Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

Now there were only the others, the four we had chosen to leave behind. Tu and Fa’a took the long length of palm rope and restrung them together like a sad chain of paper dolls, the cord loose on their arms. They sat them down at the base of the tree, their backs against the bark, and then tied one end of the rope — again, very loosely, so loose a sharp tug would have broken it — around one of the low-hanging branches. (The rope was meant to protect them, or so we thought: if they stayed together rather than wandering in their separate directions, we thought they would … what? Be able to watch one another die instead of dying alone? But at the time it seemed a kindness, although it is difficult now to remember why.) Before them, Tallent and Esme and I placed tiers of food: Spam, slid from its metal containers and placed on palm leaves, kanavas and manamas and no’akas. There were those weird fungi Eve liked, and rattly portions of things I realized Tallent must have filched from the dried-goods hut, including a small stack of vuakas, which Tu and Fa’a glanced at covetously before turning resolutely away.

When we were finished, we stepped back, and something about seeing them all looking at us, their eyes as large and black and trusting as a sloth’s, and the ground at their feet decorated with gifts as if it were Christmas and these were the presents under the tree, wrenched something inside me, and for a moment I was paralyzed by the cruelty of what we were doing.

I think we all must have felt the same way, for although I could not understand him, I could hear the anguish in Fa’a’s voice and saw the tenderness with which he laid his hand on each shoulder, gesturing toward the food as he spoke to them. Later Tallent would tell me what he had said: Don’t leave one another. Take care of one another. Eat the food when you get hungry. Stay by this tree. We’ll soon return .

And then we left. “Don’t turn around,” Tallent warned us, and we all stumbled forward, driven by our desire to move as far away from them as possible, when they suddenly, as a group, began to hum, a fat, buggy drone that sounded mysterious and full of portent, a chant of goodbye, although really it was nothing of the sort, just a sundowning reflex, a bit of echolalia.

We walked later than we ever had that night, so late that soon the only light we had was the red glint of bats’ eyes as they flapped noisily above us and the phosphorescent gleam from a flock of hard-shelled beetles that crested above us in a clicking, clackety gaggle, knocking into one another with crisp little toks and careening off branches. It was imperative that we put as much distance between the abandoned and ourselves as we could, but even after our walking became first inconsequential, as we were going so slowly, and then counterproductive (had we been moving in circles? It was impossible to tell), we seemed unable to stop ourselves. In the forest’s dark, in the absence of sight, all sounds became magnified, and out of the darkness loomed visions and nightmares. At one point I swore I felt something large and furred skim fleetingly over the top of my head, almost as if the air itself had grown feathers, but when I asked the others if they had felt it too, no one had. I found myself aware, as I had not been in the village, of the woods beyond and what might be living past the tiers and tiers of trees we had not even thought to access. Earlier in the day I had watched as a swarm of moths, so densely clumped that they appeared to be one creature, threw themselves at two kanava trees in a barreling kamikaze mission. But to my surprise they disappeared between the trees, vanishing into what I saw was the barest of fractures between them, an opening so slender I hadn’t even seen it. What else had managed to muscle through the trees’ barrier? There was the forest we knew, but beyond it perhaps there was a whole other forest, an entirely different ecosystem with its own distinct set of birds and mushrooms and fruits and animals. Perhaps there was another set of villages as well, protected by the trees for centuries, whose people lived to be a thousand and never lost their minds, or who died when they were teenagers, or who never had sex with children, or who only did.

I could hear Fa’a and Tallent speaking to each other, and eventually, when Fa’a fell back, I asked Tallent what they’d been saying. “He’s upset,” said Tallent, and he sounded upset as well. “He says we should never have tied them to the tree.”

“But the cord’s easy enough for them to break.”

“That’s what I told him,” said Tallent. “But he says he never should have told them to stay. He says they’ll never break the cord — they’ll just sit there, waiting for us to come back, because we promised we would.”

