The People in the Trees: A Novel

by Hanya Yanagihara

  “I was very sad,” Mua said, “because these were my friends. I had fought with them and hunted with them, and they had all attended my vaka’ina, and now they were leaving me without saying goodbye. But I understood that this was the way it must be.”

  “Did they eat the opa’ivu’eke at your vaka’ina?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “They had many fewer o’anas than I did,” he said.

  “Have you seen them in the village?” I asked.

  “No. They are dead.”

  He said this with such fierce certainty that we were surprised.

  “How do you know?”

  He shrugged. “I know,” was all he said. And then he began his chant: “He kaka’a, he kaka’a.” I’m tired, I’m tired.

  “Wait,” I pleaded with him and with Fa’a, who was already standing, ready to take Mua back to the others. “Mua, what happened to you and the other mo’o kua’aus?”

  He sighed. “We walked and walked. We ate the food. Sometimes we caught something to eat, but it was difficult without our spears. One day we came across a stream, very deep, very fast, and stayed there for a long time. There were plants that grew around the trees, and we ate those. The man I was with was becoming more and more of a mo’o kua’au by the day—he forgot and forgot, and I had to watch him like a child. I did more and more of the work. One day I came back from getting us something to eat and I saw that he was dead.”

  “How did he die?” Tallent asked gently.

  “He was in the river,” said Mua. He shook his head. “He forgot to ask permission to drink its waters, and the water choked him and he died.” We were all quiet.

  “So what did you do?” I asked.

  “I left.”

  “And did you ever find the other man, the one who ran from the hunters?”

  “No,” he said. “But he was becoming more of a mo’o kua’au as well, so I think he is perhaps dead too.”

  “How would he have died?”

  “Maybe he fell? Or maybe he too forgot to ask permission to take a drink and was cursed and killed.”

  “But how did you meet up with”—I gestured toward the group—“the others?”

  “Ah,” said Mua. “Well, I walked and walked, and some days I had food and some days I didn’t, and then one day I met up with some of them, and then with others, and then we hunted as a group and ate as a group, and fought against the others when we needed to.”

  I felt Tallent look at me. “Which others?” I asked.

  “The others,” he said, a bit impatiently. “The others in the forest.”

  “Hunters?”

  “No, no, not hunters—mo’o kua’aus.”

  “There are others?”

  “Of course.”

  “How many? Where are they? Why don’t you speak to them? Why were you fighting? Why—”

  “He kaka’a, he kaka’a,” he sang, almost mockingly, as if he knew how desperate I was for the answer, and Fa’a stood with a resolute air.

  “Wait,” I told him, but this time it was Fa’a who shook his head, Fa’a, who never contradicted any of us, and we all fell silent.

  “Tallent,” I hissed at him as we watched them go, “We need to sort this out right now.”

  “We need to figure this all out tomorrow,” Esme interjected, a little too decisively for my taste (she had unfortunately returned from the creek just in time to insert herself into the proceedings).

  “Tomorrow,” Tallent agreed. “It’s late.” And although I hadn’t noticed it before—we had quickly grown accustomed to the village’s hours—in that moment I noticed that it was indeed very late, and that everything around us had grown so quiet that the only sound aside from our own voices and the nearby snores and grumblings of the dreamers was, as always, the fire, hissing to itself in the still air.

