The People in the Trees

  And then I saw someone skittering out of the darkness. His torso was hidden by shadows and so I could see only his legs; for a moment, I fancied that it was not one of the children but rather an imp, a wicked sprite who darted through darkened houses, searching for its other half.

  But of course I knew who it was. “Victor!” I called, as loudly as I dared, smacking the glass. To go around to the front door I would have to have been able to somehow straddle the wooden gate that separated the front from the back yard, which was not only taller than I but could be unlocked only from the front side (why? I wondered). I had no other options, no options but Victor. Screaming for help? It would not do to have the neighbors discovering me, the great scientist, in his bathrobe and slippers, locked out of his house and commanding one of his children to let him back in! (The other children I imagined upstairs, slouched into positions of unearned indolence, their round dark ears cupped with foam-fattened headphones, their poor fragile eardrums assaulted by thumping basslines, drumbeats, horns.) There was only Victor, only Victor. “Boy! Open the door this instant!”

  The legs stopped then, a few feet from me. “Boy,” I hissed. “Open the door right now. Do it now.” I was about to threaten him, but then I realized how weak and pathetic it sounded: I was the one outside in the cold, with only my bathrobe for cover. He was inside, in the house, in my house. In the windowpanes I could see the reflection of the tree, its lights blinking meaninglessly. On and off, on and off. “Victor!”

  And then he came suddenly very close to the glass, and I am sorry to say I took a short step backward, which he of course noticed. He smiled, and for a moment, with his fierce grin and sharp, bright, pointed teeth and his dark eyes—so moth-dark that it was difficult to determine where the pupil met the iris—he looked like a demon, and I was frightened of him.

  “My name,” he said, and I could hear him through the glass, “is Vi!”

  “Victor,” I said slowly, in a tone I knew was frightening, “you are to open this door right now. Then you are to go to bed. If you do not open this door right now, I will beat you so hard that you will be unrecognizable.” To myself I thought, I will anyway, whether he opens the door now or five minutes from now.

  But he just tilted his head and stared at me. Nor did he drop his ferocious smile, which stretched his mouth into a long, thin, evil-looking shape, like the blade of a scythe. It was, I realized, the same awful smile I thought I had rid him of all those years before, and I felt a shiver run through me. “I would have,” he said, in a voice that was meant to mimic my own. “But you called me Victor. After you said you would not.”

  I knew he was not finished. “Victor!” I hit the door again. “Victor, you animal!”

  But he was not shaken. “And so,” he continued, “I’m afraid that makes you a liar. And what is it that you’ve always taught us about lying? That it is a degradation of one’s integrity. But I don’t believe that. I believe that it damages the person you lied to as much as the person who told the lie. And so I am going to punish you.” He took a step back, so his face was lost again to shadows. Still, I could hear his voice. “I’m afraid,” he said, in that cold voice, “that I will have to leave you there to think about what you have done.” Another step back, so I could see him only from his chest down. And now his voice was fainter too. “It’s never too late”—another step back; only his waist and legs were visible—“to learn a lesson.” Another step back. “Papa.” The word felt like no more than a whisper. And then he turned, and I could see the whites of his soles as he walked away from me.

  I realized then that I had remained frozen during the last part of Victor’s speech, and suddenly I saw my reflection in the glass: my palm, crepey and lined, scratching against the door, my mouth gaping and mute, my eyes startled and wide with the helpless confusion of the elderly. My god, I thought. My god. Who is he? Who is this child I have living in my house? I thought again of how I had found him, curled on the ground, covered with a layer of soot so dense it was like a pelt. Like an animal, I had thought, and had been outraged. But now I thought it again. Like an animal. And my outrage, though no less real, was not directed at his circumstances but at myself. I should have left him, I thought. It was never my place to try to save something that no one else had wanted.

  But I continued to call. “Victor!” I shouted, as loudly as I could. I clawed at the door. “Victor! Victor!” I continued to bang against the door and call for minutes, hours. “Victor!” While upstairs, I knew, he lay curled up in the bed I had given him, in the room I had given him, and slept.

  It was Gregory, one of the adult children, who found me the next morning, slumped against the doorframe. It seemed as if I had eventually succumbed to sleep, and when I was awoken by his cry, I was made to experience anew both the indignity of my situation and my physical dishevelment—a long sparkling floss of saliva stretched from lip to chin, and once inside, I began to shake with such ferocity that I could hear my teeth clicking against one another like castanets.

  “Papa, what were you doing outside?” he asked me. I assumed he had already opened his envelope, for he was particularly solicitous, scurrying around me, handing me his cup of coffee, draping a blanket around my shoulders.

  “What time is it?” I asked him, and my voice was hoarse; the words scraped against my throat.

  “Eight,” he said.

  Eight. How long had I been outside in the cold? Five hours? Six? Only anger, the taste of it hot in my mouth like blood, had kept me from freezing.

  Gregory led me through the kitchen and into the living room, where I saw that all the children had gathered and were busy palming handfuls of candy into their mouths, laughing and talking and fighting.

