Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

Only Fa’a remained aloof, his gaze upon her inscrutable, although it was also he who came to me one night after dinner and, pointing at Eve, said, “Iv” (that was how he and Tu and Uva pronounced her name).

“Yes,” I said, “Eve.”

“Iv,” he repeated, and handed me a stick, mimed writing on the ground.

He was the only literate one of the three of them — Esme said his father had for a period attended one of the missionaries’ schools — and he watched, curious, as I etched in the dirt her name in large capital letters.

“Ah,” he said, “Eh-veh,” saying it as a U’ivuan word.

“Eve,” I corrected, but he smiled — the first time I had seen him smile; he and Eve had the same arrowheady teeth — and shook his head. “Eh-veh,” he repeated, and from then on she was Eve to us, Eh-veh to the guides.

And so we worked through the days in a sort of not unpleasant half-truce, each of us taking turns leading Eve — she was so forgetful, her attention span so limited, that we kept the rope knotted loosely around her neck like a collar — laying out her food, waiting as she dropped to the ground and sniffed and snorted. One evening, after we had stopped for the day and were eating our own meal of manama fruit and Spam and shirs of velvety tree mushrooms that we knew, thanks to Eve, were edible, she suddenly heaved herself to her feet and began her flat-footed stomp into the woods beyond. Eve was capricious, her interest in things unpredictable and often perplexing, and there was always something both funny and irritating about how purposefully she would head off in one direction or another, one of us trotting dutifully behind, only to discover that the object of her fixation was nothing more exotic than a manama fruit trembling with hunonos or a steady drip of water pocking against a large flat leaf.

I was on Eve duty that night, and so I wearily had to leave my dinner and follow her, the long end of her leash trailing behind her like Rapunzel’s braid. Her gait was so galumphing, so graceless, that I always found myself underestimating how quickly she really moved, and by the time she stopped at the edge of the clearing we’d chosen, I was panting and covered the last few yards slowly.

She was staring into the forest beyond, all blackness and shadows, but again, I thought nothing of this: she could spend literally hours staring at nothing, her mouth agape, her eyes dull as coins. “Come, Eve,” I told her, and it was when I bent to retrieve the loose end of the rope and coil it around my hand that I saw it: a gleam of pale, fatty yellow about two feet beneath me.

I stepped back, and the yellow disappeared before winking once more into place. Time then seemed to yank into a long, zinging string, vibrating with a terrible, indiscernible significance as if it were itself alive, a witness to what I might do next.

I was terrified, of course. The others were not far behind me, maybe only a seven-minute walk, less if they moved quickly, but in that moment I was unable to think of them, unable to think even of Eve, although I could hear her loud, regular breathing, hear the saw of her fingers as she rubbed them over her scalp. The only thing I could concentrate on was that lozenge of yellow, which seemed to blink and tease like a firefly. I thought suddenly of Greek mythology, of Hades, and that beyond this clearing were not trees but the waters of Acheron, and that the yellow smear was Charon’s flickering lantern.

But I had to know, I had to know. And so I stepped forward, my hands stretched before me like a blind man’s, groping in the dark, certain that my foot would land in the river’s cold, fudgy muck.

My fingers closed around the first thing they encountered, but so lost were my senses that it was another second or so before I was able to identify it as an arm, a disembodied arm that I could not see but that had somehow taken shape within my grasp, or so it seemed. And then I found my voice and screamed, and Eve screamed with me, and the arm screamed too, and from behind it came other screams, all of us so loud that I could hear the forest wake and rearrange itself: bird wings, bat wings, a chorus of flapping, of insects’ patter, of colonies of unknown, hidden beasts being roused from their idyll and scuttling from one unseen tree branch to another, our noises an insult to the forest’s perfect crystalline calm.

They were with me in what seemed no time at all: Tallent and Esme and Tu and Uva and Fa’a, all of them, and then they were pulling at me, working my hand loose from the arm and pulling the arm itself from the copse of trees beyond, and I saw it was a man, Eve’s height, also naked, his face covered with a fantastic beard, his mouth still open in a scream, that yellow light his teeth, the brightest thing against the black of his face.

Behind him were arms, legs, hair, bone, and as Esme soothed Eve and Tallent the new man (but who would comfort me?), the guides were plucking from the darkness person after person, until there were seven of them standing before us, four men and three women, naked and creatively half clothed, clean and slovenly, talking and not.

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.