The People in the Trees: A Novel

by Hanya Yanagihara

  I was met by a guide, one I’d not had before. He could have been anyone, but he spoke a little English, and he was wearing a sarong in dull mustard below a white man’s undershirt that was far too long for him. His hair was cut, cropped close around his ears. He led me not to a horse but to an orange-rusted jalopy, a Frankenstein of a car, cut and soldered from many pieces and makes, of which he was very proud, and drove me haltingly over to the dock, where a new deck had been clumsily built. There stood the boatman—the one from my original trip all those years ago, who pretended now, as ever, not to know me—but his vessel was, if not new, newer at least, and fitted with a proper motor that roared and belched as we bounced across the sea. And then, in half the time as before, there was Ivu’ivu, but as we rounded the corner to pull into the lagoon, another shock: the jungle had been pruned back so far that there was now a real beach, a scoop of mucky gray sand, the greenery forming an untidy hairline to its rear. On the sand was a beaming man, waving his arms at me as the boat dredged itself up onto shore.

  “No-ton! No-ton!” said the man, and I realized with a start that it was Uva, though not the Uva of my memory.71 This Uva was wearing pants—khakis, far too large for him—and a real button-down shirt, albeit one that had obviously been washed and rewashed and patched with runnels of stitches so dense they looked like scar tissue. His hair, like the boatman’s and the guide’s, had been hacked away at as well, and the bone had been removed from his nose, though on either side of his nostrils he carried a dark brown stain where the holes had closed over and healed.

  “How you?” asked Uva, smiling proudly, and this—his newly acquired English, and his pride in it—made my skin prickle for some reason, and the enormity of the island’s changes loomed large and clear in my mind.

  Everywhere were differences. A real path had been dozed uphill, and although we still had to traverse it by foot, Uva now pulled my supplies in a wheeled cart. He was not used to wearing so much clothing and sweated copiously. At one point he fumblingly unbuttoned his shirt partway, and when I took off my own to encourage him, he gazed at my nakedness longingly before turning away and buttoning back up: you could almost see the determination in his face, his new dedication to being fully clad. But why? I wanted to ask. One of the things the Ivu’ivuans had gotten right, after all, was their adherence to their own nudity; in such humidity, clothes were not only foolish but ill-advised.

  As we went, I could not help but study the treescape around me, trying to map the developments. Was it quieter than it had been last time, less filled with birdcall and monkey screech and insect flutter? Were there fewer manama trees and less fruit on the ground? Did the kanava trees seem less grimed with vuaka shit than they had before? Did that moss always look so trodden, or had someone recently walked across it? Was the passage between that stand of palm trees always so forgiving, or had it been widened recently by hand? Was that a white card, a botanist’s label, affixed to that orchid, or was it in fact a butterfly, its wings folded into a flat square?

  We smelled and heard the village before we saw it, but the smells were ones I recognized from the States, not from here, and the sounds were not of Ivu’ivu either. There was the tart, burned tang of bacon frying, and the hiss of a slosh of grease sliding against a hot pan. There were men’s voices, all speaking English, and the bright, aggressive scent of laundry detergent, and the ching of metal pinging against stone.

  And then we were upon them, their neat clean tents and their laundry—stretched-out T-shirts and cotton pants, all the same linty color—draped over the low manama branches, and the fire over which one of them held aloft with a pair of metal tongs a can of baked beans, whose contents burbled diarrhetically over the rim.

  I introduced myself—I couldn’t not—and learned that they were the Pfizer group; the Lilly group was apparently to the right of the village, although about the same distance removed. They were respectful, they were hostile, they were surprised; I could see them regarding me with envy, for while they spent their days trying to develop drugs and cold creams, I was doing real work, and they knew I was their superior. And yet they had all the resources—it was clear, from my single rucksack resting in Uva’s cart, that I did not—and it was already clear that the ones who had the resources would win. This is always true in science. It was true even then. I excused myself as soon as I could.

