The People in the Trees: A Novel

by Hanya Yanagihara

  She was indiscriminate in what she ate, but she knew what was food and what was not; she would not eat the pile of grass we placed before her as a test (although she did spend a few minutes sniffing it, so intently that little shavings of it whisked up her nostrils, making her hack), but whatever we ate, she would eat too. She was hungry in the morning when she woke, and hungry again at midday, but otherwise undemanding; during the day she would forage for food, and when she found it, she would eat it right away. We always had something for her to eat upon waking, but one day we withheld it and watched as, after staring and panting for a while, she hoisted herself upright and began her search, moving her foot in sweeping arcs across the jungle floor, scraping leaves and moss and grubs into a pile that she would then sort through, eating the grubs and leaving the rest. But although she knew what was edible, she seemed unable to distinguish flavors: later we tried the grubs, which were plump and squirmy and a greasy, candle-wax white, and found them almost unbearably bitter, a taste that made you squinch your features and cough, your saliva deserting you in protest. Eve, however, could eat handfuls of them, chewing them with a sturdy, steady rhythm that seemed almost comically militaristic in its consistency, swallowing them in great noisy gulps. By observing her, we discovered that the jungle was much more edible than we’d thought; so distracted had we been by the manama that we had ignored the grubs, and the fragile, veined, lettucelike leaves that clustered sweetly at the trees’ bases, and the pale, puddingy sacs of eggs some unknown insect had deposited in the shallow scoops where one thick tree root merged into the next. We didn’t enjoy any of these new discoveries, necessarily—the leaves were crunchy like seaweed but tasteless and the eggs viscous, a thick silky clot of mucus—but we did marvel at Eve’s ability to find them, especially because according to the guides, these were not things that a U’ivuan would normally think to eat, much less identify.

  Temperamentally, she was placid enough until she was not. Sometimes I knew what might upset her (I had assumed my attempted vaginal exam would probably be a failure), but sometimes I did not—she would be agreeable, letting me examine her throat, her mouth, submitting to my tape measure, which I wrapped around her waist, her thighs, her skull, but then she would turn on me, baring her teeth and snarling, her eyes pricked open so wide that the irises seemed to be floating in a jellied egg of white. And then, just as suddenly, she would recede, return to her stupid, dreamy state, her tongue—an unnervingly bright, pretty peony pink—thrusting between her dark and scabrous lips. They never failed to alarm me, these abrupt turns of hers, although after the first few times I no longer saw malice in them, only boredom. She was restless in her own way, Eve; she woke each day without any apparent memory of the day before, and her patience for and with us was limited. Her curiosity was saved only for food and for the search for food.

  At night, after we had fed and bound her—Tallent and Esme and I were in favor of letting her sleep unfettered, but Fa’a had protested strenuously, holding aloft the found spear as argument and speaking so rapidly that Tallent, mostly to appease him, had acquiesced—we talked, sharing the day’s discoveries. The guides (who now slept near us) walked every day deeper and deeper into the jungle beyond, for hours at a time, looking for signs of other abandoned spears, of other Eves, but had so far found nothing. Their minuet with the jungle, their parries and retreats, were doing us no good, and we knew that soon we would have no choice but simply to enter it and move up the island until we found what Tallent hoped for and Fa’a feared.

  I would recount my day’s observations of Eve, and although I could sense Esme wanting to interrupt—her impatience, her need to interject, clogged the air like something living—she remained silent, letting Tallent ask for clarifications, letting him question me and react to the things I had seen and recorded.

  “How old do you think she is?” Tallent asked one night.

