The People in the Trees

  There were more serious problems with Esme as well. Late one night I walked to the stream—the same one I mentioned earlier; its source seemed to be high in the mountains, where we were headed—and saw a crumpled blossom on the jungle floor. Against the dark, it was gloriously, impossibly white, the white of fresh paper, and at its center was a splash of deep burgundy. Here the flowers were waxy and indistinguishable as flowers: where there should have been stamens there were grossly suggestive plasticky lips upon which bugs alighted to rest; where there should be leaves there were aggressive, thrusting planes. But in that white flower I was reminded of the blooms I had grown up with: sugary peonies, as frilled and shirred as ballet skirts, gauzy clumps of asters. It seemed the loveliest thing I had seen for many days, and I stood there staring at it.

  But as I continued stumbling over to the creek, I saw that the flower was no flower at all but rather a crumple of tissue, at its heart a smear of blood. I felt a sort of fury—first, rightly, that Esme should be so careless with disposing of her own trash, and second (and I admit less defensibly), that she should have spoiled for me an image so soothing.

  Back on our mats, I poked her awake. “You have to be more careful,” I told her.

  She was slit-eyed, wild-haired. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “Your waste,” I said. “I nearly stepped in it.”

  “Leave it alone, Perina,” she said, and flopped back over onto her other side.

  “Esme!” I hissed. “Esme!” But she was already feigning sleep, and I dared not speak louder for fear of waking Tallent. “Esme!” I shook her shoulder, and under her shirt her flesh was repulsive, a quaking blancmange, its surface pimpled with perspiration.

  The next morning we ate breakfast (more Spam, scooped out of the tin with the splintery slices of a hard yellow papayalike fruit that Fa’a had found and cut for us) in silence, with Tallent writing in his notebook and even Esme, for once, wordless. I did not look at her, but around her seemed the sickening scent of menstrual blood, a tinnily feminine smell so oppressive that it was a relief finally to begin the day’s climb and to find it vanishing slowly into the odors of the jungle. And from then on I was unable to look at her without thinking of oozing liquids, as thick and heavy as honey but rank and spoiled, seeping from her every hidden orifice.

  After some days of walking (I am sorry, but the exact length of time eludes me now as it did then; it could have been five days or fifteen), we entered one afternoon a different sort of place. I cannot describe it any better than that, except to say that the very quality of the air seemed to change: one step behind us was the jungle we knew, sodden and creeping and thick with secrets, like something in a fairy tale, and in the next was someplace else. Suddenly the air was drier, the trees less assertive, the sun—the sun!—visible, actually casting shifting, fuzzy-edged parallelograms of light across the elaborately ferned and twigged forest floor. Above me I could see a crochet of spiderwebs stretched between two trees, glinting like a tangle of jeweled necklaces.

  Fa’a said something quickly and excitedly to Tallent, who in turn told us that we were little more than a day’s walk from the place where Fa’a had seen his people. He had marked the location by scratching a large X with a stick in the bark of something called a manama tree. The manama’s bark grew in scales, Tallent said, and when pierced it wept a jammy sap that dried in a crust of hard blemishes: we would know it when we saw it.

  But now, he announced, we would rest, and we did at once, all six of us dropping our bags on the ground. It was good, and odd, to lie there, to have survived the jungle (even though later I would have to admit that the jungle was without any real dangers, that then was really the time to feel frightened), to feel the sun creeping over our faces, to hear the first faint birdcalls; their music seemed like fairy song, so strange and beautiful was it, so otherworldly.

  We slept then, all of us, even the guides, and when I woke and saw the others’ still bodies, I thought for a minute that they were dead and I was alone in this strange, sunlit place, surrounded by trees I did not know the names of and birds I could hear but could not see, and that no one would ever know I was here or remember I had ever existed or would ever find me. The sensation was fleeting, but what I would remember is how quickly, like a breath, I moved from despair to resignation, how well equipped the human mind is to readjust to its realities, to soothe oneself of one’s deepest fears. And then I felt proud, I suppose, of my very humanness, and briefly invincible, and sure that I would be greeted with nothing in the next day that I could not bear.

