The People in the Trees (53 page)

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.
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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 their 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.
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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.

One Sunday found me at home particularly early. Victor had been given an assignment for history class in which he had to re-create a seed cake that the early American settlers ate and that involved large quantities of millet and cornmeal and rye. The assignment was due the next day and he had to make enough for everyone in the class to try a slice, and naturally, he did not think to share this information with me until lunchtime.

I suppose he was expecting me to do the assignment myself (and why would I have? I wanted to ask him, for I did not think I had a reputation among the children as someone who would take responsibility for their failings), but I commanded him to the kitchen and
ordered him to start mixing the ingredients, none of which we had, of course, which necessitated a hurried trip to the store before it closed for the day.

We worked in silence, mostly. He was restless, quite literally jumpy, hopping from foot to foot in a manner that I found very distracting but that I would later realize was a sort of warmup, a prelude to a fight to which I had not known I was invited. “Now you have to roll out the dough,” I told him, and when he didn’t respond—he was staring, mouth slightly open, at apparently nothing more interesting than a fat squirrel crouched on an apple tree branch outside—I snapped at him. “Victor! The dough! Victor!” And he turned back to me, scraped the dough out of its bowl, and slammed it onto the counter with a wet
thwack
.

“You’re getting it everywhere, Victor,” I said to him, and then, when he once again didn’t respond, “Victor! I am talking to you!”

Again silence. And then, “Why was I named Victor?”

“I told you,” I said. “I named you for the pilot who took us away from U’ivu when I was adopting you.”

“But why him?”

They always wanted to know, my children, why they had been given this name or that. They were fond of self-mythologizing, and I think they all hoped that there might be some heroic story behind their naming, that they alone might be imbued with a special significance, that I might have secreted some message to them in my choice that they would one day understand and appreciate. The truth, however, was that I had usually simply named them after people I had encountered on my journeys to and from retrieving them: they were named after check-in counter clerks at airports and managers at hotels, customs agents and bellhops, pilots and stewardesses, seatmates and waitresses, unknown State Department functionaries who had cleared their entries and familiar immigration officials who had waved at me as I advanced toward them, holding the hand of a new charge. What could I do? I had long ago exhausted the names of friends and colleagues, and by the late 1970s the children were arriving so quickly that contriving imaginative names for them hardly seemed an essential concern.

“Why not?” I asked him. “It’s a good name.”

“Victor is a stupid name,” said Victor.