The People in the Trees

by Hanya Yanagihara

  Really, we realized later, when we had assembled them at our camp, there was little to distinguish them as a group, other than they were all Ivu’ivuans, and all (we checked) bore the mark of the opa’ivu’eke on the backs of their necks. They were also, as far as I could determine, all in good physical health; their pulses (after they had calmed themselves) rhythmic, their teeth and gums strong. None of the men had spears, and their absence made the guides cluck and chatter to one another; to them it was a fearful deformation, as if their hearts were beating outside their chests. It was a very long night, examining them, talking to them, with Eve, tied to a tree a few yards off, forgotten for the moment, although she seemed not to take offense.

  They all knew Eve. The apparent leader of the group, the one I had grabbed, was named Mua, and like the others he appeared to be around Eve’s age, a little older perhaps. But he—again like the others—was unlike Eve in one crucial way: he spoke. They all spoke, all coherently, some intelligently, others not so. But I will return to that in a moment. The important thing was that they had been looking for Eve (whose real name, it was revealed, was Pu’u, flower); she had wandered away from their group.

  They seemed for the most part happy to let Mua represent them, but then some of them would start talking, their voices lapping over one another like waves, and then the guides—who until then had sat silent and staring and frightened, their fingers wrapped around their spears—would start answering them or talking among themselves, and poor Fa’a would be swiveling his head back and forth from one of us to the next, trying to follow the various scatters of conversation.

  Finally, finally, we made them lie down, and soon everyone was asleep, even Tallent, and the forest resumed its impassive quiet. Only Fa’a and I stayed awake, the two of us on guard for the night, sitting across from each other while the others—eight now instead of one—sprawled in a misshapen ellipse between us. They were singularly ungraceful sleepers, their mouths yawning open, their hammy thighs twitching like a dog’s, and in slumber they appeared a strange hybrid, their bodies those of sturdy children, their faces those of someone much older: a crone, a wizard, a sorcerer. Once I looked across the way toward Fa’a, who had not spoken a word since we had begun our watch. I could barely see him, so near total was the darkness, but he must have sensed that I was looking at him, for he bared his teeth at me in a gesture that felt reassuring, not malevolent, and I saw a flash of dingy white, proof that he was there with me and that we were seeing the same thing and living the same dream, however unlikely it seemed.

  The next day belonged to me, and so while Tallent and Esme began, with Fa’a’s help, to interview some of the subjects, I was left to give the rest of them basic neurological tests—simple, crude things, but no less interesting for that (and besides, they were the best I could manage). I had Tu, who spoke a trace of English, assemble three things I knew the names of, and placed them in turn before each subject.

  “Name?” I asked, sitting on the peaty ground before one of these squatting dreamers with my notebook and ridiculous fountain pen (why, I thought, as the ink smeared and perspired across the damp pages, had I brought a fountain pen?).

  “Ko’okina?” asked Tu.

  “Mua.”

  They were Mua, Vanu, Ika’ana, Vi’iu (these were the men), and Ivaiva, Va’ana, and Ukavi (these were the women). Ivaiva and Va’ana were sisters, fraternal twins, I guessed. Ivaiva was plumper and her face jollier, and Va’ana somehow dignified, or as dignified as one could be in her state.

  I presented them with an object. “What is it?”

  “Eva?” Tu translated.30

  “Manama.”

  The next one: “Eva?”

  “Hunono.”

  The next one: the spear Fa’a had found. When I produced it, Tu recoiled for a moment, but then recovered and asked bravely, “Eva?”

  “Ma’alamakina.”

  “E, ma’alamakina,” Tu agreed. (Later I would learn that the name for spear was actually just alamakina but that both men had preceded the word with the honorific ma.)

  And then I moved on to the next person. When I had interviewed all of them—Va’ana, despite her keen, intelligent eyes, misidentified the manama as something called a ponona (Tu drew a sharklike creature on the ground before me, jabbing at it and repeating “Ponona, ponona”), and both Vanu and Vi’iu were unable to name any of the objects—I sat again in front of Mua and asked him to name the objects I’d shown him (communicating to Uva what I needed required the help of both Tallent and Fa’a).

