The People in the Trees: A Novel

by Hanya Yanagihara

  With Uo I saw much of what had eluded me the last time, and since I was no longer as frightened, nor as anxious to reach our ultimate destination, I was able to examine everything more closely. And this time I did what I ought to have done when I had first had the opportunity: when Uo brought me a creature that I assumed was an armadillo but later saw was a monstrous beetle, its carapace jointed into a hundred flexible plates that rippled and shifted upon one another as it wriggled in his hands, I made drawings and took notes and measurements. I pressed between my notebook pages the round, gingkolike leaves that grew in staggered tiers on a spindly golden-trunked tree I’d not noticed before, the ones that changed color from green at their base to purple at their tips, the space in between filled by a strange, unnameable shade that made me think of dragons’ scales. I found a nest of plum-black lizard eggs the size of avocados whose stippled shells reminded me of leather and which peeled off in thick, supple pieces like an orange’s skin. (Inside, I was surprised to see the fetal lizards covered in a strange, cottony fuzz, one that began disintegrating as soon as the embryonic fluid was drained.)64

  Therefore, it was something of a disappointment when our journey was at last over and I was deposited by Uo among my own people at our camp. Tallent was not even there to greet me when I arrived. Instead there was only Esme, who I am sorry to say had not improved in appearance or temperament in the intervening seven years. She did not look pleased to see me.

  “Norton,” she said.

  “Esme,” I said. And that was it.

  For all of Tallent’s fears about the island being overrun by various competitors and mercenaries, there was only one addition to our group, a minky little man named Johan Meyers, who was a mycologist from Berkeley. He was one of those people you meet and are instantly weary of, mostly because of his globular eyes and his rapid blink (he was very nearsighted) and his dreadful stammer, which was not helped by his insistence on narrating every small thing he encountered. I once made the mistake of going mushroom-hunting with him, and had to endure many hours of his dull prattle: “And now here we see—what is this?—oh, it’s a sort of fungus that grows in these stepped formations on this manama tree. Consistency very soft, almost velvety, tipped with what appears to be a very gentle fur, almost like that of a fly, but here powdery instead of coarse, and almost silvery in color,” etc., etc. Like most mycologists, Meyers was deeply boring and interested in only one thing: fungi. A dinosaur could have gone crashing through the forest inches before him and it’s doubtful he would have lifted his eyes from the puddle of snail-shaped mushrooms that he’d discovered growing at the base of a particularly mature lawa’a fern. He had absolutely no time for turtles or people, much less very old ones, and indeed had the useful ability to simply stop listening when the talk turned to such subjects, drifting off instead into a self-induced trance in which the whole world was remade as various fungal mutations. You always knew when this was happening, for his little mouth took on a sort of lightness and his eyes, behind their glass slabs, became moist and ecstatic. I often envied him those moments.

  I hoped to accomplish three things while on my visit. The first was to gauge the chief’s mental health (he would be only sixty-seven, and his adviser seventy, and so this was more of a checkup than anything else; I wasn’t expecting any mental degradation yet). The second was to ascertain whether anyone else had celebrated their vaka’ina, and if so to begin a file on them. And the third—and primary—goal was to secure at least two opa’ivu’ekes, which I intended to take back alive to the States. I had a little less than a month to do this; on the twenty-eighth day, Uo would guide me back down-island, where I would be met by the boatman and taken back to U’ivu, where the pilot would meet me in the field at daybreak of the thirty-seventh day. If I missed him, I would have to wait until Tallent and Esme left the island, which would not be for another nine weeks after that.

  One of the few nice things about revisiting a place that no one ever visits and where nothing ever changes is that one can skip all the introductions and reintroductions and simply reinsert oneself into the current of local life. By the fourth day, I had found the chief and had a brief audience with him. I am fairly certain he recognized me, but he seemed neither particularly surprised nor gratified by my presence. He did not seem to appreciate that I could now speak to him in his language, or the improbability of my reappearance in his life. But I did get from him the answer I wanted: no, no one else had celebrated their vaka’ina. As for the other question—that of his mental acuity—I had to make certain deductions. I could not, after all, give him any tests to measure it without offending him, but I left him feeling quite confident that no diminishment had yet begun.

