The People in the Trees (11 page)

“I’m not like that,” I wanted to say, but I said nothing. He was drunk, I could now see. How long had he been like this? Had he been drunk when I first came in? I felt suddenly foolish, and childish, and embarrassed for myself. Why could I not see what was before me? What was the trick to understanding people that I alone seemed unable to possess? As I thought, Smythe was making strange noises, small gulping sounds. I thought he was choking, but when I hurried to him, I realized he was crying, his chin flat against the napkin still tucked into his shirt, his hands folded in his lap like a child’s. “Oh god,” he said. “Oh god.” I did not know what to do. My coat was on the chair next to me, where Smythe had placed it. I picked it up and fled.

The following Monday I did not go into the lab. I did not go to any of my classes. Instead I stayed home and read, or looked at my atlas and made lists of places I wanted to see. I thought occasionally of what Smythe had said to me and decided he was wrong. I thought of him crying and felt pity for myself and disgust for him. For meals, I made my favorite snack, hot oatmeal into which I stirred raw eggs,
until I realized that it was the sort of strange concoction Smythe might serve. I was terrified that I might become him, although it was not until some years later—about the time, in fact, I discovered what a persimmon should truly taste like—that I was able to define why: that worse than his poor science, the flimsy scholarship, was his small, inexplicable life alone in that strange house, with no one around to distract him from the meagerness of his own existence. It startled me to learn this about myself, that I had such petty, poor fears, that I had come to think in such trite and soft ways.

After a few days of my moping, the medical school secretary called, asking snippily if I was planning on returning to classes, followed by Brassard, who told me in his sniffing way that I had potentially ruined Parton’s experiment and oughtn’t bother returning. When I hung up, I was relieved, for in the space of my dinner with Smythe the lab had come to seem a sort of trap, a sort of place where I
would
become like him, holding my theory tightly to me, idealess, terrified of the inevitable day when I would be proved an imposter. Or at least this is what I told myself I feared. Now I had been not just released but told I was inappropriate, that I would never become one of them, and their words, their dismissal, left me shaky with joy. I was safe, I thought, and for some time, for a long time, I was.

The next day I returned to my classes. My professors—some of whom were quite close to the Turks—seemed to have heard that I was no longer with Smythe’s lab and, surprisingly, treated me better than they had before, although I was still nobody exceptional. But I was careful not to feel resentful about this, as I might have before. I thought of Smythe—“But
now
they’re coming back to me,
now
they’re giving me what I want”—and cringed. For the next year I attended classes and sat silently in the lecture halls, determined not to make myself into something more significant than I really was. It was my first lesson in humility, in the lab or in life.
¹⁶

III
.

One of the attractions of medical school for the unimaginative (or, if I am to be more charitable, to the less dreamily inclined) is certainly the lack of choices it offers. Of course, a doctor, whether he works with patients or alone, with tissues, must make dozens of decisions within a given day, but the larger questions—the ones about what you must do next in life—are answered for you. Indeed, you need never think about what the next year will bring, because for many years the path is laid before you, and it is only your duty to follow it. College leads to medical school, which leads to internships and residencies, which leads perhaps to fellowships, then to an appointment or a private practice or a job in a hospital or a group. It is this way now, and it was this way when I was in school as well.

By the January of my last year in medical school, I was feeling anxious. It was not a familiar sensation, and not a welcome one, either. I had no intention of working with patients, and so while my classmates interviewed for internships, I sat in my room like a hunk of wood, waiting for my future to resolve itself. It embarrasses me now, how inactive I was, how I allowed ignorance and naïveté to stymie me, but at the time it seemed a no more or less effective way of answering a future I could not even begin to imagine for myself.

A few months into this paralysis, probably in March or so—a year after my disastrous dinner with Smythe, in fact—one of my instructors, a man named Adolphus Sereny,
¹⁷
with whom I was completing
my surgical rotation, asked me to come see him in his office at the hospital one day.

