Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

Our trip down was muted and hurried, and by the time I had sent Mua and a stunned, staggering Fa’a back to the group and tied my six packets of turtle flesh to the highest branches of my tree, the air was beginning to lighten and the first of the morning birds were starting to chatter.

We had all, it seemed, resolved to pretend: Tallent that we had not fought, Fa’a that he had not been cursed, I that I had not done what I had needed to without permission or encouragement. Throughout the day I would intermittently be struck by the courage and resolve I had exhibited the previous night, as well as by my resourcefulness, although there was no one with whom I could share my story. I passed Fa’a once — I was on my way to the creek for water; he was just returning — but as I walked toward him he turned away, and I saw the planes of his face slide and lock into one another in an expression of utter unreadability that I never saw him without after that day. I knew then that he would never reveal to the others what he had witnessed that night; to do so would mean having to confront his own stain, his own ruination.

Only Mua seemed to have forgotten everything of our nighttime adventure. That afternoon I happened to see Fa’a, both hands wrapped around his spear, his chin propped on its blunt end, staring at him — though whether with envy or pity, I could not say.

Earlier I had sneaked over to my tree and retrieved the packages, and then dug into the ground as deeply as I could, the soft, floury earth as rich and moist as cake, before placing the packages in the hole and covering them with dirt. One, however, I set aside and unwrapped. For several minutes I remained there in a crouch, preparing myself to gag down the wet red flesh of one of the opa’ivu’eke’s feet. This, I reminded myself, was why I had disobeyed Tallent and gone to the lake: to taste and swallow, to prove to myself that there was nothing to fear. But instead I found myself paralyzed with my own ambivalence. Not to eat it was to admit that I was frightened, that the impossible was possible after all. And oh, I wanted it to be true, I wanted to be correct, I wanted to know that my discovery was real. And yet I also didn’t want it to be true — I didn’t want everything I had always thought upended, to have certainties and practicalities tossed away like molding fruits. To eat the turtle would be to admit that I was wrong, but it would also be to admit that the world I knew would continue as it had, unruffled and unchanged, its laws unchallenged and unassaulted.

But I couldn’t do it. In the decades after, I would recall this moment as if it were a hallucination and remember how close I had come to joining the ranks of the dreamers. What if I had not rewrapped the foot and placed it among the others but had instead allowed my tongue to touch its surface, if I had allowed myself to succumb to the tide-pull illogic of that strange and haunted evening?

That night my dreams were wild and diverse, the ending of one leaking into the beginning of the next. I dreamed I was wandering through the forest, making our uphill climb to the village, and that all the trees had become Ivu’ivuans, their babble filling the woods like birdcall, their feet bleeding into the trees’ roots and their hair weaving itself into branches. I dreamed that the chief and I were riding sidesaddle atop a car-sized opa’ivu’eke, who trudged through a dried mudflat landscape denuded of all trees, but faint on the horizon, against a plum-colored sky, was a miniature city of parched cement. I dreamed that I was sitting at a table in a wooden house where the ceiling was trussed with thick-grooved pieces of lumber, with a metal platter before me on which sat a strange pink creature, four-legged and with saggy pooling flesh, which I came to realize was a carapaceless opa’ivu’eke. Across from me was Fa’a, dressed in a pale button-down shirt, his hair trimmed short around his ears, his hand holding out to me a knife and fork, and as I came to understand that I would have to eat the turtle, it twitched its head and opened its eyes and mouth, and its mouth, when it opened it, was the boy’s mouth, with his little jagged teeth and his small, bright tongue.

I woke then, to the forest unremarkable around me, and with Esme and Tallent beside me as they should be, and still on Ivu’ivu, in the midst of one of its dense black nights. Nothing around me had changed.

The next morning, Tallent announced that we were leaving.

V.

It made sense, I knew, and it was inevitable. I had been told that we were to be there for at least four months, or at least some finite amount of time. But still the news came as a shock. First, despite all appearances, there really had been something of a plan all along, and even up here in the village, where governments and technology and clothes and books and schools and hospitals had no place, we were not free from its tentacles. Then there was the shock of time itself, its sudden reappearance and relevance in our lives. Here, time twirled itself into long, spiraling whorls, defying biology and evolution; not even the human body respected it. And yet the definition of time we had to obey was the one determined in the part of the world where people consulted clocks and made and kept appointments, in which time was measured in increments smaller than seasons. It was unsettling to remember that that world existed still, and that as foreign as it was, it was that world that still commanded us, that made our decisions and determined our arrivals and departures. I had the sudden fanciful thought that perhaps the reason the villagers lived so long was that no one had ever thought to tell them they couldn’t.

That last week was very crowded: there were final interviews to conduct, final measurements to take, final physical evaluations to make, final drawings of the village to be rendered, final head counts and numbering of the stores in the meat hut, the dried-goods hut, the palm-leaf hut to do. Unpacking my rucksack late at night to make room for the packets of opa’ivu’eke meat — I had managed to cadge some salt from Uva and had cured the parts, which I would pack just before we left — I came across the two dozen needles nestled in their cotton blanketing, and with their smooth, cold glass-and-metal surfaces they felt somehow like curiosities, as if the village were the more advanced culture and these were artifacts, purpose unknown, from some primordial past. I had by that point almost nothing left in my bag; my clothes I had for the most part given away to the village women, who stared perplexed at my jacket and button-down shirts until I demonstrated how they might be ripped and their sections used to bind two pieces of palm rope together, for example, or a sloth’s legs to a spear, and the microscope had broken early in our journey, and more recently so too had the thermometer, with whose spooky silver beads of mercury the village children had played, coating them with a powdery fluff of dirt and rolling them into one another until I had collected and removed them.

It had occurred to me belatedly that Sereny must not have thought very much of me at all. The entire medical school, in fact, must not have thought much of me. Had I even been requested? Or had they convinced Tallent or whoever had ill-advisedly given him the funds for this expedition to let me come along? Had I even been wanted? The brief, as I understood it, was that Tallent would search for his mythical lost tribe, and he had, however improbably, found it. But who would have thought that the greater discovery would be mine, and that it would be what it was? There had been no knowing in advance that a scientist would be needed; my presence was the consequence not of luck but of the school trying to get rid of one of its least promising students by sending him off on an absurd mission that was doomed to failure. I was humiliated for not having seen it before, and humiliated that I should have been such a pawn in such a poorly played game. And yet despite this unpleasant revelation, I was determined not to think like Smythe— I’ll show them; I’ll prove them wrong —although I also could not help but project my thoughts into the future, for I knew with certainty that I had found something spectacular, something bound to change science and society forever. I had found nothing less than immortality itself. It sounded so grand to say aloud (and so I didn’t), but its import could not be ignored, even with its hovering cloud of fairy dust.