The People in the Trees (34 page)

A theory was beginning to shape itself, a theory that now seems so obvious that I am embarrassed to call it a theory at all. I was working from the assumption that the opa’ivu’eke caused some sort of … what? A disease? A condition? A state that led to an unnaturally long life—an immortal life. But it was a parody of immortality, because while the afflicted did in fact remain physically frozen at the age at which she had eaten the turtle, her mind did not. Bit by bit, it disintegrated—first the memory, then the social nuances, then the senses, and then finally speech—until all that was left was the body. The mind was gone, worn down by the years, its fissures and byways exhausted by having to perform for far more decades than it was organically equipped to do. I had a fanciful vision of Eve’s brain
on its stem as a salt lick, its surfaces lapped clean and smooth into a pencil nub. Surely there must be an end to this life, for there is an end to every life. But it would not, it seemed, be from simple old age; it would end from disease, or accident, or murder.

It is a strange feeling to revisit this revelation as a seventy-four-year-old. When one is a twenty-five-year-old, such concepts can be experienced only academically. Age, then, is not something that can be understood; it is a preoccupation of the old, and the old is anyone older than oneself. It is a subject that has no relevance, a subject that seems a bore, an indulgence and lament of the weak-minded and feeble and querulous. As I have grown first older and now old, however, I have contemplated the dreamers’ fate more and more, and today I see it very clearly for what it is—a curse. There is a point—for me, it arrived perhaps a few years ago—when, without even realizing it, you switch over from craving more life to being resigned to its end. It happens so abruptly that you cannot help but recall the moment itself, and yet so gently that it is as if it comes to you in a dream.

Back then, however, my thinking was uncluttered by such nuance, and I knew the two things I needed to do next, both of which were, unfortunately, highly complicated. The first thing was to get one of us—me or Tallent—to eat some of the opa’ivu’eke. This was not ideal, of course—I knew in advance what a production it would be and what a risk it presented—but it was necessary if I was to establish the opa’ivu’eke’s central role in this affliction. For it was possible (unlikely, but possible) that the opa’ivu’eke was less to blame than I supposed; perhaps it was a genetic misfiring particular to the Ivu’ivuans—if they somehow were able to pass a certain threshold of age, they were guaranteed something close to eternal life. The second and more important thing I needed to do was to get at least two of the dreamers off the island and back to a proper lab so I could run tests and do some bloodwork. I had no idea how to begin doing this. But without that step, we—I—had wasted more than five months, which seemed an eternity (the irony of this thinking did not escape me). Without conclusive bloodwork, I was left with nothing more than a series of fairy tales, and I had never been interested in fictions.

I began with the slightly less difficult operation: securing an
opa’ivu’eke for future experiments. Tallent and Esme were, predictably, horrified by my plan. A long and at times nasty debate began, in which Tallent, at least, recognized the purpose and indeed necessity of what I was asking but refused to participate on principle, which I found a rather weak and lazy excuse. Esme, however, refused even to acknowledge that such an action was the next logical step. I screamed at them for being intellectual cowards and sentimentalists. She screamed back that I was a monster, coldhearted and disrespectful, and that I was on the verge of ruining all that she and Tallent were trying to accomplish.

“What
are
you trying to accomplish, Esme?” I screeched back at her. “Recording the details of people’s shit is hardly what I’d consider useful work.” We were now shouting so loudly that a number of the villagers had ventured to the border of their property and were watching us with interest and some amusement, pointing back and forth among us and whispering and snickering to one another. Tallent made attempts to calm us both, but it was too late. In retrospect, it was somewhat ignominious.

“How dare you belittle me! I want to help them!”

“You don’t want to help them at all! If you did, you’d do what’s necessary!”

“
You
don’t want to help them! To you they’re nothing more than insects, and you don’t care what you destroy in the process!”

“I didn’t even want to come! I came because you needed me!”

“I never wanted you to come!”