  But it was when we reached the edge of the village that the horror, the severity, of the island’s transformation really assaulted me. The huts were the same, as were the dirt floor’s well-drawn boundaries, but those were the only things that had remained as I remembered. Lanced on a stick over the fire was a cube of Spam sweating lardy drops into the flames, and an already roasted block of it sat nearby, its heat wilting and curling the palm leaf on which it rested. And a few feet off, a group of men hovered over a third brick, squeezing off pieces of it with their fingers and feeding their hogs a bite for every two or three they took. But somehow the worst thing was the clothesline that had been stretched between two manama trees on the left side of the village; the line had been made using some of the twisted palm-leaf rope—a precious rope, a rope meant for repairs and hauling and hog-leashing—and draped all across it was a junky selection of used clothes: yellowed undershirts and torn-pocketed trousers and plain, prim, long-sleeved cotton dresses that would have been useless in America, much less in tropical Ivu’ivu. And all around me the villagers went on their way in clothes, sometimes worn correctly and sometimes not, but always worn in earnest and with real effort—which was in many ways the most alarming thing of all, for it meant that it was not a lark, not a game, but that somehow they had been convinced that this was a habit worth adopting, a necessary adaptation. But who had told them so, and why had they believed them?

  I found myself walking toward the ninth hut. To one side, two of the pharmacists were kicking a soccer ball to each other and laughing as some of the village children—some in shirts so big that they resembled kimonos, the fabric of the arms sailing as they jumped and ran—joined in. Inside, the hut was as I remembered it: silent and cool and somehow somber. I was relieved, momentarily. But then I thought, was it too unchanged? There was something about it that felt dusty almost, and I found myself absurdly studying the dirt floor for signs of neglect. It was as if in the context of such enveloping changes, the ninth hut’s sameness made it appear less, not more, relevant. It was clear that what had once been—from dress to food to even the children’s play—was no longer valued, and the fact that no one had thought to update the hut with some recognition of the new world that had been visited upon them made me fear that it remained not as a symbol of something cherished but as a relic of something outgrown.

  Later I would realize that what had taken me weeks to find had taken teams of researchers only days. Later I would hurry uphill toward the lake—the path now an abandoned parade route, all staked with yards of fluttering bright red tape strung from tree to tree—and run crazily toward the two scientists (these from a German outfit that had set up camp some distance from the Lilly group) lifting a large opa’ivu’eke from the lake, the turtle’s limbs pinwheeling in fear. Later, after they had left, I would lean over the edge of the lake, its once-clean border made mucky with the stamped-sole imprints of a dozen men’s boots, and see only five heads break the surface of the water, and as long as I waited, they would not come to me but would only hover in the center of the pond, and I would have to try to stop myself from howling. Later I would learn (from one of those same German pharmacologists) that Tallent was missing, and had been missing for at least two weeks: he had been on the island alone, without Esme, and had met only some of them. And then one day he was gone. It had taken them a while—two days? three?—to notice his absence, but once they had, they had ventured into the forest in small groups and then sent their guides in after them. But they could find no evidence of him. He had carried only a knapsack, which he had taken with him, and although they had searched, they had been unable to find anywher
e that he might have disturbed the jungle: no fields of moss bearing the ghost impressions of his feet, no scattered manama seeds, no smudges of earth and stick where once a fire might have burned.

  And then I knew—this was the worst thing of all. Worse than the turtles, who had learned not to trust the new humans too late and were now much reduced in number. Worse than seeing the boy, my young friend who had slept leaning against me just a short while before and who seeing me now turned from me, his too-long pant legs sweeping behind him like a bride’s gown. I could not believe, could not accept, the fact that Tallent might be gone from me, from us, forever. By day I spoke to everyone I could—Ivu’ivuans, the pharmacologists—asking them for information. The latter group, seeing that it distracted me from getting in their way, indulged me, but they had such little information, such frustratingly little information, that many days I wished I had never asked. How had he seemed in the days before his disappearance? Fine, they said, but because they had not known him (and, I had to admit to myself, neither had I), they could not say whether his behavior was normal or not. He was calm and contemplative and kept to himself. What had he been researching? What had they seen him observe? They didn’t know, they said; he spoke sometimes to members of the village, but most of the time he was observing them, writing in his notebook, writing by himself. Had he spoken to any one villager in particular? No, they didn’t think so. Had he looked—and here I had to stop until I was certain I wanted to know the answer—unkempt, or seemed ill or illogical or delusional? No, they said. No, no.

