Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

One morning, some ten weeks or so after our arrival, Tallent came to us as we sat eating our sad breakfast. (It was, however, less sad than before. As Tallent had promised those many weeks before, we were finally able to light our own fire and were holding over its flames long skewers of vuakas, which Fa’a had procured for us and which were shockingly tasty, like mammalian ortolans.) “We’ve been invited to another ceremony,” he announced.

“Oh god,” Esme muttered.

“Tonight,” Tallent said. “It’s the chief’s birthday.”

It had never occurred to me to think of the chief as an individual; he was simply the chief. I realized then that I didn’t even know his name, or which of the women and children were his, or even why he was the chief. Was it because of an accident of birth or the rewards of accomplishment? 44

“What’s going to happen?” asked Esme sourly. She now assumed that any sort of ritual practiced in the village involved having sex with children, when in fact only two or three of them did.

“I’m not sure,” said Tallent. “But I think there’ll be a pretty significant feast of some sort — they’re building an additional fire, and everyone’s tidying up over there.” I squinted toward the village and saw that indeed there were two fires smoking instead of one.

“How old is he turning?” I asked, more to make conversation than anything else.

But here Tallent turned to look at me and smiled. “Sixty,” he said, saying the word as if he were giving me a gift.

Sixty . The word hung in the air like smoke, and I thought of what I wanted to say next, to separate the one question I knew I needed to ask from the tangle that filled my mind and mouth.

Naturally, Esme had to ruin the moment. “Sixty!” she yawped. “Eve’s age!”

“Eve’s approximate age based on Norton’s physical examinations,” Tallent reminded her gently.

It didn’t matter, however, because Esme wasn’t listening. And to be honest, neither was I. Tallent’s revelation was demanding some recalibration on my part. No longer was this a village filled with young people; now it was a village with people who appeared to be young but might not be. What this might mean I could not determine, but I knew it meant something .

“He’s the oldest person in the village,” Tallent added, looking at me closely, as if he were giving me an essential clue that would make me remember where I’d hidden the answer.

But it didn’t. I had to think, and to do that I had to be alone. I told Esme and Tallent that I was going for a walk. “The ceremony starts at dusk,” Tallent called after me. “Be back by then.”

I walked in widening circles around the circumference of the village, but by the time the light began to thicken into syrup, I was still no wiser. It was very frustrating, and in my frustration, everything about my surroundings — the damp, squishy forest floor, the far-off moans and bleats of the dreamers, the trees’ continual droppings of various crackly dried plant matter onto my head and shoulders — chafed. I began, irrationally, to somewhat hate Tallent, who had brought me to this island and then dropped on me an enormous mystery that he seemed to expect me to solve.

By the time I crossed back into the village, I was in a very foul mood. But I walked over to the fires, where I saw Tallent and Esme sitting among the villagers, who had formed two long rows on either side of the flames. To my surprise, Fa’a was also there, seated next to Esme and staring straight ahead, his spear laid across his lap.

“Fa’a’s here?” I asked Tallent, sitting down to his left.

“Yes,” he whispered back (the villagers were again vibrating with their collective hum). “The chief invited all of the guides, but only Fa’a wanted to come.”

Before I could think about what this might mean, the chief appeared, walking slowly toward the head of the rows. And although he, like the rest of the villagers, was wearing no clothes, he carried himself as if he were heavy with jewels and cloaks: his straight back might have supported a cape made of yards and yards of weighty crimson velvet; his long, thick neck might have been hung with twisted ropes of gold and slabs of diamond-studded metals. He did at least wear a crown, a double strand, about as thick as my thumb, of a gorgeous, shimmery marigold, in a soft material of such lambency that it gleamed even in the firelight. I had never thought of the chief as particularly handsome, but this night he was indisputably majestic: his skin had been oiled to the same mirrorlike gleam as his crown, and his hair had been brushed out somehow and oiled as well, so that it hung past his shoulder blades and flared around his face in an imitation of the fire; as he drew closer, I could smell the faint rancid odor of fat. His hog — and his hog was, not surprisingly, the biggest and cruelest and most dangerous-looking of the bunch — had been polished as well, and for once his mean little eyes, which were as shiny as lathed bullet shells, were outshone by his slicked, coarse hair and tusks, which seemed to have been honed and scrubbed especially for the occasion. On the chief’s left were the men who had joined him for our negotiations, and on his right were three women, all of whom appeared to be in their thirties, and two boys, one of whom was one of the spear-carrying adolescents I had seen having sex with the boy during the a’ina’ina ceremony.

When he had almost reached the first of the fires, the chief sat down and began to chant, a rolling, rhythmic song without beginning or punctuation, which sometimes rose into a falsetto that was almost a wail and sometimes thickened into a groan that was almost a growl. After a few minutes of this, I sensed a movement at the other end of the rows and saw, staggering into sight, two men who were dragging behind them a boulder, atop which sat another stone of approximately the same size. As they came into view, I heard the crowd break from their humming to give a collective sigh — of pleasure or dismay, I couldn’t tell — and as the men approached our end of the row, I saw that what I had mistaken for the second stone was actually an enormous turtle.

I had never seen, and would never again see, a turtle that large. Even now it is difficult for me to find something to which I might compare it. I can say only what it was bigger than: it was bigger than a truck tire, bigger than a washtub, bigger than a wolfhound. Because it wasn’t particularly thick — only about two feet high or so — its size was almost completely attributable to its exceptional diameter. And although I knew it was an opa’ivu’eke from its distinctive, mountainous back, it otherwise seemed as unrelated to the creature I had seen all those weeks ago in the stream as it was to the chief’s ferocious hog.

The men positioned the turtle in front of the fire closest to us — and the chief — and then stepped away, breathing hard with the exertion. The chief went on chanting, and just as I recognized the word opa’ivu’eke in his song, the turtle, as if on cue, slowly muscled his head out from his shell. He was facing me, and when he opened his eyes, he seemed to look in my direction, as if trying to communicate some message meant solely for me.

“What?” I whispered to him, ridiculously.

He raised his head then, that odd little beautiful head he had, his neck stretching out as he did so, his eyes never leaving mine, and I felt myself leaning toward him. But just as I was doing so, I heard the chief break from his song and give a great, gleeful, terrifying cry, and then bring his spear (which I hadn’t even noticed him holding) down swiftly in front of him, and then the opa’ivu’eke’s head was bouncing into my lap, its black eyes still staring at me, its blood weeping onto my shorts.