  “Look who I found outside,” Gregory announced loudly (he had always craved attention), and the others looked. And then at once there was a great sound, not unlike the sound of a flock of large birds rising from the beach, and a good many of them (the older and the very young ones only; the adolescents merely gazed at me stupidly) came charging at me, their arms open and expressions of great, elaborate pity wrought on their faces.

  “Papa, we were looking for you!”

  “Where were you?”

  “Are you shaking?”

  “You’re so cold!”

  “I didn’t get as many candies as Jared did.”

  But I wasn’t listening; instead, I looked among them for Victor. But he wasn’t there.

  And then suddenly he came whooping into the room, holding high in one hand a couple of batteries and tucked under his other arm the remote-controlled car that he had begged for and that I had bought and wrapped for him not a week before. “I’ve got them!” he was shouting, sliding across the carpet to land near Jack. “It’ll work now.” He had not yet seen me.

  That little beast, I thought. That wretched monster. I wished fervently that he was dead, or that I might be able to kill him.

  “Victor,” I said, and I kept my voice icy. “Victor.”

  Naturally, he did not look up.

  “Victor!”

  There was no response. But by now a sort of murmuring, wondering disapproval was wending its way through the room. The adults, some of whom were not familiar with the battle that had been fought (and surrendered) over Victor’s name change, scowled openly at him. “Answer Papa when he talks to you, Victor,” I heard someone say, and a tiny voice, a girl’s, responding, “It’s Vi now.”

  Then I was walking over to him. “Stand up,” I commanded him. “Stand up.” He looked down, his mouth disobedient and wide and flat and ugly as a sand dab’s, and would not. I grabbed him by his arm and brought him to his feet. He was only a few inches shorter than I, but scrawny, and I could feel the sharp, complicated bones of his elbow underneath my hands. And then I hit him, in the face, as hard as I could. His head jerked backward, then snapped forward. I hit him again. Both times I used the flat of my palm, and after, my hand stung in the same needley way it had when I had been slapping the glass, yelli
ng after him. “How dare you?” I asked him, keeping my voice low and awful. “How dare you, you beastly insect, you thing, you nothing. How dare you come down here, partake in my kindness, my generosity. How dare you open the gifts you’ve done nothing to deserve but that I bought you—I bought you—out of kindness?

  “Do you know,” I heard myself continue, “why I took you in? I took you in because I pitied you. Because you were less than a human, less than a child. Your father would have sold you to me for a piece of rotting fruit. I could have done to you anything I wished. I could have taken you with me and kept you chained in the basement and no one would have known or cared. I could have sold you to a man who would first have mutilated you and then chopped you into bits for pigs’ feed. There are people who would have done this, too, and your father was perfectly willing to sell you to any of them. It only happened that he sold you to me first.

  “You are nothing. I gave you meaning. I gave you a life. And this is how you behave?” I slapped him again. A thin rivulet of dark blood began to creep from his nostril.

  Around me the room had of course gone utterly silent. I knew that if I looked, I would see them as still as marble, their mouths slightly open, their arms full of the gifts I had given them.

  I bent, still holding his arm, and picked up his toy car, his stocking heavy with candy, and flung them at the nearest child, who was too stunned to squeal in delight. “Toys are not for animals,” I told him. “And you are less than one. Now go. Get out of my sight. I don’t want to see you. I dropped his arm then, and he stood, slightly swaying, before turning and walking toward the staircase.

  “No,” I called after him. “Animals stay in the basement. Downstairs.”

  He turned again, still rocking a bit, and looked at me, directly at me. For a second a strange smile seemed to move over his mouth, but then I realized that it was one of confusion and fear, not triumph, and allowed myself to relax. And then, without a word, he turned again, and we watched him walk out of the living room, and through the kitchen, and then down the stairs to the basement, the door latching shut quietly behind him. I walked over, locked the door after him, and slipped the key into my bathrobe pocket. Behind me the room was still, as toneless and suspended as a scene in a picture.

  The day was ruined, of course. The older children left soon after, waving vaguely in my direction and thanking me with a carefulness that I found embarrassing. The younger children cleaned up the living room without my having to ask and sneaked upstairs with their new toys and clothes. We usually ate together on Christmas, but that day I went instead to my study, and then to my bedroom, where I slept. When I woke, late that afternoon, I could hear the children creeping about downstairs, fixing themselves plates of food.

  I stayed in my room all night long. Around me the house settled into a fur-thick silence. It occurred to me late that night, as I lay awake, that Victor had meant for me to die outside, to freeze against my own door at my own house.

  Oh, I thought, and shivered. I had had children who had despised me before, had loathed me in fact, whose eyes were animated and had shone with hatred. But I had never had one who had tried to kill me, who had detested me so much that he would try to facilitate my end. Realizing this was somewhat perversely reassuring, for I was now aware what he was capable of, and it would be my new task to sort out how best to control him. I would not, I decided, be frightened of my own child. I could not.

  The next morning, before the sun rose, I went downstairs to the kitchen and prepared two plates of food. On each I folded slices of turkey, a few sharp triangles of cheese, rolls crunchy with nuts, a spoonful of olives glistening with oil, and a mound of buttery lettuce. I set one of the plates in front of my seat at the kitchen table. Then I unlocked the door to the basement and placed the other at the top of the stairs.

