The People in the Trees (35 page)

Staggering, I carried the turtle over to the edge of the forest, far enough away from the lake that his companions would not be able to see what I was doing. I was tired from the walk uphill and from the turtle’s weight, and I sat down beside him, resting my hand on the back of his shell, and he closed his yellow eyes as if in pleasure, as if I were petting him. For a minute we rested, both of us savoring
the air, the hushing of the trees, and the simple, stupid fact of being alive.

Then it was time. I had a penknife in my pocket (also stolen from Tallent) and a roll of large palm leaves (stolen from the palm hut). My plan was to cut away as much meat from the opa’ivu’eke as possible (I didn’t know if I would have the strength or, frankly, the nerve to lift away its shell), wrap the pieces in palm leaves, pack them into the net bag, and bury the carapace under some of the forest decay. I’d take everything back downhill and dry the meat in the branches of my tree. I’d eat some myself and record any deleterious effects; the rest I’d take back with me to the States so I could have it more thoroughly tested.

A breeze licked its way between the trees, and as the opa’ivu’eke stretched his neck forward to partake in it, I flicked open the blade and brought it down on his neck. I thought it would be an easy cut, like slicing through warm butter, but his skin was much tougher and more webbed than I had expected, and in the end I had to saw away at it, so that his head separated from his throat by degrees, first nodding to one side, then dangling to the other, until only a last flap of particularly stubborn skin united the two and I had to work the blade between its grooves, flicking it upward until the skin separated with a series of wet, elastic slaps. Except for a sort of soft, slow sigh, like a tire deflating, he made no sound, but his eyes remained open, their pupils shrinking into the irises like splashes of ink in water.

So intently was I concentrating on the laborious work of detaching the turtle’s hind leg that I mistook the shout for Mua’s and called back (pointlessly, of course) that I was busy and he had to wait. But when I heard him running across the grass toward me, shouting incomprehensibly all the way, I was forced to stop my task and look up, whereupon I saw that it was not Mua racing in my direction but Fa’a.

Stupidly, my first reaction was happiness. Fa’a was here! I had always felt safer around him, and had even, I realized, grown to like him, despite his carefully maintained inscrutability, which did little to conceal the fact that he was growing more disenchanted with our expedition by the day. But I felt—romantically, perhaps—that in my most sorrowful or conflicted moments, Fa’a had been there beside
me, as steady and reliable as a tree. I had a vision of him as a shepherd, someone who stood sentry for all of us as we slept or hunted, someone whose eyes scanned the landscape so we would not have to, someone who was there to witness every remarkable event. As the other guides had lost interest and fallen away, bit by bit—they were still among our number, of course, but seemed to spend increasing amounts of the day hunting for vuakas (I was amazed and slightly repulsed by their apparently insatiable appetite for them) and gathering various fruits and seeds and strange growths from the forest floor—Fa’a was always there. Uva and Tu continued to perform their duties with the dreamers, but in a somewhat rote fashion: at the stream, they stood and spoke and laughed with one another while the more impaired of their charges splashed their hands or feet uselessly in the water, unsure of what they had been taken there to do. But when it was Fa’a’s turn, he scooped handsful of water over their backs and shook out their brushy hair and murmured back at them when they sighed with contentment. Certainly I respected him; perhaps I even admired him.

But I was very quickly made to adjust my reaction once I saw Fa’a’s face and recognized the tenor of his voice. He was shouting, truly shouting, one hand playing worryingly over his spear, the other pointing to the dead opa’ivu’eke, its head—its eyes still open—arranged decorously in the middle of the largest palm leaf, waiting to be wrapped like a gift. He was so angry that his eyes were bulging, and bits of foam, as white as stars, sailed forth from his mouth, and I found myself wanting to laugh.

