He never answered us but instead walked away. As I have said, to answer would have been to acknowledge what he tried very hard not to. He was sixty o’anas. Soon—not terribly soon, but eventually—his future would arrive, and he would become someone whom even he would not be able to recognize. He didn’t need to speak; it was all the answer I needed.
The trip downhill was much faster than our ascent had been, and less wondrous too. Here for the second time were the plains of moss, the clans of cycads, the jewel-bright spiders, the occasional gusts of gnats or butterflies, and the unseen toucans hooting to one another from the unseen treetops. Nearly six months ago it had been a place of mingled delights and horrors, but now it was discovered land, and we were already bored with it. And here again were the dreamers, all tied together with a length of palm-leaf cord we had been reluctantly given from the hut, led by Fa’a and tailed by me or Esme. Before us walked Tallent, and far ahead of him—so far that we had lost sight of them—Uva and Tu.
We had agreed, Tallent and Esme and Fa’a and I, to abandon the dreamers we could not take with us in the more forestlike part of the jungle, the antechamber to the village. The chief had not specified how far away we had to take them, but Fa’a had suggested at least three days’ walk, and as the end of the third day approached, I could feel us all slowing our pace, matching our strides to Eve’s stumbling instead of yanking her along as we normally did. Sometimes Fa’a would hum to the dreamers in brief nasal puffs and they would hum back, and although their tones were unpretty, they could sustain a note for an astonishingly long time, until their hums melded with the hums of the forest itself and everything around us seemed to thrum with noise.
Finally the air around us seemed to paint itself gray, as if it had been washed with gouache, and we knew we could avoid it no longer. All of us, including Tallent and the other two guides, who had returned from their advance work, followed Fa’a as he led the dreamers toward an enormous makava tree, the biggest I had ever seen: the six of us together could not encircle it. As Fa’a talked to the dreamers in his kind, quiet way, the other guides lifted their hands out of their palm-rope handcuffs, separating from the group the four we had determined to keep: Eve, of course; Vanu and Mua, because they were father and son; and Ika’ana, both for his extreme age and because he formed a link between Eve and the others.46 Uva worked a different length of palm around their wrists and led them away, the four of them following him obediently and without question. As nighttime came they grew more pliable than ever, and watching them leave, I could not help but feel a sort of pain at their gentle acquiescence, their old men’s shuffling.
Now there were only the others, the four we had chosen to leave behind. Tu and Fa’a took the long length of palm rope and restrung them together like a sad chain of paper dolls, the cord loose on their arms. They sat them down at the base of the tree, their backs against the bark, and then tied one end of the rope—again, very loosely, so loose a sharp tug would have broken it—around one of the low-hanging branches. (The rope was meant to protect them, or so we thought: if they stayed together rather than wandering in their separate directions, we thought they would … what? Be able to watch one another die instead of dying alone? But at the time it seemed a kindness, although it is difficult now to remember why.) Before them, Tallent and Esme and I placed tiers of food: Spam, slid from its metal containers and placed on palm leaves, kanavas and manamas and no’akas. There were those weird fungi Eve liked, and rattly portions of things I realized Tallent must have filched from the dried-goods hut, including a small stack of vuakas, which Tu and Fa’a glanced at covetously before turning resolutely away.
When we were finished, we stepped back, and something about seeing them all looking at us, their eyes as large and black and trusting as a sloth’s, and the ground at their feet decorated with gifts as if it were Christmas and these were the presents under the tree, wrenched something inside me, and for a moment I was paralyzed by the cruelty of what we were doing.
I think we all must have felt the same way, for although I could not understand him, I could hear the anguish in Fa’a’s voice and saw the tenderness with which he laid his hand on each shoulder, gesturing toward the food as he spoke to them. Later Tallent would tell me what he had said: Don’t leave one another. Take care of one another. Eat the food when you get hungry. Stay by this tree. We’ll soon return.
And then we left. “Don’t turn around,” Tallent warned us, and we all stumbled forward, driven by our desire to move as far away from them as possible, when they suddenly, as a group, began to hum, a fat, buggy drone that sounded mysterious and full of portent, a chant of goodbye, although really it was nothing of the sort, just a sundowning reflex, a bit of echolalia.
We walked later than we ever had that night, so late that soon the only light we had was the red glint of bats’ eyes as they flapped noisily above us and the phosphorescent gleam from a flock of hard-shelled beetles that crested above us in a clicking, clackety gaggle, knocking into one another with crisp little toks and careening off branches. It was imperative that we put as much distance between the abandoned and ourselves as we could, but even after our walking became first inconsequential, as we were going so slowly, and then counterproductive (had we been moving in circles? It was impossible to tell), we seemed unable to stop ourselves. In the forest’s dark, in the absence of sight, all sounds became magnified, and out of the darkness loomed visions and nightmares. At one point I swore I felt something large and furred skim fleetingly over the top of my head, almost as if the air itself had grown feathers, but when I asked the others if they had felt it too, no one had. I found myself aware, as I had not been in the village, of the woods beyond and what might be living past the tiers and tiers of trees we had not even thought to access. Earlier in the day I had watched as a swarm of moths, so densely clumped that they appeared to be one creature, threw themselves at two kanava trees in a barreling kamikaze mission. But to my surprise they disappeared between the trees, vanishing into what I saw was the barest of fractures between them, an opening so slender I hadn’t even seen it. What else had managed to muscle through the trees’ barrier? There was the forest we knew, but beyond it perhaps there was a whole other forest, an entirely different ecosystem with its own distinct set of birds and mushrooms and fruits and animals. Perhaps there was another set of villages as well, protected by the trees for centuries, whose people lived to be a thousand and never lost their minds, or who died when they were teenagers, or who never had sex with children, or who only did.