  I had half expected to find him sitting there, ready to spring into my face like a feral cat, but instead the basement was dark, the stairs vanishing into the black, and completely silent. Indeed, I could hear nothing, no breath, no sound. “Victor,” I called into the dark silence, “I have left you some food.” I paused, uncertain how to continue. “I will leave you more later today,” I finally announced. I wanted to say something else, something declarative, but could not think of what it might be. And so in the end I simply closed the door behind me, locked it, and sat down to enjoy my meal.

  At the end of the day, before I went to bed, I unlocked the door again to leave him another plate. But the one I had left him that morning was still there, its contents untouched, the edges of the turkey browning and curling like old parchment paper. I said nothing, though, merely placed the new plate down next to the first.

  When, three days later, I opened the door for good, there were eight plates, each full of moldering food, completely undisturbed but for a single fly that moved dozily from one plate to another, complacent in the face of such unspoiled variety. “Victor,” I called into the blackness, “I am leaving for work now. Please clean this up after you leave.” Once again I hesitated, unsure what else to say. And then I left, leaving the door ajar behind me.

  That day at work I found it difficult to concentrate: What would greet me that night? Whenever the phone rang, I flinched, certain that this would be the time one of the techs would come and fetch me, his eyes wide, to tell me that the police, the fire department, the hospital, was on the line for me. I had a vision of driving home, the sky above me dark with swirling clouds, and then I would realize that it was not clouds I saw but smoke, and I would follow it home to see my house burned to cinders, the lawn transformed into a volcanic sprawl, the children standing on the edge of the curb in a weeping clutch, Victor nowhere to be found.

  But when I went home that evening, although the door to the basement remained open, the plates were gone. Later, I saw them cleaned and stacked in a neat pile on the counter, almost glowing in the white pool made by the overhead light.82

  After that, the situation with Victor became, if not easier, then at least more predictable. Indeed, there is hardly anything more worth saying on the matter. He never became what I suppose one would call an exemplary, or even a good, child, but neither did he slide into delinquency, as I was certain he would. Instead, he spent the next five years in my house merely existing, at once both present and not. During the children’s monthly movie nights, he would lie on his stomach, slightly separate from the group, and eat popcorn in the same distracted, vacant way he now did everything, staring at the screen without reacting. Sometimes after the rest of the children had laughed at something he might chuckle too, but it would always be a beat too late, and no one would understand why he was laughing. Nor, I think, would he. He became a set of social reflexes, many of them misapplied just enough to make him sometimes seem very strange, a person for whom time was measured on a different scale. He would look at me with those flat eyes, but where once had been challenge and obstinance now there was nothing, just a dull black like a shallow puddle of oily water.

  If I am guilty of anything, I suppose, it is the fact that I was secretly quite contented with Victor’s new state. And yet I knew too that it was not healthy, that it was not something I should desire for one of my children. But I could not help myself. He had been so horrible for so long that I almost allowed myself to believe that this was in fact who Victor had been before he had been seized by the furies of adolescence, before he had been transformed into a defiant, willful, uncontrollable creature, as different from the toddler I remembered as a beast was to a human. And besides, he was not a zombie; he took pleasure from many things in life: he competed with his high school’s track and field team, for instance, and joined the school choir. (Listening to them sing at a concert, I could distinguish his flat, toneless tenor from the others’ and wondered why he had not been dismissed.) His grades were mediocre, but he had never been a stellar student. Still, I told him—as I told all the children—that I would gladly send him to the best college that would accept him, and when that proved to
be Towson State, I wrote the first tuition check straightaway and bought him a brushed-steel watch, just as I had done for both William and Isolde two years before when they had graduated from high school. Later I helped him pack his clothes and books and various knickknacks into boxes and garbage bags and left him at his dormitory room with his new sheets and towels Mrs. Lansing had bought him. After that I saw him less frequently, although of course he was always welcome in the house. Like the other children, he liked college, or rather I assumed he did, for I never heard from him. Really, only the bill from the bursar’s office and the intermittent report cards (which told me that his major was something called sports ideology and that he was making Cs and, in a couple of classes, Bs) told me that he was still where I pictured him, attending classes or not, reading or not, perhaps going to parties or sleeping with pretty girls, the sort who found his elusive national origin exciting. At times I found myself wondering idly, as I had not done with the other children, what he had done the previous night or what he was doing at that moment. I pictured him in class, his legs stretched out in front of him, throwing back his head on his long neck and yawning, his mouth opening wide to reveal his fleshy salmon tongue and his white, white teeth, each topped with a tiny, pricey porcelain cap.

  One day during the spring of Victor’s sophomore year of college, I was sitting at home in the garden. It was a beautiful, damp day, the kind of early-spring day in which everything becomes, as if at once, a hundred unnameable shades of startling green, and I was gazing at the trees, their new leaves so tender and young and light that they were as translucent and resplendent as if fashioned from thin sheets of gold. I had come home early from work because I had been suffering from an intestinal flu, and my head felt cottony, my saliva tangy with bile. But I remember feeling grateful to be at home and in my garden, with the world quiet around me.