Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

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 from 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.