The People in the Trees (36 page)

(What did
you
do, Fitch and Brassard?
We injected mice with viruses
. Why, what did
you
do?
I discovered a group of people who never die
.)

It was now critical that I convince Tallent to let us take a few of the dreamers off the island, and to my surprise, he acquiesced without much of an argument. Naturally there was a longish lecture about the dangers of removing native peoples from their context and the extreme unlikelihood that they would ever be able to assimilate back into their society, but his arguments seemed a bit wan, not to mention absurd. Soon, if I was correct, they would have no conception at all of their context anyway, and their society had already rejected them, so why shouldn’t we remove them?

“Well,” he said at last, lamely, “we should at least ask the permission of the chief.”

Not surprisingly, the chief did not seem to care. He even seemed slightly pleased with our proposal, although as I have said, he was quite unemotive in general. And why should he not have been pleased? We were volunteering to take away four useless mo’o kua’aus, and with them gone, there would be four fewer people looking for vuakas and eating manamas, four fewer people who might someday, in their endless perambulations, happen once again upon the village.

Then, “What about the others?” the chief asked.

“What do you mean?” Tallent replied.

“They cannot stay here,” the chief said.

Tallent opened his mouth and shut it. There was nothing for him to do. “We will take them away,” he said, and the chief nodded.

Then he turned and left. I don’t know why—movies, perhaps, or fables—but I had thought there might be some longer leave-taking, an exchange of gifts or perhaps a ceremony, especially given the culture’s love of them. But there was none of those things. Just the chief’s back receding from us and his hog’s hooves scuffing up little bursts of dust behind him. It occurred to me then that there was no
ritual for leave-taking because there were no visitors: no one ever arrived, and no one—except the mo’o kua’aus—ever left.

Then I remembered something. “Wait,” I told Tallent, “get him back here for a moment,” and Tallent called out to the chief, who turned and walked back to us with great reluctance.

“Ke,” he said flatly.
What?

“Ask him,” I instructed Tallent, “if he’s ever known of anyone who has celebrated his vaka’ina who
hasn’t
become a mo’o kua’au?”

He didn’t want to answer, I could tell. It wasn’t only because he was exhausted by the topic; it was because his answer would be an admission of his own fate. Until this moment he had been able to avoid the question, to imagine—as surely every other sixty-year-old had before him and would after him—that he might be the first: in his daydreams, he was chief forever, eating every few years at a new person’s vaka’ina, his wives and children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren following him in a flock, the meathouse never empty, the palm-frond hut constantly replenished. He would grow so old that he would initiate his own great-great-great-great-grandson at his a’ina’ina, so old that he would watch this same boy grow up and initiate
his
grandson. He would grow so old that the little sproutlike shoots of manama trees that fringed the border of the village would grow to maturity and die and be replaced again, so old that someday he would be as old as the gods themselves, so old that one day they would reveal themselves to him, A’aka and Ivu’ivu, and maybe he would one day be a third in their union, and be granted some realm of his own. The stars and rains and winds and waters and sun had their guardians, but maybe something would be assigned to him—the trees, perhaps, or the flowers, or the birds whose claws pinched the branches high above him. These were his daytime envisionings. No wonder he often looked heavy-lidded, sated—he was drugged on them, and they were lovely things, savory and enchanting and easy to indulge in as often as he wanted.

But by night he would have different dreams. Of one day being led into the forest, perhaps so far lost to himself that he would no longer remember that he had once been chief and that he had had a shiveringly awful hog who had followed him everywhere like a retainer. Of his spear being taken from him, perhaps by a grandson he had initiated. Of walking day after day through the forest looking
for food, of hearing the calls of birds and monkeys above him and being unable to remember how to catch them, of not even remembering how easy it had once been or, worse, having a half-memory of it tug at the edge of his consciousness, reminding him of what he did not know but almost did. Of discovering a pinkish fruit at his feet, worms Medusa-ing from its scalp, and not remembering that it was for eating and that he had once enjoyed it—had, in fact, been able to consume them by the dozen. Had liked them dried, so that the edges were thin and crispy with crystallized sugar, or mashed into a paste and daubed on a chunk of sloth meat, the sweet slobbering into the salty. Of being alone when he had once led sixty-five others, of day becoming night and then day again but with nothing to mark the passage of time—no ceremonies, no events, no chants or intercourse or hunts, nothing but his own diminishing relevance to himself, which would happen so gently and smoothly that he wouldn’t even notice it. It was those dreams that were the real ones, and he knew it. It was why he would yearn for the daylight, when he was in control of his own mind and in control of everything else besides. I saw then the discipline, the courage, it must have taken to have the dreamers in his midst, to know that every one of them was proof of the inevitability of his nighttime visions and the falseness of his daytime ones.

He never answered us but instead walked away. As I have said, to answer would have been to acknowledge what he tried very hard not to. He was sixty o’anas. Soon—not terribly soon, but eventually—his future would arrive, and he would become someone whom even he would not be able to recognize. He didn’t need to speak; it was all the answer I needed.