  He remembered the hunono and the alamakina but not the manama. And it was the same with the others: they could not properly remember the objects that I’d shown them less than an hour before—only Ukavi got all three words correct, and recollecting them took her a full five minutes, most of which she spent staring at a tree, as if the items themselves might suddenly appear before her. Their results were so poor that I was forced once again to borrow Fa’a, whom I instructed to rerun the test. He had a low, gentle voice, Fa’a, and although I could not understand what he was saying, I imagined from his quiet, coaxing tone that he was offering them encouragement: What did you see? You remember. Tell me.

  But his results were no better than Tu’s, and indeed, I could see that some of the group were growing tired, their eyes slipping away from Fa’a’s before he even began to speak.

  There was so much I was unable to test. I could not ask them to read a sentence and repeat it back to me, for they did not know how to read. (Some U’ivuans, Tallent had told me, could still read ola’alu, their prehistoric hierogylphic alphabet, but when I had Tu trace some basic symbols on a piece of paper—man, woman, sea, sun—they stared at them uncomprehendingly.) I could not ask them what day it was, for, embarrassingly, I no longer knew myself. Besides, the difficulty wasn’t simply that their memories were poor; it was that their attention spans were so brief.

  But although they all suffered from mental impairment, their physical condition was, like Eve’s, impressive, their reflexes sharp, their balance and coordination excellent. Without warning, I tossed the manama (its surface long broken and lively with worms after so much handling) to Mua, who reached out and caught it quite naturally before throwing it back to me in a lovely, clean arc. And like Eve, they all had impressive hearing: I stood two feet from Ukavi and rubbed my fingers near her right ear, only to have the other seven—and Tu—turn quickly in the direction of the sound, which seemed to me no more than a whisper. They were sensitive to smell, to touch—I traced a fern tip down the sole of their left foot, and they jerked it away as if I had cut them with a blade—but like the others, their vision was poor. As I widened the distance between Mua and myself for our game of catch, I noticed at one point that his eyes were closed, and I realized he was listening for the sound of the fruit parting the air, not watching for it at all. At the last second, he stretched out an arm, and the manama landed with a thunk in his palm, flesh striking flesh.

  They also, not inconsequentially, looked very healthy, healthier in some ways than a sixty-year-old in the States. Yes, the women’s teats were stretched and obviously depleted, but their faces were smooth, and the men’s hair still mostly black—like the guides, they wore it twisted into a plush knot at the base of their skulls—and all of them had extravagant blooms of pubic hair, so thick that from a distance it was a bit of a shock, as if some volelike creature had grafted itself onto their skin. Like the guides, they were muscled and dexterous, if not necessarily quick: they had Eve’s affectless, slump-shouldered stump, which made them appear curiously resigned; theirs was the shuffle of people leaving the factory after a long day of numbing work, or slouching down the aisle toward their prison cell.

  It was an exhausting day, and it wasn’t until the air once again grew blurred and thick with nightfall that we were able to talk with Mua. Anyone who saw him with the others would immediately have been able to single him out as the leader; he looked at you directly, unlike the others, whose gaze drifted f
rom you uninterestedly almost instantly, and he was the cleanest and, though this ought not to have mattered, also the most competently and fully dressed. Ika’ana and Ukavi and Ivaiva all had some semblance of clothing, though they seemed to interpret it more as decoration than as utility: all Ika’ana wore around his waist was a necklace woven from some vines, from which dangled five sharp teeth (human? I wondered), and Ukavi wore a short band of stiff, fibrous, frog-green cloth draped uselessly around her neck like a scarf. Ivaiva had some of that same cloth—later, when I felt it, I realized it was not as brittle as it appeared but instead had a soft, fawny texture—tied in a strange lump around her right upper thigh. But Mua wore his cloth fastened around his groin, and although it covered not much of anything (his pubic hair made a bristling hedge above it), it seemed the closest approximation to practicality.