“But won’t they forget we said that?”

He sighed. “I explained that to him,” he said. “But.” He didn’t say anything more.

We were quiet for a moment. The ground crunched and squished beneath us.

“So what does he think will happen?” I finally asked.

“He thinks they’ll just stay there, not touching the food, waiting for us to return, until they die of starvation.”

“Isn’t that a bit extreme?” They had, I reminded myself, coped well on their own for years, for decades. And yet a part of me understood Fa’a’s distress: now that we had entered the dreamers’ lives — now that we had named them as dreamers, now that we had cared for them, now that we considered them ours, something found and given meaning — it was somehow difficult to imagine them capable of living on without us.

He sighed again. “He wants to go back for them. He wants to take them to his village. I told him he couldn’t. He said he was a killer.”

“Poor Fa’a,” I said, although my answer was more reflexive than anything else. He was a good, kind person, and although I thought he was being melodramatic, I appreciated his compassion. In the absence of action, Poor Fa’a seemed to be the only thing to say.

“Poor Fa’a,” repeated Tallent, his voice low. “Poor Fa’a.”

And then we were almost at the end. I had experienced the journey of almost six months before in reverse and was surprised at how familiar the sensations felt, and how friendly too: here I was stumbling over the same slippery crosshatch of roots, and growing heartily tired of the endless march of green, and feeling the wet air press upon me like a water-soaked mattress. Even with the dreamers — who, it must be said, were very good: obedient and placable — we were a day ahead of schedule. The boat would pick us up at midday on Tuesday, and by late afternoon on Sunday we had only another seven hours of walking to go. Once again I was impressed that Tallent had all along been keeping track of time; he even produced from his rucksack a small calendar, and seeing the days ticked off by a pencil mark made our stay on the island feel somehow both longer and more real.

He decided that we would stop early for the night and have an easy amble the next day. On Tuesday morning we would walk the final two hours to the shore, but it wasn’t worth going earlier, because that would mean sitting by the shore getting bitten by the mosquitoes that were becoming more and more frequent the closer to water we got. Knowing that we were so near the sea made me jumpy with impatience: how I longed to see something more powerful and unknowable than the jungle or the forest, something whose surface would prickle with light, something that could ferry us away from this place.

That night we ate the last of the Spam, and I remembered the meal of crackers we had had early in our trip and how Tallent had said I would miss their crispness. There were no crackers this time — they had been consumed long before — but their absence made me think of what an imperfect place this island was: above, in the village, there was fire but no water, and here everything sagged and burped water. The trees were swollen with it, the ground was fecund with it, our bodies produced it with such unceasing constancy that everything I owned was silky with moisture. Still, it was a nice penultimate meal on the island, and the food we ate and what we lacked were only incidental. Even the dreamers seemed to realize that something grand and exciting was about to happen, for they smiled their silly smiles and chattered away and at one point Mua even rose to do a funny little half-dance that resembled the one that the women did after the cessation of their menses. Uva and Tu — who had taken advantage of the leisurely day to go vuaka hunting and had returned with a sack that squirmed with so many of them that it resembled nothing so much as a gigantic, bloated manama fruit — were particularly joyful, laughing and talking and showing their pointy teeth, relieved that their time in this impossible place was almost over and that they would soon be home, alive and, even better, with a rich man’s haul of monkeys. Only Fa’a remained locked into his fugue state, and as the rest of us clapped our hands and shouted at Mua’s dancing, he sat apart from us, staring in turn at each of the dreamers, rubbing his thumb up and down his spear. It was impossible not to intuit what he was thinking: in the dreamers he saw not only his fate but his responsibility. Their presence was an unbearable reminder to him of what he’d done and of what he’d become. When he murmured something to Tallent and left, stalking into the woods beyond, I thought nothing of it, only that he wanted to be alone, away from us. And why would he not want to be alone, to prolong considering the inevitability of his departure? He was returning home a cursed man. What would he say to his family?