  I woke the next morning with my mouth dry with hate. My god, was I sick of the dreamers. I hated them, I hated their stingy, teasing way with information, I hated their stupid flat faces, their unintelligent eyes, their clumpy hair, their bulbous figures, their poor memories, their recycled conversation. I hated their village and their island and their weather (the heat was by this point so oppressive that we all spent most of the day sleeping, and I wished I had a tail like the hogs did to flap away the omnipresent flies and gnats and fleas and ticks and beetles and ants and wasps and bees and dragonflies that buzzed round us all day and night, never ceasing, never diminishing), and their fruit that moved and their endless supply of meat (of which we had not been offered one morsel), and their kin with their braying children and grunting women and taciturn men. I hated the way the breeze was so seldom that when it came it felt begrudging, that something that should have been consistent and plentiful had been made into something rare and capricious. I hated that Tallent would not let me walk alone up the path to the open field, that he would not give me an answer as to why I couldn’t, that he wouldn’t let me take Mua to show me the way. I hated the sloths who acquiesced so meekly to their deaths, their tiny, piteous voices, the way the hogs licked their skins clean as lazily as if they were lapping at ice cream. I hated Tallent, and I hated Esme, and I hated the guides, and I especially hated Mua and the chief, who I suspected could resolve the whole situation for us at once if they chose and yet for some reason—boredom? playfulness? who knew?—had chosen not to. But most of all I hated the smallness of life here, and how even though it was so small, I was unable to solve the mystery whose central question I could still not determine.

  And yet here I was, trapped on this island (for I knew Tallent would never leave now, not when he was so close to unraveling something important), and my only way out was to resolve the problem.

  I should add that there were other factors that were contributing to what must sound like petulance. I had begun, over the preceding week or so, to notice that the village was abuzz with what seemed like an oppressive amount of sexual activity. Whether this was in fact unusual or I had simply become alert to it I was unable to determine, but each day brought numerous examples of coupling, so many that I, to whom nothing human is foreign, began to feel somewhat assaulted. A walk through the village meant encountering a couple, their slabby bodies smacking against each other, tussling just a few inches from the fire, groaning like the hogs. Something had even been reawakened in the dreamers, and now when I tried to sleep, it was often to a chorus of moans, one evening so loud that I finally roused myself to investigate: there they were, their hideous loose flesh chafing against their partners’, clawing and petting, their movements inexpert and inelegant. My presence, however, did not deter them in the least, and when, in a moment of desperation, I tossed a manama into their midst to startle them into silence, there was only the slightest of pauses before they resumed their activities, and I heard, faintly, the manama squish into the earth under the weight of someone’s back.

  Returning to my mat, however, I noticed something else amiss: both Tallent and Esme were gone. Their mats were there, but they were not. “Esme?” I called softly. “Tallent?” But no one answered.

  My mind immediately filled with the worst of thoughts. I saw Esme pressed against a tree, Tallent embracing her, her ugly mouth open like a greedy carp’s, the messy excessiveness of her body—her sprawling hips, her bulging stomach, her puckered, dimpling thighs, her frizzed dandelion head of hair—a repulsive foil to the trim discipline of his own form.

  I was, I am sorry to say, in a torment. Not knowing was unbearable, but so was knowing. Nevertheless, I found myself making concentric rings around the village, heading deeper into the forest with each lap, calling out their names in a low voice with every turn. Where could they have gone? I even, on the seventh lap, attempted to follow the path behind the ninth hut as far as I could, until it grew increasingly faint under a bloom of moss and I was forced to retreat downhill. The panic of discovering them was beginning to give way to new concerns. Where could they have gone, in our circumscribed world, that I could not find them? Was this a regular occu
rrence? And—this thought came to me last but was the most alarming—did not their disappearance mean that I was alone, with only Fa’a with whom to speak some semblance of English, and the dreamers my responsibility?

  It was while I was contemplating these thoughts (only later would I realize that I had been running, my arms stretched in front of me like a zombie’s to feel for unseen trees) that I encountered the boy. At this point I was quite deep into the forest, maybe nine rings or so in, and I first mistook him for a boar. He was turned away from me, after all, and standing near a tree, and when my fingers first touched his rough bundle of hair, I mistook it for a hide, giving a little shout of fear and surprise when I did.

  He gave a shout as well, but I think it was just to echo mine, for when I knelt down beside him—there was a crack in the canopy above us, and a little moonlight leaked through, enough for me to see the outlines of his features—he seemed calm, and his eyes met mine without fear or suspicion.

  It did not take me long to identify him as the boy from the first a’ina’ina. He was, as I have said, an exceptionally beautiful boy, slim and well assembled, with unusually good posture, although what was most striking about him was the steadiness of his gaze, which I could feel upon me, even if I could barely see it in the poor light.

