Read Online The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Hanya Yanagihara
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quite competitive. Each disdained the other for the supposed inferiority of his education (a curious thing, as they had been classmates from prep school through medical school), his intellectual vivacity (again, both seemed equally unimaginative to me), and, it became clear, for his relative favor with Smythe at any moment.
Beneath Brassard and Fitch were four junior residents, also M.D.’s, named Parton, Nesser, Ulliver, and Curtis. The four of them were in their way even more insufferable than Brassard and Fitch, who had chosen them (with Smythe’s approval). All of them too had gone to boarding school (though not Brassard and Fitch’s), and all of them walked about the lab with an expression that aspired to solemnity—a gently furrowed brow underneath hair still cut in a schoolboy style, their hands clasped behind their backs in an approximation of greatness—but that was, despite its ambition and seriousness of intent, unable to conceal the slight smiles they wore when they thought others weren’t looking, that admiring preen that women affect upon encountering a mirrored surface. I was assigned to work with Parton, whom I liked best of the bunch, for his smooth, fat-cheeked face and messy shirt (for which he was always being rebuked by the Turks, to whom these sorts of details mattered) and for the fact that he left me alone, forgetting for days that I was assisting him with his experiments and that he was therefore responsible for monitoring my movements and, as they called it, daily output of activity.
After the junior residents came the two medical students: me and a fellow named Julian Turnbull, who was a great favorite of the Turks’ and who never once spoke to me, as if my very inappropriateness were a condition he might be able to contract by even the briefest communication. So he stayed away, and that suited me fine; I knew he was in my year, and that he was from somewhere in Connecticut, and that he had a fiancée at Wellesley, but I knew nothing of how he thought nor where his intelligence lay, for he neverspoke of those matters, almost as if they were incidental to his life at the lab.
Next came two undergraduates, both of them usually biology majors at the college (these turned over so quickly and were at any rate so interchangeable that none of us ever bothered to learn their names), both of them headed for medical school, both of them always looking rather frightened: to be working in Smythe’s lab as an undergraduate was an almost kingly honor, and they wore on their faces expressions of fear and pride. Looking at them, I sometimes wondered what promises had been extracted from them to win them these slots, what tests they had had to pass with their advisers, what obligations they now carried.
After the undergraduates came a man named Dean O’Grady, who, in the humor of the day, was known as Fat Irish because he was fat and Irish. Fat Irish was the person in the lab whose work was the most visible and qualifiable: while the rest of us took notes and flicked our fingernails against air bubbles in syringes and extracted blood and took more notes, Fat Irish took care of the animals, and did the things we would not. He cleaned the monkeys’ cages and fed them a slurry of browned bananas and oatmeal. He changed the mice’s water and cleaned weeping scabs from the dogs’ eyes. I was impressed by his impassivity: he was neither an animal lover nor a sentimentalist (the lab had once had one of those, I learned, and it had ended disastrously when Fitch had discovered him late one night trying to shoo the dogs from their cages and into his waiting truck), nor did he seem impressed by or interested in the lab itself. You sometimes had animal caretakers—as I would have myself one day—whose hatred for the people who ran the lab was visceral. It was not because they were animal lovers (a job application from anyone who admitted to loving animals was immediately thrown away) but because they abhorred
Beneath Brassard and Fitch were four junior residents, also M.D.’s, named Parton, Nesser, Ulliver, and Curtis. The four of them were in their way even more insufferable than Brassard and Fitch, who had chosen them (with Smythe’s approval). All of them too had gone to boarding school (though not Brassard and Fitch’s), and all of them walked about the lab with an expression that aspired to solemnity—a gently furrowed brow underneath hair still cut in a schoolboy style, their hands clasped behind their backs in an approximation of greatness—but that was, despite its ambition and seriousness of intent, unable to conceal the slight smiles they wore when they thought others weren’t looking, that admiring preen that women affect upon encountering a mirrored surface. I was assigned to work with Parton, whom I liked best of the bunch, for his smooth, fat-cheeked face and messy shirt (for which he was always being rebuked by the Turks, to whom these sorts of details mattered) and for the fact that he left me alone, forgetting for days that I was assisting him with his experiments and that he was therefore responsible for monitoring my movements and, as they called it, daily output of activity.
After the junior residents came the two medical students: me and a fellow named Julian Turnbull, who was a great favorite of the Turks’ and who never once spoke to me, as if my very inappropriateness were a condition he might be able to contract by even the briefest communication. So he stayed away, and that suited me fine; I knew he was in my year, and that he was from somewhere in Connecticut, and that he had a fiancée at Wellesley, but I knew nothing of how he thought nor where his intelligence lay, for he neverspoke of those matters, almost as if they were incidental to his life at the lab.
Next came two undergraduates, both of them usually biology majors at the college (these turned over so quickly and were at any rate so interchangeable that none of us ever bothered to learn their names), both of them headed for medical school, both of them always looking rather frightened: to be working in Smythe’s lab as an undergraduate was an almost kingly honor, and they wore on their faces expressions of fear and pride. Looking at them, I sometimes wondered what promises had been extracted from them to win them these slots, what tests they had had to pass with their advisers, what obligations they now carried.
After the undergraduates came a man named Dean O’Grady, who, in the humor of the day, was known as Fat Irish because he was fat and Irish. Fat Irish was the person in the lab whose work was the most visible and qualifiable: while the rest of us took notes and flicked our fingernails against air bubbles in syringes and extracted blood and took more notes, Fat Irish took care of the animals, and did the things we would not. He cleaned the monkeys’ cages and fed them a slurry of browned bananas and oatmeal. He changed the mice’s water and cleaned weeping scabs from the dogs’ eyes. I was impressed by his impassivity: he was neither an animal lover nor a sentimentalist (the lab had once had one of those, I learned, and it had ended disastrously when Fitch had discovered him late one night trying to shoo the dogs from their cages and into his waiting truck), nor did he seem impressed by or interested in the lab itself. You sometimes had animal caretakers—as I would have myself one day—whose hatred for the people who ran the lab was visceral. It was not because they were animal lovers (a job application from anyone who admitted to loving animals was immediately thrown away) but because they abhorred
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