  I told him it was difficult to say with any authority, but I thought she was maybe around sixty,28 given the gray in her hair, the condition of her teeth, the wrinkles that pulled her lower abdomen into a sorrowful, pleated dog’s face, and the way she relied more on her sense of smell than on her sight, for it had begun to occur to me that her porcine behavior, the way she sniffed everything so deeply and at such close range, may have been a necessity, a skill learned to compensate for her impaired vision. Even in the dusk, when the grubs she so enjoyed glowed whitely like stars, she was unable to pluck them from the ground without first scraping them into a pile and then sorting through the pile, bringing her face close to each object. But of course it was impossible to say; I had no way to verify my hunch, and she had no way to communicate with me. But this nearness of vision seemed to be her only potentially serious disability—besides, obviously, her lack of language and general forgetfulness—and one commensurate with her age. In all other ways she was in good, even excellent health, especially for someone who by all evidence had been living on her own in the jungle for an unidentifiable length of time. She ate well and slept well and shat well. Her limbs were strong and her calves were complicated with muscle. Her hearing was remarkable: she could hear a manama fruit’s windy whistle as it fell through the air, something I would never have thought to listen for myself. Each morning when I took her pulse, I was impressed anew by its steady thrum, like the faraway echo of some primitive drumbeat. (Later, when I was older, I would remember with awe and envy another quality as well—her apparent lack of loneliness, how she seemed to need no one and nothing except food, how our company seemed not to disrupt the unchangeable patterns of her everyday existence.)

  “Sixty,” murmured Tallent.

  “I could be wrong,” I added quickly.

  “No,” said Tallent. “I think you’re probably right. Sixty, though. That makes me wonder.” But he said nothing more, and after waiting for a while for him to continue, Esme mumbled something about getting ready for bed, and I went with her to lay out our mats, leaving Tallent to sit and think his private thoughts, the nature of which I could only try and try to envision.

  The average U’ivuan woman is fifty-three inches tall, the average U’ivuan man fifty-six. The average U’ivuan family has four children. U’ivuans are stocky and blocky. They have wide feet (which make them good swimmers), long thighs (which make them good trekkers), thick arms (which make them good throwers), and small, square hands. The women, like all women in tropical climates, begin menstruating early (as early as eight, though usually around ten) and are finished with menopause by forty. As a race, they are known for their excellent auditory sense and their exceptional sense of smell. They are prone to tooth decay. The primary cause of death among both men and women is dysentery, probably from their habit of drinking the same water in which they bathe. The average age of death is fifty-two.29

  Of course, I did not know any of this when I examined Eve. So the next morning, when Tallent asked me to examine the three men as a sort of imperfect control group, I thought nothing of it. I suppose what was surprising to me was how similar—superficially, at least (though superficiality was all I had)—they were to Eve: the state of their gums, for example, their general flexibility, their good hearing and quick reflexes. They submitted to my exams tolerantly, opening their mouths obediently when I opened mine, taking deep breaths as I pantomimed filling my own chest with air. I even improvised a vision test, in which I drew thick black marks on sheets of notebook paper and then stood about twenty feet away; the men showed me by holding up their fingers how many marks were on the page.

  “How are the men?” Tallent asked me that night.

  “In good health,” I answered lamely.

  “How old do you estimate them to be?” he asked mildly.

  “Eve’s age,” I replied. I was very certain about this. “Sixty, give or take. Tu is perhaps a few years younger; his teeth are a little less worn, his vision a little sharper.” I did not add that the vision test had surprised me; all three men’s results were poor, poorer than I had anticipated. At first
I thought that they had not understood the test, but when I stepped closer to them, it became clear that they knew what they were to do—they were simply incapable of doing it.

  “Ah,” said Tallent, and was silent for a bit. “You’re right about Tu—he is younger than the others.” He paused again. “Tu is forty, Uva just turned forty-one, and Fa’a is forty-two.” He said this without triumph, only a sad kind of wonderment.

  Then it was I who had nothing to say. “But … they can’t be,” I said uselessly.

  Tallent smiled his brief, melancholy smile. “They’re elders in this country,” he said. “They are what forty-year-olds look like here. The question is”—and he nodded in Eve’s direction—“why a sixty-year-old looks like a forty-year-old.”

