To Paradise

by Hanya Yanagihara

“When you are a sailor, or when you have spent significant time with them, you understand that to make plans is folly—God will do what He wishes, and our plans are nothing against His. I knew this, and yet I was unable to stop myself. I knew it was silly, and yet I was unable to stop myself—I dreamed and dreamed. I planned the house I would build for us, on a cliff overlooking the rocks and the sea, with lupines all around it.

But was he indeed a man of the world? Or was he only a man of the Bingham-created world, one that was rich and varied but, he knew, vastly incomplete? Here he was, in a room in a house that was less than a fifteen-minute hansom ride from Washington Square, and yet it was more foreign to him than London, than Paris, than Rome; he might have been in Peking, or on the moon, for all he recognized in it. And there was something worse in him as well—a sense of incredulity that spoke to a naïveté that was not just distasteful but perilous: Even as he had entered the house, he had persisted in thinking Edward lived here as a lark, as an affectation of poverty.

What would it be like to be someone anonymous, someone whose name meant nothing, who was able to move through life as a shadow, who was able to sing a music-hall ditty in a classroom without word of it traveling among everyone one knew, to live in a frigid room in a boardinghouse with a neighbor who woke when others were settling in their parlors for drinks and conversation, to be someone who was beholden to no one? He was not so romantic as to desire this, necessarily;

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.

The fact that he had not experienced the same kind of happiness was a source of both sorrow and concern; of late, he had been beginning to fear that it was not just that no one might love him but that he might be incapable of receiving such love, which seemed altogether worse.

Percival’s death has made me think more often as well of William, of how wild with misery I was when he died, and of how, in my brief time spent with you, I began to imagine that I might be able to live again with a companion, someone with whom I might share the joys of life, but also its sorrows.

Or—not forgotten, perhaps, but ceased to be curious about him. The idea of marriage itself had similarly lost any of the sense of intrigue it had once had, even if that intrigue had been tempered by wariness. It seemed, suddenly, a declaration of timidity to allow oneself to be shuttled into a marriage, to surrender the idea of love for stability, or respectability, or dependability. And why would he resign himself to a dun-colored life when he could have another?

“Then,” his grandfather said, “you must write to Mister Griffith at once and tell him you accept his offer to see him again. And at that meeting, you must either break off relations entirely or you must tell him of your intentions to continue communications. And if you do decide to keep speaking with him, David—and though you have not asked me, I think you ought—then you must do so with sincerity and with a generosity of spirit of which I know you to be capable. You owe the man that. Will you promise me this?”

but his other reasons were altogether less honorable and generous: a sense of misplaced and unfulfilled lust, a desire to punish Edward for his silence and unreachability, a need to distract himself from his own difficulties. By doing so, he had made another difficulty, one entirely of his own creation, in which he was undeniably the pursued, the object of another’s longing. It chilled him to realize that these were his thoughts, that he was so proud and selfish that he had encouraged not just another person, but a good person, to form false hopes and expectations simply because his pride was injured and he wanted to be flattered.

He did not enjoy relations with Charles, not exactly—although he came to welcome the attention, and Charles’s consistent and sustained excitement and physical strength, he thought the man too earnest, both dull and inelegant—but continuing them made his memories of Edward inexplicably sharper, for he was always measuring one against the other, and finding the former wanting.

Charles Griffith. Charles had become disagreeable to him because he was available, and yet that same generous availability also made David feel less vulnerable, less helpless in the face of Edward’s continuing silence. He had come to nurse a small hatred for Charles, for loving him so much, and, mostly, for not being Edward. His budding disgust for Charles made being with him feel sacrificial, a delicious self-punishment, an almost religious act of degradation that—if only to him—proved what he was willing to withstand in order to someday be reunited with Edward.

“But we are those kinds of people, Edward! There is no difference between us! If we were ever suspected, if we were ever caught, the consequences would be dire. If we couldn’t live as who we are, then how would we be free?”

talking with another man his age was like slipping back into water and recognizing its silk on his skin, remembering how comfortable it could be.

They would never be as happy again as they were that night.

All of it he had provided. Running beneath these triumphs, though, like a dark and poisoned river, was his disgrace—the unconscionable things he’d said to Charles and, below that, the fact of his behavior, of how disrespectfully he had treated Charles, how he had used him out of restlessness and fearfulness and in desire of praise and attention.

And so what if this was Heaven? Would he know it if it were? Perhaps not. But he knew it was not whence he had come: That was someone else’s Heaven, but it was not his. His was somewhere else, but it would not appear in front of him; rather, it would be his to find. Indeed, was that not what he had been taught, been made to hope for, his entire life? Now it was time to seek. Now it was time to be brave. Now he must go alone. So he would stand here for another moment, the bag leaden in his hand, and then he would take a breath, and then he would make his first step: his first step to a new life; his first step—to paradise.

Finally, they had worked out a code: Whenever he passed Charles’s office, and Charles wasn’t busy, he would clear his throat and twirl a pencil between his fingers;

How many are those? he asked. They were both smiling by then. “Loads,” said Charles. “Countless. Tens of thousands of dollars in billable hours. More than any other client I have.”

