Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

“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.

“But my father knew he had no choice, and at any rate, he knew from what had happened to his father that while Ivu’ivu held the likelihood of danger and death, remaining on U’ivu guaranteed it.

“My father went down to the shore. He had nothing to trade, nothing to give, and even if he had, there were very few fishermen who would venture as far as Ivu’ivu — the trip would take almost a day, and that, and their fear, meant that convincing someone to carry him by boat would be impossible. Oh , my father thought, if only I could fly! If only I could swim like a dolphin! And then he thought of the turtle’s dream and felt anger, and then despair. How could he fulfill such an impossible command?

“As my father stood near the shore, very sad, he suddenly saw something dark sliding beneath the water’s surface. My father assumed it was a school of the skinny, silvery fish that anyone could scoop up with a bit of homemade net and then cook over an open fire, their bones so fine you could eat them whole. But then, to my father’s great astonishment, the thing rose, and my father saw that it was an enormous turtle, the biggest he had ever seen, both taller and wider than he was, its feet as large as lawa’a ferns, paddling the water in brisk, forceful strokes and staring at my father with its slow yellow eyes. My father was so amazed he found himself unable to move, but then the turtle waddled the top half of his body onto land, and my father understood that he was to straddle the turtle’s back and the turtle would take him to Ivu’ivu.

“My father had never felt exhilaration like the kind he experienced riding atop the turtle. The turtle swam gingerly through the shallows, careful not to scratch his feet on the great oceans of coral, but once they were in open water his swimming became swift and powerful, and they passed groups of sharks, pods of whales, and once a magnificent fleet of other opa’ivu’ekes, hundreds of them, each as big as the one he was riding, who lifted their heads from the water and stared at him as if in salute with a multiplicity of glowing eyes.

“In no time at all they were at Ivu’ivu, and as my father was climbing off the turtle’s back, he was for a moment certain that the turtle, who had been watching him with his big eyes, as large and yellow as mangoes, was going to speak to him. But the turtle did not, only blinked at my father and turned and swam back to sea, while my father kept his head bowed in the turtle’s direction, in respect, until he could no longer hear the turtle’s strokes, only the sound of the waves.

“For the next many days, my father walked. Although he listened as hard as he could, he never heard the trees speak to one another, and although he stayed awake as long as he could, he never once felt the island make its nighttime perambulations. But he did see flocks of strange birds, their plumage bright blue and yellow and red against the forest, who swaggered through the trees in bustling, clucking groups, and branches so thick with chattering vuakas that they sagged under their weight, and makava groves so wild and tangled with fruit that his father would have wept to see them.

“After a very long time, my father reached a village, and there, although it was not easy — the people were suspicious and thought him a ghost — he was finally welcomed, and on his fourteenth birthday given his spear. And eventually he made a family.

“But even after all these years, no one ever believed my father was from another place. They did not believe in U’ivu. And why should they? They could not see it. My father’s claim that this island was one of three that made a country called U’ivu was information they had never heard before and had no reason to believe. To us Ivu’ivuans, Ivu’ivu is the world, no more, no less. For many years I myself did not believe my father’s stories — I thought they were tales he had made up to amuse us. But eventually I began to think he might be telling me the truth after all. Why? Well, first, my father is a very honest person. I have never known him to insist that something is true when it is not. And second, he has told this same story for so many years now, I can only believe in him, and because he is my father, I must.”

You must remember that the entire time Mua was speaking, I was looking only at Tallent. I could not understand Mua’s words, of course, so I tried to interpret how Tallent was reacting to them by watching his face. It was not very illuminating. I have to imagine that Tallent was changing some of the words as he went, making Mua’s sentences lovelier and more complex, but I was unable to gauge his reaction — his voice only strode onward, his tone calm and unchanging, even when Mua’s voice pitched up in excitement and then crested down. Later, when Tallent and Esme and I read over my notes and things were explained to me and put into their proper context, I would marvel at just how calm he had remained, how well he had been able to compose himself, when with each sentence Mua spoke he must have felt himself moving closer and closer to a discovery he had not even known to imagine for himself.

Only once did I hear Tallent’s voice change, and much later I would wish that I had been watching him more closely at that moment, that I had thought to seize the image in my head and preserve it in wax, so that I might always be able to look upon it as one of those rare moments in which one senses the plates of the world shift beneath one and life is forever altered: on one side of the buckling earth is the past, and on the other side the present, and there is no soldering the two together ever again.

“I’m going to ask Mua when his father died,” Tallent murmured to me, his eyes still on Mua. “Mua, e koa huata ku’oku make’e?”

Mua responded quickly, tossing his arm toward the group, and as he did, I saw Tallent grow absolutely still, and in that instant — as strange as it will sound — I had the sense that he was trying to shrink into himself, to pitch himself backward into the soft floor of the jungle, which might open like the mouth of a great beast and swallow him, gently, whole.

“He’s still alive,” said Tallent, and then he looked at me, and in the night — we had been interviewing Mua for at least an hour by then — his face, under the copper of his skin, was as pale as bone. “Vanu is his father. Mua says we can speak to him if we like.”

It took an entire day of Esme and Tallent talking — to each other, to me — to make me fully comprehend the implications of Mua’s story. By this time we were moving again, the dreamers (as I had come to think of them, for their somnambulists’ drool, their dopey half-glaze of clarity, as if they were slogging through a thick sediment of sleep) separated into three groups, bound together by their wrists with a long string of vine which was fastened to the waist of one of the guides. We were headed — again — uphill, but in no particular direction, for Mua was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to explain to us where his village was. But uphill seemed the only possibility; to our left and right, the forest had once again closed in, the tree trunks nudged together so tightly that only the faintest ringlets of ferns could penetrate the millimeters between them.