The People in the Trees: A Novel

by Hanya Yanagihara

  When he had almost reached the first of the fires, the chief sat down and began to chant, a rolling, rhythmic song without beginning or punctuation, which sometimes rose into a falsetto that was almost a wail and sometimes thickened into a groan that was almost a growl. After a few minutes of this, I sensed a movement at the other end of the rows and saw, staggering into sight, two men who were dragging behind them a boulder, atop which sat another stone of approximately the same size. As they came into view, I heard the crowd break from their humming to give a collective sigh—of pleasure or dismay, I couldn’t tell—and as the men approached our end of the row, I saw that what I had mistaken for the second stone was actually an enormous turtle.

  I had never seen, and would never again see, a turtle that large. Even now it is difficult for me to find something to which I might compare it. I can say only what it was bigger than: it was bigger than a truck tire, bigger than a washtub, bigger than a wolfhound. Because it wasn’t particularly thick—only about two feet high or so—its size was almost completely attributable to its exceptional diameter. And although I knew it was an opa’ivu’eke from its distinctive, mountainous back, it otherwise seemed as unrelated to the creature I had seen all those weeks ago in the stream as it was to the chief’s ferocious hog.

  The men positioned the turtle in front of the fire closest to us—and the chief—and then stepped away, breathing hard with the exertion. The chief went on chanting, and just as I recognized the word opa’ivu’eke in his song, the turtle, as if on cue, slowly muscled his head out from his shell. He was facing me, and when he opened his eyes, he seemed to look in my direction, as if trying to communicate some message meant solely for me.

  “What?” I whispered to him, ridiculously.

  He raised his head then, that odd little beautiful head he had, his neck stretching out as he did so, his eyes never leaving mine, and I felt myself leaning toward him. But just as I was doing so, I heard the chief break from his song and give a great, gleeful, terrifying cry, and then bring his spear (which I hadn’t even noticed him holding) down swiftly in front of him, and then the opa’ivu’eke’s head was bouncing into my lap, its black eyes still staring at me, its blood weeping onto my shorts.

  “What a bizarre ceremony,” Esme grumbled as we walked back to our mats. Fa’a had left earlier, as soon as he politely could, and so it was only the three of us. “I can’t believe that after all that, we weren’t even offered anything to eat. It’s very unusual, you know, to be invited to these kinds of events and then not be treated to some sort of feast. But I suppose I should just be grateful that no children were raped tonight.”

  Although I would never have agreed with her aloud, I did have to admit that it seemed a shoddy and somewhat pointless sort of event. And it did seem odd, given the participatory nature of many of the village’s other ceremonies, that this was such a solo performance: a long and tedious night spent watching the chief dismember the opa’ivu’eke (which he did in a particularly bloody and laborious way, by ripping its carapace off—the sound was upsettingly juicy—and then spooning out the flesh with his hands) and scorch it in chunks over the fire while the rest of the village hummed and looked hungry. Having witnessed the chief’s thoroughness with the boy, I suppose it should not have surprised me that he was also a thorough (though not very fast) eater: we sat there watching as he grilled and ate the soft meat of the turtle’s body, but also sucked the cartilage and blood from its scaly feet and, having retrieved the head from me, crunched down on its eyes and, after heating it in its skull like a soup, greedily slurped down the slurry of its brain. Only one other man, one of the chief’s advisers—one who had also been with the boy at the first a’ina’ina—was offered any of the turtle to eat; we all watched as he pinched out the liver, a glistening puce thing, and swallowed it as one would an oyster.

  “What I don’t understand is where they got the opa’ivu’eke to begin with,” I said. Flies swirled around my groin, attracted by the turtle’s sticky sweet blood. “That was far too large to have ever lived in the stream, but I haven’t seen any other water source around here.”

  “It’s a good question,” Tallent said. “There must be somewhere around here—a lake, or a larger river—that they go to find these. But we’ve been asking and asking the dreamers, and they’ve never mentioned anything like that.”