  The acquisition of opa’ivu’ekes was both more and less difficult than I’d anticipated. Happily, I did not have to go through the charade of pretending not to be interested in the turtle; without having to have an actual conversation about the matter, Tallent and I seemed to have reached some unspoken détente: he knew I was here for the opa’ivu’eke and had decided not to mention it if I did not. At any rate, I saw far less of him and Esme than I’d anticipated—their research was about the Ivu’ivuans’ family structure and society, things that did not much concern me, and they spent most of their days conducting interviews with the various villagers.

  Less happy, however, was my lack of a guide to the lake of turtles. The one thing Tallent had forbidden me to do was ask any of the villagers how to find my way back up that winding path to the plateau; to do so, he told me, would cause such grave offense we’d be lucky to escape with our lives. In later years I would reflect on Tallent’s constant threats of the Ivu’ivuans’ violence and wonder how much of it was exaggerated to make me behave in a way that he thought I ought, and how much of it was real and based on actual experience. Certainly I knew from the way that I’d seen the villagers kill their catch that they were skilled with their spears and unafraid to use them, but I never, in all my time in the village, saw one man turn his weapon against another. Was it because there was no need to, or was it because they were fundamentally incapable of such brutality? I was never to know.

  Naturally, I was not eager to make a stumbling, hapless nighttime exploration to the lake, and so I spent my days venturing farther and farther up the path, trying uselessly to remember what looked familiar and what did not. I began each journey by tying a string around the base of the manama tree behind the ninth hut and concluded each path by tying the other end of the string at its natural end. I had foolishly never considered that the path might prong off in so many directions, but the only thing that saved me from becoming completely frustrated was that each of the routes I unsuccessfully pursued had finished in a dead end: one against a glossy grove of yellow bamboo that was so tightly packed I couldn’t even squeeze my finger between them, another against a smooth blank edifice of putty-colored rock. Yet somewhere, somewhere high above me, was that snaking, illogical path that led to that improbable field and its lake with its gulping wide-eyed turtles.65

  Those were my days, then. But in the evenings I thought about the dreamers. It was difficult not to, especially when I was alone and in the forest; I kept expecting that one day I would turn and there, standing before that tree or slumped against that rock, one of them would be. Perhaps it would be someone I knew, one of the ones we had left with their god’s offerings of Spam and hunonos, or perhaps it would be one I had never seen before, a twin of Mua or Ika’ana. They might be single or in a group, sentient or not, terrifying in the moment or not. Sometimes in certain late-afternoon light, when the air around me seemed to shimmer and sag with millions of gold particles, I was almost certain that I saw one of them, a shadow of hair making a thundercloud against a curtain of trees, or heard one of their footfalls crunching the rug of dead leaves behind me. But when I looked, there was nothing, and I would have to remind myself that even if I did encounter one, I was fully capable of overpowering him, and that at any rate they would mean me no harm.


  One day I was headed back from yet another fruitless search for the lake when I came around a large kanava tree and found myself suddenly in front of the boy, the one whose a’ina’ina I had witnessed, the one I had encountered in the woods that night. He was of course no longer a boy—he would have been about seventeen by the Western calendar—and when I cried out in surprise, he looked back at me with a flat, level gaze, one that made me feel silly for being so expressive.

  I must admit that I had been looking for him since I’d arrived, albeit not very hard. Normally, it would not have been difficult to find him, but it was the peak of hunting season, the time of year when the biggest game—monkeys and sloths and the wild boars you sometimes heard thundering through the woods—were slaughtered and skinned, and many of the young men who otherwise would have spent their days lounging about the village were gone in shifts, making abrupt reappearances at odd hours of the night and then vanishing again before the rest of the villagers woke.