  But it was disconcerting to come across him here, so deep in the forest, holding himself so still, almost as if he had been waiting for me to find him, although that of course would have been impossible.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him gently, although he could not understand me and so said nothing.

  “What is your name?” But still, naturally, there was no response.

  I pointed to myself. “Norton.” I pointed to him: And you? But he only cocked his head, the way the chief had, before righting it and looking at me again.

  “It’s late,” I told him. “Shouldn’t you be at home?”

  But then, before I could keep speaking, he placed one of his hands on the side of my face. It was such a strange gesture, so shockingly intimate and adult—pitying, wise, maternal, even—that I found myself very close to tears. It seemed in that moment as if he were offering me a sympathy I had not even known I had been craving, but feeling his hot, dry palm on my cheek—a boy’s palm, when I later examined it, sticky and faintly dirty and scuffed with small cuts, but underneath soft and somehow innocent—I felt the unhappiness and loneliness of the past few days, the past four months, the past twenty-five years, press upon me like a great, bony mass.

  We stayed in that position for what felt like a long period, me in my painful crouch, he before me, my cheek tipped now into his hand. Above us the moon glided behind a cloud, and it was then, in the absence of light, that he reached down and lifted my hand and placed it solemnly on his genitals.

  I immediately removed it. By now the darkness was so complete that the only part of him I could see were his eyes (and he mine), and in them I saw nothing that one might expect: nothing keen or conniving, nothing eager or lascivious, nothing hungry or fevered. I do not know how to explain it better; I do not wish to be sentimental and say that they had a wisdom, or any sort of special intelligence, but I do think it fair to say that they did contain, at the very least, a kind of gravity.

  He took my hand again, very gently, like a seducer, and began to move it across his body. Once again I pulled it away, and once again he patiently replaced it.

  I am being bewitched, I thought as we went back and forth, my hand now feeling almost disconnected from my body, a floating white bird moving on its own accord through the darkness. The boy shifted position then, to lie down against the base of the tree, and tugged at my other hand.

  Oh, Tallent, I thought. Oh, Esme, save me. I am being held captive. I am being spellbound. I may even have said this aloud. But they didn’t come, of course, and the forest remained quiet, the only sound the boy’s breath, his face blurring in and out of focus as the moon revealed and concealed itself in an endless flirtation with some unseen lover.

  IV.

  Something had been troubling me about my conversations with Mua, particularly my most recent one. Why was he a mo’o kua’au? What made him one? Yes, he was forgetful, and yes, he perseverated, and yes, he could quite often be very dull (I have not recounted here the numerous boring and repetitive conversations I had with Mua over these months), and yes, his short-term memory was very poor indeed (the day after our hike to see the opa’ivu’ekes, I asked him a question about it, and he had no memory of our trip; indeed, my insistence made him frightened and anxious), but his long-term memory was excellent, and his attention span, while by no means admirable, was no shorter than that of a child. Certainly all of these things combined to become very annoying, but was it really so bad? Was it worth abandoning someone simply because he was forgetful and repetitive?

  I had been working on a list of the dreamers’ approximate ages, and now I separated them into two smaller lists: one group that was apparently known to the village, the other that apparently was not.

  Known Unknown

  Mua (appx 104 years) Eve (?)

  Vanu (Mua’s father; appx 131 years) Vi’iu (?)

  Ivaiva and Va’ana (sisters;

  appx 133 years) Ika’ana (appx 176 years)

  Ukavi (appx 108–109 years)

  Except for Lawa’eke’s father, the chief and Lawa’eke were the oldest people in the village. We had, in a subsequent conversation, gotten both of them to confirm unambiguously that they knew Mua, Vanu, Ivaiva, Va’ana, and Ukavi and that they remembered them being taken into the forest. But as hard as we tried, we could not get them to recognize Eve, Vi’iu, or Ika’ana. Esme, being Esme, attributed their ignorance to willfulness. “Of course they know them,” she insisted. She was, however, unable to explain what benefit to them there might be from denying knowledge of the others. “They have their reasons,” she’d say—she saw conspiracy even in this simplest of civilizations, a civilization so guileless that its people didn’t even bother to conceal the fact that they abandoned their elders once they began to stray from the obscure behavioral strictures that governed their society.