  “I’m going to ask him some questions,” Tallent told me. “As he answers, I’ll translate, and I need you to write down what I say as accurately as possible.” He looked at me, his face unreadable. Tallent had chosen me to help him; Esme, along with the guides, would be watching over the others in the clearing uphill from us, and was already busy leading them to the stream for some water. “All right?”

  “All right,” I said. I felt, for some reason, frightened, both of what I would hear and of not rendering it correctly. It seemed—though Tallent had said nothing of the sort—that there was something crucial and irreproducible about this interview, this moment, and I had the sudden image of myself in the foggy, gray-haired future, standing before a rapt audience and telling them, “This is where it began. This is where I learned the great secret,” though of course I had no idea what secret I was even supposed to be desiring to learn.

  “Let’s begin,” said Tallent, and took a breath and turned to Mua, who tipped his head attentively, ready for what might follow. And so I raised my pen.

  “My family was not like the other families,” said Mua. “Other families here on Ivu’ivu, they are born on Ivu’ivu and they die here, and it is the same with their parents and grandparents and everyone in their family. Ivu’ivu is their world, and there is nothing else.

  “But my father was not from Ivu’ivu. He was from U’ivu, and there his family were planters. They planted makava trees—do you know what those are? They are like manamas, but the fruit is smaller and pinker and the flesh is sweeter. But they don’t have hunonos, so people here don’t care for them as much.

  “One day, a day in the year the great king died, my father’s mother grew very sick. She groaned and tossed from side to side. The pain seemed to come from her stomach, which was large and hard. For a day and a night she thrashed and screamed, and my father—he had twelve o’anas then—didn’t know what to do. His father was away in the makava grove, where he spent every lili’aka harvesting the crops. The grove was not too far—my father could have reached it in a day if he hurried—but it would mean leaving behind his five younger brothers and sisters, and his mother, through her moans, had made him promise to watch over them. So what could he do? Nothing. He had to stay and watch his mother flop on her mat like a suffocating fish.

  “On the second night, my father’s mother’s screams grew louder, and the neighbors who had come to hold her hand and slap her cheeks, calling her name so that she would come back to herself and rid herself of whatever was inside her, decided they had to have someone perform ka’aka’a. This was a very old practice that involved cutting away the flesh of whatever ailed you and burying it. My father’s father’s father was a ka’aka’a practitioner, and when I was a child, my father would tell me how he watched him once crack a woman’s skull like a coconut with a blunt piece of wood held to one side of the woman’s head, which he struck with a rock repeatedly. The woman’s insides oozed out, and then my father’s father’s father stitched her back up with tava thread, and after that she had no more pains in her head ever again.

  “At that time in my father’s village there was only one remaining ka’aka’a practitioner. There had once been many, but then the ho’oalas arrived and there were fewer. The ka’aka’a practitioner came over and chanted to my father’s mother, and the neighbor women held her down as she bucked and shouted. My father and his sisters and brothers were made to wait outside their hut, but there was a small window, and because my father was the tallest, he was just able to peer over the edge and watch as the ka’aka’a man took out a long stick, maybe from my father’s father’s makava grove, where he was harvesting crops because it was lili’aka, and which he had carved into a sharp point. And my father watched as he held it high above his head and then drove it into the stomach of my father’s mother, who screamed so loudly that my father promised that the roof of the house shook and trembled.

  “The ka’aka’a man carved a large wedge of flesh out of my father’s mother’s stomach and held it again above his head, chanting to A’aka and Ivu’ivu to save my father’s mother, to heal her and comfort her. Then he wrapped the piece of flesh in some tava cloth that he would have pounded that morning and asked one of the neighbor women to bury it under a kanava tree. My father’s mother was screaming and screaming.