  We were all quiet for a moment. And then suddenly I knew what I needed to do. “Mua,” I told Tallent. “We need to talk to him.”

  “But he’s asleep!” Esme protested. I ignored her.

  “Tallent, please,” I said to him. “I need to ask him some questions.”

  Tallent sighed. But what could he do? He had no answers, and if I thought I might be able to get him some, he had to defer to me. “All right,” he said. “Esme, go tell Fa’a to wake him.”

  It had been a few weeks since I had last interviewed Mua, mostly because (I am now ashamed to admit) I had begun to find his perseverating exhausting. But now, seeing his sleep-puffed face come into view, I found myself convinced that it was he who had the answers, that if I asked just the right questions, everything would at once reveal itself.

  I asked Tallent to translate. Fa’a was wearing his now permanent expression of wariness. For a few minutes I said nothing and thought carefully how to begin; it is difficult to choose a beginning when you don’t know what you want or expect the ending to be. I felt like a prosecutor trying to make an accused man confess to a crime whose nature I had not been told. Mua sat there, patient and sleepy. Time seemed to mean nothing to him. “Mua,” I said at last, “do you remember the celebration of your sixtieth birthday?”

  “Oh yes,” said Mua. “There was the vaka’ina.”

  “What is the vaka’ina?”

  “A celebration.”

  “And what happens during the vaka’ina?”

  “You go to the hut. You are rubbed in umaku”—sloth fat—“and your hog is rubbed in umaku. You go to the fires and you chant the vaka’ina chant.”

  “What else?”

  “You eat the opa’ivu’eke.”

  I stopped to think. I felt like I was at the gates playing a game with the sphinx, but only she knew the rules.

  “Do you like opa’ivu’eke?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Do you—” I stopped again. I stepped one foot closer to the sprite. He tensed on the balls of his feet, ready to dart. “Does everyone like opa’ivu’eke?”

  He hesitated, his mouth open in confusion. Please, I thought. Please. “I don’t know,” he said at last.

  “Why don’t you know?”

  “Because not everyone eats the opa’ivu’eke.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you only get to eat the opa’ivu’eke at the vaka’ina.”

  “And why do you eat the opa’ivu’eke?”

  “Because you are special.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are sixty o’anas. Because most people do not see that many o’anas.”

  “So you are special if you do?”

  “Yes. And that is why you eat the opa’ivu’eke.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you eat the opa’ivu’eke, the gods are happy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They will let you …” He was getting tired, I could tell; his face was growing long and ugly. “They will let you live forever. Like they promised.”

  No one spoke. Even Fa’a was leaning forward, his hand wrapped tightly around his spear.

  “Mua,” I said, very quietly, “how many o’anas do you have?”

  His head nodded. “One hundred and four,” he said. “Maybe.”

  Think, I commanded myself. “Mua, has everyone else you’re with—Vi’iu, Ivaiva, Va’ana, all of them—eaten the opa’ivu’eke?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And did they all eat it at their vaka’inas?”

  “Of course.”

  We paused again. “I’m going to ask him when he lef
t the village,” Tallent whispered to me, and then put the question to Mua, who shook his head and replied briefly. Tallent turned back to me, apologetic. “He said he can’t remember,” he said.

  “He kaka’a,” said Mua. I’m tired.

  “Wait,” I told Tallent. “Mua, where do you get the opa’ivu’eke from?”

  He looked at me directly then, a bit puzzled, as if I’d asked him how many hands he had. “The lake,” he said.

  “Which lake?” I asked him. “Where?”

  “The lake where the forest ends,” said Mua, after which, although we tried very hard, he would say nothing more.

  “He kaka’a,” he repeated.

  “Take him to bed,” Tallent said to Fa’a, and we watched the two of them go.

  The next day it was abruptly hot, and the sunlight seemed to drool through the leaftops like honey. “U’aka,” said Tallent, shrugging, when I looked over at him, my mouth dry. The hot season. We had been on Ivu’ivu a little more than four months.

