The People in the Trees (40 page)

We made plans to meet for dinner. Owen had a friend with a car and drove down to Palo Alto. Why we decided to remain near campus and not go into San Francisco eludes me now. But my world had by that time shrunk to such a narrow locus—the lab, my on-campus apartment—that it is simply likely I was unable to think beyond its borders.

It felt pleasantly familiar (a strange sensation, after months of aggressive unfamiliarity) to see Owen, although he now had a beard and was fatter than I remembered.

“Hi,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Hi,” I said, and shook it. “You got fat.”

He shrugged and grunted irritatedly. I remembered that he had never had a very good sense of humor. “Let’s go.”

We had drinks, and I asked him about his work. “Are the students smart?”

“What do you think?” He grunted again. “They’re silly girls. They spend most of their time here, actually”—meaning Stanford—“and at Cal, trying to meet husbands.” He sighed. “I feel like a cow in a henhouse.”

“You mean a fox,” I said.

He looked annoyed. “No,” he said, “I mean a cow. Cows are herbivores. They eat grass. They’re not interested in eating chickens. To them, they’re just smelly and stupid birds.”

I suppose this was Owen’s way of telling me he was homosexual, for we never discussed his preferences again, and yet the next time I saw him, it was in the company of a very young man who laughed nervously at Owen’s every weak joke. Many years later, when people began to discuss such topics publicly, I heard him recount to someone how he had “come out” to me. It was clear that he was (still) quite
pleased with his cleverness, but hearing it again only reminded me of what a tortured and unsuccessful metaphor it was.

Over dinner, as I half listened to Owen drone on about the college and how much he hated California, and some long explanation about something that seemed to have happened to my winter coat when he had had to use it to put out a fire in his room, I reflected upon how fundamentally naive he was, how small and plebeian his concerns were, and how he never could have endured what I had, and how profoundly changed I now was. I had no disdain for him, however, and indeed, it was soothing to be with someone for whom life was a series of the familiar, whose every problem was solvable, who could find such pleasure in the everyday. It was startling to remember that I had once been one of those people as well. Now, however, I no longer was.

II
.

Of all the emotions to describe in retrospect, happiness is perhaps the most dull, but awe is the most difficult. Years later I would be asked (and asked and asked) how I felt when the fourth month and then the fifth month and then the sixth month passed and the mice I had fed the opa’ivu’eke lived on, burrowing into their shredded-paper caves, spinning vapidly on their wheels, sucking at their cages’ water bottles, even as the control group became an ever-vaguer memory, incinerated long ago after they all died, one after the next, in the seventeenth through twentieth months of their lives.

“I was amazed,” I would say, and while this was true, it also was not. Although I could not say so until much later (I was still endeavoring back then to be humble, as it was notable displays of humility that won young researchers grants), any initial shock I might have felt was eclipsed by a quiet sense of vindication. As I watched the mice live on and on, I felt no excitement of discovery; in fact, the whole thing seemed a bit anticlimactic. My theory had always made sense to me, and I had never doubted it, but now I would have to go through the necessary (and tedious) steps of proving it to everyone else.

I had the second group of mice (the ones I had procured as pinkies) already started on the regimen, but in July of 1951 I began
a third experiment, this time on a group of 200 fifteen-month-old mice. If my theories were correct, the 100 mice who ingested the opa’ivu’eke would live, on median, at least twice as long as their natural lifespan.

