To Paradise

by Hanya Yanagihara

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...