  I craved something cold and watery, something far from the fibrous fruits that the island seemed to specialize in, and was grateful to Fa’a when he brought me a gourd, about the size of a cucumber and covered with an unappetizing pelt of coarse brown hair. But when he cracked its tapered neck against a rock, I saw that it was hollow, and inside was a viscous clear liquid, as thick as oil but as coolly sweet as honeysuckle nectar. When he saw me drink it, he brought me four more and showed me how I could tear out the thin layer of meat with my fingers; it too was cool, and barely sugary, and seemed to dissolve on my tongue at once into a thousand little crystals.

  After I’d finished my breakfast, I went over to where Esme and Tallent were sitting and announced that today we’d go find the lake.

  Esme didn’t want to go: as far as we knew, there was no lake; we didn’t know where this lake was; Mua seemed exhausted; what did I expect to find at this lake, etc., etc. I found such skepticism and sudden embrace of practicality very ironic coming from a woman who had been willing to accept without question that Ika’ana was 176, but I knew enough by then to realize that her discomfort rose not from any philosophical differences but because the dynamic among the three of us had changed—I would be the one who would find what we sought (whatever that might be), not Tallent. He had recognized and accepted the inevitability of this; she had not.

  “Fine,” I told her. “You don’t have to go.” From her silence, I knew she would come anyway.

  The next thing to do was to question Mua again, though I was dismayed to see that he looked no more alert than he had the previous night. It would be a trying day.

  “Mua,” I asked him, “where are we?” Tallent translated the question to him.

  He laughed at the stupidity of the question. “Ivu’ivu.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but where?” I handed him a stick. “Can you draw where we are on the island?” But he only looked at me in reply, his mouth open.

  I thought for a minute. I could almost feel the smugness radiating off Esme. And then I knew what to try. “Mua,” I said, “I need your help.” He looked at me. “There’s going to be another vaka’ina,” I told him, “and we need to find an opa’ivu’eke. Can you help us find it?”

  “Whose?” Mua asked, reasonably.

  “His,” I said, gesturing at Tallent.

  “Ah,” said Mua, nodding wisely. And then he stood and began striding in the direction of the village.

  Was it to be that easy? Apparently it was. This, I reflected, was one of the difficulties of working with the dreamers and of being dependent on them for answers and direction: sometimes they grew mulish with a sort of stubbornly adhered- to logic understood and respected only by them, and sometimes they seemed wholly oblivious to the obvious. Tallent was clearly no more a sixty-year-old than I was, and yet here we were, off to find the lake of turtles like a jolly pack of travelers in a bardic tale. Or perhaps it wasn’t that they were oblivious; perhaps they simply saw things differently than we did. Or perhaps it was that they saw nothing at all; if they were told someone was sixty, then he was sixty, and no more proof was demanded. It was exhausting, this quicksand logic of theirs, applied with an inconsistency that was all the more frustrating for being so unpredictable.

  The five of us walked, concealed by trees, around one side of the village, Fa’a running back to tell Tu and Uva to watch the dreamers before joining us again, until we reached the back of the ninth hut, where Mua paused, frowning a bit, looking about him at the forest beyond. Then he gave a grunt, as if in recognition, and led us around a particularly thick manama trunk, behind which was hidden a rough sort of path, scarred with rock, that gradually, so slowly one barely sensed it, wound its way uphill.

  It felt good to be walking again after being so long confined to the village. The air was warm, and the earth smelled cozy and biscuity, and we were none of us encumbered by anything but our notebooks and pens; I noticed Tallent sketching a rough, mostly gestural map in his book as we went.

  The trek was not difficult, but we would never have been able to follow the path were it not for Mua. In some places it disappeared entirely, and in others it became an asphalted road of donkey-gray stone in which were embedded hundreds of chalky white fossils. I identified delicate insect carapaces, their legs as fine as threads, and the ridged backs of scorpions, and many other creatures that bore no resemblance in their stony state to anything I had seen before. Mua too seemed to enjoy the walk, and he hummed a vague, meandering tune through his nose as he went. Watching him bustle through the trees and sheafs of ferns, I was reminded anew of how superior his physical condition was, and how from the back he could have been no more than thirty.

