The People in the Trees

by Hanya Yanagihara

I was working from the assumption that the opa’ivu’eke caused some sort of … what? A disease? A condition? A state that led to an unnaturally long life—an immortal life. But it was a parody of immortality, because while the afflicted did in fact remain physically frozen at the age at which she had eaten the turtle, her mind did not. Bit by bit, it disintegrated—first the memory, then the social nuances, then the senses, and then finally speech—until all that was left was the body. The mind was gone, worn down by the years, its fissures and byways exhausted by having to perform for far more decades than it was organically equipped to do.