The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

off the artery to its kidney and stitched it closed again. A few days later, when the dog was in kidney failure—it moaned and whined; its urine was treacly and venomous in appearance and leaked out in fat, viscous, reluctant drops—I redrugged it, removed its dead kidney (now the bruised, sheeny blue of rotting meat), and tried to transplant into the dog a kidney I had infected in another dog. I sewed both dogs back up. The donor dog I had incinerated. The one that had received the transplant soon expired as well,although whether from the infected kidney or from my poor surgical skills I was never quite certain. I observed it and took notes on its decline in my notebook, and when it died, I harvested its organs of interest and preserved them for further analysis and then had its corpse incinerated too.
    This is how day after day passed. I realize I sound bored recounting it now, and perhaps even a little dramatically fatalistic, but at the time it was interesting enough, both the work itself—for at times I truly did feel, as a good lab with a charismatic leader encourages its fellows to feel, that I, as much as anyone, perhaps more, was on the inevitable verge of a discovery of a small but important sort, something that might change science forever—and because I was learning from my days in the lab and the lives of those around me that it was not a life that I would choose. It is a funny thing, working for someone else in a lab: you are chosen because you are the best in your class or the most promising in your field or an interesting thinker, and you are put in a room full of others like yourself. In some of your colleagues you see your past, the student you once were, and in others you see your future, or at least a template for your future, although you yourself, you assume, will be better and brighter and more talented than they.
    But what does it mean to be successful or talented in a lab? For your work there is not truly your own; you are chosen because of your mind and then asked, to varying degrees, to cease thinking for yourself and begin doing so for another. For some people this is easier than for others; they are the ones who remain. And so although you gain fraternity, you forsake your independence. But ambition is a difficult thing to quash completely, and so it is redirected—instead of working alone, you work in a room with others, but even as you do, you hope every day that you will be the one to make the key discovery, that you will be the one to find the answer, that you will present it, triumphant, to your director and that he will be generous and intellectually confident enough to give you your due credit. This is your hope, and it has motivated and kept alive men much more distinguished than I. But it is answered for only a very few of them, and they—the ones who one day are awarded their own labs, their own patented cell lines, their own papers—are the lucky ones. Theyare all of them patient, though; I, however, knew by the end of my first term with Smythe’s lab that I could never be that patient, nor that pliable.
    Part of this certainty was attributable to the discomfort I felt with the culture of the lab itself. Labs at that time were not like the ones today. Not that I cared a terrible amount about my colleagues’ lives, the things they were interested in outside of the office, but there was at work a kind of conservatism, a fixation on neatness, that I found difficult and dispiriting. In those days science considered itself the realm of gentlemen. This was the era, after all, of Linus Pauling and J. Robert Oppenheimer, both of them exceptional, of course, but not exempt from having to dress a certain way, or from being able to perform at cocktail parties, or from pursuing romance. Genius was no excuse for social ineptitude, the way it is today, when a certain refusal to acquire the most basic social skills or an inability to dress properly or feed oneself is generously perceived as