  He had grown up well; he was a man. In one hand he clutched his spear, and his other hand rested on his hog, which was as mean-eyed and mud-flecked as all the other men’s hogs. But still I knew it was he: in adulthood he had the same somehow noble, well-composed face, the same lift to his chin, the same calm eyes. He would be married now, I imagined, and perhaps have a child of his own. Had his days as someone who lurked in the forest at night or embraced other boys under a tree ended, then? Or if I crept my way through the dark that night, my arms aloft as before, would I find myself being led to him once again, standing still and silent, waiting for me to happen upon him?

  I could think of so much I wanted to say to him, and yet in the moment nothing would come forth, and so in the end I only nodded at him. After a long pause, he nodded back, and then turned and made his silent way off the path and into an uncharted part of the forest, his hog swaggering alongside him. In seconds he was gone, the thin trees he’d pushed aside to make room for him slapping back into place at once, erasing his presence completely.

  I stood there watching the place where he’d disappeared. Had he remembered me? It seemed impossible that he hadn’t. And yet the interaction had the strange effect of making me doubt that I had actually ever met him before. That night in the forest, when I had crashed through the underbrush with my hands stretched out before me, running until I encountered him, had been one of the loneliest and most desperate moments I had had on Ivu’ivu. When I had found him, I had been so grateful—not just because of the kindness he had shown me, but because it seemed as if he had been planted there to remind me of my own presence, my own realness. I often felt this way on Ivu’ivu, as if I were floating away from myself, my atoms rearranging themselves so that they were no more permanent or tangible than sunlight, so that the more time I spent there, the less certain I was of my own existence. I could have been lost that night in the forest. But I hadn’t been. He had found me.

  One afternoon I took a break from my scheming and turtle-searching and, for lack of anything better to do, followed Tallent and Esme for a bit as they made their rounds through the village. (Meyers had invited me to go look at some doubtless fascinating fungal fringe he’d discovered a short way downhill, but I had declined.)

  However, watching Tallent and Esme sit at the edge of the village and scribble away in their notebooks was not much more interesting. After a while, Esme marched off to harass the poor woman who was guarding the meat hut, and I sat next to Tallent in silence, he scribbling, I staring at the small, busy lives before me, trying to see in the older children those whom I might have known as babies.

  I was thinking about the lake of turtles and all the paths I might still have to explore when a toddler bobbled up to me, holding a piece of grass in her hand. She was probably a little over a year, unusually fat for an Ivu’ivuan, and had a sort of solemnity about her that reminded me of the boy, to whom my thoughts returned again and again.

  “Hello,” I said to her. “What’s that you have?”

  She stared. I have never found it difficult, as some do, to speak to children. All one has to do is pretend that they’re some kind of intelligent farm animal: a pig, perhaps, or a horse. In fact, one should be much more intimidated by the prospect of speaking to a horse, since they can often be quite quick-witted and possessed of a great disdain for those they feel are not worthy of their attention.

  At any rate, we had a nice exchange, the baby and I, which ended with her giving me the grass (and I thanking her) and then her bungling away. Somewhere in the middle of this interaction I became aware that Tallent had stopped writing and was watching us, and as she left, he said, “You’re very good with children.”

  “Oh,” I said, surprised. It had never occurred to me that there might be two different categories of people—those who were good with children and those who were not—and that I might be in the former group.

  “Do you want children of your own?” Tallent asked.

  This was even more surprising. You must remember that in the fifties, people, especially men, did not ask one another if they wanted children. It was assumed that you would have them, and liking them or not had very little bearing on the matter. It was simply something you did: you got married, you got a job, you had children. You might have a single child or many, your wife might be beautiful or not, your job dull or exceptional, but those were the only variations. So, “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never thought about it.” And I hadn’t.

  “Mmm,” said Tallent. “I think you will.”

  I found his confidence irritating. He had a certain talent for being able to make me feel like a creature from a book he had studied, who was doomed to fulfill a certain destiny whose shape only he knew.

