had used the opa’ivu’eke’s left foreleg to feed the mice in the first and second experiments and the right hind leg on the mice in the third experiment. He actually sent Sereny both the remaining legs, the right foreleg and the left hind leg, so that Sereny would be able to replicate the variables as closely as possible. Sereny ended up using the left hind leg in his own experiment.

⁵⁵
It actually replicated the third of Norton’s experiments. On March 14, 1954, Sereny began an experiment in which he fed one hundred mice aged fifteen months a portion of opa’ivu’eke. The control group of one hundred was fed the same species of box turtle that Norton had used. A voluminous and highly technical correspondence specifying the amount of turtle that should be consumed by both groups was exchanged, all of which can be found among Sereny’s papers, which are in the possession of Harvard Medical School.

⁵⁶
Norton is probably referring to James Watson, who would have been only twenty-seven in 1955.

⁵⁷
A slightly better survival rate than Norton’s mice, but not necessarily significant, for reasons explained in the following note.

⁵⁸
It is not known why Sereny decided to submit his paper when the mice were just forty months instead of waiting for them to reach forty-six months, which was the age of Norton’s mice when he submitted his paper.

⁵⁹
Adolphus Sereny, “On ‘Observations on Prolonged Human Longevity Among the Ivu’ivu People,’ by Norton Perina: A Response,”
Lancet
268, no. 6940 (September 1, 1956), 421–28. Interestingly, it was Sereny who ended up naming the Ivu’ivuan village people “the Opa’ivu’eke people of Ivu’ivu.” The villagers had no name for themselves—they were simply
u’ivu’ivu
, or “of Ivu’ivu”—and so Sereny’s moniker eventually became commonly accepted. It was also Sereny who later named the condition “Selene syndrome.” (Sereny had studied classics as an undergraduate and was famous among his students for his love of mythological allusions and references. It was said that in order to succeed in Sereny’s classes, it was good to know the difference between the trochlear and the trigeminal, but it was far better to know the difference between Tiryns and Tartarus.)

⁶⁰
Owen Perina,
The Nautilus Sky: Poems
(San Francisco: City Lights, 1956).

⁶¹
In 1993, a much-debated book speculated that not only was Tallent perfectly aware of Norton’s theft, but he was aware as well that ingestion of the opa’ivu’eke led both to a superannuated lifespan and to a highly compromised one. In
Nowhere Is an Island: The Man Who Was Paul Tallent
(New York: Faber and Faber), Henry Gombrecht, an American studies professor at Williams, claims that Tallent never announced his findings for fear that the island would be overrun with fortune hunters and scientists. He further claims that once Tallent figured out that Norton had come to the same conclusion, he and Esme plotted to kill him or abandon him on Ivu’ivu, but that Tallent lost his nerve shortly before the deed was to be done. Gombrecht also claims that Tallent’s eventual disappearance was a sort of self-inflicted penance for what he considered his role in the destruction of the island, though in a curious bit of scholarly circumspection, he stops short of speculating whether Tallent killed himself (as many believe) or simply vanished into some small unreachable part of the world.
   As efficient and yet dramatic as Gombrecht’s theory is, it is very difficult to see where he might have found proof for any of it, given that none of Tallent’s personal writings have ever been located. Gombrecht, though (who if nothing else proved himself tenacious in the face of the controversies that erupted after the book’s publication), claims to have pages from Tallent’s first Ivu’ivu journals that an unnamed source gave to him. However, considering the facts that (1) he has refused to have the papers authenticated, or even to show them to any of his colleagues, and (2) the people who would have had the most ready access to pages from that diary would have been Esme Duff—who died in 1982, when Gombrecht was still in graduate school and unlikely to have cause to be introduced to her—and Norton himself, who would surely have volunteered them to a much more respectable and trustworthy academic source had they existed, it is difficult to believe, much less confirm, the veracity of his statements.