  “Well,” I admitted, “then there’s a simple explanation. I’m wrong. She’s not sixty. She must be closer to their age.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Tallent, and he called over to Fa’a, who, once he saw where Tallent was heading, came only reluctantly. All of the guides avoided Eve, but Fa’a perhaps most assiduously. He stopped a few feet short of her, and when Tallent pushed aside her fat beaver’s tail of matted hair to show him the mark, he craned his neck forward, lifting his heels and lowering his torso like a crane rather than taking one step closer to her.

  But when he saw the tattoo, his reaction was immediate. For a moment he froze in that strange stance, his hands still held behind his back in a parody of an English gentleman, and then slowly moved closer to her. As Tallent had that first time, he let his fingertips just hover over the mark and then jerked them away as if he’d been burned. His jabberings to Tallent sounded furious, and although I could not understand his words, I could guess at their meaning—What is this? Is this a joke?—and, through Tallent’s soothing, low tones, his reply as well—No, it’s not a joke. Be calm. Be calm. (Even all these days and conversations later, U’ivuan still sounded to me like a blur of glottal stops and aggressive u’s chopped up by the same three or four graceless consonants. Many years later, in Maryland, I would stand on a playground watching some of my newly arrived sons and daughters be taunted by the neighborhood children, who would scoop their hands under their arms, chasing after them and making noises like cartoon gorillas—“Oo-oo-ah-ah! Koo-oo-ka-ah!”—and would not be able to stop myself from agreeing with their interpretation.)

  Fa’a stamped off; he and Tallent seemed not to have resolved their argument.

  “Why is he so upset?” I asked.

  Tallent sighed. “He recognized Eve’s mark,” he said, pointing at Eve, who was now lowering herself to the earth with a series of hoggy grunts, “as I knew he would. The mark of the opa’ivu’eke is given only to those who reach the age of sixty. It is given in a special ceremony, which is followed by a great feast.” He was quiet. “I have never witnessed it myself.”

  I didn’t understand. “But why would that agitate him?”

  “Because U’ivuans don’t live to be sixty.”

  “Ever?”

  “Fa’a doesn’t know of anyone. His great-grandmother, the longest-lived person in the known history of his village—that’s what he kept repeating, over and over—was fifty-eight when she died. He has never heard of anyone who has lived to sixty. It is an impossible age, and a coveted one. So you’re right, Norton. Eve is sixty—at least—and we need to figure out why, and how, she has lived this long.”

  Esme arrived then, back from the stream, and Tallent told her of what had happened. I sat near them, half listening, but really I was looking at Fa’a, who was standing slightly apart from his cousins (who, as Tallent had predicted, were greedily devouring their salted vuakas, moaning with delight and relish) and looking up into the forest beyond. And suddenly, watching these short-lived creatures eating another short-lived creature, all of them spending their days searching only for a taste of something delicious, the jungle seemed a very sad place to me, and I longed to urge Fa’a to enjoy his vuaka while he could; he was forty-two, after all, and would surely not return to this island. But instead I only watched the three of them as if they were figures in a diorama, while in low voices behind me Tallent and Esme puzzled over how an Ivu’ivuan could have possibly reached the ancient age of sixty.

  The forest was as Tallent had described it—hushed and mossy and magical—and in it I could feel both its lull and its danger: it was dangerous because it lulled.

  I knew the forest was having its effect because of the way the guides’ behavior changed around Eve. They weren’t exactly friendly or casual—I could still see their small fingers tighten almost imperceptibly around their spears when they drew closer to her—but they talked to her in U’ivuan, and sometimes even reached out to stroke her skin, a gentle skimming pet of a touch, never lingering, never with any pressure.

  Only Fa’a remained aloof, his gaze upon her inscrutable, although it was also he who came to me one night after dinner and, pointing at Eve, said, “Iv” (that was how he and Tu and Uva pronounced her name).

  “Yes,” I said, “Eve.”

