The People in the Trees

  “The gods knew that not all of the humans had forsaken the old ways, and they felt sorrowful that they could not separate and save the good from the bad, the righteous from the disrespectful. But still the humans continued to ignore the gods and the agreement that they had made with their grandparents so long ago. And so the gods were forced to continue their punishments, the tidal waves, the fierce droughts. A’aka asked his sister to join his efforts, to subject the humans to torrential rains, rains so terrible that many-hundred-year-old trees were uprooted and slid groaning into the sea, and that waterfalls overspilled their canyons and turned creeks into barreling, angry rivers. With each attack, the gods watched their children grow weaker and smaller and more depleted, and with each attack, their sorrow grew.

  “As did their anger. And so the gods decided that they had no choice. One day, after many years, a man named Manu’eke—Kindly Animal—was fishing in a cool stream high atop Ivu’ivu when he saw swimming in the shallows, unbelievably, a turtle. Quickly he grabbed the creature and rushed home to his village. There he killed it, and in his eagerness and haste and perhaps poor manners, he ate the entire animal without sacrificing any to the gods, his forefathers.

  “That night he dreamed that he had been turned into a god, that he was the first to be allowed to live forever. But oh! The gods were furious. They saw what Manu’eke had done, and they knew that if a human could forget to offer some of this sacred creature to them, as was their right, then man had fallen very far indeed. And so they decided to punish Manu’eke by giving him what he most desired, eternal life. But a horrible life. For after his sixtieth year—some say earlier, some say later—Manu’eke became less and less human. He forgot what it was to be a man. The people he had once known became strangers to him. He spoke in a voice no one recognized. He forgot to keep himself clean. He became a creature that was not quite an animal, not quite a man. He was driven from his people and never allowed to return.

  “And so Manu’eke wanders the jungles still, not one thing and not another, a memory of a man, an example of the gods’ wrath and their warning as well. He reminds us of Ivu’ivu’s and A’aka’s power, that life is theirs to give and theirs to take, and that they are always watching us, ready to take or give the gifts that men most desire.”

  Here Tallent stopped, and once again I felt that shiver. Around us the night seemed to have grown darker still, so dark that I could not even see Tallent seated right next to me, so dark that his voice seemed to become something tactile and textured, a curtain of deep-plum velvet hanging between us.

  And then I felt yet another shiver, but this one more frightening and colder, because it was in this moment I realized: this story, this myth, memorized by Tallent from who knows whom and secreted and cultivated and petted and caressed until he was able to almost sing it, perfect in its pauses and rhythms, was why we were here. He meant to find Manu’eke; he meant to give meaning to a fable; he meant to hunt down a creature that loped through children’s nightmares, that populated campfire tales, that existed in the same universe as stones who could mate with planets and father mountains and men. Suddenly my existence here seemed surreal, and the quest—even the word quest was something out of fictions and fantasies, in which an object, magical and imbued with improbable powers, is sought by a group of feckless heroes—we were to undertake seemed tinny and cheap.

  And yet—and this was even more frightening still—I could also feel something within me come undone. Even today, all these decades later, I cannot explain it with any greater accuracy. I found myself suddenly imagining a long, fat, chalked line stretching across a flat burned earth. To one side was what I had known, a neat-bricked city of windowless structures, the stuff and facts I knew to be true (I thought, unbidden, of my staircase, its names of those wiser than I, and was at once embarrassed for myself, for finding myself in this situation, in speechless thrall to an anthropologist). And on the other side was Tallent’s world, the shape of which I could not see, for it was obscured by a fog, one that thinned and thickened in unpredictable movements, so that I could discern, occasionally, glimpses of what lay behind it: nothing more than colors and movements, no real shapes; but there was something irresistible there, I knew it, and the fear of succumbing to it was finally less awful than never knowing what lay beyond that fog, never exploring what I might never again have the opportunity to explore.

  And so I closed my eyes; I forgot my senses; and I stepped over the line.

