We made plans to meet for dinner. Owen had a friend with a car and drove down to Palo Alto. Why we decided to remain near campus and not go into San Francisco eludes me now. But my world had by that time shrunk to such a narrow locus — the lab, my on-campus apartment — that it is simply likely I was unable to think beyond its borders.
It felt pleasantly familiar (a strange sensation, after months of aggressive unfamiliarity) to see Owen, although he now had a beard and was fatter than I remembered.
“Hi,” he said, holding out his hand.
“Hi,” I said, and shook it. “You got fat.”
He shrugged and grunted irritatedly. I remembered that he had never had a very good sense of humor. “Let’s go.”
We had drinks, and I asked him about his work. “Are the students smart?”
“What do you think?” He grunted again. “They’re silly girls. They spend most of their time here, actually”—meaning Stanford—“and at Cal, trying to meet husbands.” He sighed. “I feel like a cow in a henhouse.”
“You mean a fox,” I said.
He looked annoyed. “No,” he said, “I mean a cow. Cows are herbivores. They eat grass. They’re not interested in eating chickens. To them, they’re just smelly and stupid birds.”
I suppose this was Owen’s way of telling me he was homosexual, for we never discussed his preferences again, and yet the next time I saw him, it was in the company of a very young man who laughed nervously at Owen’s every weak joke. Many years later, when people began to discuss such topics publicly, I heard him recount to someone how he had “come out” to me. It was clear that he was (still) quite pleased with his cleverness, but hearing it again only reminded me of what a tortured and unsuccessful metaphor it was.
Over dinner, as I half listened to Owen drone on about the college and how much he hated California, and some long explanation about something that seemed to have happened to my winter coat when he had had to use it to put out a fire in his room, I reflected upon how fundamentally naive he was, how small and plebeian his concerns were, and how he never could have endured what I had, and how profoundly changed I now was. I had no disdain for him, however, and indeed, it was soothing to be with someone for whom life was a series of the familiar, whose every problem was solvable, who could find such pleasure in the everyday. It was startling to remember that I had once been one of those people as well. Now, however, I no longer was.
II.
Of all the emotions to describe in retrospect, happiness is perhaps the most dull, but awe is the most difficult. Years later I would be asked (and asked and asked) how I felt when the fourth month and then the fifth month and then the sixth month passed and the mice I had fed the opa’ivu’eke lived on, burrowing into their shredded-paper caves, spinning vapidly on their wheels, sucking at their cages’ water bottles, even as the control group became an ever-vaguer memory, incinerated long ago after they all died, one after the next, in the seventeenth through twentieth months of their lives.
“I was amazed,” I would say, and while this was true, it also was not. Although I could not say so until much later (I was still endeavoring back then to be humble, as it was notable displays of humility that won young researchers grants), any initial shock I might have felt was eclipsed by a quiet sense of vindication. As I watched the mice live on and on, I felt no excitement of discovery; in fact, the whole thing seemed a bit anticlimactic. My theory had always made sense to me, and I had never doubted it, but now I would have to go through the necessary (and tedious) steps of proving it to everyone else.
I had the second group of mice (the ones I had procured as pinkies) already started on the regimen, but in July of 1951 I began a third experiment, this time on a group of 200 fifteen-month-old mice. If my theories were correct, the 100 mice who ingested the opa’ivu’eke would live, on median, at least twice as long as their natural lifespan.
While I was watching mice and getting bored stupid with the dreamers, however, Tallent was becoming famous. In October of 1951 (the opa’ivu’eke-eating mice from the first group were by then twenty-three months old and as frisky as ever), he published a report entitled “The ‘Lost Tribe’ of U’ivu: An Ethnological Study of the Village Peoples of Ivu’ivu” in the Journal of Ethnography. A fevered skim of the article revealed page after page of highly pointillist renderings of the tribe’s family structures, rites, rituals (not, notably, the a’ina’ina), philosophies, origin myths, taboos, notions of time, and social workings but relatively little — shockingly little — about their extended lifetimes. There was a long section about the opa’ivu’eke, and an excessively granular description of the vaka’ina (so granular that it managed to convey none of the wonder and terror one felt while watching it), and, buried in an endnote, this comment:
I have spoken of the tribe’s fascination with immortality. Although this is a preoccupation central to the U’ivuans’ mythology as well, it would not be overstating the case to call it a subject of obsession among the villagers. Indeed, they believe that the ingestion of the opa’ivu’eke50—the turtle devoured during the vaka’ina ritual by those reaching or having surpassed the age of sixty o’anas — confers eternal life. There is, of course, no conclusive scientific proof of these claims, although there is evidence that certain members of the tribe are unusually long-lived.
Reading this, I felt three things. First, amusement at Tallent’s timidity; was it not he who had been so quick to insist that Ika’ana was centuries old? Second, an odd sort of relief at his uncharacteristic circumspection: not only had he not revealed what was fundamentally my discovery, but he had left room for me to enrich and emboss his account with my own. And third — and following those initial two reactions — a niggling suspicion that Esme, not Tallent, had been responsible not only for the note (its poor delivery, its bland writing) but also for Tallent’s apparently newfound wariness.
Fairly or not, I found myself disappointed with Tallent. As I have said, I did not and do not consider anthropologists the most creative and disarming of thinkers — though they do take superlative and meticulous notes — but I had come to admire what I had grown to see as his single-mindedness. But he was also to be my first lesson in the strange phenomenon that besets all of us who travel to strange places and find our own assumptions and lessons proven not just wrong, but opposite. It is very easy to be intellectually brave in such locations, where the academy, one’s peers, and the entirety of Western history and religion feel not only irrelevant but misguided. But unlearning things is much more difficult than learning them, and even the most courageous of minds will find itself tempted to retreat back into the known at the first opportunity. It is astonishing and a little sad to realize how many discoveries, how many advancements, have been delayed for years, for decades, not because the information was unavailable but because of sheer cowardice, fear of being laughed at, of being ostracized by one’s colleagues.
Luckily, I was never limited by such worries or constrained by such fears (being ostracized by my colleagues seemed something to covet, not avoid). And so in 1953, I published a brief postulative paper51—really nothing more than an announcement, the medical equivalent of Martin Luther posting his theses on the church’s wooden door52—in a small, now-defunct journal called the Annals of Nutritional Epidemiology. In it I revealed my findings: not only were a significant percentage of the mice from the first group that had eaten the opa’ivu’eke still alive, but so were the mice from the second and third groups.53