Free The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

science and the people who practiced science, all of us in our white coats and what they considered our despicable arrogance, though whether it was our education they hated or what we were doing with our education (they considered one excessive and the other self-indulgent) was difficult to say. They were not people capable of superior cognitive reasoning, and because they were unable to understand what it was we were doing and yetwere equally unwilling to admit their limitations, they found it easier to call us names and detest us. (It is not only animal caretakers who behave like this, but also journalists, and animal activists, and priests, and politicians, and housewives, and artists—people, in other words, for whom every mystery must be attributed to human arrogance and evil.)
    But to return to Fat Irish: he would arrive at four every afternoon and begin his work, and when we came back the next day, messes would be cleaned, water trays filled, and the labs would smell more intensely of their signature perfume, the eggy scent of detergent and the sweetish fragrance of stale feces. Sometimes, working late, you would see Fat Irish and nod at him, and he would nod back. He would not try to make conversation. If you asked him a question directly, he would answer in the most perfunctory way—not rudely, but not foisting on you the sort of chatter (about the weather, working hard, their various aching body parts) of which janitors and waiters and various service staff in general seem to have an endless supply. Instead it was “Good morning, Fat Irish.” “Good morning.” “Basset Four [meaning the basset hound in cage 4] croaked last night.” “I’ll take care of it.” And that was all.
    After Fat Irish we come to the bottom: the lab techs, David and Peter, the two of them granted neither last names nor desks, although they did have white coats. They went from station to station, cleaning flasks, cutting pieces of mesh, scrubbing spoiled biomatter from test tubes, delivering mugs of burned coffee, fetching mice from cages, returning mice to cages. I tried not to use them too frequently: first, it was faster to do the work myself, and second, they were both loquacious, fond of telling you about their women, or about the meal they were awaiting that night, or about how sick of their jobs they were. They were not needlessly cruel to the animals, but they were sloppy: they clutched the mice so tightly that they squealed and kicked their small feet in the air; they forgot which dog went into which cage; they knocked over Bunsen burners and swabbed up their ensuing mess imperfectly, so that you were for the rest of the day forced to pick your way around your own desk until the night janitor came to clean what they had missed.

    The lab was located on the first floor of a building called Chase Hall, ten stories, red brick, ugly and utilitarian; it was destroyed some years ago. There was a main room, about twelve hundred square feet, a long rectangle with four windows looking out onto the green beyond. In the south corner, farthest from the roar of the building incinerator, which abutted our lab, was Smythe’s office, a small, glassed-in square in which sat a burled desk (perfectly, suspiciously clean-surfaced), a metal filing cabinet, and a metal bookcase. Just outside his office, running along the east side of the room, beneath the windows, were front-to-front metal desks for each of the chief and junior residents and for the medical students and undergraduates. The remainder of the room was dominated by eight long metal countertops fitted with sinks and crowded with Bunsen burners and flasks. The floors were linoleum and the walls a pale butter that always made me crave bread or potatoes—something starchy and floury.
    Behind the main room, running its length, were the two animal labs. The first, to the south side, was the mice lab, windowless, about three hundred square feet, and lined on three sides with cages stacked