Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

He took my hand again, very gently, like a seducer, and began to move it across his body. Once again I pulled it away, and once again he patiently replaced it.

I am being bewitched , I thought as we went back and forth, my hand now feeling almost disconnected from my body, a floating white bird moving on its own accord through the darkness. The boy shifted position then, to lie down against the base of the tree, and tugged at my other hand.

Oh, Tallent , I thought. Oh, Esme, save me. I am being held captive. I am being spellbound . I may even have said this aloud. But they didn’t come, of course, and the forest remained quiet, the only sound the boy’s breath, his face blurring in and out of focus as the moon revealed and concealed itself in an endless flirtation with some unseen lover.

IV.

Something had been troubling me about my conversations with Mua, particularly my most recent one. Why was he a mo’o kua’au? What made him one? Yes, he was forgetful, and yes, he perseverated, and yes, he could quite often be very dull (I have not recounted here the numerous boring and repetitive conversations I had with Mua over these months), and yes, his short-term memory was very poor indeed (the day after our hike to see the opa’ivu’ekes, I asked him a question about it, and he had no memory of our trip; indeed, my insistence made him frightened and anxious), but his long-term memory was excellent, and his attention span, while by no means admirable, was no shorter than that of a child. Certainly all of these things combined to become very annoying, but was it really so bad? Was it worth abandoning someone simply because he was forgetful and repetitive?

I had been working on a list of the dreamers’ approximate ages, and now I separated them into two smaller lists: one group that was apparently known to the village, the other that apparently was not.

Known

Unknown

Mua (appx 104 years)

Eve (?)

Vanu (Mua’s father; appx 131 years)

Vi’iu (?)

Ivaiva and Va’ana (sisters;

appx 133 years)

Ika’ana (appx 176 years)

Ukavi (appx 108–109 years)

Except for Lawa’eke’s father, the chief and Lawa’eke were the oldest people in the village. We had, in a subsequent conversation, gotten both of them to confirm unambiguously that they knew Mua, Vanu, Ivaiva, Va’ana, and Ukavi and that they remembered them being taken into the forest. But as hard as we tried, we could not get them to recognize Eve, Vi’iu, or Ika’ana. Esme, being Esme, attributed their ignorance to willfulness. “Of course they know them,” she insisted. She was, however, unable to explain what benefit to them there might be from denying knowledge of the others. “They have their reasons,” she’d say — she saw conspiracy even in this simplest of civilizations, a civilization so guileless that its people didn’t even bother to conceal the fact that they abandoned their elders once they began to stray from the obscure behavioral strictures that governed their society.

I, however, thought there was a much easier explanation: surely the reason that the three dreamers remained unknown to Lawa’eke and the chief was that they were so old they had been exiled when the two men were very young, too young to remember? This absolutely made sense in Ika’ana’s case: if he was 176 now and he had begun becoming a mo’o kua’au at, say, 110, he would have been escorted away well before either of them had even been born.

That left the mystery of both Vi’iu and Eve. Vi’iu, I suspected, was younger than Ika’ana, though perhaps not by much. He had not, it seemed, been alive during Ka Weha, for example, but when Ika’ana spoke of it, he nodded wisely, in the way of someone who had heard about the event so often that he had almost forgotten that he had not experienced it. But he was very impaired, there was no doubt of that: I remembered how poorly he had performed on the basic neurological tests I had given him, how he was unable to identify any of the objects I had placed before him, how his attention drifted the moment I began to speak to him.

Last and least, then, there was Eve, who was her own special problem. Even in the company of the dreamers, she remained singular. There was so much she could not do! She could not speak, she did not listen, she could not interact with the others, she was without shame or manners or niceties or logic. Often when I regarded her from a distance, I felt as if I were watching something inanimate that had been unlawfully given breath — she staggered about and yelped when she felt like it, and crammed things into her mouth, and scrutinized the inconsequential, and ignored the fascinating. With her coloring and lumpy shape, she occasionally resembled nothing so much as a sweet potato, one set upon two legs and plopped amid us. It was not a life, but that she breathed and sighed and ate.

And then suddenly I realized: this was what being a mo’o kua’au must be. This was what they were afraid of; this was the end of the story. I flipped back in my notebook, looking for Tallent’s definition of a mo’o kua’au, which I had written down after our conversation all those months ago—“all normal in appearance, but all incapable of making meaningful conversation. All they could do was jitter and babble and laugh at nothing, the neighing laughter of the brainless”—and knew: Eve was a fully transformed mo’o kua’au. She was what the others would become. All it took, it occurred to me, was time.

I flew back toward our camp. “Lawa’eke’s father!” I screamed as I ran. All we had to do now was ask Lawa’eke’s father to identify Ika’ana and Vi’iu, who would surely have been alive and been present in the village at the same time. We would also ask him to identify Eve; if he couldn’t, it would confirm what I suspected — that Eve was so old that not even Ika’ana and Vi’iu knew her from the village. That would make her well over two hundred years old.

“Lawa’eke’s father!” I shouted at Tallent, who was, with Fa’a, leading some of the dreamers back from the stream. When he saw me, he passed them to Fa’a and started walking toward me.

“Tallent,” I gasped; I could feel myself grinning. “We need to talk to Lawa’eke’s father right now .”

He may have said my name, but I was talking too fast, and he stopped to listen to me and my theories, which I knew, knew for certain, were correct — I had never been more certain of anything, it seemed, and the feeling was exhilarating. Exhilarating and also somehow completely natural, as if such a feeling were my birthright. This , I caught myself thinking, was what my life should be like —this sensation, this breathless excitement.

“Norton,” said Tallent finally, when I was at last able to calm myself, “Lawa’eke’s father is gone. They took him into the forest last night.”

I was of course devastated. I railed away at Tallent, demanding that he retrieve for me the chief (so I could what? Shout at him? Rebuke him?) or the hunters who had taken him (who had yet to return), and that we ask to borrow one of the hogs to sniff a path toward Lawa’eke’s father (I had no idea if hogs were even capable of doing this). I was also struck by the unfairness of the entire situation. Here we were in a place where nothing — sometimes almost literally nothing — happened for days and days, and then, exactly when I needed things to remain the same, they suddenly changed.

But finally he was able to convince me that there was nothing to be done. “But we can still test your theory,” he said sensibly (not that I was in any mood to be sensible). “If what you’re saying is correct, Ika’ana should remember Eve.”