  Around us the foliage alternately thickened and thinned, so that sometimes we were in darkness, an utter cocoon of green and black, and sometimes we were in landscape that resembled a meadow, with vast, empyreal sweeps of feathery yellow bushes and only a few slender trees, their boughs extravagantly trimmed with ruffled drapes of leaves. In these meadows we could see the sky above us, a bright, aching blue, and feel all around us the clicks and whirs and mechanical ticks and tocks of whole societies of insects. I came to realize that we had been in a prison of trees, all of them our wardens, and recognized then all that they had kept from us: light, wind, air, sound, space—the things every living creature on earth craves.

  So reveling in these familiar, long-lost sensations was I that I at first failed to notice that Mua had slowed, and that beside me Fa’a had stopped. We had entered, after another purgatory of trees, more meadowland—the fifth or sixth one—when I saw before me, about five hundred yards ahead, a shimmering lake. For a moment, I did not believe it existed. Not because it was particularly large (indeed, it was about the circumference of the village), or particularly lovely, or in fact particular in any sort of way at all, but because of its mere existence. Just as I had nearly forgotten what it was like to be in sunlight—true sunlight, not the inmate’s portion that was meted out to us each day by the treetops—so too had I forgotten what it was like to see a contained body of water, one not in constant motion but simply being. My instinct was to run into it, to feel the sensation of breaking its surface, but of course I didn’t.

  “Opa’ivu’eke,” said Mua matter-of-factly.

  We looked. There was nothing around the lake: no reeds, no trees, no shrubbery. Its borders were as clean and precise as the borders of the village, and later I would wonder if the people had modeled their village on this lake. But as we walked closer (unconsciously, we moved together as one organism, as if that might protect us from something we didn’t know to fear), I saw a cluster of tiny, clear eggs speckling the lake’s surface: a group here, a group there, all of them as fragile and pretty as glass.

  Drawing closer still, however, we realized that they weren’t eggs at all but bubbles, and just as the first of us had begun to exclaim, the first turtle’s head emerged from the waters, its mouth slightly open, its pleated throat stretching toward the sun, its ey
es closed. This was followed by another and another, until we counted, dotted around the lake, seven opa’ivu’ekes. There was no sound, not even the sound of the water breaking, and when they submerged themselves again, they were replaced by another group, this one of six, including three that were clearly children, their heads no bigger than a walnut shell. Down and up they went, an uncomplicated and lovely synchronized performance, while we stood and gawped from just a few yards away. It was then that I noticed that the insects’ buzz had been replaced by Fa’a’s low chant, the same one (presumably) he had made when he had last seen a live opa’ivu’eke, the tiny one paddling its way downstream at the start of our journey.

  “Hawana,” observed Mua, squinting at the lake. Many. He said something else too, and Tallent translated: “Sometimes there are many, sometimes there are few.”

  Then he spoke to Tallent again, something longer, and I saw Tallent shake his head, and Mua insist, and Fa’a, despite himself, let out a faint cry.

  Tallent looked at us, stricken. “He says I must go pick out the one I want, and that he will help me carry it.”

  Something was beginning to shape in my mind. “Ask him if I can pick one.”

  He did, and then turned back to me, shaking his head. “Only people who have reached sixty o’anas can touch an opa’ivu’eke, he says.”

  “So you can, because you’re supposed to be sixty o’anas, and he can, because he already is.” Beside me, Fa’a moved from one foot to the other, shifting his weight and gazing into the woods beyond the lake.

  Tallent confirmed this with Mua and nodded.

  “Ask him—ask him what would happen if you touched an opa’ivu’eke before you made sixty o’anas.”

  I saw the agitation in Mua’s face immediately. His answer was long and seemed complicated, and Tallent frowned, so hard was he concentrating on what Mua was saying. A couple of times he stopped Mua and asked him for clarification, and Mua answered him rapidly, his hands fanning the air.