  By night I looked for him, taking meandering, meaningless walks through the jungle. They were useless walks, for I never went too far and I never called his name, just swung my flashlight before me in arcs, the flat disk of light skittering across the various surfaces it encountered, illuminating bark here, leaves there, ground there, in jittery sequence. I do not think I seriously thought I’d find him. But on those walks I always remembered how I had first encountered Mua, stepping out of the shadows of the jungle like a nightmare come to life, and I suppose some part of me felt that it might happen again, that one night I’d move the flashlight just an inch to the right and there, centered in its beam, would be Tallent, his beard obscuring his expression, saying, “Well, Norton, what brings you here?”

  It was very rare, but every other year or so the villagers would lose someone to the forest: a hunter, usually young and inexperienced, would venture deep into the trees on his own and never return. Sometimes he would be lost forever. The Ivu’ivuans had a saying for such events—“Ka ololu mumua ko,” The jungle devoured him. The odd thing was that they would never consider that the disappeared person had died; he was simply away, unable to find his way home but alive all the same, trying and trying and trying to return to the village.

  Many theories have since been proposed about Tallent’s disappearance. He had gone to find more dreamers. He had followed a dreamer into the forest. He had gone mad. He had found another, more secret society and gone to live among them. He had discovered something glorious. He had discovered something terrible. He had been murdered by the villagers and taken away at night. He had become obsessed with a species of flower he had found. He had run away with one of the village women, one of the village men (preposterous, as no one from the village was missing). He had yearned to escape civilization and had gone to found his own. He had escaped from the island in secret and was living under an assumed identity in Hawaii, teaching at the university there. He had killed himself. He was alive still. He knew exactly where he was going. He had no idea where he was going.

  I cannot claim to know what happened to him. But I think about him often, more often than I think anyone would expect. When he vanished, I am afraid I have to admit, something I had once had vanished as well: the ability to care as intensely, one might diagnose it, but something else as well. I wonder sometimes, if he had remained in our world, how I might be different, how I might ultimately have found satisfaction other than in the ways I eventually did. And I suppose that if I were made to come to a conclusion, I would have to say that I too think that the jungle devoured him, and that somewhere he walks through it still. Indeed, I sometimes see him, very gaunt now and pale, having spent years and years under the dark canopy of trees, lifting his face to the small droplets of sunshine that the deepest part of the forest allows to penetrate. I never see him in the company of others but rather wandering in the forest alone, his clothes now mere scraps, decorations, a piece of bamboo for a walking stick, his beard scraping his rib cage. I wonder, has he eaten a bit of turtle to stay alive? Does he sing, or talk to himself, for company? Does he remember me? Did he ever find his way back to the village, and did he perhaps visit it once a year or so, standing hidden behind a tree, watching it change so profoundly that after a certain point he never returned?

  In my imaginings I sometimes call out to him, and sometimes he turns, and his eyes are bright and luminous and starved, and I am in those moments breathless, at the rapaciousness of his hunger and the keenness of his searching, and I am unable to say anything but stare at him, until he silently, with one thin and darkened hand clutching at his stick, turns back away from me—and is gone.

  IV.

  Well, what more is there for me to say on this matter? You know, we all know, what happened next. There were endings, but none of them were happy. Whenever I am asked, I cannot help but be brisk when relating what followed, for it is too difficult for me to make the story into what it ought to be: a saga in itself, a long death that spirals down slowly to the ground.