It was only then that I recalled how reverentially he had chanted when we had encountered the opa’ivu’ekes the last time, and with what awe he had watched the vaka’ina, and so there seemed to be little to do but let him have his rant. I had felt certain Fa’a would never touch me, but suddenly—and I will never know his intentions—he raised his arm with the spear: not threateningly, I will admit, nor even in my direction, but the mere act of his wielding a weapon alarmed me, and I instinctively lifted the turtle’s corpse before me, his rounded shell a shield, and thrust it toward Fa’a just at the moment he was leaning in my direction. And it was then, as I was wriggling the turtle in front of me, cowering behind it, that I heard
Fa’a emit a shriek. I looked over the top of the carapace and saw that I had brushed Fa’a’s outstretched hand with one of the turtle’s dangling forelegs, and in that moment I heard his shouts become keens, and he dropped to his knees on the ground, holding his affected hand before him and wailing.

Had I been a less sensitive person, I surely would have succumbed to laughter. But that was only initially, and soon, as I watched Fa’a bent on the ground, his right hand—his spear-carrying hand—stretched toward the turtle as if in a sacrifice, that I began to sense the sincerity of his despair. His keening quieted to weeping and then to nothing at all, just a constant juddering of his shoulders and back, his face turned to the dirt, his spear abandoned at his side. For once I was glad not to speak U’ivuan, for he believed he was now doomed to become a mo’o kua’au, or that he had doomed someone in his family to it, and nothing I could have said would ever have been able to convince him of the contrary. And so I watched him for a while, in fascination and sympathy, until finally there was nothing left to do but continue my tedious work, bundling the flaccid pieces of the opa’ivu’eke in the satiny palm leaves, the ground beneath me black with its blood.

Our trip down was muted and hurried, and by the time I had sent Mua and a stunned, staggering Fa’a back to the group and tied my six packets of turtle flesh to the highest branches of my tree, the air was beginning to lighten and the first of the morning birds were starting to chatter.

We had all, it seemed, resolved to pretend: Tallent that we had not fought, Fa’a that he had not been cursed, I that I had not done what I had needed to without permission or encouragement. Throughout the day I would intermittently be struck by the courage and resolve I had exhibited the previous night, as well as by my resourcefulness, although there was no one with whom I could share my story. I passed Fa’a once—I was on my way to the creek for water; he was just returning—but as I walked toward him he turned away, and I saw the planes of his face slide and lock into one another in an expression of utter unreadability that I never saw him without after
that day. I knew then that he would never reveal to the others what he had witnessed that night; to do so would mean having to confront his own stain, his own ruination.

Only Mua seemed to have forgotten everything of our nighttime adventure. That afternoon I happened to see Fa’a, both hands wrapped around his spear, his chin propped on its blunt end, staring at him—though whether with envy or pity, I could not say.

Earlier I had sneaked over to my tree and retrieved the packages, and then dug into the ground as deeply as I could, the soft, floury earth as rich and moist as cake, before placing the packages in the hole and covering them with dirt. One, however, I set aside and unwrapped. For several minutes I remained there in a crouch, preparing myself to gag down the wet red flesh of one of the opa’ivu’eke’s feet. This, I reminded myself, was why I had disobeyed Tallent and gone to the lake: to taste and swallow, to prove to myself that there was nothing to fear. But instead I found myself paralyzed with my own ambivalence. Not to eat it was to admit that I was frightened, that the impossible was possible after all. And oh, I wanted it to be true, I wanted to be correct, I wanted to know that my discovery was real. And yet I also
didn’t
want it to be true—I didn’t want everything I had always thought upended, to have certainties and practicalities tossed away like molding fruits. To eat the turtle would be to admit that I was wrong, but it would also be to admit that the world I knew would continue as it had, unruffled and unchanged, its laws unchallenged and unassaulted.

But I couldn’t do it. In the decades after, I would recall this moment as if it were a hallucination and remember how close I had come to joining the ranks of the dreamers. What if I had not rewrapped the foot and placed it among the others but had instead allowed my tongue to touch its surface, if I had allowed myself to succumb to the tide-pull illogic of that strange and haunted evening?

