The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

that?”
    “Yes, I do,” I answered. He sighed once again, almost sadly, although that would have been impossible, as he neither knew me nor had any personal attachment to me. “When would I leave?”
    “I’ve been informed that he wants to depart soon, very soon—probably late June. You’d barely have time to graduate.”
    “That’s all right,” I assured him. I would have left earlier; my diploma meant nothing to me. “But sir,” I asked him, “why are you speaking to me about this? Why not Tallent’s contact?”
    “He’s out of town, but he asked me to speak with you as soon as I was able.”
    “Who is Tallent’s contact?” I asked. But I already knew the answer.
    “Gregory Smythe,” said Sereny. 18 He looked at me again, and this time he seemed puzzled himself. “He spoke very highly of you.”

    The fact that Smythe had suggested me for the job bothered me at the time, and it was not until I was much older and at my own lab that I realized his reasons for recommending me for such a job, one that would take me far away from him, one in which there would be no danger of encountering me on campus and becoming embarrassed upon seeing me—he had, after all, cried in front of me, and served me that strange meal—one in which the only people I could tell about his perplexing behavior would be Stone Age natives, their noses spliced with animal bones. By the time I had determined his motivations, though, there was nothing to forgive for such a self-serving act, and I had only pity for Smythe, his misshapen life and the even sadder turn it had taken. (It will perhaps say everything you need to know about the medical college, and Smythe too, when I tell you that my being offered this assignment was seen—by the Turks and their kind, at least—as a humiliating sort of punishment, and my acceptance as a sort of professional suicide, final proof of either my idiocy or my unacceptability, or both.)
    The next few months passed quickly. I was not nervous; I was not anxious: I did my coursework and went home every afternoon feeling light and calm. I began packing weeks early, assembling in a canvas rucksack what were now to be the tools of my trade—a spirometer, a thermometer, a blood pressure cuff and stethoscope, a reflex hammer, and a small portable microscope. I had a cedar-wood container, a little larger than a cigar box, in which I stored various small items—buttons and screws, thumbtacks and rubber bands—and into which I now packed two dozen glass syringes, each wrapped in gauze, and an extra dozen steel needles, and a metal flask I filled with disinfectant from the labs. I had received a brief letter from Paul Tallent, welcoming me to the project and giving me my instructions: we would meet on June 20 (a day after my graduation, it turned out) in Hawaii and from there hitch a ride on a military transport plane, which would detour on its way to Australia to drop us off in the Gilbert Islands, 19 from which we would continue to U’ivu. Beyond these details, however, he had provided little useful information: nothing on what to pack, nothing on what I might expect, nothing more specific about the nature of his studies, nothing even about the island itself. Months later, in U’ivu, I would spread my gear before me, marveling at how misguided I had been, how thoroughly I had miscalculated, and before my time there was over I would have left most of it—books, jackets, shoes, even my butterfly net—scattered through the jungles of U’ivu, abandoned as things no more relevant to the islanders’ lives than they would turn out to be to mine.
    In part, though, I cannot blame myself too severely, for my ignorance of the situation I was to enter was almost entirely due to the fact that the world at large was ignorant of U’ivu. Directly after leaving Sereny’s office, I went to the library to consult its atlas, and although I had the island’s coordinates, it took me a few seconds to locate it, my