Free The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara Page A

some seven feet high along the walls, which were here a shiny, curdled, charred orange color. The mice lab, like animal labs everywhere, stank of damp newspaper and feces and the moldy, algaeish stench of wet fur. Every night the floors were swabbed with disinfectant, but it seemed only to intensify the room’s native odors, which were so impermeable they seemed to have been baked into the walls. Adjacent to the mice lab was the dog lab, almost twice as large but with the same smells, the same rust-colored walls, the same wire cages, although here they were stacked all the way to the ceiling. There were thirty-six or so cages, and they were all small, about two feet square, so that the dogs (usually hounds, for some reason) were unable to stand and spent their days on their sides or crouched, front legs spread open, in a way that made them appear drunk and unseemly. Then there were about ten or twelve taller cages, and these were reserved for monkeys, which we had with some regularity, but not frequently enough or in large enough numbers to merit their own lab. What I remember most about those labs is their silence—one heard the mice’s frantic, shrill peeping, the dogs’ futile, squealing whimpers, only when they were being removed from orreplaced in their cages. The rest of the time they were silent, staring at their paws and waiting. Only the monkeys complained and chattered and screeched all day, shrieking at nothing. They were a bother for that reason, and for the enormous mess they made, and for the intensity of their odors, although they were of course more valuable specimens to work with.
    I spent most of my time with the mice. One of Parton’s ongoing experiments—the exact parameters of which I never did discover, because strangely, although I was trusted with much, I was apparently not seen as consequential enough to learn what it was I passed most of my days doing—involved infecting mice with various sorts of viruses in the hopes that they would provoke a cancer. You began with, say, a dozen mice, one mouse per each numbered cage. Then you would take a virus and inject it with a mix of saline into each mouse. And then you would wait. Every day you would weigh and measure and observe them. Did they seem torpid? Were they eating and drinking properly? Were they growing any strange nodules (you certainly hoped they would, but it never happened, not in any of the tests I conducted)? I recorded the results in my notebook, which Parton might have asked to see but never did. Boredom made me fanciful: “No. 12. White mouse,” I would write (they were all white), “chalky in complexion. Nose and pawpads: rose pink from yesterday, when carnation pink. Personality: dull.” (They were all dull. They were mice, after all. They spent their days doing mousy things.) After a certain point, around three months, you would kill them, autopsy them, and begin with a fresh group.
    I rather enjoyed killing the mice. There were surprisingly few ways to do so: drugging them took too long and was too expensive; drowning them was messy and also tedious. (And at any rate, either method would compromise key tissues we would need to study.) It was Ulliver who taught me how to kill them. What you did was hold a mouse by its tail and twirl it in a circle like a lasso until it was dizzy, its head lolling sickly from side to side. Then you’d put it on the table and with one hand hold its head behind its ears and with the other hand pull it up by its tail. A little crick! and the neck would be broken. Sometimes Julian Turnbull and I would stand at either end of the long counter that ran down the middle of the mice lab, both of us whirling four or five mice in each hand, killing them inbatches. It was a satisfying task, a small but real accomplishment to mark a day that, like so many other days, seemed devoid of structure, or progress, or meaning.
    Then you’d take the mice to the main lab and spread them on one of the countertops,