That night my dreams were wild and diverse, the ending of one leaking into the beginning of the next. I dreamed I was wandering through the forest, making our uphill climb to the village, and that all the trees had become Ivu’ivuans, their babble filling the woods like birdcall, their feet bleeding into the trees’ roots and their hair weaving itself into branches. I dreamed that the chief and I were riding sidesaddle atop a car-sized opa’ivu’eke, who trudged through
a dried mudflat landscape denuded of all trees, but faint on the horizon, against a plum-colored sky, was a miniature city of parched cement. I dreamed that I was sitting at a table in a wooden house where the ceiling was trussed with thick-grooved pieces of lumber, with a metal platter before me on which sat a strange pink creature, four-legged and with saggy pooling flesh, which I came to realize was a carapaceless opa’ivu’eke. Across from me was Fa’a, dressed in a pale button-down shirt, his hair trimmed short around his ears, his hand holding out to me a knife and fork, and as I came to understand that I would have to eat the turtle, it twitched its head and opened its eyes and mouth, and its mouth, when it opened it, was the boy’s mouth, with his little jagged teeth and his small, bright tongue.

I woke then, to the forest unremarkable around me, and with Esme and Tallent beside me as they should be, and still on Ivu’ivu, in the midst of one of its dense black nights. Nothing around me had changed.

The next morning, Tallent announced that we were leaving.

V
.

It made sense, I knew, and it was inevitable. I had been told that we were to be there for at least four months, or at least some finite amount of time. But still the news came as a shock. First, despite all appearances, there really had been something of a plan all along, and even up here in the village, where governments and technology and clothes and books and schools and hospitals had no place, we were not free from its tentacles. Then there was the shock of time itself, its sudden reappearance and relevance in our lives. Here, time twirled itself into long, spiraling whorls, defying biology and evolution; not even the human body respected it. And yet the definition of time we had to obey was the one determined in the part of the world where people consulted clocks and made and kept appointments, in which time was measured in increments smaller than seasons. It was unsettling to remember that that world existed still, and that as foreign as it was, it was that world that still commanded us, that made our decisions and determined our arrivals and departures. I had the sudden fanciful thought that perhaps the reason the villagers lived so long was that no one had ever thought to tell them they couldn’t.

That last week was very crowded: there were final interviews to conduct, final measurements to take, final physical evaluations to make, final drawings of the village to be rendered, final head counts and numbering of the stores in the meat hut, the dried-goods hut, the palm-leaf hut to do. Unpacking my rucksack late at night to make room for the packets of opa’ivu’eke meat—I had managed to cadge some salt from Uva and had cured the parts, which I would pack just before we left—I came across the two dozen needles nestled in their cotton blanketing, and with their smooth, cold glass-and-metal surfaces they felt somehow like curiosities, as if the village were the more advanced culture and these were artifacts, purpose unknown, from some primordial past. I had by that point almost nothing left in my bag; my clothes I had for the most part given away to the village women, who stared perplexed at my jacket and button-down shirts until I demonstrated how they might be ripped and their sections used to bind two pieces of palm rope together, for example, or a sloth’s legs to a spear, and the microscope had broken early in our journey, and more recently so too had the thermometer, with whose spooky silver beads of mercury the village children had played, coating them with a powdery fluff of dirt and rolling them into one another until I had collected and removed them.

It had occurred to me belatedly that Sereny must not have thought very much of me at all. The entire medical school, in fact, must not have thought much of me. Had I even been requested? Or had they convinced Tallent or whoever had ill-advisedly given him the funds for this expedition to let me come along? Had I even been wanted? The brief, as I understood it, was that Tallent would search for his mythical lost tribe, and he had, however improbably, found it. But who would have thought that the greater discovery would be mine, and that it would be what it was? There had been no knowing in advance that a scientist would be needed; my presence was the consequence not of luck but of the school trying to get rid of one of its least promising students by sending him off on an absurd mission that was doomed to failure. I was humiliated for not having seen it before, and humiliated that I should have been such a pawn in such a poorly played game. And yet despite this unpleasant revelation, I was determined not to think like Smythe—
I’ll show them; I’ll prove them wrong
—although I also could not help but project my thoughts
into the future, for I knew with certainty that I had found something spectacular, something bound to change science and society forever. I had found nothing less than immortality itself. It sounded so grand to say aloud (and so I didn’t), but its import could not be ignored, even with its hovering cloud of fairy dust.