I could hear Fa’a and Tallent speaking to each other, and eventually, when Fa’a fell back, I asked Tallent what they’d been saying. “He’s upset,” said Tallent, and he sounded upset as well. “He says we should never have tied them to the tree.”
“But the cord’s easy enough for them to break.”
“That’s what I told him,” said Tallent. “But he says he never should have told them to stay. He says they’ll never break the cord—they’ll just sit there, waiting for us to come back, because we promised we would.”
“But won’t they forget we said that?”
He sighed. “I explained that to him,” he said. “But.” He didn’t say anything more.
We were quiet for a moment. The ground crunched and squished beneath us.
“So what does he think will happen?” I finally asked.
“He thinks they’ll just stay there, not touching the food, waiting for us to return, until they die of starvation.”
“Isn’t that a bit extreme?” They had, I reminded myself, coped well on their own for years, for decades. And yet a part of me understood Fa’a’s distress: now that we had entered the dreamers’ lives—now that we had named them as dreamers, now that we had cared for them, now that we considered them ours, something found and given meaning—it was somehow difficult to imagine them capable of living on without us.
He sighed again. “He wants to go back for them. He wants to take them to his village. I to
ld him he couldn’t. He said he was a killer.”
“Poor Fa’a,” I said, although my answer was more reflexive than anything else. He was a good, kind person, and although I thought he was being melodramatic, I appreciated his compassion. In the absence of action, Poor Fa’a seemed to be the only thing to say.
“Poor Fa’a,” repeated Tallent, his voice low. “Poor Fa’a.”
And then we were almost at the end. I had experienced the journey of almost six months before in reverse and was surprised at how familiar the sensations felt, and how friendly too: here I was stumbling over the same slippery crosshatch of roots, and growing heartily tired of the endless march of green, and feeling the wet air press upon me like a water-soaked mattress. Even with the dreamers—who, it must be said, were very good: obedient and placable—we were a day ahead of schedule. The boat would pick us up at midday on Tuesday, and by late afternoon on Sunday we had only another seven hours of walking to go. Once again I was impressed that Tallent had all along been keeping track of time; he even produced from his rucksack a small calendar, and seeing the days ticked off by a pencil mark made our stay on the island feel somehow both longer and more real.
He decided that we would stop early for the night and have an easy amble the next day. On Tuesday morning we would walk the final two hours to the shore, but it wasn’t worth going earlier, because that would mean sitting by the shore getting bitten by the mosquitoes that were becoming more and more frequent the closer to water we got. Knowing that we were so near the sea made me jumpy with impatience: how I longed to see something more powerful and unknowable than the jungle or the forest, something whose surface would prickle with light, something that could ferry us away from this place.
That night we ate the last of the Spam, and I remembered the meal of crackers we had had early in our trip and how Tallent had said I would miss their crispness. There were no crackers this time—they had been consumed long before—but their absence made me think of what an imperfect place this island was: above, in the village, there was fire but no water, and here everything sagged and burped water. The trees were swollen with it, the ground was fecund with it, our bodies produced it with such unceasing constancy that everything I owned was silky with moisture. Still, it was a nice penultimate meal on the island, and the food we ate and what we lacked were only incidental. Even the dreamers seemed to realize that something grand and exciting was about to happen, for they smiled their silly smiles and chattered away and at one point Mua even rose to do a funny little half-dance that resembled the one that the women did after the cessation of their menses. Uva and Tu—who had taken advantage of the leisurely day to go vuaka hunting and had returned with a sack that squirmed with so many of them that it resembled nothing so much as a gigantic, bloated manama fruit—were particularly joyful, laughing and talking and showing their pointy teeth, relieved that their time in this impossible place was almost over and that they would soon be home, alive and, even better, with a rich man’s haul of monkeys. Only Fa’a remained locked into his fugue state, and as the rest of us clapped our hands and shouted at Mua’s dancing, he sat apart from us, staring in turn at each of the dreamers, rubbing his thumb up and down his spear. It was impossible not to intuit what he was thinking: in the dreamers he saw not only his fate but his responsibility. Their presence was an unbearable reminder to him of what he’d done and of what he’d become. When he murmured something to Tallent and left, stalking into the woods beyond, I thought nothing of it, only that he wanted to be alone, away from us. And why would he not want to be alone, to prolong considering the inevitability of his departure? He was returning home a cursed man. What would he say to his family?