  I, however, thought there was a much easier explanation: surely the reason that the three dreamers remained unknown to Lawa’eke and the chief was that they were so old they had been exiled when the two men were very young, too young to remember? This absolutely made sense in Ika’ana’s case: if he was 176 now and he had begun becoming a mo’o kua’au at, say, 110, he would have been escorted away well before either of them had even been born.

  That left the mystery of both Vi’iu and Eve. Vi’iu, I suspected, was younger than Ika’ana, though perhaps not by much. He had not, it seemed, been alive during Ka Weha, for example, but when Ika’ana spoke of it, he nodded wisely, in the way of someone who had heard about the event so often that he had almost forgotten that he had not experienced it. But he was very impaired, there was no doubt of that: I remembered how poorly he had performed on the basic neurological tests I had given him, how he was unable to identify any of the objects I had placed before him, how his attention drifted the moment I began to speak to him.

  Last and least, then, there was Eve, who was her own special problem. Even in the company of the dreamers, she remained singular. There was so much she could not do! She could not speak, she did not listen, she could not interact with the others, she was without shame or manners or niceties or logic. Often when I regarded her from a distance, I felt as if I were watching something inanimate that had been unlawfully given breath—she staggered about and yelped when she felt like it, and crammed things into her mouth, and scrutinized the inconsequential, and ignored the fascinating. With her coloring and lumpy shape, she occasionally resembled nothing so much as a sweet potato, one set upon two legs and plopped amid us. It was not a life, but that she breathed and sighed and ate.

  And then suddenly I realized: this was what being a mo’o kua’au must be. This was what they were afraid of; this was the end of the story. I flippe
d back in my notebook, looking for Tallent’s definition of a mo’o kua’au, which I had written down after our conversation all those months ago—“all normal in appearance, but all incapable of making meaningful conversation. All they could do was jitter and babble and laugh at nothing, the neighing laughter of the brainless”—and knew: Eve was a fully transformed mo’o kua’au. She was what the others would become. All it took, it occurred to me, was time.

  I flew back toward our camp. “Lawa’eke’s father!” I screamed as I ran. All we had to do now was ask Lawa’eke’s father to identify Ika’ana and Vi’iu, who would surely have been alive and been present in the village at the same time. We would also ask him to identify Eve; if he couldn’t, it would confirm what I suspected—that Eve was so old that not even Ika’ana and Vi’iu knew her from the village. That would make her well over two hundred years old.

  “Lawa’eke’s father!” I shouted at Tallent, who was, with Fa’a, leading some of the dreamers back from the stream. When he saw me, he passed them to Fa’a and started walking toward me.

  “Tallent,” I gasped; I could feel myself grinning. “We need to talk to Lawa’eke’s father right now.”

  He may have said my name, but I was talking too fast, and he stopped to listen to me and my theories, which I knew, knew for certain, were correct—I had never been more certain of anything, it seemed, and the feeling was exhilarating. Exhilarating and also somehow completely natural, as if such a feeling were my birthright. This, I caught myself thinking, was what my life should be like—this sensation, this breathless excitement.

  “Norton,” said Tallent finally, when I was at last able to calm myself, “Lawa’eke’s father is gone. They took him into the forest last night.”

  I was of course devastated. I railed away at Tallent, demanding that he retrieve for me the chief (so I could what? Shout at him? Rebuke him?) or the hunters who had taken him (who had yet to return), and that we ask to borrow one of the hogs to sniff a path toward Lawa’eke’s father (I had no idea if hogs were even capable of doing this). I was also struck by the unfairness of the entire situation. Here we were in a place where nothing—sometimes almost literally nothing—happened for days and days, and then, exactly when I needed things to remain the same, they suddenly changed.