  I walked in the direction of the stream, which had become perversely wider and more powerful the farther uphill we climbed, a clear, quick channel of cold water, its taste, oddly, more intensely sealike than it had been at the lower elevation. I drank from it and then sat at its bank, watching it move over pebbles, admiring the small orange flowers that trimmed its edge. And it was then, sleepy, daydreaming of nothing, that I saw something move from beneath one of the boulders that lay across the river: a dark form, no more than that, like the shadow a cloud casts when it scuds over the sea. But as it grew closer it began to take shape, and I saw it was a turtle, the ridge of its peaked and bony back breaking through the skin of the water, and knew at once what it was.

  “Opa’ivu’eke! Opa’ivu’eke!” I was shouting, and I could hear the others running toward me.

  I say I knew it was an opa’ivu’eke, but it was only because we were on its land; otherwise the turtle, at first glance at least, was nothing remarkable. It was perhaps somewhat smaller than I’d imagined—about the circumference of a hubcap—and its feet, not surprisingly, more flipperlike, more like a sea turtle than I’d pictured.25 Then I regarded it more closely—it had stopped its journey downstream to tread water, its legs paddling slowly against the current—and noticed its carapace, as humped as a dromedary’s and a beetley, glossy green, so green it was almost black, and divided into neat squares, the border of each as well defined as if it had been wrought from metal by a chisel. But it was its head, a small, oddly shaped cashew of a thing on a long, telescoping neck, that made me consider it further. I had never to that point been in the habit of imbuing animals with human traits or human intelligence, but watching the opa’ivu’eke, I was discomfited by what I suppose can only be called its expressiveness. I looked in its bagged, drooping amber eyes and felt, if only briefly, that Tallent’s story was true, that this was an animal possessed of wisdom and fortitude, and that we were its guests and certainly not its superiors. Behind me I could hear the three guides murmuring something in unison in U’ivuan, a low, chantlike hum like crickets’ song, and after a few moments, in which we all remained perfectly silent, the turtle blinked its eyes at us and then, almost haughtily, continued its swim, head still held aloft, finlike feet parting the water in neat furrows.

  We stayed and watched it leave, but once it was out of sight, the three guides began talking quickly, and I saw in their faces excitement and fear.

  “This was the first opa’ivu’eke they’ve ever seen,” Tallent told Esme and me in a quiet voice, and we observed the three men telling one another about the experience they’d just witnessed, all of them speaking so fast that it seemed they were trying to expunge themselves of the memory rather than cement it.

  We three—even Esme—said nothing, only watched them, and although at the moment I found their behavior, their near panic, curious, later I understood it: gods are for stories and heavens and other realms; they are not to be seen by men. But when we encroach on their world, when we see what we are not meant to see, how can anything but disaster follow?

  The hours we walked following the turtle sighting were strange ones. I had never thought of our guides as particularly voluble—in fact, they were often so far ahead of us on our daily hikes that I, shamefully, thought of them rather little at all—but today they walked with us, near us almost, as if for comfort and protection (somewhat worrisome, as with the possible exception of Tallent, w
e were ill-equipped to protect them from anything), and their silence was not so much a quiet as it was a complete absence of noise. Unlike us, they did not pant as they trudged forward, they did not stop to wipe the slicks of sweat off their brows; they seemed in fact to need less breath than we did, to be immune to the jungle’s heat. But this afternoon I was made to realize that the sounds they did make—little chirrups back at the unseen insects that peeped and scraped from the sky, the airy whistle they gave one another to announce their location—had been a part of the jungle’s soundtrack after all.