  “Just as the neighbor women were leaving the hut—and by this time the entire village had gathered outside, chanting for the sick woman, and some were preparing to leave and retrieve my father’s father, whose groves were a day away if they hurried, and where he was harvesting makava fruit—my father’s mother’s screams became louder, so loud that the animals of the village, the pigs and chickens and horses, began screaming too, and my father said the whole world seemed made of sound and nothing else. He was tired from standing on his toes to look in the window, but he lifted himself up again in time to see the ka’aka’a man reach into my mother’s stomach and lift something out of it. From my father’s perspective, it looked like a great gleaming wodge of pale fat, the kind that the women would render from horses and cook with. But then it slipped from the ka’aka’a man’s hands and fell to the ground, where, to my father’s alarm, it cracked like a stone, shattering into many shards on the earth.

  “Then there was a great uproar, and the ka’aka’a man was pointing at my father’s mother and saying that she had had an opa’ivu’eke inside of her and that she had been carrying a god inside her all along. When the villagers heard this, they started rushing into the small hut to see proof of the opa’ivu’eke, and when they saw what remained of it, its shell broken in pieces, they started wailing, and the men rushed home to get their spears. It was unclear, my father said, what they meant to do. Was his mother a demon, as some said, for carrying the god, or was she to be worshipped for doing so? Why had she not said anything? What did it mean that she was carrying an opa’ivu’eke? Nothing like this had ever happened before, and so they did not know whether my father’s mother was good fortune or bad, whether she must be slain or healed. Lost in all of this was the ka’aka’a man, who surely bore much of the blame for breaking the god but who had somehow managed to slip away, but not before convincing the others—for ka’aka’a men are known for their ability to persuade people, for their gifted tongues—that he deserved all of the glory and none of the blame for what had happened.

  “But before the villagers could decide what to do with my father’s mother, she died, and the people, who were angry at how she decided her fate before they could, set fire to my father’s house and then ran after my father and his siblings, the women leaping out of trees, ululating in that fierce way women have, to scare my father and his sisters and brothers into running in one direction, then another, whereupon the women’s husbands would leap out and stab them with their spears. But my father, because he was the oldest, was the fastest runner, and after he saw his second sister die, he ran as fast as he could toward his father’s makava groves, where he was harvesting his crop.

  “He ran and ran, and eventually he came upon a great hog lying dead on the side of the path. This was strange, because hogs normally kept to the jungles and always traveled in packs. S
ometimes a sick hog might wander off by itself, but it was very rare.

  “Even though the hog appeared dead, my father was wary. Many remarkable things had happened already, and the sight of the lone hog did not seem a good omen. He slowed his pace and walked carefully toward the hog. But as he grew close he cried out, because it was not a hog at all but his father, burned so black that my father had mistaken the little dried flakes of skin that were lifting in the breeze for a hog’s sharp quills. My father said that later he would remember most vividly how his father lay, with his arms and legs bent and tucked into his body, how the fire had been so complete that his legs seemed to have fused into one large trunk. He knew that he must have been on his way home and attacked by some of the village men who had seen the turtle that was inside my father’s mother.

  “Now my father was an orphan, and alone. He had begun the day as the oldest child of six, with a father who had makava trees and a mother and sisters and brothers. But now he had nothing. He could not return to his village, and he knew no one else who might help him—his father’s and mother’s siblings had died long before, and there was no other person he knew in the world.

  “My father crawled into a kanava tree not far from his father’s charred body. That night he dreamed that Opa’ivu’eke came to him and told him that his mother was cursed for carrying one of his descendants in her womb, but that my father could reverse this curse—if, that is, he left behind everything he knew and traveled to Ivu’ivu, from which he could never return.

  “The next morning my father awoke both frightened and determined. U’ivuans simply did not go to Ivu’ivu—Ivu’ivu was, my father said, a land inhabited solely by gods and spirits and monsters. Sometimes he had listened to the adults of the village tell stories at night about Ivu’ivu, about how in the dark the island came alive and roamed the seas, its huge bulk cleaving the waters and upsetting the tides before returning to its spot before dawn. He had heard stories of how trees there talked in whispery rushes, how stones slid silently across the ground, how there were plants that fed on flesh. Everyone had claimed to know some foolish person who had once gone there to explore and who had never returned.