  “Do you?” I shot back at him.

  He paused then and was thoughtful, which I hadn’t expected. “I don’t think so,” he said at last.

  “Why not?”

  “It just isn’t for me,” he said, and smiled—not at me, but at something in the distance, as if at something or someone he recognized. I followed his gaze, fearful that he might be regarding Esme, but when I looked, there was no one there, just the square, empty for once but for the fire, the air around it blurring oilily in the heat.

  It was not until the twenty-sixth day that I finally made my way back to the lake of turtles. There they were, paddling toward me, as friendly and gently inquisitive as cows, and there I was, lifting two of the smaller ones, each about the size of a large dinner plate, out of the water and putting them into the punched-hole cardboard carrying boxes I had brought with me.

  The way down was not difficult, but it was slow. I had thought about how I might successfully mark my path but had concluded that there was no way of doing so without letting others benefit from it. I could not risk, say, nailing stakes into the earth or scratching symbols on trees without reasonably expecting that some future seeker (though at the time I wasn’t wholly convinced there would be as many as Tallent had predicted) would find and follow them himself. So in the end I had to resort to sketching a highly detailed map, marking each turn and change of direction not by landmark—for indeed, the tree I might recognize as a sapling today would be something unrecognizable two or three years from now—but by the approximate distance that separated each one from the next. And of course I had to keep putting the turtles down to make another notation and then picking them up again.

  Once I had reached the manama tree at the back of the ninth hut, I crouched behind it and waited for the last of the light to leave the sky; Esme and Tallent had, on this trip or the previous one, finally been invited to join the dinnertime feasts by the fire, and they could spend hours there without looking around them. Meyers generally spent his evenings back at the camp, dusting his precious fungi with one of the many stiff-bristled brushes he had brought and breathing humidly through his mouth. I crept around the back of the storage houses and toward my old tree, where I piled small branches and handfuls of moss on top of the boxes to conceal their presence. I had brought
with me some turtle-food pellets I’d bought at an animal supply store back in California, and when I placed some before the opa’ivu’ekes, they stared at them for a moment or two before eating them and I sat back, relieved.

  Later, herpetologists would write papers detailing the species’ many unusual traits and characteristics, but all neglected to mention the one I found most appealing and singular about them, which was how they could project an almost canine friendliness combined with a feline centeredness. After eating, they padded about me for a few minutes, and when I stroked their carapaces, they did not retreat or take offense but merely shut their eyes and enjoyed it, much as their predecessor had done all those years before.

  As I sat there with them, my thoughts turned to that conversation I’d had with Tallent about children. Over the past two weeks, some of the only comfort (and certainly the only amusement) I’d found had been with the village’s children. I would encounter them playing on the borders of the village as I slumped back to the camp from yet another unsuccessful day of hunting for the lake of turtles, and after watching them, I began to see games and playacting emerge from what I’d previously been able to view as only a chaotic ruckus. They had one trick they especially enjoyed performing, in which two children would face each other, each with a bit of plant husk balanced on a finger. Then they’d twirl them around faster and faster, and whoever managed to find just the right speed so the husk remained on his finger would win.

  There was one child in particular whom I particularly enjoyed speaking with and watching. He was maybe seven or eight, and in his stillness and attentiveness he reminded me somewhat of the boy. He wasn’t a social outcast or anything of the sort, but he did seem apart from the others; when they played throwing games, or chased one another around the village, or dared one another to go another foot and then yet another past the manama tree behind the ninth hut, shrieking with fear and triumph as they ran back downhill, he would instead watch, a finger at the edge of his mouth and a worried expression on his face. I was moved by this frown of his, which was so adult and sad and somehow wise on a person so young. As he grew to know me and trust me, he would sometimes place a small hand on my arm or sit next to me and press his body against mine, and I would find myself babbling on to him, telling him about my life and the lab and Owen, none of which he could understand and all of which he listened to quietly, as if my words were a warm rain, so comforting that he felt no need to seek shelter.