“Well, Perina,” said Sereny. “What do you plan to do when you graduate?”

“I don’t know, sir,” I told him.

Sereny looked at me for a long moment and then sighed. He was a large, cushiony man, with a fringe of pale, pebble-colored hair circling the back of his head. We had never spoken before outside of rounds, or much during them.

“Something has come up,” he said, “and you have been suggested for it.”

“What is it?” I asked.

He sighed again; not irritatedly, I think now, but because he was fat and puffy and it was in his nature to sigh. When he moved in his chair, air gusted from him. “Well, here it is,” he began. “There’s a man named Paul Tallent. An anthropologist from Stanford—young, well regarded. He claims to have evidence of some lost tribe on an island called U’ivu. Have you heard of it?” I hadn’t. “Well, never mind. It’s somewhere in Micronesia, I understand, though you’ll have to look at an atlas to confirm exactly where. Small spot. At any rate, he has a private grant of some sort, reasonably substantial, I understand, to go there and study them—if he can find them, that is.” Another sigh, though this one intentional, I believe. Doctors in those days did not think much of anthropologists, who were considered, often rightly, not truly scientists. “His team will include him, of course, and his assistant, and a doctor, who will be responsible for drawing blood, taking samples, recording, and”—he flapped a plump hand—“so on. He has connections here, and asked if a young doctor could be convinced to go with him. You were recommended. Are you interested?”

It may have been the first time in my life I felt giddy. “I am, sir.”

“You understand, Perina,” said Sereny with a sort of sternness I found dramatic and therefore thrilling, “that this is at least a four-month appointment, that there probably won’t be money for you to come home during that period? And that nothing at all may come of this … expedition? That it could be many months of your life spent chasing down someone else’s imaginings? That this island you’ll be living on is, for all purposes, terra incognita? That it will almost
assuredly be uncomfortable, in all likelihood intensely so? Do you understand 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 finger skimming over pages of blue ocean. And then I found it: three small chips of light green arranged as three points in a ragged isoceles, its topography rendered unspecific and blurry, a little less than a thousand miles east of Tahiti. Further research yielded a small collection of facts, each interesting on its own but which once
combined somehow failed to illuminate one another in any helpful way. The country, I read, had never been colonized. Like the Hawaiians, its people were thought to have immigrated from Tahiti five thousand years ago on outrigger canoes. They were a hunting and fishing culture; all children, both boys and girls, were expected to kill (the encyclopedia did not specify how) a wild boar before their fourteenth birthday.
²⁰
They had a king, Tuimai’ele, who had three wives and thirty children and who lived in a wooden palace in the capital, Tavaka. It was not a wealthy country, but the soil was rich and there was always food. But once its people had been notorious for their ferocity, and tales of their love of brutality and zest for cruelty had carried across the seas—so far, in fact, that theirs was the lone country that Captain James Cook purposefully bypassed in his 1787 travels through the Pacific. (“The fierceness of the Wevooans,” he wrote in a letter to a friend the year prior, “makes the crew uneasy, and as it is difficult to sail, we shall not be anchoring there.”)

I read this in the encyclopedia, but I could not believe all of it: the wooden palace, the king with thirty children, the wild boar killing—they all seemed somehow familiar, like something I had once read in, say, a Kipling story about some faraway, allegorical land. But although I had not enough experience in the world to prove this, I suspected even then that the strangest details were the most mundane, and that what we tell others to shock will only inure them to realizing what is truly remarkable. And in this perception I was not to be proven wrong.

¹²
Hamilton College, summa cum laude, 1946; Harvard Medical School, cum laude, 1950. Both Norton and Owen received medical deferments from the armed forces in 1944, Norton on the grounds of his flat feet and mild but recurring sciatica and Owen for his asthma and extreme astigmatism.

¹³
A well-known professor might pick one, or at the most two, of his most promising medical or undergraduate students to work in his lab for anything from one to four terms. These students are usually chosen on the basis of their grades, test scores, dedication, and diligence.