  “Is Manu’eke real?” I asked, and immediately berated myself for doing so. You are forgetting yourself, buzzed some high mosquito whine of a voice within me. Be careful; you are forgetting yourself. Remember who you are. This is not how you think. Remember what you have been taught.

  But I couldn’t. I tried, but I couldn’t.

  He sighed. “Nobody knows,” he said at last. “Older U’ivuans, of course, swear he is. But no one knows where he was meant to live—U’ivuans say Ivu’ivu, not surprisingly—or what became of him. Or rather, there are many theories about what became of him. That he dove into the sea and never returned. That he vanished. That he grew shriveled and hairy and small and turned into a monkey. That he became a stone. The only thing that remains consistent is that he never dies in these stories—he may disappear, he may transform, but no one claims to have seen him die.”

  I thought about this. “Do they still sacrifice turtles?”

  “Ah,” said Tallent, and for the first time I heard approval in his voice. “Now that—that is a good question. The question, really. No. No, they don’t. At least, not on U’ivu. Opa’ivu’ekes are very rare these days. You rarely see them in the water, much less on land. There is a subspecies of them, a smaller freshwater turtle that they seem to resemble, and you sometimes—once in a great while—will find them on Iva’a’aka or U’ivu. But the islanders are scared of them now and avoid them. They are prized, and it is good luck to see them, but no one dares touch them. No one except—”

  “The Ivu’ivuans,” I guessed.

  “Allegedly. Yes.”

  He was silent again, this time for a very long period.

  “There is a story,” he began, and then stopped, began again. “It is said that there is a tribe of U’ivuans who live deep in the jungles of Ivu’ivu. It is said that they keep to the old ways, that they still sacrifice to the gods. It is said”—and here I could feel rather than see his head turn toward mine—“that they never die.

  “I have never seen these people, this tribe, myself. But when I was last here, three years ago, studying the U’ivuan family structure—very interesting in and of itself—I met a man who said he had been to this island before, that he had seen a man who was not a man. Who looked like a man and moved like a man but who flailed and could not speak, who screeched like a monkey and, though he seemed strong and healthy, was without sense.

  “This was distressing enough, but what was more upsetting still, he said, was that the man was followed by another, and another—a whole group of men and women, all normal in appearance but all incapable of making meaningful conversation. All they could do was jitter and babble and laugh at nothing, the neighing laughter of the brainless. The U’ivuans value conversation, you know, and to be without it is to be mo’o kua’au—I suppose the nearest translation is ‘without throat,’ although kua’au can also mean ‘friends’ or ‘love.’ So, without friends. Without love.

  “The man, who was a hunter, left these strange people and hurried back to his home on U’ivu. For months, years, he tried to persuade his friends and family to return with him to the Forbidden Island and find these people, to see if he could help them and to learn who they were. But the U’ivuans, who are already wary of Ivu’ivu, as it is Opa’ivu’eke’s children’s favorite grounds and therefore sacred, refused to accompany him.

  “But this man, this hunter, could not forget what he had seen, no more easily than he could explain what compelled him to return to the Forbidden Island, which in truth frightened him. These people hau
nted him. The man could think of nothing else.

  “And so when this hunter learned that someone had finally believed him—albeit a ho’oala—and was planning to find these people, he asked to come along as translator and guide. He would bring two cousins of his whom he had, over many discussions, finally managed to convince.”

  “Fa’a,” I realized. “He was the hunter. The storyteller.”

  “Yes,” said Tallent, and again I felt rather than saw his face turn toward me in the dark. “We are going to find these people. If they exist, we’ll find them.”

  “Immortals,” I said, and I could hear my own skepticism.

  But if Tallent heard it too—and he must have—he didn’t remark on it. “Immortals,” he agreed, his voice inscrutable once more. And then he fell silent for the last time, and I sensed the darkness drawing itself around me like a warm and heavy cloak.

