To Paradise

by Hanya Yanagihara

By the time they had finished, it was still early enough for him to reach the school before Edward’s class concluded, but then his grandfather asked him to stay for tea, and, again, he had no reason to refuse—his leisure was so well-known that it had become its own kind of prison, a schedule in the absence of one.

“It seems not to be here, Mister Bingham,” Edward declared at last, standing and looking at David directly with an expression, an almost-smile, that David wasn’t able to interpret: Was it one of flirtation, or even seduction, an acknowledgment of both their roles in this particular pantomime? Or was it (more likely) teasing in its nature, even mocking? How many men with foolish plans and affections had Edward Bishop endured in his short life? How long was the list to which David must now add his own name? He would have liked to end this piece of theater but was uncertain how to do so: He had authored it, but he realized too late that he’d not conceived of a conclusion before he began.

And for the first time in their brief acquaintance, David recognized a sort of tentativeness on the other man’s face, something he’d not seen before, and understanding this made him feel both more tender and braver as well, so that when Edward at last said, “Shall I make us some tea?” he was able to step forward—just a single step, but the space was so minute that it delivered him within a few inches of Edward Bishop, so close that he could see his each individual eyelash, each as black and wet as a stroke of ink.

When he had been a shy schoolboy, slow to make friends and often ignored by his classmates, Grandfather had once told him that all one had to do to seem interesting was to ask questions of others. “People adore nothing more than to speak of themselves,” Grandfather had said. “And if you ever find yourself in a circumstance in which you fear your place or standing—though you should not: You are a Bingham, remember, and the best child I know—then all you must do is ask the other person something about him- or herself, and they will forever after be convinced that you are the most fascinating individual they have ever encountered.” This was an exaggeration, naturally, but his grandfather had not been incorrect, and this advice, once followed, had, if not transformed his place among his peers, then certainly prevented what would have promised to be a lifetime of ignominy, and he had relied upon it on countless occasions since.

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; he would not much like to live in this cold little cell so near the river, to have to fetch water every time one wanted to have a drink instead of merely giving a single sharp yank to a bell pull—he was not even convinced he would be capable of it. Yet to be so known was to trade adventure for certainty, and therefore to be exiled to an unsurprising life.

He was aware that Edward thought him naïve, and also of his delight in astonishing him, of trying, often, to shock him. And he was happy to comply: He was naïve. He enjoyed being astonished. In Edward’s presence he felt both older and younger, and weightless, too—he was being given the opportunity to relive his youth, to finally experience that sense of abandon that young people felt, except he was now old enough to know to treasure it. “My innocent,” Edward had begun calling him, and although he might have felt patronized by the affection—for it was patronizing, was it not?—he did not. 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.

He had returned to Washington Square after that, reluctantly dressing and venturing into the cold, but later, up in his study, he was able to recognize that that discussion, that encounter, had left him changed. He had a secret, and his secret was Edward, and not just him, his smooth white skin and his soft dark hair, but Edward’s experiences, what he had seen and what he had endured: He was from another place, another existence, and in sharing his life with David, he had made David’s own suddenly richer, more profound and ecstatic and mysterious all at once.

He did not only want to believe Edward, he had to believe him; if he went to California, he would be leaving behind his home and his grandfather, but might he not also be leaving behind his sickness, his past, his mortifications? His history, so entangled with New York itself that every block he walked was the scene of some past embarrassment?: Could it not be draped in a sheet and hung in the back of his closet like his winter coat? What was life worth if he might not have his chance, slim as it might be, of feeling that it was truly his, his to make or destroy, his to mold like clay or shatter like china?

“Age is just a number,” one of his more vapid friends had said, trying to be nice, but he was wrong—age was a different continent, and as long as he was with Charles, he would be moored there. Not that he had anywhere else to be. His future was a vague, vaporous thing. He wasn’t alone in this; so many of his friends and classmates were like him, drifting from home to their jobs and then home again before going out at night to bars or clubs or other people’s apartments. They didn’t have money, and who knew how long they would have life? 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.

And yet sometimes, on those summer nights, he thought he knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted to be somewhere between where he was, in a bed dressed in expensive cotton sheets next to the man he had grown to love, and on the street, skirting the edge of the park, squealing and clinging to his friends when a rat darted from the shadows inches from his feet, drunk and wild and hopeless, his life burning away, with no one to have dreams for him, not even himself.

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 always perplexed and impressed by how much waste the body was able to create until the very end, even when it was given little to digest. On and on it went, the enjoyable things—eating, fucking, drinking, dancing, walking—falling away one by one, until all you were left with were the undignified motions and movements, the essence of what the body was: shitting and peeing and crying and bleeding, the body draining itself of liquids, like a river determined to run itself dry.

