Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

“What a bizarre ceremony,” Esme grumbled as we walked back to our mats. Fa’a had left earlier, as soon as he politely could, and so it was only the three of us. “I can’t believe that after all that, we weren’t even offered anything to eat. It’s very unusual, you know, to be invited to these kinds of events and then not be treated to some sort of feast. But I suppose I should just be grateful that no children were raped tonight.”

Although I would never have agreed with her aloud, I did have to admit that it seemed a shoddy and somewhat pointless sort of event. And it did seem odd, given the participatory nature of many of the village’s other ceremonies, that this was such a solo performance: a long and tedious night spent watching the chief dismember the opa’ivu’eke (which he did in a particularly bloody and laborious way, by ripping its carapace off — the sound was upsettingly juicy — and then spooning out the flesh with his hands) and scorch it in chunks over the fire while the rest of the village hummed and looked hungry. Having witnessed the chief’s thoroughness with the boy, I suppose it should not have surprised me that he was also a thorough (though not very fast) eater: we sat there watching as he grilled and ate the soft meat of the turtle’s body, but also sucked the cartilage and blood from its scaly feet and, having retrieved the head from me, crunched down on its eyes and, after heating it in its skull like a soup, greedily slurped down the slurry of its brain. Only one other man, one of the chief’s advisers — one who had also been with the boy at the first a’ina’ina — was offered any of the turtle to eat; we all watched as he pinched out the liver, a glistening puce thing, and swallowed it as one would an oyster.

“What I don’t understand is where they got the opa’ivu’eke to begin with,” I said. Flies swirled around my groin, attracted by the turtle’s sticky sweet blood. “That was far too large to have ever lived in the stream, but I haven’t seen any other water source around here.”

“It’s a good question,” Tallent said. “There must be somewhere around here — a lake, or a larger river — that they go to find these. But we’ve been asking and asking the dreamers, and they’ve never mentioned anything like that.”

We were all quiet for a moment. And then suddenly I knew what I needed to do. “Mua,” I told Tallent. “We need to talk to him.”

“But he’s asleep!” Esme protested. I ignored her.

“Tallent, please,” I said to him. “I need to ask him some questions.”

Tallent sighed. But what could he do? He had no answers, and if I thought I might be able to get him some, he had to defer to me. “All right,” he said. “Esme, go tell Fa’a to wake him.”

It had been a few weeks since I had last interviewed Mua, mostly because (I am now ashamed to admit) I had begun to find his perseverating exhausting. But now, seeing his sleep-puffed face come into view, I found myself convinced that it was he who had the answers, that if I asked just the right questions, everything would at once reveal itself.

I asked Tallent to translate. Fa’a was wearing his now permanent expression of wariness. For a few minutes I said nothing and thought carefully how to begin; it is difficult to choose a beginning when you don’t know what you want or expect the ending to be. I felt like a prosecutor trying to make an accused man confess to a crime whose nature I had not been told. Mua sat there, patient and sleepy. Time seemed to mean nothing to him. “Mua,” I said at last, “do you remember the celebration of your sixtieth birthday?”

“Oh yes,” said Mua. “There was the vaka’ina.”

“What is the vaka’ina?”

“A celebration.”

“And what happens during the vaka’ina?”

“You go to the hut. You are rubbed in umaku”—sloth fat—“and your hog is rubbed in umaku. You go to the fires and you chant the vaka’ina chant.”

“What else?”

“You eat the opa’ivu’eke.”

I stopped to think. I felt like I was at the gates playing a game with the sphinx, but only she knew the rules.

“Do you like opa’ivu’eke?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Do you—” I stopped again. I stepped one foot closer to the sprite. He tensed on the balls of his feet, ready to dart. “Does everyone like opa’ivu’eke?”

He hesitated, his mouth open in confusion. Please , I thought. Please . “I don’t know,” he said at last.

“Why don’t you know?”

“Because not everyone eats the opa’ivu’eke.”

“Why not?”

“Because you only get to eat the opa’ivu’eke at the vaka’ina.”

“And why do you eat the opa’ivu’eke?”

“Because you are special.”

“Why?”

“Because you are sixty o’anas. Because most people do not see that many o’anas.”

“So you are special if you do?”

“Yes. And that is why you eat the opa’ivu’eke.”

“Why?”

“Because if you eat the opa’ivu’eke, the gods are happy.”

“What do you mean?”

“They will let you …” He was getting tired, I could tell; his face was growing long and ugly. “They will let you live forever. Like they promised.”

No one spoke. Even Fa’a was leaning forward, his hand wrapped tightly around his spear.

“Mua,” I said, very quietly, “how many o’anas do you have?”

His head nodded. “One hundred and four,” he said. “Maybe.”

Think , I commanded myself. “Mua, has everyone else you’re with — Vi’iu, Ivaiva, Va’ana, all of them — eaten the opa’ivu’eke?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And did they all eat it at their vaka’inas?”

“Of course.”

We paused again. “I’m going to ask him when he left the village,” Tallent whispered to me, and then put the question to Mua, who shook his head and replied briefly. Tallent turned back to me, apologetic. “He said he can’t remember,” he said.

“He kaka’a,” said Mua. I’m tired .

“Wait,” I told Tallent. “Mua, where do you get the opa’ivu’eke from?”

He looked at me directly then, a bit puzzled, as if I’d asked him how many hands he had. “The lake,” he said.

“Which lake?” I asked him. “Where?”

“The lake where the forest ends,” said Mua, after which, although we tried very hard, he would say nothing more.

“He kaka’a,” he repeated.

“Take him to bed,” Tallent said to Fa’a, and we watched the two of them go.

The next day it was abruptly hot, and the sunlight seemed to drool through the leaftops like honey. “U’aka,” said Tallent, shrugging, when I looked over at him, my mouth dry. The hot season. We had been on Ivu’ivu a little more than four months.

I craved something cold and watery, something far from the fibrous fruits that the island seemed to specialize in, and was grateful to Fa’a when he brought me a gourd, about the size of a cucumber and covered with an unappetizing pelt of coarse brown hair. But when he cracked its tapered neck against a rock, I saw that it was hollow, and inside was a viscous clear liquid, as thick as oil but as coolly sweet as honeysuckle nectar. When he saw me drink it, he brought me four more and showed me how I could tear out the thin layer of meat with my fingers; it too was cool, and barely sugary, and seemed to dissolve on my tongue at once into a thousand little crystals.

After I’d finished my breakfast, I went over to where Esme and Tallent were sitting and announced that today we’d go find the lake.