Yes, the argument had soon reached those depths, and we would have gone deeper still had not Tallent—for the first time since I’d met him, truly furious—physically inserted himself between us. “Both of you are behaving reprehensibly,” he said, and his voice was cold. “Esme, go take the dreamers to the river and get them something to drink. Norton”—he glared at me, and I realized suddenly how little he asked me to do with the dreamers, but instead of being relieved, I was wounded; did he too not trust me with them?—“go take a walk. Both of you stop this outrageous behavior at once.”

“But what about the opa’ivu’eke?” I whispered, hating the whine, the pleading, in my voice.

“Norton,” said Tallent, and he said my name as if he had spoken
an entire page, “I understand why you want to carry out this … this … experiment. Wait,” he said, raising his hand as I was about to interrupt. “But I’m afraid it’s just not going to be possible. It’s not possible logistically, and furthermore, it’s simply not advisable. May I remind you that we are guests here? That we are here by the chief’s grace? Don’t forget this, Norton. Don’t forget that those spears are used not only for killing sloths and spearing vuakas.”

I was silent, and he was silent too, the two of us staring at each other.

“Promise me,” he said, his voice regaining its plush tones, its bottomless calm. “Promise me you won’t defy me.”

“I won’t,” I mumbled.

“Norton,” he began, and then stopped until I looked at him. “I’m warning you. There are ways we can test your theory, but this is not one of them.”

“I understand you, Tallent,” I said, but I knew he was wrong. There was no other way to test my theory. And if he refused to help me, I would have to do so on my own.

There was a certain brief period every night when the village seemed to pause in its activities, an hour or two during which the daytime hunters overlapped in sleep with the nighttime hunters, and the fire finally burned low, and the only sounds were the myriad cracks and croaks of the myriad unseen creatures who crept through the woods in the gloom.

It had been a very tense evening, spent first in a silent meal with Tallent and Esme, which was followed by a silent collective journal-writing period and which concluded with a silent unfurling of our mats. Later I would ask myself why I decided I needed to act so quickly, and I suppose there was something rash about it, though I would also argue that I needed to act quickly—both before I lost my nerve and before Tallent realized the inevitability of my actions.

Once I was certain that the villagers were all asleep—their snores seemed to reverberate through the trees—I crept over to Mua. I had stolen Tallent’s flashlight from his bag while he was helping bathe the dreamers, though I was determined to use it as little as
possible. I had to use it now, however, to find Mua; the group of them slept in a muddle, a jumble of limbs and hair that always looked and smelled faintly unwashed despite their daily ablutions.

I found him lying near Ika’ana, his head resting on Vi’iu’s back, one arm flung out over Ivaiva’s breasts. Slowly I knelt and shook him awake.

“Mua,” I whispered when he at last woke with a grunt, struggling up through layers of sleep. “I need your help.” And then I remembered that he could not speak English.

I grabbed a stick and drew the sign of the opa’ivu’eke in the dirt beside us—the circle bisected with the line—and then pointed to myself. “Opa’ivu’eke,” I said, to clarify. “Vaka’ina,” and then pointed again at myself.

“Ah,” he said, and clambered to a sitting position.

One of the useful things about the dreamers’ impaired state, I reflected, was how little explication they demanded. Even if we had been able to communicate, Mua would not have asked me why I was waking him so late at night to fetch the opa’ivu’eke, or why I needed it right now. He was becoming a set of reactions born from years of conditioning, and while I could see quite clearly how an abandonment of logic could be a dangerous thing, at the time I was glad for it.

Around the village we walked, past the sighing hogs, past the low purrs and grumbles of the men and women and children, heading toward and then beyond the ninth hut, back into the jungle, which seemed to swallow Mua in a single greedy gulp. There was no light, and for a minute I was unable to move, so seized was I by a cold, irrational fear; I even forgot my flashlight. And then there was Mua tiptoeing back into view to find me, and saying something I could not understand, again and again. I realized then that it was a chant, two phrases that he repeated in a loop, until after a while they ceased to sound like words and became as meaningless as drumbeats, and I felt myself shuffling my feet in pace to its rhythm.