While I was watching mice and getting bored stupid with the dreamers, however, Tallent was becoming famous. In October of 1951 (the opa’ivu’eke-eating mice from the first group were by then twenty-three months old and as frisky as ever), he published a report entitled “The ‘Lost Tribe’ of U’ivu: An Ethnological Study of the Village Peoples of Ivu’ivu” in the
Journal of Ethnography
. A fevered skim of the article revealed page after page of highly pointillist renderings of the tribe’s family structures, rites, rituals (not, notably, the a’ina’ina), philosophies, origin myths, taboos, notions of time, and social workings but relatively little—shockingly little—about their extended lifetimes. There was a long section about the opa’ivu’eke, and an excessively granular description of the vaka’ina (so granular that it managed to convey none of the wonder and terror one felt while watching it), and, buried in an endnote, this comment:

I have spoken of the tribe’s fascination with immortality. Although this is a preoccupation central to the U’ivuans’ mythology as well, it would not be overstating the case to call it a subject of obsession among the villagers. Indeed, they believe that the ingestion of the opa’ivu’eke
⁵⁰
—
the turtle devoured during the vaka’ina ritual by those reaching or having surpassed the age of sixty o’anas—confers eternal life. There is, of course, no conclusive scientific proof of these claims, although there is evidence that certain members of the tribe are unusually long-lived
.

Reading this, I felt three things. First, amusement at Tallent’s timidity; was it not he who had been so quick to insist that Ika’ana was centuries old? Second, an odd sort of relief at his uncharacteristic circumspection: not only had he not revealed what was fundamentally my discovery, but he had left room for me to enrich and emboss his account with my own. And third—and following those
initial two reactions—a niggling suspicion that Esme, not Tallent, had been responsible not only for the note (its poor delivery, its bland writing) but also for Tallent’s apparently newfound wariness.

Fairly or not, I found myself disappointed with Tallent. As I have said, I did not and do not consider anthropologists the most creative and disarming of thinkers—though they do take superlative and meticulous notes—but I had come to admire what I had grown to see as his single-mindedness. But he was also to be my first lesson in the strange phenomenon that besets all of us who travel to strange places and find our own assumptions and lessons proven not just wrong, but opposite. It is very easy to be intellectually brave in such locations, where the academy, one’s peers, and the entirety of Western history and religion feel not only irrelevant but misguided. But
unlearning
things is much more difficult than learning them, and even the most courageous of minds will find itself tempted to retreat back into the known at the first opportunity. It is astonishing and a little sad to realize how many discoveries, how many advancements, have been delayed for years, for decades, not because the information was unavailable but because of sheer cowardice, fear of being laughed at, of being ostracized by one’s colleagues.

Luckily, I was never limited by such worries or constrained by such fears (being ostracized by my colleagues seemed something to covet, not avoid). And so in 1953, I published a brief postulative paper
⁵¹
—really nothing more than an announcement, the medical equivalent of Martin Luther posting his theses on the church’s wooden door
⁵²
—in a small, now-defunct journal called the
Annals
of Nutritional Epidemiology
. In it I revealed my findings: not only were a significant percentage of the mice from the first group that had eaten the opa’ivu’eke still alive, but so were the mice from the second and third groups.
⁵³

It is very difficult for my biographers and for younger scientists to comprehend when I tell them with what ridicule, what scorn, what
hatred
this paper was received. The
Annals of Nutritional Epidemiology
was at best an obscure publication, but somehow my essay seemed to be read by people who would not normally have troubled themselves with such journals, and in the coming months the
Annals
(rather pantingly, I thought) published all manner of letters from various doctors and scientists outraged that this sort of “childish fiction and robust fantasies” should be taking the place of real science, etc., etc. The fellows in the adjoining lab—still bitter at my youth, my space, and my mysterious funding—took to dropping by
under the pretense of talking to Cheolyu, whom they’d update with fresh insults about my work that they’d recently overheard from this chemist or that biologist. (The fact that Cheolyu would only gape at them and every now and again blink his small eyes behind his glasses until they triumphantly flounced out seemed not to register with them at all.)

Did any of this bother me? No, it did not. I was certain I was correct—more and more certain, in fact, when, with each passing month, the opa’ivu’eke-fed mice lived on, their little lives stretching out, a thin elastic line, longer and longer—and as I have said, it was not in my nature to listen to the chatter of others, especially others for whom I had no particular regard.

