To Paradise

by Hanya Yanagihara

How could he leave these walls that had stared blankly, plainly back at him through all of his states?

It was as if he had been bewitched and, knowing it, had sought not to fight against it but to surrender, to leave behind the world he thought he knew for another, and all because he wanted to attempt to be not the person he was—but the one he dreamed of being.

To Edward, he was not ignorant after all but innocent, something small and precious, something to be protected and cherished from everything that existed outside the boardinghouse walls.

For many years—so many years—he had wondered if there was something not just amiss with him but deficient within him. It was not that he was not invited to the same parties as John and Eden; it was what happened at them. This was back when they were younger and simply known as the Bingham siblings, and he was only identified as the eldest, not “the bachelor” or “the unmarried one” or “the one who still lives at Washington Square”: They would enter the party, ascending the low, wide stone steps of a recently built Park Avenue manse, Eden and John first, her arm looped through his, he bringing up the rear, and upon entering the glittering, twinklingly lit space, he would hear what sounded to him like a cheer, as John’s and Eden’s faces were kissed by well-wishers sighing in delight at their arrival. And he? He would be greeted as well, of course; they were well-brought-up, their acquaintances and peers, and he was a Bingham, and no one would dare be anything less than cordial, not to his face. But for the rest of the party, he would feel strangely elsewhere, as if floating above the room, and at dinner, where he would be seated not with the bright young things of the gathering but, rather, among their parents’ friends and relations—the father’s sister, for example, or the mother’s elderly uncle—he would feel the full force of his undeniable otherness, how what he had striven to conceal had been recognized and accounted for by everyone in their circle. From the other end of t...

“Practicality is a virtue,” he said. “Perhaps. But too much practicality, like too much of any virtue, is very dull, I think.”

If he could not have Edward in his arms, he wanted Edward’s name on his tongue;

Charles had become disagreeable to him because he was available, and yet that same generous availability also made David feel less vulnerable, less helpless

Once, when he and his siblings were still quite young, probably soon after they came to live in Washington Square, they had had a conversation with their grandfather about Heaven, and after Grandfather had explained it, John had promptly said, “I’d like mine to be made all of ice cream,” but David, who did not care, then, for cold things, had disagreed: His Heaven would be made of cakes. He could see it—oceans made turgid with buttercream; mountains made of sponge; trees dangling candied cherries. He did not want to be in John’s Heaven; he wanted to be in his own. That night, when his grandfather came to wish him good night, he had asked him, anxious: How could God know what each person wanted? How could He be certain they were in the place they had dreamed of? His grandfather had laughed. “He knows, David,” he had said. “He knows, and He will make as many Heavens as He needs.”

she didn’t approve of monogamy, and neither did she approve of men:

“Self-pity is an unattractive quality in a man,” he heard his grandmother say. What about in a woman? “Also unattractive, but understandable,” his grandmother would say. “A woman has much more to pity herself for.”

a person who in certain respects had ceased to become real to him: He was an apparition, someone who appeared only in David’s dreams, someone who had long ago wandered away from the realm of consciousness into wherever he was, someone lost to him. Over the decade since David had seen him last, he had worked hard to never think about him, because thinking about him was like succumbing to a riptide so powerful that he was afraid he would never emerge from it, that it would carry him so far away from land that he would never be able to return. Every day he woke and practiced not thinking about his father, as an athlete practices his sprints or a musician his scales.

Now he began to apologize—for being in the executive washroom, for being covered in ink, for being alive.

He had abandoned his father in life, and now he was abandoning him again, in fantasy. Should he not at least be able to dream him into a better existence, a kinder one? What did it say about him, as his son, that he was incapable of even that?

Preparing to be thirty, much less forty or fifty, was like buying furniture for a house made of sand—who knew when it would be washed away, or when it would start disintegrating, falling apart in clots? It was far better to use what money you could make proving to yourself that you were still alive.

when Eden finally died, he had sobbed, both because she had left him but also because no one had been prouder of him, no one had seen how hard he had worked at not running away. She had been the final witness of the person he had been, and now she was gone, and her memory of his transformation was gone with her.

“This is Wika, the reader in the family,” he’d introduce me to acquaintances, and I would feel embarrassed, because I knew that I was reading nothing important, that I didn’t really have the right to call myself a reader. But it hadn’t mattered to him; if I had ridden horses, I would have been the Rider, and if I had played tennis I would have been the Athlete, and it wouldn’t have made a difference if I had distinguished myself or not.

I turned and looked through the screen door and saw the two of them, mother and son, in the kitchen making dinner. Edward said something to his mother and she tipped her head back and laughed, and then reached over and rubbed the top of his head, playfully. They had turned the kitchen light on, and I had the strange sense that I was looking inside a diorama, at a scene of happiness I could witness but never enter.

And then she turned and walked away from me, and I watched her go. She slid into her car; she put the bag of empty containers onto the seat next to her; she checked her reflection in the rearview mirror, running a hand along the side of her face, as if reminding herself that it was still there. Then she started the engine and drove away. “Goodbye,” I said to her, as the car disappeared. “Goodbye.”

Suddenly I wished my husband were here. Not because I would tell him what I had done but because he was proof that nothing bad was going to happen to me, that I was safe, that he would always take care of me, just as he had promised.

