The People in the Trees

  I would like to be able to say that after waiting, the morning draining away from us, we were suddenly surrounded by Fa’a’s people, who arrived as unexpectedly and dramatically as, say, the manama fruit had. But that is not what happened. Instead, finally, after conferring with a head-shaking Fa’a once more, Tallent announced that we would split up in different directions, each of us with our guide, to, as he vaguely put it, “explore the area and look for clues.” He and Fa’a would go north, uphill, and Esme and I to the east and west respectively. We would meet back at the tree when the sun was directly overhead.

  As I recount this story I am astonished anew by how patchy, how makeshift a solution this was. But again, at the time it seemed the most sensible, the most practical, the best thing to do. In illogical situations, one clings to any idea that seems at all logical, even if it is only a scrim, translucent and flimsy, that shields the lack of serious planning behind it.

  And so we went off, all of us, I am certain, less than convinced that anything would actually happen. Fa’a’s people, indeed! How did we know they even existed? But you saw the opa’ivu’eke, I reminded myself, while another voice inside me rebutted, You saw a turtle, nothing more. A turtle, whom you have made into a god. You are as lost as the rest of them now. And to that I had no response. The voice was right. I was.

  II.

  It was Fa’a who saw it first.

  This we learned later, much later, when the sun had almost set and the entire forest was awash, ghostlike, with an eerie reddish light, the air seeming to thicken with a bright haze of blood. We had been waiting, Esme and Tu and Uva and I, for Fa’a and Tallent to return, and as time passed Uva and Tu became increasingly anxious, taking turns running uphill while the other stayed behind to guard our things and us, as if we were prisoners, or children (which to them I suppose we were no better than).

  And then finally they were before us, walking down the slope, Fa’a calling out frantically and rapidly to the others, Tallent behind him, and behind him someone else, a third person, and we stood, all of us, and watched them emerge from the trees. I saw fear on the guides’ faces and knew it was echoed on my own. But I am getting ahead of myself.

  After leaving us that morning, they walked, Tallent and Fa’a, past the butterfly tree (which, although none of us had said it aloud, we had begun to consider the demarcation line: below it was land we knew, above it terra incognita. Although this was of course nothing more than a contrived organizing principle, for the fact was it was all terra incognita—what lay past the tree was no more conquerable by us than what lay before it) and into the jungle beyond. A few hundred yards in, the copses of trees had thinned out further still, although their canopies had became more massive and umbrellalike in their reach, making the air increasingly dark and cool, muted in light and muffled of sound. I had been using the words interchangeably, but here was truly more a forest than a jungle, the bewitched forest of fairy tales, where huts made of glossy black licorice and lardy white frosting appear in clearings and talking wolves trot upright in old women’s bonnets. Around them too the plants had changed: gone were the rapacious fly-eating orchids, the saucy, vulgar bromeliads, the squat cycads, and in their place were frilly wedges of sober-colored mushrooms and whorls of tightly closed ferns.

  They had been walking for about an hour, they thought, when they heard a noise: nothing interesting, nothing large, just a crinkling like paper high above them. Two days before, they would have thought nothing of this; it would have been another family of vuakas gamboling across a kanava branch, or one of those vexing toucanlike birds whose aggressive, phosphorescent yellow feces streaked the tree trunks like oil paint. But here the animals were silent, furtive—they had seen enormous fleecy sloths the size of Labradors hanging sleepily from branches, and witnessed spiders, their backs daubed with glittery blue specks, picking their prim, careful way across spun-glass webs—and the sound here was of no sound, of a place holding its breath, an edgy, bitten-back quiet, as if it would at once explode with the color and noise of a great party. And so hearing this, they stopped, listened. Tallent found himself counting, nonsensically, as if once he reached a certain number, something would be revealed to them.

