Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

As we went, I could not help but study the treescape around me, trying to map the developments. Was it quieter than it had been last time, less filled with birdcall and monkey screech and insect flutter? Were there fewer manama trees and less fruit on the ground? Did the kanava trees seem less grimed with vuaka shit than they had before? Did that moss always look so trodden, or had someone recently walked across it? Was the passage between that stand of palm trees always so forgiving, or had it been widened recently by hand? Was that a white card, a botanist’s label, affixed to that orchid, or was it in fact a butterfly, its wings folded into a flat square?

We smelled and heard the village before we saw it, but the smells were ones I recognized from the States, not from here, and the sounds were not of Ivu’ivu either. There was the tart, burned tang of bacon frying, and the hiss of a slosh of grease sliding against a hot pan. There were men’s voices, all speaking English, and the bright, aggressive scent of laundry detergent, and the ching of metal pinging against stone.

And then we were upon them, their neat clean tents and their laundry — stretched-out T-shirts and cotton pants, all the same linty color — draped over the low manama branches, and the fire over which one of them held aloft with a pair of metal tongs a can of baked beans, whose contents burbled diarrhetically over the rim.

I introduced myself — I couldn’t not — and learned that they were the Pfizer group; the Lilly group was apparently to the right of the village, although about the same distance removed. They were respectful, they were hostile, they were surprised; I could see them regarding me with envy, for while they spent their days trying to develop drugs and cold creams, I was doing real work, and they knew I was their superior. And yet they had all the resources — it was clear, from my single rucksack resting in Uva’s cart, that I did not — and it was already clear that the ones who had the resources would win. This is always true in science. It was true even then. I excused myself as soon as I could.

But it was when we reached the edge of the village that the horror, the severity, of the island’s transformation really assaulted me. The huts were the same, as were the dirt floor’s well-drawn boundaries, but those were the only things that had remained as I remembered. Lanced on a stick over the fire was a cube of Spam sweating lardy drops into the flames, and an already roasted block of it sat nearby, its heat wilting and curling the palm leaf on which it rested. And a few feet off, a group of men hovered over a third brick, squeezing off pieces of it with their fingers and feeding their hogs a bite for every two or three they took. But somehow the worst thing was the clothesline that had been stretched between two manama trees on the left side of the village; the line had been made using some of the twisted palm-leaf rope — a precious rope, a rope meant for repairs and hauling and hog-leashing — and draped all across it was a junky selection of used clothes: yellowed undershirts and torn-pocketed trousers and plain, prim, long-sleeved cotton dresses that would have been useless in America, much less in tropical Ivu’ivu. And all around me the villagers went on their way in clothes, sometimes worn correctly and sometimes not, but always worn in earnest and with real effort — which was in many ways the most alarming thing of all, for it meant that it was not a lark, not a game, but that somehow they had been convinced that this was a habit worth adopting, a necessary adaptation. But who had told them so, and why had they believed them?

I found myself walking toward the ninth hut. To one side, two of the pharmacists were kicking a soccer ball to each other and laughing as some of the village children — some in shirts so big that they resembled kimonos, the fabric of the arms sailing as they jumped and ran — joined in. Inside, the hut was as I remembered it: silent and cool and somehow somber. I was relieved, momentarily. But then I thought, was it too unchanged? There was something about it that felt dusty almost, and I found myself absurdly studying the dirt floor for signs of neglect. It was as if in the context of such enveloping changes, the ninth hut’s sameness made it appear less, not more, relevant. It was clear that what had once been — from dress to food to even the children’s play — was no longer valued, and the fact that no one had thought to update the hut with some recognition of the new world that had been visited upon them made me fear that it remained not as a symbol of something cherished but as a relic of something outgrown.

Later I would realize that what had taken me weeks to find had taken teams of researchers only days. Later I would hurry uphill toward the lake — the path now an abandoned parade route, all staked with yards of fluttering bright red tape strung from tree to tree — and run crazily toward the two scientists (these from a German outfit that had set up camp some distance from the Lilly group) lifting a large opa’ivu’eke from the lake, the turtle’s limbs pinwheeling in fear. Later, after they had left, I would lean over the edge of the lake, its once-clean border made mucky with the stamped-sole imprints of a dozen men’s boots, and see only five heads break the surface of the water, and as long as I waited, they would not come to me but would only hover in the center of the pond, and I would have to try to stop myself from howling. Later I would learn (from one of those same German pharmacologists) that Tallent was missing, and had been missing for at least two weeks: he had been on the island alone, without Esme, and had met only some of them. And then one day he was gone. It had taken them a while — two days? three? — to notice his absence, but once they had, they had ventured into the forest in small groups and then sent their guides in after them. But they could find no evidence of him. He had carried only a knapsack, which he had taken with him, and although they had searched, they had been unable to find anywhere that he might have disturbed the jungle: no fields of moss bearing the ghost impressions of his feet, no scattered manama seeds, no smudges of earth and stick where once a fire might have burned.

And then I knew— this was the worst thing of all. Worse than the turtles, who had learned not to trust the new humans too late and were now much reduced in number. Worse than seeing the boy, my young friend who had slept leaning against me just a short while before and who seeing me now turned from me, his too-long pant legs sweeping behind him like a bride’s gown. I could not believe, could not accept, the fact that Tallent might be gone from me, from us, forever. By day I spoke to everyone I could — Ivu’ivuans, the pharmacologists — asking them for information. The latter group, seeing that it distracted me from getting in their way, indulged me, but they had such little information, such frustratingly little information, that many days I wished I had never asked. How had he seemed in the days before his disappearance? Fine, they said, but because they had not known him (and, I had to admit to myself, neither had I), they could not say whether his behavior was normal or not. He was calm and contemplative and kept to himself. What had he been researching? What had they seen him observe? They didn’t know, they said; he spoke sometimes to members of the village, but most of the time he was observing them, writing in his notebook, writing by himself. Had he spoken to any one villager in particular? No, they didn’t think so. Had he looked — and here I had to stop until I was certain I wanted to know the answer — unkempt, or seemed ill or illogical or delusional? No, they said. No, no.