I woke the next morning to screams, to Uva and Tu running toward us, shouting at Tallent, startled groups of bugs and birds rising up and screeching away in their wake. “Fa’a!” they were shouting “Fa’a!,” followed by something else.
He was up and running after them at once. “One of you, stay behind with the dreamers!” he called back to us, but both Esme and I bolted after him, which I later had to admit was not very wise—they could have wandered off and we might never have seen them again.
We ran, and for once the jungle, as if recognizing our panic, seemed to adjust itself to us. Our feet did not land in the hollows of roots and did not skid over the ankle-breaking rimes of moss but instead floated over every impediment, each footfall landing as cleanly and solidly as if we had been running on lawn, on tarmac.
Before us, in the distance, was a tree, an enormous makava, its branches stretched low and long like an octopus’s tentacles, and from one of them hung Fa’a. He had used a length of palm-frond rope, the same we had tied the dreamers with, and made an imperfect noose, so imperfect that when I examined him and felt his neck intact, I realized that he had suffocated and that his death had been a slow and agonizing one.
Uva and Tu were howling, their heads thrown back and their eyes seamed shut, their slabby tongues working muscularly in their mouths. Esme was crying. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Fa’a.” Tallent looked exhausted, his face pulling itself down toward the ground, his hands hanging at his sides.
It took all of us to bring him down. Tu climbed up the tree and onto the branch and sawed at the rope with Tallent’s knife. Tallent and I caught him as he fell, and we all carried him back, Tallent and Tu on one side, the rest of us on the other, Fa’a a solid, swinging weight between us.
I had not witnessed a death the entire time I had been in the village. A birth, yes—the baby, like any other baby anywhere else in the world, had slid out, snarled with fleshy cord and colored that particular unattractive mauve color that newborns are, as I watched, barely breathing so as not to betray my presence, from behind the hut—but not a death. So I did not know how the Ivu’ivuans would bury their dead, or even if they had many occasions to do so.47 But the U’ivuans’ treatment of their dead would be different from the Ivu’ivuans’ anyway, Tallent reminded me. In U’ivu they would take the body to a remote location high in the hills and leave it to be consumed by animals. Then, six months later, they would return and move the bones somewhere secret; only the deceased’s family would know the location, and they would never tell for fear that someone else would steal the bones and with them the dead person’s spirit.
But here there was no high hill nearby. That afternoon (we had kept Fa’a’s death from the dreamers) Tu and Uva took Fa’a away. They were gone for so long that, although we did not voice this fear to one another, I think we were all concerned that they might not return, even though they hated the island, and even though they had left their sack of vuakas behind. By the time they did walk back to us it was daybreak, and the sky was lightening, and we could see small dust-colored insects, their wings webbed and traced with veins so fine and yellow they looked like strands of saffron, clogging the air before and above us.
They were spent, gray-faced. They spoke to Tallent. “They’ve hidden him somewhere,” he reported to us. “They said they’d return in six months to hide his bones.” But we knew, all of us, that this would not happen, that Fa’a’s body would remain wherever they had left it, to be nibbled away at by ants and bats and birds and beetles until it was picked clean, its bones as white as butter.
In the end, we had spent so long waiting for Tu and Uva that we had to hurry the rest of the way downhill to meet the boat. Tu carried Fa’a’s spear, which he would return to his family and which would serve as evidence that he was truly gone. By the time we reached the little shore, where the water lapped so far up onto ground that there was a span of about ten yards that was not quite ocean and not quite land, where you could see the two worlds coming together into one—fish swimming above grass and orchids shimmering beneath the ocean’s oily slick—the sun was so high in the sky that for a moment I feared that the boat had already come and gone and we would be trapped here forever, too far from one civilization and unwilling to return to the other. But then we heard a far-off chugging and watched the boat
materialize in the distance as a gray-brown smear before it drew closer and solidified into shape. After these months it looked, for all its crudeness, impossibly sophisticated, a creation of a bold and ingenious society. At the prow, the boatman held up his arms, and Tallent waved back to him. I wondered what the boatman would think of his extra passengers, and what the dreamers would think of the boat, and, later, what it would feel like to be on the open water, to have the ocean bouncing away beneath us. With each yard we would be drawn farther away from this place, which was already beginning to feel like a dream, a series of events and meetings that had never happened, and back toward our own society. I asked myself if I was happy about this and was surprised to find that I didn’t know that I was.
The boat was now close enough for its driver to see who we had with us, and even from the shore I could see his mouth form itself into an O.
“Bring them closer—get ready to board,” Tallent told us, already wading out into the shallows to help pull the boat in.
We drew them along, Tu and Uva and Esme and I, each of us holding one of the dreamers’ hands. They were reluctant to put their feet into the water, but once they did, they let out small sighs of happiness, although Ika’ana’s hand tightened around mine, and I squeezed his back to reassure him.
The People in the Trees: A Novel Page 26