At the time, this had felt like a privilege, a gift, but since then he had come to learn that when Charles declared his ignorance it was only because he thought the subject inconsequential. He could make his lack of knowledge—about flowers, baseball, football, modernist architecture, contemporary literature and art, South American food—sound like a boast; he didn’t know because there was no reason to know. You might know, but then you had wasted your time—he had other, more important things to learn about and remember.

It was difficult to explain why he was—he knew he would sound petty. I just want to help you, he’d begun. I just want to feel like I’m doing something here. “But you are helping me,” Charles had said. “Every night you’re here with me, you’re helping me.”

Well—thank you. But—I want to feel like we’re doing something together, like I’m contributing something to your life. I feel like—like I’m just taking up room in this house, but I’m not actually doing anything, do you know what I mean?

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.

What if he were with someone whom he could look at and see, if only superficially, himself? Was it Charles’s wealth, or his age, or his race that made David feel so often helpless and inferior? Would he be more purposeful, less passive, if things between him and his boyfriend were more equitable? Would he feel like less of a traitor?

Food was real, food was proof of life, of how your body was still yours, of how it still could and still would respond to whatever you put inside it, of how it could be made to work. To be hungry was to be alive, and to be alive was to need food. Over the months, Ezra gained weight, at first slowly and then quickly, and now he was fat. But as long as he was fat, he wasn’t sick, and no one would ever think he was: His cheeks were hot and pink; his lips and fingertips were often slicked with grease—wherever he went, he left evidence of his existence. Even his new grossness was a kind of shout, a defiance; he was a body that took up more space than was allowed, than was polite. He had made himself into a presence that couldn’t be ignored. He had made himself undeniable.

He just wanted more life. He didn’t know what he would do with it, but he wanted it—and not just his own but everyone’s. More and more and more, until he had stuffed himself with it. He thought, inevitably, of his father, of what his father had craved. Love, he supposed, affection. But nothing else. Food did not interest him, or sex, or travel, or cars or clothes or houses.

But we all functioned; we all had to. We went to funerals and to hospitals, but we also went to work and to parties and to gallery shows and ran errands and had sex and dated and were young and stupid. We helped each other, it’s true, we loved each other, but we also gossiped about people and made fun of them and got into fights and were shitty friends and boyfriends, sometimes. We did both—we did it all.

“If you’re lucky, that is. You should always have a close friend you’re slightly afraid of.” Why? “Because it means that you’ll have someone in your life who really challenges you, who forces you to become better in some way, in whatever way you’re most scared of: Their approval is what’ll hold you accountable.”

When he told Eden of Charles’s and his friends’ concerns, she had said that it was a very white male fixation to be concerned with legacy. How do you mean? he’d asked. “Only people who have a plausible hope of being immortalized in history are so obsessed about how they might get immortalized,” she said. “The rest of us are too busy trying to get through the day.”

What he wouldn’t know until he was much older was that no one was ever free, that to know someone and to love them was to assume the task of remembering them, even if that person was still living. No one could escape that duty, and as you aged, you grew to crave that responsibility even as you sometimes resented it, that knowledge that your life was inextricable from another’s, that a person marked their existence in part by their association with you.

He was alive, and when this night was over, he would climb two flights upstairs and maybe he and Charles would have sex and maybe they wouldn’t, and the next day he would wake and choose what he wanted for breakfast, and what he wanted to do that day—he would go to the bookstore, or to the movies, or to lunch, or to a museum, or simply take a walk. And in that day he would make hundreds of choices, so many he would lose count, so many he would forget to notice he was doing it, and with every choice he would be asserting his presence, his place in the world.

He had come to realize that it was when you were dying that people most wanted things from you—they wanted you to remember, they wanted reassurance, they wanted forgiveness. They wanted acknowledgment and redemption; they wanted you to make them feel better—about the fact that you were leaving while they remained; about the fact that they hated you for leaving them and dreaded it, too; about the fact that your death was reminding them of their own inevitable one; about the fact that they were so uncomfortable that they didn’t know what to say.

“Of course, this is if you’ve been lucky enough to keep your mind. Though lately I’ve been wondering if it’s so lucky at all, being so conscious, being so aware that, from now on, you’ll never progress. You’ll never become more educated or learned or interesting than you are right now—everything you do, and experience, from the moment you begin actively dying is useless, a futile attempt to change the end of the story. And yet you keep trying to do it anyway—read what you haven’t read and see what you haven’t seen. But it isn’t for anything, you see. You just do it out of practice—because that’s what a human does.”

“I’m scared because I know my last thoughts are going to be about how much time I wasted—how much life I wasted. I’m scared because I’m going to die not being proud of how I lived.”

In those years, fear—of sounding dumb, of being inadequate—kept him from the generosity he should have shown, and it was not until he had accumulated many regrets that he had learned that his comfort could have taken any form, that what had been important was that it was offered at all.

