Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

“Why?” I asked sullenly.

“Because she can’t be so old that she’d have left before Ika’ana was even born,” he said. “That would make her, what? Almost three hundred years old? That’s impossible.”

He was so grave, so certain, that I wanted to laugh. Ah, how quickly we had grown accustomed to this absurdity, this world in which 300 years was an impossibility but 176 was not! Who knew — perhaps 300 years was not impossible at all. Perhaps Eve was 300, 400, 500, 1,000 years old. Perhaps she had been exiled long before Ka Weha, long before Ika’ana had been born, so long ago that monstrous opa’ivu’ekes roamed the land by the thousands, so long ago that the trees around us had been saplings, tender and girlish, and from where we stood, she would have been able to see in every direction the blue sky and the blue sea, stretching before her in endless planes.

As it turned out, however, Tallent was right: Ika’ana did remember Eve. She had been exiled when he was a young boy, after Ka Weha (when he was five o’anas) but shortly before, he thought, his a’ina’ina. He didn’t know how old she was when she was taken, but Tallent and I had determined, based on the others, that people began exhibiting symptoms of mo’o kua’au-ness anywhere between, say, 90 and 105. Even if Eve had experienced an early onset, it would still make her today no younger than 250. How, I wanted to ask Tallent, was that possible?

She had had children, but none of them, according to Ika’ana, had lived to sixty o’anas, and neither had her husband. She had had grandchildren as well, but none of them had lived as long as their grandmother either. In the end there was only Eve, living in the forest alone for more than a century, trudging up and down its hills, eating her grubs and manama fruits and whatever else she could find, with only herself for comfort, her whole world at once oppressively narrow and oppressively huge. The forest was all colonies of like creatures: the families of vuakas, the trees dangling their bunches of manama fruits, the sloths and the spiders and the copses of orchids each with their companions. And then there would be Eve, an explorer searching for nothing, adrift in a sea without any memory of what she had once sought or of what she wished to return to.

“I was surprised when she found us,” murmured Ika’ana, his eyes, as usual, focusing on nothing. “I had not thought of her in many years. Many, many years. But then I saw her, and I thought, Oh, it is you . And it was.”

“Ika’ana,” I said, struggling to keep the anger from my voice, because I knew it was unfair, and not productive anyway, “why did you not tell us this before?”

Then he did look at me. “You never asked,” he said.

I may not have been discovering everything I needed to at the pace I had hoped, but (as I tried to reassure myself) each new revelation did lead to the next question I needed to answer. I now had some notion of how old Eve was and what a mo’o kua’au was. Further questioning of Ika’ana had revealed that Eve had not been born a mute, which meant that her silence, her antisocial behavior, were a result of brain damage or deterioration or lack of social interaction, not a congenital condition.

A theory was beginning to shape itself, a theory that now seems so obvious that I am embarrassed to call it a theory at all. I was working from the assumption that the opa’ivu’eke caused some sort of … what? A disease? A condition? A state that led to an unnaturally long life — an immortal life. But it was a parody of immortality, because while the afflicted did in fact remain physically frozen at the age at which she had eaten the turtle, her mind did not. Bit by bit, it disintegrated — first the memory, then the social nuances, then the senses, and then finally speech — until all that was left was the body. The mind was gone, worn down by the years, its fissures and byways exhausted by having to perform for far more decades than it was organically equipped to do. I had a fanciful vision of Eve’s brain on its stem as a salt lick, its surfaces lapped clean and smooth into a pencil nub. Surely there must be an end to this life, for there is an end to every life. But it would not, it seemed, be from simple old age; it would end from disease, or accident, or murder.

It is a strange feeling to revisit this revelation as a seventy-four-year-old. When one is a twenty-five-year-old, such concepts can be experienced only academically. Age, then, is not something that can be understood; it is a preoccupation of the old, and the old is anyone older than oneself. It is a subject that has no relevance, a subject that seems a bore, an indulgence and lament of the weak-minded and feeble and querulous. As I have grown first older and now old, however, I have contemplated the dreamers’ fate more and more, and today I see it very clearly for what it is — a curse. There is a point — for me, it arrived perhaps a few years ago — when, without even realizing it, you switch over from craving more life to being resigned to its end. It happens so abruptly that you cannot help but recall the moment itself, and yet so gently that it is as if it comes to you in a dream.

Back then, however, my thinking was uncluttered by such nuance, and I knew the two things I needed to do next, both of which were, unfortunately, highly complicated. The first thing was to get one of us — me or Tallent — to eat some of the opa’ivu’eke. This was not ideal, of course — I knew in advance what a production it would be and what a risk it presented — but it was necessary if I was to establish the opa’ivu’eke’s central role in this affliction. For it was possible (unlikely, but possible) that the opa’ivu’eke was less to blame than I supposed; perhaps it was a genetic misfiring particular to the Ivu’ivuans — if they somehow were able to pass a certain threshold of age, they were guaranteed something close to eternal life. The second and more important thing I needed to do was to get at least two of the dreamers off the island and back to a proper lab so I could run tests and do some bloodwork. I had no idea how to begin doing this. But without that step, we — I—had wasted more than five months, which seemed an eternity (the irony of this thinking did not escape me). Without conclusive bloodwork, I was left with nothing more than a series of fairy tales, and I had never been interested in fictions.

I began with the slightly less difficult operation: securing an opa’ivu’eke for future experiments. Tallent and Esme were, predictably, horrified by my plan. A long and at times nasty debate began, in which Tallent, at least, recognized the purpose and indeed necessity of what I was asking but refused to participate on principle, which I found a rather weak and lazy excuse. Esme, however, refused even to acknowledge that such an action was the next logical step. I screamed at them for being intellectual cowards and sentimentalists. She screamed back that I was a monster, coldhearted and disrespectful, and that I was on the verge of ruining all that she and Tallent were trying to accomplish.

“What are you trying to accomplish, Esme?” I screeched back at her. “Recording the details of people’s shit is hardly what I’d consider useful work.” We were now shouting so loudly that a number of the villagers had ventured to the border of their property and were watching us with interest and some amusement, pointing back and forth among us and whispering and snickering to one another. Tallent made attempts to calm us both, but it was too late. In retrospect, it was somewhat ignominious.

“How dare you belittle me! I want to help them!”