  He had reached seventy-three when Fa’a grabbed his arm and pointed, and he saw it climbing down the trunk of a manama about fifty yards to their left. It was not a skillful climber, nor particularly graceful, and yet when it began to emerge, he mistook it for a sloth, not a human; unlike a human, who would have shimmied down feet first, this creature led with its arms, which encircled the tree in a tight grip, the rest of its body following limply and uselessly behind. The manama’s branches are sturdy and level and grow from almost its base to its very top, but the animal did not take advantage of them, did not use them, as a human would, as a ladder. Rather, it continued to slither down, snakelike (although this was difficult, as the manama’s bark made slithering all but impossible), and whenever it encountered a branch, it seemed to pause, confused, clearly unaware that the branch could be used to its benefit. At the bottom of the tree, when its head had touched the forest floor, it paused again, and then flipped over onto the ground and for a long moment simply lay there on its back, its arms and legs spread open, not making a sound. Fa’a held out his arm to keep Tallent from advancing (not, as Tallent said later, that he needed to; he was too spellbound to think of moving), and for a few minutes the two of them stood frozen, staring at the thing on the floor.

  When it finally stood, it did so in stages, first moving to a sitting position—which it did without the use of its elbows, but at once, from the waist, as if attached to the end of an invisible pulley—and then, after another pause, abruptly to its feet. And then it began to walk, and Fa’a and Tallent stepped behind a tree to watch it.

  It was a little shorter than Fa’a, maybe four feet or so, and a woman, with used, drooping teats and a hard-looking, rounded stomach and Fa’a’s wide, flat feet, although hers seemed wider still, the ends of her toes pooling fleshily into the earth. She was very hairy—her pubic hair was a dense, rooty tangle, and the hair on her head appeared a solid block of black, so matted and snarled was it. Her legs too were dark with fuzz, and on her back was a fine pelt. Things clung to her hair: chips of leaves and smears of dirt and fruit and shit; Tallent saw a hunono worm nestled in the hair above her vulva like an extraneous organ. Her movements were human, he supposed—they watched as she bent (again, stiffly at the waist) to retrieve a fallen manama fruit, which she bit into violently, the hunonos oozing through her fingers and smearing into a pink paste around her mouth—but somehow poorly practiced, as if she had once, long ago, been taught how to behave as a human and was slowly, steadily forgetting. And then, in another of her abrupt gestures, she turned and stared directly at Fa’a and Tallent, and while Fa’a shrank behind the tree, making a low hissing noise of horror and repulsion, Tallent stepped from behind it and, ignoring Fa’a’s scrabbling, beseeching hand, made his way toward the creature.

  He was slow, careful, aware by now that her movements began without preamble, and came within about ten yards of her before he stopped. All this time she had watched him approach, the wriggling manama fruit still in one hand, the worms still dropping from her mouth and palm, bouncing off her stomach and falling to the ground, her mouth stupidly, grotesquely open, her eyes not moving from his face.

  Tallent walked a step closer. The creature watched him. He made another step. Still nothing. One more and he would almost be able to touch her. And so he made another.

  And then she began to shriek, a noise that went up and down, up and down, moving in register from growl to keen to shrill to squeal, and then back again and up again. Behind him, he could hear Fa’a calling to him, “Come away! Come away!” but he did not, and remained there, a few feet from the thing, his arm still stretched toward her, her hand still squeezing the manama, the worms still dropping to her feet, her voice the only voice in that quiet, awful, haunted forest, going on and on, horrible and arrh
ythmic and ceaseless.

  Then it was over. She closed her mouth and the sound stopped, the jungle seemed to echo with it, and then she was eating her manama fruit again, and all he could hear was the sound of her slurping and lapping at it, all he could see was her pink tongue thrusting into the cavity of the pink fruit, the pink worms listing from the corners of her mouth like cilia. She seemed to have forgotten he was before her, and he spoke to her, a few simple words in U’ivuan—Hello. Who are you?—and when she did not answer, he walked backward toward Fa’a, and she did not watch him go.

  “Fa’a,” he whispered, “give me one of the cans of Spam.”

  He prised the lid off with his fingers, slicing himself in his haste, and began digging out the meat with his nails, walking toward her again as he did so. When she was once again within his grasp (or, he fleetingly thought, he within hers), he laid down a chunk of the meat and took a step back in Fa’a’s direction, leaving a hunk of pink flesh (the same color pink as the manama, he realized, although he had never made the connection before) every foot or so, until he backed into the tree behind which Fa’a stood, his eyes wide.