We often end up resenting our children when they achieve what we’ve wished for them—although this isn’t my way of saying that I resent you, even though my only wish was that you grow up and leave me behind.

The problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you’d been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you’re nothing once again.

There had been plenty of times when I had resented the lack of any true, meaningful privacy in my house, but suddenly the alternative—an absence of people, nothing but time and silence—seemed horrible, and it seemed to me that I should stay with Edward as long as I could, for when I left, he would have no one.

Not because I shared his anger—but because I craved his certainty, this strange and wondrous notion that there really was a single answer, and that, by believing in it, I would cease to believe everything that had bothered me about myself for so long.

Friendships at that age are so fragile, because who you are—not just the physical dimensions of you but the emotional ones, too—change so dramatically from month to month.

The strange thing, though, is that I didn’t resent them: I resented where I had come from. I cursed my school, where generations of Binghams had gone, for not better preparing me. What had I learned there that was useful? I had taken all the same subjects my new classmates had, but so much of my education, it seemed, had been taken up with learning Hawaiian history and bits of Hawaiian language, which I couldn’t even speak. How was that knowledge meant to be useful to me, when the rest of the world simply didn’t care? I didn’t dare bring up who my family was—I sensed that half of them wouldn’t believe me, and the other half would mock me.

Edward needed to be Hawaiian, or at least this idea of Hawaiian he had created. He needed to feel that he was a part of some larger, greater tradition. His mother was dead, and he had never known his father; he had few friends and no family. To be Hawaiian was not a political imperative for him but, rather, a personal one. Yet here, too, he was unconvincing to others, kicked out of Keiki kū Ali‘i, unwelcome (or so he said) in the Hawaiian-language classes he tried to take, expelled from the hālau because a painting job had meant he would miss too many practices. This was his birthright, and even here he was unwanted.

If the skies are clear, you can see all the way up the spine of the island, and when it’s sunny, the river, which is normally brown and creamy, instead glitters and appears almost pretty.

How far back do I have to go? How many decisions must I regret? Sometimes I think that somewhere in this house is hidden a piece of paper with the answers, and that if I hope hard enough, I’ll wake up in the month or year when I first began to go astray, only this time, I’ll do the opposite of what I did. Even if it hurts. Even if it feels wrong. Love, Charles

I have always wondered how people knew it was time to leave a place, whether that place was Phnom Penh or Saigon or Vienna. What had to happen for you to abandon everything, for you to lose hope that things would ever improve, for you to run toward a life you couldn’t begin to imagine? I had always imagined that that awareness happened slowly, slowly but steadily, so the changes, though each terrifying on its own, became inoculated by their frequency, as if the warnings were normalized by how many there were. And then, suddenly, it’s too late. All the while, as you were sleeping, as you were working, as you were eating dinner or reading to your children or talking with your friends, the gates were being locked, the roads were being barricaded, the train tracks were being dismantled, the ships were being moored, the planes were being rerouted. One day, something happens, maybe something minor, even, like chocolate disappears from the stores, or you realize there are no more toy shops in the entire city, or you watch the playground across the street from you be destroyed, the metal jungle gym disassembled and loaded into a truck, and you understand, suddenly, that you’re in danger: That TV is never returning. That the internet is never returning. That, even though the worst of the pandemic is over, the camps are still being built. That when someone said, in the last Committee meeting, that “certain people’s chronic procreation was welcome for once in history,” and no one rea...

Yet for the first two or so years of our marriage, I had a dream of how he might fall in love with me. It wasn’t a typical dream but, rather, a waking one, as I never had it while I slept, though I always wished I would. In it, I was lying in my bed, and suddenly I felt my husband get into bed next to me. He held me, and then we kissed. That was the end of that dream, but sometimes I had other dreams, in which my husband kissed me while we were standing, or that we went to the center and listened to some music and held hands.

The answer, implicit in the man’s question, was that a dystopia doesn’t look like anything; indeed, that it can look like anywhere else.

People in a young dystopia crave information—they are starved for it, they will kill for it. But over time, that craving diminishes, and within a few years, you forget what it tasted like, you forget the thrill of knowing something first, of sharing it with others, of getting to keep secrets and asking others to do the same. You become freed of the burden of knowledge; you learn, if not to trust the state, then to surrender to it.

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.

You know of course what I’m thinking. For a long time, I assumed that it would be a virus that would destroy us all in the end, that humans would be felled by something both greater and much smaller than ourselves. Now I realize that that is not the case. We are the lizard, but we are also the moon. Some of us will die, but others of us will keep doing what we always have, continuing on our own oblivious way, doing what our nature compels us to, silent and unknowable and unstoppable in our rhythms.

the dead, all the lost, all the vanished. I don’t often cry, and I had forgotten how, beneath the physical discomfort, there was something exhilarating about it as well, every part of the body participating, the machinery of its various systems lurching into movement, plumping the ducts with liquids, pumping the lungs with air, the eyes growing shiny, the skin thickening with blood.