  For the first week or so after that night, I tried to keep track of what time it was and whether it was night or day. (My watch stopped working the second day; moisture had crept in through its joints and laced the face over in cobwebby patterns.) But quite soon I realized that doing so was pointless—so thick was the foliage that the sun became unnuanced and unreliable. You could not say that it had vanished, really, or that the light had faded, because there was no direct light in the jungle. There was only darkness and the absence of darkness. One was night, the other day.

  Looking back on it now, of course, I realize how extraordinary those first few days were, before I became immune to the awes of the jungle and even grew to despise them. One day—it must have been our third or fourth—I was trudging uphill as usual, looking around me, listening to the conversations of birds and animals and insects, feeling the floor beneath me gently buckling and heaving with unseen layers of worms and beetles as I placed my feet upon them; it could feel like treading on the wet innards of a large dozing beast. And then there was for a moment Uva at my side—he normally walked far ahead of me, in a pack with Fa’a and Tu, darting forward and back to assure Tallent that all was safe—holding his hand out before him, signaling me to stop. Then, quickly and gracefully, he sprang toward a nearby tree, indistinguishable from the others, thick and dark and branchless, and scrabbled up it quickly, turning his wide feet inward to cup its thorny bark. When he was about ten feet or so up, he looked down at me and held out his hand again, palm down—wait. I nodded. And then he continued to climb, vanishing into the canopy of the forest.

  When he came down, he was slower, and clutching something in his hand. He leapt down the last five feet or so and came over to me, uncurling his fingers. In his palm was something trembling and silky and the bright, delicious pale gold of apples; in the gloom of the jungle it looked like light itself. Uva nudged the thing with a finger and it turned over, and I could see it was a monkey of some sort, though no monkey I had ever seen before; it was only a few inches larger than one of the mice I had once been tasked with killing, and its face was a wrinkled black heart, its features pinched together but its eyes large and as blankly blue as a blind kitten’s. It had tiny, perfectly formed hands, one of which was gripping its tail, which it had wrapped around itself and which was flamboyantly furred, its hair hanging like fringe.

  “Vuaka,” said Uva, pointing at the creature.

  “Vuaka,” I repeated, and reached out to touch it. Under its fur I could feel its heart beating, so fast it was almost a purr.

  “Vuaka,” said Uva again, and then made as if to eat it, solemnly patting his stomach.

  “No,” I said, horrified, “no,” and he tipped his head at me curiously and shook it at my poor taste, I suppose, and then walked off toward the tree again, where he tossed the monkey upward, and I watched it latch onto the bark and hurry up, a flashing pulse of sun.

  Later, from Tallent, I learned that the vuaka was an early monkey, a sort of ur-monkey, and that they lived in enormous colonies in a certain kind of tree that was also endemic to U’ivu. The U’ivuans considered them a delicacy—they scalped and then roasted them by the dozen on long twigs and ate them like kebabs—but the tree, the kanava, grew only in thickly forested areas, the kind that no longer existed on Iva’a’aka or U’ivu. In fact, these days the kanava (and therefore the vuaka) could be found in great quantities only on Ivu’ivu, but nothing, not even the lure of fresh vuakas, could induce the U’ivuans to this island.

  Tallent laughed. It was something he rarely did. “Fa’a may be here to find the lost tribe,” he said, “but the others? I think they’re only here for the vuaka.” It was too wet to roast them, of course, but Tallent said the men would skin them and cure them with salt they’d brought from home for exactly this purpose.

  I knew it was sentimental (not to mention pointless) to feel pity for the poor, pretty vuaka, and I didn’t want Tallent to think I was weak, so I said nothing. But that night, lying on my mat, I thought of the vuaka, its huge, sad eyes, the glorious streak of gold it had made as it vanished into the dark above us, and felt for a moment a despair so profound that I was momentarily unable to breathe.