  It took her some time to notice it. She had finished the manama fruit—she had been remarkably thorough with it, her broad, flat tongue sucking at the skin with such force that Tallent could see her cheeks pulling inward, like a purse—and stood for some time, breathing heavily as if she had just expended a great effort, her hard stomach puffing in and out.

  When she turned, she stepped into the Spam, and Tallent watched it spread, slow and thick as lava, over the mud of her skin. For a while she seemed once again oblivious, a staring, panting statue, her tongue lolling out stupidly, her eyes fixed on nothing. And then she looked downward, very casually, as if admiring a new pair of shoes, and saw the meat, and quickly dropped to all fours and began sniffing the food avidly, her nostrils making wet, exaggerated snorts. She did this for some time, revolving around the pile on her palms and feet (like a pig) before settling onto her haunches (like a monkey) and conveying the soft meat to her mouth with the flats of her hands. After consuming the first installment, she rested and belched, and then, not standing from her squat, waddled to the next pile and began her ritual—stare, stare, sniff, sniff, eat, eat, belch—again, until she was close to the tree, so close that Fa’a and Tallent could smell her, a composty odor that was less noxious than one would have expected, and then Fa’a pounced upon her, grabbing her around her waist with both arms.

  He had expected her to struggle, to fight, but she only turned and looked at him and drew her mouth back, her head tipping on its stem and her eyes widening, as if all three actions were connected, and although both Tallent and Fa’a waited for her to start screaming again, she never did. The moment passed. Her mouth snapped back into its normal dumb shape, her eyes regained their hoods, her head lolled forward; she was a marionette, her strings had been slackened, and she was ready to be returned to her box, where she would patiently await the next person to give her life.

  Fa’a released her—she sat down, hard, not bending her knees—and he and Tallent stared at her again.

  “This was what I saw,” Fa’a told Tallent. “One of these. But there were many of them—men, women. But she is like them—they stood and stared and made noises at nothing. But where are the others? Why is she alone?” He was worried, although whether for the creature or for themselves, alone in a forest, perhaps surrounded by dozens of these not-humans, Tallent could not discern. He could sense, however, that Fa’a was exhausted and frightened; he had perhaps half thought, half hoped that he had conjured these people, and the proof that he had not—that yet another myth had come to life before him—was bewildering and terrifying.

  “Let’s go back,” Tallent told him gently, although he knew he would be bringing this woman with them and that her very presence would unsettle poor Fa’a. But there was no undiscovering her now; Fa’a had led him here, and now he was tormented by his knowledge.

  And so they began making their slow way downhill, Fa’a first, silent and jumpy, then Tallent, and following him—they had thought they would need to coax her with more Spam, but she followed quite naturally, her mouth held in its strange jack-o’-lantern grin, her teeth sharp and bony, like glints of flint—the creature. She sometimes wandered off, or stopped still to stare or scratch at herself, and then Tallent would walk close to her and beckon, which she seemed to understand, for she would resume walking.

  In his desire to move far away from the creature and get back to his compatriots, Fa’a had bolted ahead, and so when he cried out, Tallent could at first not see him and stumbled after his voice, tripping over ridges of tree roots and slipping on floes of moss, until he saw what Fa’a was pointing at—a spear, about five feet long and slender, stuck into a manama tree, the sap frothing around it like foam. They pulled it out, the two of them grunting, fighting against the manama’s grip, and saw how sharply its end had been carved, how it had pulled clean from the tree in one solid piece.

  Fa’a had been uneasy before. Now, for the first time in all the time Tallent had known him, he looked petrified. The U’ivuans are master spear whittlers, and no adult man is without his spear: they are used to hunt boars, to hunt octopuses, and once, to hunt humans. But as any U’ivuan knows, spears are never, ever to be left behind. A U’ivuan’s spear is his soul—Ma’alamakina, ma’ama, as the saying goes26—and if a warrior should die in battle, one of his comrades will rescue his spear from wherever it has fallen and return it to his family. It is the one possession about which U’ivuans are sentimental, although perhaps that is too weak, too cozy a word. So maybe this: it is the one thing that they truly cherish. Everything else is la, meaningless.27

  So it was no wonder that Fa’a was scared: an abandoned spear, one longer than he’d ever before encountered, left like an omen in this unearthly, unfriendly place. And it was even less of a wonder that Tallent was so excited, although he said nothing to Fa’a at the time: here was his proof, as much as the creature who stood beside him, making her wet sucking sounds again, that something lay above them, a different world. All he had to do was find it.