  It was in this silence that the thing fell from the sky, something wet and heavy that landed with a juicy, suggestive thwack, like one slab of raw meat falling smack against another from a very great height. This startled the guides into talk once more (I fear I may have shrieked a bit), and they clustered around the thing, which turned out to be a fruit, though not like any fruit I had seen before. It was disgustingly priapic, about eighteen inches long and fat as an eggplant, and that particular sugary newborn pink one finds only in tropical sunsets. But what really distinguished it was the fact that it was moving—something was forcing its thin, unspeckled skin to swell into small bulges before smoothing flat again, the ripples undulating up and down its length. The guides began their excited all-at-once chatter again, and Tallent, hurrying over, joined in their chorus.

  “It’s a manama fruit,” he explained. “They only grow at this elevation. It means we’re close.” Then he took the thing from Fa’a’s hand and with his penknife slit it down the middle. Out of the cut squirmed a large writhing mass of grubs the approximate size and color of baby mice, which fell from the fruit to the ground and began wriggling off; against the moss of the floor they looked like rivulets of suddenly animated ground beef, worming their way toward some sort of salvation. (Esme looked sick. I don’t mind admitting I felt a little sick myself.) “They’re hunono worms,” Tallent continued, and for a moment I found his serene equanimity, his apparent inability to be repelled by anything nature might hurl at him, somehow inhuman and slightly suspicious. “They live in this fruit for their incubation period, and when they’re mature they explode at once from it as butterflies, the most beautiful butterflies I’ve ever seen.” He smiled at us. “They’re a delicacy, if you can find them, but so is the fruit,” and scraping the last of the grubs away with the blunt edge of his knife, he cut a slice of manama for us both. I wasn’t looking forward to eating it, but what choice did I have? Esme was already bringing hers to her mouth. The insides were the same color as the skin, barely sweet and slightly fibrous, and had the meaty, elastic chewiness of tendon. When Tallent offered me another slice, I shook my head, and he shrugged and handed over the rest to the guides, who began tearing off hunks with their fingers. Against the dun of their skin, the fruit looked even more vulnerable and fleshy, and I felt a thrum of illogical fear.

  And so we continued, the manama fruit falling with greater frequency the farther we climbed, each time landing with the same unnerving violence. I chanced looking overhead at one point and found I could see only their bottoms, so that the sky seemed punctuated with floating tumors, attached to nothing but suspended overhead like strange pink moons. Gradually too the other trees—like the kanava, which had heretofore been ubiquitous—began to be replaced by the manamas (whose bark really did grow in tiered, scalelike crusts), until eventually we seemed to be surrounded exclusively by them and the air seemed to smell faintly of something human and unclean.

  But just as I was beginning to despair of Fa’a ever finding his tree, the one he had marked, Uva gave a call and pointed at a manama trunk upon which was a great swath of blood, a ragged and almost comical splatter-paint smear of it. As we moved closer, I saw that it was not blood but something living, so that it almost appeared a raw, exposed organ, as if the tree turned out to possess an anatomy of its own. Oh god, I thought, can nothing in this jungle behave as it ought? Must fruits move and trees breathe and freshwater rivers taste of the ocean? Why must nothing obey the laws of nature? Why must everything point so heavily toward the existence of enchantment? And so it was not until I—reluctantly, wearily—moved directly up to the manama that I saw that it really was just a tree, and that what I had taken for a thrusting heart, a heaving lung, was in fact a teem of butterflies, their crimson wings spattered with a pallid gold. These, of course, were what the grubs had become, and when Tallent chased them away with his hand—I watched a little sadly as they scattered and for a moment hovered around and above us in an assaultive cloud—I saw that they had returned to the tree that had once sheltered them to feed on its sap, which, as Tallent had promised, had hardened into a mass of opaque, glassy bubbles.

  We had made it. This was the tree, this was where Fa’a had seen his not-humans, this was what our days of walking had led us to. But this sense of accomplishment was diminished by what I very soon sensed was the lack of a real plan. Surely, I thought, slightly hysterical, this had been better considered? Were we simply to wait by this tree, as if children in a fable, for these hypothetical half-humans to appear before us like walking dreams? I had a vision of us all turning around, en masse, and heading back down through the thickets of the jungle, entering once again its wet, clammy embrace, until we reached the shore, and then—what? We would somehow return to U’ivu, and then Esme and Tallent to California, and I—to nothing. I found myself experiencing that same sense of dislocation I had had at Smythe’s house, and wondered bitterly when in life I would be able to tell with certainty when the circumstances around me were a hoax and when they were simply unfortunate.