James, he was disappointed and relieved to discover, was nowhere in sight, and for a moment he watched, mesmerized, at the tenderness with which one young woman lowered the remaining quarter of the cheesecake into a plastic tub, settling it as if it were a baby she was tucking into its cradle.

Charles may have been incurious about David, but David was guilty of the same incuriousness; each of them wanted the other to exist only as he was currently experiencing him—as if they were both too unimaginative to contemplate each other in a different context. But suppose they were forced to? Suppose the earth were to shift in space, only an inch or two but enough to redraw their world, their country, their city, themselves, entirely? What if Manhattan was a flooded island of rivers and canals, and people traveled in wooden longboats, and you yanked nets of oysters from the cloudy waters beneath your house, which was held aloft on stilts? Or what if they lived in a glittering, treeless metropolis rendered entirely in frost, in buildings made from stacked blocks of ice, and rode polar bears and kept seals as pets, against whose jiggling sides you’d press at night for warmth? Would they still recognize each other, passing each other in different boats, or crunching through the snow, hurrying home to their fires? Or what if New York looked just as it did, but no one he knew was dying, no one was dead, and tonight’s party had been just another gathering of friends, and there was no pressure to say anything wise, anything conclusive, because they would have hundreds more dinners, thousands more nights, dozens more years, to figure out what they wanted to tell one another? Would they still be together in that world, where there was no need to cling together from fear, where th...

They were silent for a long time, and although David was thinking many things, he mostly thought about how good this moment was, lying next to Charles in a warm room, with snow outside. He thought that he should tell Charles that he would hold the air pump for him, but he couldn’t. He wanted so much to give Charles something, some measure of the consolation that Charles had given him, but he couldn’t. Much later, he would wish, again and again, that he had said something, anything, no matter how clumsy. 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 were on our way toward Waimānalo, on the eastern coast, and as he zagged down the road, I stared out at the ocean, a wrinkled sheet of blue.

I was at once very tired and thirsty; the sun above us was too hot. “I need to lie down again,” I said to him, and felt the ground beneath me crater and then sink, and my head fall, as if in slow motion, into Edward’s palms. For a while, there was silence. “You big lolo,” I heard him say at last, but as if from far away, and his voice was fond. “You dummy,” he said, “you dummy, you dummy, you dummy,” repeating the word like a caress, while above me the sun stopped in its path, turning everything around me a bright, unyielding white.

One second, I was in my room, and the next, I was outside of it, and nothing had changed in that moment except that I had tried. It’s like that, sometimes, you know; you wait and wait and wait—because you’re frightened, because you’ve always waited—and then, one day, the wait is over. In that moment, you forget what it was to wait. This state that you’d lived in for sometimes years is gone, and so is your memory of it. All you have at the end is loss.

After that, we heard the whup-whup-whup of the police helicopter’s blades, and then it really was quiet again, so quiet we could hear the sound of someone crying, a woman, from either above or next to us. But then that too stopped, and there was a period of real silence, and I lay and watched my husband’s back as the strobe light moved across it and up the wall and disappeared again out the window. The curtains were supposed to block the strobe, but they didn’t entirely, though after a while you forgot it was happening.

One day last month, Nathaniel and I took over some of baby’s old clothes and toys to donate, standing for a few minutes in a separate, much shorter queue, and though I’m not shocked by much anymore in this shit-ass city, I was shocked by that center: There were probably a hundred adults and fifty kids in a space meant for maybe sixty people, and the stench—of vomit, of feces, of unwashed hair and skin—was so overpowering that you could almost see it, coloring the room a dull mustard. But the thing that really struck us was how quiet it was: Except for one baby, who cried and cried in a thin, helpless way, there was no sound. Everyone was standing mutely in lines for one of the seven air showers, and when one person exited, the next would silently enter the shower space and draw the curtain closed.

He has a couple of friends here, quiet, earnest boys, but they rarely come over to our apartment, and he’s rarely invited to theirs. 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. And our child is.

One of the reasons I never became a clinician is because I was never convinced that life—its saving, its extension, its return—was definitively the best outcome. In order to be a good doctor, you have to think that, you have to fundamentally believe that living is superior to dying, you have to believe that the point of life is more life.

“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.

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.

When I was an undergraduate, a professor of mine had said there were two types of people: those who wept for the world, and those who wept for themselves. Weeping for your family, he said, was a form of weeping for yourself. “Those who congratulate themselves on their sacrifices for their families aren’t actually sacrificing at all,” he said, “because their family is an extension of their selves, and therefore a manifestation of the ego.” True selflessness, he said, meant giving of yourself to a stranger, someone whose life would never be entangled with your own.

You forget, sometimes, how much you need to be touched. It’s not food or water or light or heat—you can go for years without it. The body doesn’t remember the sensation; it does you the kindness of allowing you to forget. The first two times, we had sex quickly, almost brutally, as if we might never have the opportunity again, but the past three instances have been more leisurely.