  We would call her, unimaginatively, Eve, the first woman of her kind, and while Tallent talked with the guides, their voices low and urgent, Esme and I led her to the river to wash her.

  I will say this for Esme: she was good with the woman, more tender than I would have thought. Eve was scared of water—its coldness, its wetness—and when she felt it on her skin, she began to shriek and howl, and Tu came bounding over to make sure that Esme and I were safe.

  We started with her back. Our washcloth was a white rag that I realized unhappily was one of Tallent’s undershirts (how long had it been in Esme’s possession?), and with every drag down Eve’s spine it changed colors, from dust to dun to brown to black. I was careful not to scrub her too hard, but Esme was more aggressive, rubbing her skin as if its very pigmentation were a layer of debris that might be stripped away. Still, she was matter-of-fact in her duty, not cruel, and as she swabbed the cloth between the woman’s breasts, under her arms, prising apart her crossed arms to reach her abdomen, she narrated what she was doing—“Now we’ll just wash your elbows, and then your forearms. You’re very strong, aren’t you? And now your hands, and then we’ll move on to your neck”—as if she did this every day, as if Eve were nothing more than another in a number of shivering half-human beings she had cleaned in a jungle, in a cool river that ribboned its way out of our sight.

  As for Eve, she was more patient than I had expected, but when we started combing out her hair, picking apart the clumps with a manama twig, she began to growl, the noise burbling up from her throat, and showed us her sharp little fangs, and Esme stepped away from her, her palms held before her in surrender. So we led her, cleaner (but not much improved, appearance-wise), back to the others, and forced her into a sitting position.

  Later we fed her—well, Esme and Tallent and I fed her; the guides would not. She took the slippery bi
ts of Spam from our palms, sometimes with her mouth (her puckering lips, wet and vaguely vaginal, kissed against me) and sometimes with the flat of her hand; she seemed not to use her fingers—and waited until she fell asleep flat on her back, all of us watching her by Tallent’s flashlight. There was some discussion about whether we should restrain her, and in the end we bound a long length of rope around her wrists and wound it around a nearby tree. We left her enough rope to be able to move her arms, but not so much that she’d be able to untie herself. While we were trussing her, she shat herself, licking her lips and sighing in her sleep, and in the dark her shit was an odd shade of magenta, like something fetal, sour and bilious from all the meat. And although the forest eventually became too black for any of us to do anything except lie down, I am certain that none of us except Eve slept that night; we could only hold ourselves flat and still, listening to her contented grunts and snuffles, her sighing groans, and waiting for the sky to brighten with sun.

  The subsequent days were busy ones. I left the planning of next steps, the ventures up into the forest beyond and back, the gathering of food and the plotting of routes, to the others and instead concentrated on Eve. She was fifty-two inches tall, cobby and solid, and I guessed that she had had children, maybe quite a few: her breasts had been sucked dry, and the nipples were calcified warts, gray and tough as elephant skin. I could not do a vaginal exam—I tried, but she screamed and thrashed so violently, so extravagantly, that not even the guides and Tallent, each of whom was assigned to hold down a limb, could keep her still—but guessed she was postmenopausal, though I have to say I gathered this mostly from estimating her age, and from the amount and density of her body hair; I had no other U’ivuan women to compare her to, nothing to tell me whether they were all this hirsute or Eve was an exception. Her teeth, as I have mentioned, were pyramidal, spiky, but her gums seemed to be in good shape: when I pressed upon them, they were firm and dry, and her breath did not smell of rot. At the base of her skull, half obscured by her snarly hair and the rings of flesh around her neck, was a small, crude tattoo, smeared like an inkstain, of the symbol Tallent had once drawn in the dirt: the sign of the opa’ivu’eke. When I showed it to Tallent, he reached out to touch it but then stopped just before making contact, his fingers hovering above the mark, Eve’s hair falling about his knuckles.