However, I was also not impractical. The one, the only frustrating thing about my paper’s less-than-enthusiastic reception was that it would retard my ability to make for myself the kind of life I had decided I wanted. I have spoken before about my fundamental ambivalence about lab life, and this was still true. But if the rhythms of the lab were not necessarily always the most stimulating, the rhythms of my
own
lab were. Being left alone—without oversight, without having to report to anyone, without having to manage someone else’s pointless projects—was a glorious freedom, and one I realized very quickly I wanted for myself. I wanted to perform my own experiments. I wanted to write what I wanted, to answer what I wanted, to follow my every passion and curiosity. In order to do that, I would need my own lab. And in order to have my own lab, I would need funding, which meant I also needed to be proven, very quickly, legitimate.

I spent much of my time brooding over this apparently insurmountable problem, gazing at nothing while Cheolyu fed the mice and made notes and dealt with the dreamers (with whom I was working less and less). And then, beginning in late February of 1954, two things happened in quick succession that would change my fate. The first came in the form of a letter from, of all people, Adolphus Sereny. In his short note, Sereny congratulated me on my successful return from U’ivu and—revealing himself a secret herpetologist—my essay on the opa’ivu’eke. More important, though, he admitted himself intrigued by my paper in
Nutritional Epidemiology
and expressed interest in re-creating my experiments. I
of course immediately responded. Sereny was a respected scientist with a well-organized lab. If he could successfully replicate my findings (and I had no doubt that he would), it would confer on me an almost instant and absolute acceptance and validity, which would in turn lead to the sort of life and intellectual freedom I craved. Even I could not help but appreciate the irony of my situation: Sereny, who I had thought hated me! I had Cheolyu carefully pack one of the opa’ivu’eke’s legs,
⁵⁴
along with complete copies of my data and detailed instructions on dosing, etc., and sent it off to Cambridge.

The second thing that happened was that the mice from both the first and, to a lesser extent, the third study began demonstrating dramatic signs of mental decay. At this point, the mice from the first group were fifty-one months old and those from the third group forty-six months old. I was not exactly unprepared for this; even as I had readied the paper for publication the previous summer, Cheolyu had noticed that the mice in the first group had been behaving oddly: they would run in tight circles, so quickly and crazily that their feet would tangle up in one another and they would fall onto their backs, kicking their paws in the air and chirping. Or they would press their noses into a corner of the cage and make strange, unrodentlike gulping gestures, opening their little mouths and closing them again and again. They would do this for hours sometimes, their azalea-pink eyes wide open and unblinking. This made sense to me; after all, they had at that point been alive slightly longer than twice their natural lifespan, the same point at which the dreamers had begun to demonstrate their first symptoms of mo’o kua’au-ness. What was truly exciting was the behavior that they were demonstrating as they reached the point at which they would be alive for three times as long as their natural lifespan, or about the equivalent of Eve’s age. And indeed, as I had hoped, their deterioration had become suddenly more profound. Seven months before, they had experienced periods of lucidity, when their behavior was still recognizably mouselike: they ran in their wheels, they burrowed in their snowfalls of shredded
paper, they picked up the pieces of food we gave them with their two front paws and nibbled away. Now, however, the twenty-three mice who remained had lost even those basic behavioral reflexes.

Later I would be asked how and why I had decided not to reveal these findings. But it was hardly a decision that was mine to make. As I have said, no one was exactly clamoring for my thoughts on anything, much less mice with extended lifetimes who were displaying progressive dementia. Even if I had wanted to say something, no one would have listened. However, I must admit that something else—I hate to use such a term as
precognition
, but there it is—also kept me silent. I knew even then that one day soon my discoveries would be legitimized and appreciated for what they were, and that in the mice’s behavioral deterioration was not only the next step in the narrative but my next challenge. I had already proven that the opa’ivu’eke could prolong life; now I had to discover how it might do so without delivering in tandem its terrible punishment.