Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

“Fa’a,” he whispered, “give me one of the cans of Spam.”

He prised the lid off with his fingers, slicing himself in his haste, and began digging out the meat with his nails, walking toward her again as he did so. When she was once again within his grasp (or, he fleetingly thought, he within hers), he laid down a chunk of the meat and took a step back in Fa’a’s direction, leaving a hunk of pink flesh (the same color pink as the manama, he realized, although he had never made the connection before) every foot or so, until he backed into the tree behind which Fa’a stood, his eyes wide.

It took her some time to notice it. She had finished the manama fruit — she had been remarkably thorough with it, her broad, flat tongue sucking at the skin with such force that Tallent could see her cheeks pulling inward, like a purse — and stood for some time, breathing heavily as if she had just expended a great effort, her hard stomach puffing in and out.

When she turned, she stepped into the Spam, and Tallent watched it spread, slow and thick as lava, over the mud of her skin. For a while she seemed once again oblivious, a staring, panting statue, her tongue lolling out stupidly, her eyes fixed on nothing. And then she looked downward, very casually, as if admiring a new pair of shoes, and saw the meat, and quickly dropped to all fours and began sniffing the food avidly, her nostrils making wet, exaggerated snorts. She did this for some time, revolving around the pile on her palms and feet (like a pig) before settling onto her haunches (like a monkey) and conveying the soft meat to her mouth with the flats of her hands. After consuming the first installment, she rested and belched, and then, not standing from her squat, waddled to the next pile and began her ritual — stare, stare, sniff, sniff, eat, eat, belch — again, until she was close to the tree, so close that Fa’a and Tallent could smell her, a composty odor that was less noxious than one would have expected, and then Fa’a pounced upon her, grabbing her around her waist with both arms.

He had expected her to struggle, to fight, but she only turned and looked at him and drew her mouth back, her head tipping on its stem and her eyes widening, as if all three actions were connected, and although both Tallent and Fa’a waited for her to start screaming again, she never did. The moment passed. Her mouth snapped back into its normal dumb shape, her eyes regained their hoods, her head lolled forward; she was a marionette, her strings had been slackened, and she was ready to be returned to her box, where she would patiently await the next person to give her life.

Fa’a released her — she sat down, hard, not bending her knees — and he and Tallent stared at her again.

“This was what I saw,” Fa’a told Tallent. “One of these. But there were many of them — men, women. But she is like them — they stood and stared and made noises at nothing. But where are the others? Why is she alone?” He was worried, although whether for the creature or for themselves, alone in a forest, perhaps surrounded by dozens of these not-humans, Tallent could not discern. He could sense, however, that Fa’a was exhausted and frightened; he had perhaps half thought, half hoped that he had conjured these people, and the proof that he had not — that yet another myth had come to life before him — was bewildering and terrifying.

“Let’s go back,” Tallent told him gently, although he knew he would be bringing this woman with them and that her very presence would unsettle poor Fa’a. But there was no undiscovering her now; Fa’a had led him here, and now he was tormented by his knowledge.

And so they began making their slow way downhill, Fa’a first, silent and jumpy, then Tallent, and following him — they had thought they would need to coax her with more Spam, but she followed quite naturally, her mouth held in its strange jack-o’-lantern grin, her teeth sharp and bony, like glints of flint — the creature. She sometimes wandered off, or stopped still to stare or scratch at herself, and then Tallent would walk close to her and beckon, which she seemed to understand, for she would resume walking.

In his desire to move far away from the creature and get back to his compatriots, Fa’a had bolted ahead, and so when he cried out, Tallent could at first not see him and stumbled after his voice, tripping over ridges of tree roots and slipping on floes of moss, until he saw what Fa’a was pointing at — a spear, about five feet long and slender, stuck into a manama tree, the sap frothing around it like foam. They pulled it out, the two of them grunting, fighting against the manama’s grip, and saw how sharply its end had been carved, how it had pulled clean from the tree in one solid piece.

Fa’a had been uneasy before. Now, for the first time in all the time Tallent had known him, he looked petrified. The U’ivuans are master spear whittlers, and no adult man is without his spear: they are used to hunt boars, to hunt octopuses, and once, to hunt humans. But as any U’ivuan knows, spears are never, ever to be left behind. A U’ivuan’s spear is his soul— Ma’alamakina, ma’ama , as the saying goes 26—and if a warrior should die in battle, one of his comrades will rescue his spear from wherever it has fallen and return it to his family. It is the one possession about which U’ivuans are sentimental, although perhaps that is too weak, too cozy a word. So maybe this: it is the one thing that they truly cherish. Everything else is la, meaningless. 27

So it was no wonder that Fa’a was scared: an abandoned spear, one longer than he’d ever before encountered, left like an omen in this unearthly, unfriendly place. And it was even less of a wonder that Tallent was so excited, although he said nothing to Fa’a at the time: here was his proof, as much as the creature who stood beside him, making her wet sucking sounds again, that something lay above them, a different world. All he had to do was find it.

We would call her, unimaginatively, Eve, the first woman of her kind, and while Tallent talked with the guides, their voices low and urgent, Esme and I led her to the river to wash her.

I will say this for Esme: she was good with the woman, more tender than I would have thought. Eve was scared of water — its coldness, its wetness — and when she felt it on her skin, she began to shriek and howl, and Tu came bounding over to make sure that Esme and I were safe.

We started with her back. Our washcloth was a white rag that I realized unhappily was one of Tallent’s undershirts (how long had it been in Esme’s possession?), and with every drag down Eve’s spine it changed colors, from dust to dun to brown to black. I was careful not to scrub her too hard, but Esme was more aggressive, rubbing her skin as if its very pigmentation were a layer of debris that might be stripped away. Still, she was matter-of-fact in her duty, not cruel, and as she swabbed the cloth between the woman’s breasts, under her arms, prising apart her crossed arms to reach her abdomen, she narrated what she was doing—“Now we’ll just wash your elbows, and then your forearms. You’re very strong, aren’t you? And now your hands, and then we’ll move on to your neck”—as if she did this every day, as if Eve were nothing more than another in a number of shivering half-human beings she had cleaned in a jungle, in a cool river that ribboned its way out of our sight.

As for Eve, she was more patient than I had expected, but when we started combing out her hair, picking apart the clumps with a manama twig, she began to growl, the noise burbling up from her throat, and showed us her sharp little fangs, and Esme stepped away from her, her palms held before her in surrender. So we led her, cleaner (but not much improved, appearance-wise), back to the others, and forced her into a sitting position.