The People in the Trees (16 page)

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 haunted 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 floating 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.