It had been some time, it seemed, since I had walked with such purpose or so far into the jungle, and where I had once seen it as something vital and teeming with busyness, with lives, it now seemed to me dead, a vast graveyard of trees, empty of anything else imaginable. I cannot say why I felt this exactly, other than that
it seemed I had already discovered the greatest of its mysteries and anything else it may have yielded would have been thin and meager in comparison.

I followed Mua’s voice as he turned right, and abruptly we were in a clearing, a small plateau high above the village; above us was the rest of Ivu’ivu, its towering, impregnable peak. Behind us was the forest, dark and quiet, and before us was a blank drop, the side of the island whooshing down toward an ocean we could not see. I began to walk, hypnotized, closer to the edge, until Mua reached out an arm to stop me. “Ea,” he told me—
look
—and I lifted my eyes; there, in front of and above and to either side of me, was the sky, such an unbelievable, fathomless black, its surface scudded with smears of stars, so large and bright that I could see their hard glitter, could feel the icy clouds of dust that surrounded them. There were so many of them that the sky seemed more light than dark, more full than empty.

It had been so long since I had seen the stars, and looking at them, at the great vastness of the sky curved above me like an embrace, I thought of Owen and wondered where he was. Still in Connecticut? Or had he gone somewhere else, as he occasionally threatened to do? And it was then that I found myself crying, and although I tried not to make a noise, it was somehow comforting, as was that distinctive, almost-forgotten taste of tears, as salty and hot as blood in my mouth.

Mua seemed not to be bothered by my tears, and we stood there for a while longer. Above us the stars winked and shone. Then he made a grunt, and we began walking again.

For a moment I was perplexed—had we stopped on this plateau on our first visit to see the opa’ivu’ekes?—and then, abruptly, frightened: where was Mua leading me? But when I turned back and saw the forest, so blackly impenetrable, I knew I had no choice but to follow him.

By the time we reached the final clearing, I was so anxious I was shaking. In the darkness loomed monsters and ghosts, and in what I could not see I saw everything I had ever feared. But then, “Opa’ivu’eke,” Mua intoned solemnly, and there before me was the lake, the turtles’ air bubbles skimming the surface like pearls. He gestured to the lake with one hand and then stepped back to watch.

For the first time I began to feel that my plan had perhaps not been as well considered as it might have been. While the village had been eating, I had managed to sneak into the palm-storage hut and steal a large woven net, which I had carried uphill draped over my shoulders like a cloak. But as I approached the lake, it occurred to me that I had no idea whether this would be adequate to snare an opa’ivu’eke. Were they fast swimmers? Would they try to bite me? Had there been a weapon I could have stolen easily, I would have, but as it happened, there hadn’t, and so I had had to settle for the net. I looked back to Mua as if for advice, but he merely crossed his arms and gazed off into the distance, as if what I was undertaking were a private event and one he had no right to witness.

I need not have worried, however. As I approached the lake’s edge, the opa’ivu’ekes seemed to notice me, and as a single unit paddled slowly toward me, their limbs cleaving the water so softly that they sent only the gentlest ruffle across the still surface. Their trust made my mission both easier and more difficult, and as I stood there contemplating which of them to take, I had to unexpectedly and sternly remind myself of the necessity of what I was about to do.

I chose one of the largest of the turtles; I assumed that its size meant it was among the elders of the lot, and I wanted to give the young ones a chance at a long life. All I had to do, it turned out, was reach into the water—cool and so clear that I could see the moon gliding along its mucky bottom—and heft it out. He was quite heavy, and a bit slimy, but not difficult to handle, and the other opa’ivu’ekes reassembled themselves at once to fill the space left by his absence, watching me with their large eyes. Unusually for a turtle, he did not burrow back into his carapace upon human contact but instead waggled his legs a bit, rotating his head, so that it felt like I was holding a large anteater, something shelled and armored but babylike in its defenselessness.