Increasingly, all of my human interactions seem to follow this pattern—I see a problem, I get overwhelmed, I don’t offer compassion when I should, and the other person storms off.

I don’t think I’ve ever told you this, but once, when he was about three, I saw him go over to some other kids on the playground who were playing in the sandbox and ask if he could join them. They said yes, and he got in, but as he did, they all got up and ran over to the jungle gym and left him there alone. They didn’t say anything, they didn’t call him names, but how could he see their departure as anything other than what it was—a rejection? But the worst thing is what happened after: He sat there in the sandbox, looking at them, and then he slowly began playing by himself. Every few seconds he’d look over at them, waiting for them to come back, but they never did.

Nathaniel always says he’s mature for his age, which is one of those things worried parents say about their children when their children baffle them, but I think what he’s mature in is his loneliness. A child can be alone. But he shouldn’t be lonely.

When I was young, Grandfather would read mysteries to me, but they always made me anxious—I liked to know what was happening; I liked things to be the same.

But once I got used to his speech, the story he told—about a man who had lived here, on this very island, on this very Square, two hundred years ago, and who had forsaken great riches from his family to follow the person he loved all the way to California, a person who his family was certain would betray him—was so absorbing that I even stopped hearing the drone of the Flies that hovered above us, so absorbing that even the money collectors forgot to circulate, and it wasn’t until an entire hour had passed that the storyteller had sat back and said, “And next week, I’ll tell you what happened to the man,” and everyone, even Grandfather, had groaned with disappointment.

But even all these years later, I still found myself wondering what had happened to the man who was going to California: Had he done so after all? Had his beloved been waiting for him? Was he in fact betrayed? Or had we all been wrong: Had they been reunited and become happy? Maybe they were in California together and happy still. I knew it was foolish, because they weren’t even real people, but I thought about them often. I wanted to know what had become of them.

“Charles,” Nathaniel said, in that same gentle voice. “I don’t really want to talk now. I just want to go home.” For some reason, this was the most upsetting thing I’d experienced all night. Not Aubrey and Norris’s diminished state; not how clear it was that David hated me. It would have been better if Nathaniel had been mad at me, had blamed me, had confronted me. Then I could fight back. We had always fought well. But this resignation, this tiredness—I didn’t know what to do with it.

not all mothers will remain mothers out of a sake of duty, much less affection.

When I was eight, my mother, shortly before she left, told me that a parent decides what she thinks about her child in the first six weeks (or was it months?) of its life, and although I tried hard not to remember those words, they came to me, unbidden, at unwelcome moments during David’s infancy. Even now, I wonder if, somewhere deep inside me, I had never liked him, and if, somewhere deep inside him, he knows that.

But though I never said so, the reason I really chose this place was because of its name: Davids Island. Not singular—David’s—but many, as if this land were inhabited not by an ever-changing population of (mostly) children, but by Davids. My son, in duplicate, at all different ages, doing all the things my son had liked to do at various points in his life. Building bombs, yes. But also reading, and playing basketball, and running about like a crazed puppy to make me and Nathaniel laugh, and spinning his daughter around, and climbing into bed next to me when it was thundering and he was frightened. The older Davids would be parents to the younger Davids, and when one finally died—though that wouldn’t be for a very long time, as the oldest inhabitants were still only thirty, the age my David would have been, had he lived—he would be replaced by another, so that the population of Davids always would remain the same: never increasing, never diminishing. There would be no misunderstandings, no concerns that the younger Davids might be somehow different, somehow strange, because the older Davids would understand them. There would be no loneliness, because these Davids would not have ever known parents, or classmates, or strangers, or people who wouldn’t play with them: They would only know one another, which is to say themselves, and their happiness would be complete, because they would never know the agony of wanting to be someone else, for there was no one else to admire, no o...

The disease clarified everything about who we are; it revealed the fictions we’d all constructed about our lives. It revealed that progress, that tolerance, does not necessarily beget more progress or tolerance. It revealed that kindness does not beget more kindness. It revealed how brittle the poetry of our lives truly is—it exposed friendship as something flimsy and conditional; partnership as contextual and circumstantial. No law, no arrangement, no amount of love was stronger than our own need to survive, or, for the more generous among us, our need for our people, whoever they were, to survive.

Pretending is the cost of sanity.

Whereas, a few years ago, I would have been outraged by the flood—its inevitability the result of years of governmental inaction and arrogance—I found that this time I could summon little of anything. Indeed, I felt nothing but a kind of weariness, and even that I experienced not as a sensation but as an absence of one.

It wasn’t until I got home that I cried. Charlie was still at work, thank goodness, and so I was alone. I cried for Charlie, for how much I loved her, and for how I hoped she would know that I did what I thought best for her, how I had chosen her safety over her fulfillment. I cried for her perhaps-husband, for his need to protect himself, for how limited this country had made his life. I cried for the man he loved, who would never be able to make a life with him. I cried for the men in the cards I’d seen and rejected on Charlie’s behalf. I cried for Nathaniel, and David, and even Eden, all of them long disappeared, none of whom Charlie remembered. I cried for my grandparents and for Aubrey and Norris and for Hawai‘i. But mostly, I cried for myself, for my loneliness, and for this world I’d helped make, and for all these years: all the dead, all the lost, all the vanished.