  But soon even the forest—what I had initially seen as its diversions and newness, its unsullied perfection and possibility—became wearying. Where I had once seen mystery, I now saw instead only repetition: the constant damp, the constant half-light, the constant pattern of trees and trees and trees, an unbroken grove of them reaching into eternity. I longed to see the sky above me, blue and sticky with clouds, or the sea, its anxious, roiling energy. Here we knew it had been raining only because the trees—so incessantly thirsty I thought of them as stands of throats, greedily swallowing every drop they could—sweated water, which disappeared into the pelts of moss that clumped around their bases, and because the ground grew squelchy and spongy. At the shoreline, any seedling that had been dropped by birds could live—I had seen mango and guava trees, and others I could not name but recognized anyway—but this deep in the forest the plants were more ancient and native, and I knew none of them. This ought to have been exciting, but it was not; the total absence of familiarity can make a place seem alien and unconquerable, and you turn your attention and curiosity away from it to avoid growing frustrated.

  Then there was the matter of the jungle’s profligacy, which I began to resent, as if it were an overdressed woman parading her entire cache of sparkly jewels before me. I felt as if the jungle were constantly showing off to itself—every rock, every tree, every surface that would stay still was trimmed, bedecked, baroque with greenery: there were fistulas of bushes wrapped with creeping vines and spotted with moss and lichen and trees draped with great valances of hairy, hanging roots from some other unseen plant that lived, I imagined, high above the canopy. Things flew up from the floor and trickled down from the treetops. It was an exhausting performance that never ended, and for what? To prove the imperturbability of nature, I suppose—its unknowability, its fundamental lack of interest in humanity. Or at least that’s what it seemed like at the time: a mockery. It was absurd, I knew, to wake each day and resent the jungle and my own insignificance in it. But I couldn’t help it. I began to think I might be going a little—well, not crazy, I suppose, but that I might be losing touch, as they say now. And then I felt childish, and ashamed.

  On and on the jungle went, so unceasing in its excesses that I eventually became numb to them. A creature, its malachite-dark back diamonded with scales, skittered across my feet, a wraithlike monkey shrieked from a tree, and I did not stop or ask Uva or Tallent what they were. There were so many shades and tones of green—serpent, aphid, pear, emerald, sea, grass, jade, spinach, bile, pine, caterpillar, cucumber, steeped tea, raw tea: how inadequate is our vocabulary for color!—that I feared I would lose my ability to distinguish anything else. Fa’a’s loincloth, a bright crimson, burned my eyes, and yet I found myself staring at it as much and for as long as I could bear, as if trying to fix its redness in my mind before it too began to be interpreted by my eye as yet another shade of green. At night I dreamed of green, great floa
ting blobs of it, morphing gently from one shade to the next, and in the mornings I woke feeling beaten and exhausted. During the day my thoughts returned to visions of deserts, of cities, of hard surfaces: of glass and concrete and chips of mica glinting from asphalted streets.

  There was also, still, the problem of Tallent, whom I could barely look at and around whom I was trying to become more fluent and less stuttery. He stayed up late in the evenings, writing in his notebook, and from my mat I’d watch him as the darkness filled the air like bats. He was careful never to use the flashlight unless we really needed to—to relieve ourselves, for example—and so even after the light disappeared completely he would continue to write, and I would lie there, as still as I could, listening to his pen skritching across the page; for some reason this was a beautiful image to me, Tallent writing without any illumination to guide his way, and when we were walking, I would sometimes close my eyes and turn it over in my mind, savoring it like a candy. On those long hikes, I also tried to make—and sometimes succeeded in making—interesting observations to him, but whenever I managed to do so, there was Esme, ready to offer her own opinion on whatever the subject was.

  Esme was a difficulty of a different sort, of course. Aside from her bossiness and smugness and general possessiveness of Tallent (which, frustratingly, I was still unable to determine whether he noticed or not, and if so, whether he cared), there was the simple fact that she was unpleasant to regard. With each day her hair grew wilder and less manageable, until it floated like a penumbra above her puffed face, and her skin, as I’ve mentioned, had taken on a more or less permanent rash. This ought not to have bothered me, but it did.