  It was an end full of ironies, as such sad and bad endings often are. Shall I tell you of how the pharmacists and neuroscientists and biologists hurried home with their carrier bags heavy with turtles, and how test after test proved what I already knew and had already tried to tell them: that the mice (and later the rats, the rabbits, the dogs, the monkeys, the who knows what else—there were rumors, but none were ever definitively proven) lived double, treble, quadruple their natural lives, but all of them, every one of the survivors, went slowly but irreversibly and horribly mad? The mice kicking and mewling; the cats, their mouths fixed open into soundless yawps, beating themselves against their cages; the dogs tearing out their own eyes with their paws; the monkeys, the closest to us in temperament and sensibility, who chattered and chattered until one day they chattered no more, and whose eyes grew so blank and unfocused one could look in them and see anything one might wish reflected in them: the sea, the clouds, a lake of turtles.

  Shall I tell you of how by the time telomeres were discovered, and then by the time genetic sequencing became sophisticated enough to conjecture exactly how the opa’ivu’eke was affecting normal telomerase, there were no more opa’ivu’ekes to be studied?72 Shall I tell you how the lake had long been scooped clean, and although in the 1970s a group of a dozen scientists went back to dredge it and then walked the length of the river, its entire reach from the top of the island to its bottom, they never found another opa’ivu’eke? Shall I tell you of the recriminations, the desperation, the bemoaning of years wasted, the millions of dollars spent, the agony of knowing how close we were to eternal life and how it once again eluded us, all dreams of godliness turned into water glugging down a wide-mouthed drain? Shall I tell you of the disbelief, the plans that were made and then had to be scrapped for age-retarding drugs, for anti-aging skin creams, for elixirs to restore male potency? Shall I tell you of Pfizer’s sorrow, of Lilly’s dismay, of Johnson and Johnson’s agony, of Merck’s rage? Shall I tell you of the years of feckless, fruitless, desperate attempts to re-create the effect using every sort of turtle on the planet? Of months waiting for the mice to continue beyond their natural lifespan, and then, upon watching them die, beginning anew with a fresh batch, and a new Hawaiian sea turtle, a new leatherback turtle, a new Galápagos tortoise? Shall I tell you about trying to re-create the effect using every animal, every plant, every fungus, that could be harvested from Ivu’ivu? The sloths, the hogs, the sp
iders, the vuakas, the toucans, the parrots, the hunonos, the manamas, the kanavas, the weird lizardlike things, the fuzzy gourds, the palm leaves, the seedpods—shall I tell you how the island was stripped of everything, whole forests razed, whole fields of mushrooms and orchids and ferns picked like fat red strawberries and shiny green lettuces and loaded onto the helicopters that were now able to land directly on the island because so many trees had been felled that there was open space aplenty?

  Shall I tell you what happened to the chief, how in the early 1970s he was lured to the United States by Johns Hopkins, where he was presumably stuck and measured and leeched of fluids every day, and may be still, for no one, no one, has ever heard of him or mentioned him again? Shall I tell you about Lawa’eke, who around that time simply disappeared and was never found again? (Shall I tell you how Pfizer accused Lilly of kidnapping him, and how Lilly blamed the University of Minnesota, and how the University of Minnesota blamed the University of Hamburg, and how the University of Hamburg blamed Merck, and how Merck said nothing?) Shall I tell you of the reports of other dreamers being found, stumbling, disoriented, through open plains that had once been forests, blinking in the sudden unfiltered light? Shall I tell you how there were rumors that there were dozens of them, scores of them, hundreds of them, but that I never saw them for myself—that there were stories that they were divvied up like candies by the pharmaceutical companies and flown away to live their lives in sterile labs, where they may be living still, punctured with needles, their arms sprouting tangles of IVs, their legs harvested for scrapings of skin, of muscle, of bone?73 Shall I tell you how in 1966, when the first institutional review boards monitoring the use of human subjects in research projects was established, I nearly lost my dreamers, and by 1975—after Willowbrook, after Tuskegee, after the birth of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research—I had lost them for good?74