Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

Esme didn’t want to go: as far as we knew, there was no lake; we didn’t know where this lake was; Mua seemed exhausted; what did I expect to find at this lake, etc., etc. I found such skepticism and sudden embrace of practicality very ironic coming from a woman who had been willing to accept without question that Ika’ana was 176, but I knew enough by then to realize that her discomfort rose not from any philosophical differences but because the dynamic among the three of us had changed— I would be the one who would find what we sought (whatever that might be), not Tallent. He had recognized and accepted the inevitability of this; she had not.

“Fine,” I told her. “You don’t have to go.” From her silence, I knew she would come anyway.

The next thing to do was to question Mua again, though I was dismayed to see that he looked no more alert than he had the previous night. It would be a trying day.

“Mua,” I asked him, “where are we?” Tallent translated the question to him.

He laughed at the stupidity of the question. “Ivu’ivu.”

“Yes,” I said, “but where?” I handed him a stick. “Can you draw where we are on the island?” But he only looked at me in reply, his mouth open.

I thought for a minute. I could almost feel the smugness radiating off Esme. And then I knew what to try. “Mua,” I said, “I need your help.” He looked at me. “There’s going to be another vaka’ina,” I told him, “and we need to find an opa’ivu’eke. Can you help us find it?”

“Whose?” Mua asked, reasonably.

“His,” I said, gesturing at Tallent.

“Ah,” said Mua, nodding wisely. And then he stood and began striding in the direction of the village.

Was it to be that easy? Apparently it was. This, I reflected, was one of the difficulties of working with the dreamers and of being dependent on them for answers and direction: sometimes they grew mulish with a sort of stubbornly adhered- to logic understood and respected only by them, and sometimes they seemed wholly oblivious to the obvious. Tallent was clearly no more a sixty-year-old than I was, and yet here we were, off to find the lake of turtles like a jolly pack of travelers in a bardic tale. Or perhaps it wasn’t that they were oblivious; perhaps they simply saw things differently than we did. Or perhaps it was that they saw nothing at all; if they were told someone was sixty, then he was sixty, and no more proof was demanded. It was exhausting, this quicksand logic of theirs, applied with an inconsistency that was all the more frustrating for being so unpredictable.

The five of us walked, concealed by trees, around one side of the village, Fa’a running back to tell Tu and Uva to watch the dreamers before joining us again, until we reached the back of the ninth hut, where Mua paused, frowning a bit, looking about him at the forest beyond. Then he gave a grunt, as if in recognition, and led us around a particularly thick manama trunk, behind which was hidden a rough sort of path, scarred with rock, that gradually, so slowly one barely sensed it, wound its way uphill.

It felt good to be walking again after being so long confined to the village. The air was warm, and the earth smelled cozy and biscuity, and we were none of us encumbered by anything but our notebooks and pens; I noticed Tallent sketching a rough, mostly gestural map in his book as we went.

The trek was not difficult, but we would never have been able to follow the path were it not for Mua. In some places it disappeared entirely, and in others it became an asphalted road of donkey-gray stone in which were embedded hundreds of chalky white fossils. I identified delicate insect carapaces, their legs as fine as threads, and the ridged backs of scorpions, and many other creatures that bore no resemblance in their stony state to anything I had seen before. Mua too seemed to enjoy the walk, and he hummed a vague, meandering tune through his nose as he went. Watching him bustle through the trees and sheafs of ferns, I was reminded anew of how superior his physical condition was, and how from the back he could have been no more than thirty.

Around us the foliage alternately thickened and thinned, so that sometimes we were in darkness, an utter cocoon of green and black, and sometimes we were in landscape that resembled a meadow, with vast, empyreal sweeps of feathery yellow bushes and only a few slender trees, their boughs extravagantly trimmed with ruffled drapes of leaves. In these meadows we could see the sky above us, a bright, aching blue, and feel all around us the clicks and whirs and mechanical ticks and tocks of whole societies of insects. I came to realize that we had been in a prison of trees, all of them our wardens, and recognized then all that they had kept from us: light, wind, air, sound, space — the things every living creature on earth craves.

So reveling in these familiar, long-lost sensations was I that I at first failed to notice that Mua had slowed, and that beside me Fa’a had stopped. We had entered, after another purgatory of trees, more meadowland — the fifth or sixth one — when I saw before me, about five hundred yards ahead, a shimmering lake. For a moment, I did not believe it existed. Not because it was particularly large (indeed, it was about the circumference of the village), or particularly lovely, or in fact particular in any sort of way at all, but because of its mere existence. Just as I had nearly forgotten what it was like to be in sunlight — true sunlight, not the inmate’s portion that was meted out to us each day by the treetops — so too had I forgotten what it was like to see a contained body of water, one not in constant motion but simply being. My instinct was to run into it, to feel the sensation of breaking its surface, but of course I didn’t.

“Opa’ivu’eke,” said Mua matter-of-factly.

We looked. There was nothing around the lake: no reeds, no trees, no shrubbery. Its borders were as clean and precise as the borders of the village, and later I would wonder if the people had modeled their village on this lake. But as we walked closer (unconsciously, we moved together as one organism, as if that might protect us from something we didn’t know to fear), I saw a cluster of tiny, clear eggs speckling the lake’s surface: a group here, a group there, all of them as fragile and pretty as glass.

Drawing closer still, however, we realized that they weren’t eggs at all but bubbles, and just as the first of us had begun to exclaim, the first turtle’s head emerged from the waters, its mouth slightly open, its pleated throat stretching toward the sun, its eyes closed. This was followed by another and another, until we counted, dotted around the lake, seven opa’ivu’ekes. There was no sound, not even the sound of the water breaking, and when they submerged themselves again, they were replaced by another group, this one of six, including three that were clearly children, their heads no bigger than a walnut shell. Down and up they went, an uncomplicated and lovely synchronized performance, while we stood and gawped from just a few yards away. It was then that I noticed that the insects’ buzz had been replaced by Fa’a’s low chant, the same one (presumably) he had made when he had last seen a live opa’ivu’eke, the tiny one paddling its way downstream at the start of our journey.

“Hawana,” observed Mua, squinting at the lake. Many . He said something else too, and Tallent translated: “Sometimes there are many, sometimes there are few.”

Then he spoke to Tallent again, something longer, and I saw Tallent shake his head, and Mua insist, and Fa’a, despite himself, let out a faint cry.

Tallent looked at us, stricken. “He says I must go pick out the one I want, and that he will help me carry it.”