  “Iv,” he repeated, and handed me a stick, mimed writing on the ground.

  He was the only literate one of the three of them—Esme said his father had for a period attended one of the missionaries’ schools—and he watched, curious, as I etched in the dirt her name in large capital letters.

  “Ah,” he said, “Eh-veh,” saying it as a U’ivuan word.

  “Eve,” I corrected, but he smiled—the first time I had seen him smile; he and Eve had the same arrowheady teeth—and shook his head. “Eh-veh,” he repeated, and from then on she was Eve to us, Eh-veh to the guides.

  And so we worked through the days in a sort of not unpleasant half-truce, each of us taking turns leading Eve—she was so forgetful, her attention span so limited, that we kept the rope knotted loosely around her neck like a collar—laying out her food, waiting as she dropped to the ground and sniffed and snorted. One evening, after we had stopped for the day and were eating our own meal of manama fruit and Spam and shirs of velvety tree mushrooms that we knew, thanks to Eve, were edible, she suddenly heaved herself to her feet and began her flat-footed stomp into the woods beyond. Eve was capricious, her interest in things unpredictable and often perplexing, and there was always something both funny and irritating about how purposefully she would head off in one direction or another, one of us trotting dutifully behind, only to discover that the object of her fixation was nothing more exotic than a manama fruit trembling with hunonos or a steady drip of water pocking against a large flat leaf.

  I was on Eve duty that night, and so I wearily had to leave my dinner and follow her, the long end of her leash trailing behind her like Rapunzel’s braid. Her gait was so galumphing, so graceless, that I always found myself underestimating how quickly she really moved, and by the time she stopped at the edge of the clearing we’d chosen, I was panting and covered the last few yards slowly.

  She was staring into the forest beyond, all blackness and shadows, but again, I thought nothing of this: she could spend literally hours staring at nothing, her mouth agape, her eyes dull as coins. “Come, Eve,” I told her, and it was when I bent to retrieve the loose end of the rope and coil it around my hand that I saw it: a gleam of pale, fatty yellow about two feet beneath me.

  I stepped back, and the yellow disappeared before winking once more into place. Time then seemed to yank into a long, zinging string, vibrating with a terrible, indiscernible significance as if it were itself alive, a witness to what I might do next.

  I was terrified, of course. The others were not far behind me, maybe only a seven-minute walk, less if they moved quickly, but in that moment I was unable to think of them, unable to think even of Eve, although I could hear her loud, regular breathing, hear the saw of her fingers as she rubbed them over her scalp. The only thing I could concentrate on was that lozenge of yellow, which seemed to blink and tease like a firefly. I thought suddenly of Greek mythology, of Hades, and that beyond this clearing were not trees b
ut the waters of Acheron, and that the yellow smear was Charon’s flickering lantern.

  But I had to know, I had to know. And so I stepped forward, my hands stretched before me like a blind man’s, groping in the dark, certain that my foot would land in the river’s cold, fudgy muck.

  My fingers closed around the first thing they encountered, but so lost were my senses that it was another second or so before I was able to identify it as an arm, a disembodied arm that I could not see but that had somehow taken shape within my grasp, or so it seemed. And then I found my voice and screamed, and Eve screamed with me, and the arm screamed too, and from behind it came other screams, all of us so loud that I could hear the forest wake and rearrange itself: bird wings, bat wings, a chorus of flapping, of insects’ patter, of colonies of unknown, hidden beasts being roused from their idyll and scuttling from one unseen tree branch to another, our noises an insult to the forest’s perfect crystalline calm.

  They were with me in what seemed no time at all: Tallent and Esme and Tu and Uva and Fa’a, all of them, and then they were pulling at me, working my hand loose from the arm and pulling the arm itself from the copse of trees beyond, and I saw it was a man, Eve’s height, also naked, his face covered with a fantastic beard, his mouth still open in a scream, that yellow light his teeth, the brightest thing against the black of his face.