Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

Of course the first thing I had done after Tallent had finished translating was to pluck Vanu from the group (he had been sleeping and flicked away my hand several times, grouchily, before I was able to rouse him) and bring him over to Mua. I watched him as Tallent tried to negotiate a conversation between the three of them. Did he look — even as I was thinking it, I couldn’t believe I was even entertaining the question — older than Mua? Maybe, I thought; if Mua looked sixty or thereabouts, Vanu appeared maybe five or six years older. And was there a resemblance? Perhaps — both had the same flat cheekbones, the same jutting lower jaw, the same low forehead carved up with horizontal grooves like a bit of bark. But on the other hand, they all looked the same to me, and had I brought over Ika’ana instead of Vanu, would I not have been able to see a similarity as well?

But later, when I was speaking with Tallent — or trying to, at any rate; Esme, who had been so slow throughout most of our ascent, was now trotting after us like a small white dog — and telling him of my observations, I was informed that I had missed the more important information, information that, as Esme seemed pleased to tell me, I could not have understood the significance of.

The first thing was, apparently, the matter of the king. “Do you remember when Mua said that his father was twelve in the year the king died?” asked Tallent.

“Of course,” I said. “But that could be any king, right? The current king’s father, perhaps?”

“It could have had he just said ‘the king.’ But he didn’t. He used a particular honorific, ma, which is used only in association with one particular king — King Vaka I, the king to unite the islands. And when did King Vaka I die?”

I said nothing. Of course I didn’t know.

“In 1831,” chirped Esme from nowhere.

“Right,” said Tallent. I had the distinct sense then that he and Esme had been practicing this call-and-response the night before, and I resolved right then that I would not participate in their little theater. “And do you remember, Norton, how Mua spoke of the ka’aka’a healer?”

“Yes,” I said, and had again a vision of the healer holding the stone baby aloft in his hands, his chants and the women’s cries filling the close, tiny hut.

“Well, ka’aka’a was outlawed by King Vaka I’s son, King Maku, in 1850, upon penalty of death. So—”

“Actually, 1849,” said Esme, all but panting with excitement.

“Sorry, 1849. So that means—”

“Yes, but surely there were people who disobeyed. If this was a tradition—”

“You don’t understand, Norton,” said Esme, and so intense was the effort I expended to keep from slapping her that I felt myself grow dizzy, “U’ivuans do not disobey the king. Ever.”

“So what are you saying?” I hurried on, before Tallent could chime in with his agreement and the two could remind me how stupid I was. “That Vanu was born in 1831?”

“Actually, he’d have been born in 1819,” said Tallent peaceably.

I stopped then and looked at them. “Please,” I said. “Please don’t tell me that you believe him.”

“Why not?” asked Tallent in the same calm, reasonable tone.

For a moment I did not trust myself to speak. Oh god , I realized, I have made a terrible mistake . I thought of Sereny, his gusting, benign presence, the sad and resigned look he had fixed me with when I had told him — without any thought! — that I would be delighted to fly off to an island I’d never heard of, with an anthropologist I’d never heard of, for almost half a year. I felt myself gripped by an intense desire to get off the island, followed almost immediately with a dull sort of ache — I would never escape. I was aware then of how lonely I was, here with the dreamers and the guides and Tallent, who was frustratingly out of my reach, and ugly, charmless Esme, with her round, shiny face and her khaki shorts that bunched at her crotch.

“Well,” I said, as calmly as I could, “the turtle, for one.”

“Oh,” said Tallent, waving his hand as if I were a waiter offering him a dish he did not care for. “Forget the turtle for a minute. What’s important is—”

“The stone baby,” I continued.

“But those do exist,” Esme interrupted.

“And are exceedingly rare,” 31I finished. “But Tallent,” I pleaded — I needed to know, and I feared his answer—“you’re not implying that you really believe Vanu to be one hundred and thirty-one years old , are you?”

Tallent looked at me for a long moment before answering, and when he spoke next, his voice was gentle again. “I know it seems improbable, even impossible, Norton,” he said. “But I can find no other conclusion. And besides”—and here he swept his arm out, indicating everything that was around us: the trees with their microscopic monkeys and massive sloths, the stones bearded with green and the rocks stubbled with moss, and, ahead of us, Eve and her people, shuffling behind the guides in a slow, ragged line—“what about this place is not impossible?”

And to that I unfortunately had no answer. Even Esme was silent. After a while there was nothing left to do but continue walking, and for quite some time none of us spoke and the sounds of the jungle stepped in to supply the conversation we could not have.

So there I was, a scientist (presumably), a doctor (allegedly), and a colleague (regrettably) of two people who were convinced that a man who appeared to be 65 was actually 131.

I knew that they thought I was being rigid and intellectually incurious and boringly conservative, and I knew too that they knew I thought them ridiculous and undisciplined and dangerously fanciful. The difference was that only one of us was bothered by this. Esme, in fact, seemed overjoyed, cleaving to Tallent like a flake of fungus to a damp sapling.

It was difficult not to sulk. Even Tallent, whose ability to notice the everyday shifts of emotions normal people experienced was rather less than stellar, swung into step with me for a minute. “Don’t worry, Norton,” he said, handing me a manama fruit (bruised, bulging, busy with hunonos), which I by this time felt confident enough to admit I really didn’t like.

It was also difficult to admit that in my desire to introduce some scientific rigor and logic into the process, I had unintentionally given Tallent and Esme even more fodder for their fairy tale. I had made us reinterview all of our foundlings in a process I had hoped would help us determine their true ages. This, however, had proved more challenging than I’d hoped, chiefly because it seemed that there were very few recorded events on Ivu’ivu: they had here no notion of the king, no notion of time, no notion of history. They had never seen a ho’oala before — they continued to stare at us, alone and in groups, in silence, the bolder ones plucking at our wrists and trying to peer up our shorts in an artless echo of our examinations of them — but this piece of ignorance was of no help, as no ho’oala had ever set foot on Ivu’ivu before. Indeed, one of the most memorable events of the past decades (I couldn’t bring myself to say the word century ) was Vanu’s arrival, a day that Ika’ana and Vi’iu, Ivaiva and Va’ana all claimed to remember. Each told the story a little differently, embroidered and embellished in various ways (Vi’iu’s rendering had Vanu arriving like a Micronesian Vishnu on the back of a monstrous, trudging opa’ivu’eke), but they all remembered it: skinny little Vanu, his funny, torn tava-cloth bloomers, too young even to have earned his first spear. The twins both claimed that they had been in the midst of their wedding ceremony when suddenly, disrupting the celebrations, there was Vanu, unable to move his eyes from the side of pork roasting over the fire for the feast that would follow. 32Only Ukavi said that she had not yet been born to witness Vanu’s entry into her life. But then she did remember being a young girl and watching Vanu get married. Like the others, her memories grew more complete and assured the deeper into the past she reached.