  Finally, after conferring for a long time with Fa’a, Tallent announced that we would camp here for the night and continue the next day. Neither Esme nor I asked him for more details—I believe we were both afraid to, and besides, neither of us was in the habit of challenging him—but meekly laid down our things. He sounded defeated, I remember, which I found perversely satisfying, although really I should only have been alarmed: it was, as he had said himself, his hunch that had brought us here, and without him I was nothing more than a silly, directionless boy stuck in a forest populated wholly by madmen and myths.

  That night I dreamed as usual, but perhaps because of the reintroduction of sunlight into my waking hours, or perhaps because I was still stubbornly clinging to the mistaken belief that I had reached some sort of significant threshold, or perhaps because of the strange manama fruit, whose ploppy cannonball drops broke the night in an irregular symphony, my visions were of earthbound things, a slideshow of all that was dear and typical and so mundane that I had never thought to miss them: a plain leather boot I had once owned, its sole flaky with dried sod; the elm that had grown outside our house, which seemed to represent all that was stately and dignified; a shirt that had once been my father’s, its chambray faded to a blue so pale it was almost white—and Owen, his face floating planetlike against a rippling sheet of silky black, his expression unreadable but, I somehow intuited, full of pity.

  But pity for whom? I wondered, even in my dream.

  For me?

  The next day we woke, ate, and sat. Or rather, Esme and Tallent and I sat, and the guides trundled off somewhere. It was becoming clear that in the absence of a plan, we were to sit and wait, like dogs, until some event chanced upon us.

  Who knows how long we sat? Hours, of course, but how many? During all this time we occasionally heard the scuttle and slide of the guides, and in between furtively looking at Tallent (who was writing more furiously than ever—about what? I wanted to ask, since nothing of any anthropological interest had happened that I could discern) and avoiding looking at Esme, I lay on my back and tried to count the numbers of a particular vine (stringy, slightly dusty-looking) that had tangled itself into a snarl on one of the manama trees’ branches above. Looking back on that day, I cannot—still—help but feel a bit embarrassed about this. Adventures really are wasted on the young, I’m afraid. I should have used that time for exploring, spelunking through the u
nderbrush (now much more accessible and appealing than it had been a couple of days before), pawing through the forest floor for unidentified plant life (I physically ache now to remember how many grasses, ferns, flowers, trees I had never seen before and could have spent the afternoon recording), even attempting to follow the guides on their obscure and single-minded missions. Instead I remained supine and counted vines. Vines! All along I had prided myself on my curiosity, what I considered the unslakability of my intellectual thirst. And yet, once placed in a situation in which almost everything was foreign, I did nothing, saw nothing.

  The problem with being young and in a singular place is that one assumes that one will inevitably find oneself in an equally foreign and exotic location at some later point in life. But this is very rarely true. For most of what we see in our immediate surroundings is in fact replicated elsewhere in the world with a sort of dull exactness: birds, animals, fruits, sky, people. They may look different from place to place, but their fundamental behaviors are essentially identical: birds tweet and flap, animals prowl and bleat, fruits are insensate and inanimate, the sky fills and empties of clouds and stars, people wear clothes and kill and eat and die. On Ivu’ivu, as I had observed multiple times, none of these things happened the way they were supposed to, and yet I was too inexperienced to fully comprehend how truly remarkable that was. (In retrospect, maybe Tallent did. Maybe that was what he was always logging in his book: not anthropological observations after all, but a documentation of the place’s sheer oddity.) It is only the old who can look around them and marvel, for it is we who know how alike the world really is, how all of its problems and wonders have already been recognized and recorded.