Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

For the first time I began to feel that my plan had perhaps not been as well considered as it might have been. While the village had been eating, I had managed to sneak into the palm-storage hut and steal a large woven net, which I had carried uphill draped over my shoulders like a cloak. But as I approached the lake, it occurred to me that I had no idea whether this would be adequate to snare an opa’ivu’eke. Were they fast swimmers? Would they try to bite me? Had there been a weapon I could have stolen easily, I would have, but as it happened, there hadn’t, and so I had had to settle for the net. I looked back to Mua as if for advice, but he merely crossed his arms and gazed off into the distance, as if what I was undertaking were a private event and one he had no right to witness.

I need not have worried, however. As I approached the lake’s edge, the opa’ivu’ekes seemed to notice me, and as a single unit paddled slowly toward me, their limbs cleaving the water so softly that they sent only the gentlest ruffle across the still surface. Their trust made my mission both easier and more difficult, and as I stood there contemplating which of them to take, I had to unexpectedly and sternly remind myself of the necessity of what I was about to do.

I chose one of the largest of the turtles; I assumed that its size meant it was among the elders of the lot, and I wanted to give the young ones a chance at a long life. All I had to do, it turned out, was reach into the water — cool and so clear that I could see the moon gliding along its mucky bottom — and heft it out. He was quite heavy, and a bit slimy, but not difficult to handle, and the other opa’ivu’ekes reassembled themselves at once to fill the space left by his absence, watching me with their large eyes. Unusually for a turtle, he did not burrow back into his carapace upon human contact but instead waggled his legs a bit, rotating his head, so that it felt like I was holding a large anteater, something shelled and armored but babylike in its defenselessness.

Staggering, I carried the turtle over to the edge of the forest, far enough away from the lake that his companions would not be able to see what I was doing. I was tired from the walk uphill and from the turtle’s weight, and I sat down beside him, resting my hand on the back of his shell, and he closed his yellow eyes as if in pleasure, as if I were petting him. For a minute we rested, both of us savoring the air, the hushing of the trees, and the simple, stupid fact of being alive.

Then it was time. I had a penknife in my pocket (also stolen from Tallent) and a roll of large palm leaves (stolen from the palm hut). My plan was to cut away as much meat from the opa’ivu’eke as possible (I didn’t know if I would have the strength or, frankly, the nerve to lift away its shell), wrap the pieces in palm leaves, pack them into the net bag, and bury the carapace under some of the forest decay. I’d take everything back downhill and dry the meat in the branches of my tree. I’d eat some myself and record any deleterious effects; the rest I’d take back with me to the States so I could have it more thoroughly tested.

A breeze licked its way between the trees, and as the opa’ivu’eke stretched his neck forward to partake in it, I flicked open the blade and brought it down on his neck. I thought it would be an easy cut, like slicing through warm butter, but his skin was much tougher and more webbed than I had expected, and in the end I had to saw away at it, so that his head separated from his throat by degrees, first nodding to one side, then dangling to the other, until only a last flap of particularly stubborn skin united the two and I had to work the blade between its grooves, flicking it upward until the skin separated with a series of wet, elastic slaps. Except for a sort of soft, slow sigh, like a tire deflating, he made no sound, but his eyes remained open, their pupils shrinking into the irises like splashes of ink in water.

So intently was I concentrating on the laborious work of detaching the turtle’s hind leg that I mistook the shout for Mua’s and called back (pointlessly, of course) that I was busy and he had to wait. But when I heard him running across the grass toward me, shouting incomprehensibly all the way, I was forced to stop my task and look up, whereupon I saw that it was not Mua racing in my direction but Fa’a.

Stupidly, my first reaction was happiness. Fa’a was here! I had always felt safer around him, and had even, I realized, grown to like him, despite his carefully maintained inscrutability, which did little to conceal the fact that he was growing more disenchanted with our expedition by the day. But I felt — romantically, perhaps — that in my most sorrowful or conflicted moments, Fa’a had been there beside me, as steady and reliable as a tree. I had a vision of him as a shepherd, someone who stood sentry for all of us as we slept or hunted, someone whose eyes scanned the landscape so we would not have to, someone who was there to witness every remarkable event. As the other guides had lost interest and fallen away, bit by bit — they were still among our number, of course, but seemed to spend increasing amounts of the day hunting for vuakas (I was amazed and slightly repulsed by their apparently insatiable appetite for them) and gathering various fruits and seeds and strange growths from the forest floor — Fa’a was always there. Uva and Tu continued to perform their duties with the dreamers, but in a somewhat rote fashion: at the stream, they stood and spoke and laughed with one another while the more impaired of their charges splashed their hands or feet uselessly in the water, unsure of what they had been taken there to do. But when it was Fa’a’s turn, he scooped handsful of water over their backs and shook out their brushy hair and murmured back at them when they sighed with contentment. Certainly I respected him; perhaps I even admired him.

But I was very quickly made to adjust my reaction once I saw Fa’a’s face and recognized the tenor of his voice. He was shouting, truly shouting, one hand playing worryingly over his spear, the other pointing to the dead opa’ivu’eke, its head — its eyes still open — arranged decorously in the middle of the largest palm leaf, waiting to be wrapped like a gift. He was so angry that his eyes were bulging, and bits of foam, as white as stars, sailed forth from his mouth, and I found myself wanting to laugh.

It was only then that I recalled how reverentially he had chanted when we had encountered the opa’ivu’ekes the last time, and with what awe he had watched the vaka’ina, and so there seemed to be little to do but let him have his rant. I had felt certain Fa’a would never touch me, but suddenly — and I will never know his intentions — he raised his arm with the spear: not threateningly, I will admit, nor even in my direction, but the mere act of his wielding a weapon alarmed me, and I instinctively lifted the turtle’s corpse before me, his rounded shell a shield, and thrust it toward Fa’a just at the moment he was leaning in my direction. And it was then, as I was wriggling the turtle in front of me, cowering behind it, that I heard Fa’a emit a shriek. I looked over the top of the carapace and saw that I had brushed Fa’a’s outstretched hand with one of the turtle’s dangling forelegs, and in that moment I heard his shouts become keens, and he dropped to his knees on the ground, holding his affected hand before him and wailing.

Had I been a less sensitive person, I surely would have succumbed to laughter. But that was only initially, and soon, as I watched Fa’a bent on the ground, his right hand — his spear-carrying hand — stretched toward the turtle as if in a sacrifice, that I began to sense the sincerity of his despair. His keening quieted to weeping and then to nothing at all, just a constant juddering of his shoulders and back, his face turned to the dirt, his spear abandoned at his side. For once I was glad not to speak U’ivuan, for he believed he was now doomed to become a mo’o kua’au, or that he had doomed someone in his family to it, and nothing I could have said would ever have been able to convince him of the contrary. And so I watched him for a while, in fascination and sympathy, until finally there was nothing left to do but continue my tedious work, bundling the flaccid pieces of the opa’ivu’eke in the satiny palm leaves, the ground beneath me black with its blood.