The trip downhill was much faster than our ascent had been, and less wondrous too. Here for the second time were the plains of moss, the clans of cycads, the jewel-bright spiders, the occasional gusts of gnats or butterflies, and the unseen toucans hooting to one another from the unseen treetops. Nearly six months ago it had been a place of mingled delights and horrors, but now it was discovered land, and we were already bored with it. And here again were the dreamers, all tied together with a length of palm-leaf cord we had been reluctantly given from the hut, led by Fa’a and tailed by me or
Esme. Before us walked Tallent, and far ahead of him—so far that we had lost sight of them—Uva and Tu.

We had agreed, Tallent and Esme and Fa’a and I, to abandon the dreamers we could not take with us in the more forestlike part of the jungle, the antechamber to the village. The chief had not specified how far away we had to take them, but Fa’a had suggested at least three days’ walk, and as the end of the third day approached, I could feel us all slowing our pace, matching our strides to Eve’s stumbling instead of yanking her along as we normally did. Sometimes Fa’a would hum to the dreamers in brief nasal puffs and they would hum back, and although their tones were unpretty, they could sustain a note for an astonishingly long time, until their hums melded with the hums of the forest itself and everything around us seemed to thrum with noise.

Finally the air around us seemed to paint itself gray, as if it had been washed with gouache, and we knew we could avoid it no longer. All of us, including Tallent and the other two guides, who had returned from their advance work, followed Fa’a as he led the dreamers toward an enormous makava tree, the biggest I had ever seen: the six of us together could not encircle it. As Fa’a talked to the dreamers in his kind, quiet way, the other guides lifted their hands out of their palm-rope handcuffs, separating from the group the four we had determined to keep: Eve, of course; Vanu and Mua, because they were father and son; and Ika’ana, both for his extreme age and because he formed a link between Eve and the others.
⁴⁶
Uva worked a different length of palm around their wrists and led them away, the four of them following him obediently and without question. As nighttime came they grew more pliable than ever, and watching them leave, I could not help but feel a sort of pain at their gentle acquiescence, their old men’s shuffling.

Now there were only the others, the four we had chosen to leave
behind. Tu and Fa’a took the long length of palm rope and restrung them together like a sad chain of paper dolls, the cord loose on their arms. They sat them down at the base of the tree, their backs against the bark, and then tied one end of the rope—again, very loosely, so loose a sharp tug would have broken it—around one of the low-hanging branches. (The rope was meant to protect them, or so we thought: if they stayed together rather than wandering in their separate directions, we thought they would … what? Be able to watch one another die instead of dying alone? But at the time it seemed a kindness, although it is difficult now to remember why.) Before them, Tallent and Esme and I placed tiers of food: Spam, slid from its metal containers and placed on palm leaves, kanavas and manamas and no’akas. There were those weird fungi Eve liked, and rattly portions of things I realized Tallent must have filched from the dried-goods hut, including a small stack of vuakas, which Tu and Fa’a glanced at covetously before turning resolutely away.

When we were finished, we stepped back, and something about seeing them all looking at us, their eyes as large and black and trusting as a sloth’s, and the ground at their feet decorated with gifts as if it were Christmas and these were the presents under the tree, wrenched something inside me, and for a moment I was paralyzed by the cruelty of what we were doing.

I think we all must have felt the same way, for although I could not understand him, I could hear the anguish in Fa’a’s voice and saw the tenderness with which he laid his hand on each shoulder, gesturing toward the food as he spoke to them. Later Tallent would tell me what he had said:
Don’t leave one another. Take care of one another. Eat the food when you get hungry. Stay by this tree. We’ll soon return
.

And then we left. “Don’t turn around,” Tallent warned us, and we all stumbled forward, driven by our desire to move as far away from them as possible, when they suddenly, as a group, began to hum, a fat, buggy drone that sounded mysterious and full of portent, a chant of goodbye, although really it was nothing of the sort, just a sundowning reflex, a bit of echolalia.

We walked later than we ever had that night, so late that soon the only light we had was the red glint of bats’ eyes as they flapped noisily above us and the phosphorescent gleam from a flock of hard-shelled beetles that crested above us in a clicking, clackety gaggle,
knocking into one another with crisp little
toks
and careening off branches. It was imperative that we put as much distance between the abandoned and ourselves as we could, but even after our walking became first inconsequential, as we were going so slowly, and then counterproductive (had we been moving in circles? It was impossible to tell), we seemed unable to stop ourselves. In the forest’s dark, in the absence of sight, all sounds became magnified, and out of the darkness loomed visions and nightmares. At one point I swore I felt something large and furred skim fleetingly over the top of my head, almost as if the air itself had grown feathers, but when I asked the others if they had felt it too, no one had. I found myself aware, as I had not been in the village, of the woods beyond and what might be living past the tiers and tiers of trees we had not even thought to access. Earlier in the day I had watched as a swarm of moths, so densely clumped that they appeared to be one creature, threw themselves at two kanava trees in a barreling kamikaze mission. But to my surprise they disappeared between the trees, vanishing into what I saw was the barest of fractures between them, an opening so slender I hadn’t even seen it. What else had managed to muscle through the trees’ barrier? There was the forest we knew, but beyond it perhaps there was a whole other forest, an entirely different ecosystem with its own distinct set of birds and mushrooms and fruits and animals. Perhaps there was another set of villages as well, protected by the trees for centuries, whose people lived to be a thousand and never lost their minds, or who died when they were teenagers, or who never had sex with children, or who only did.

I could hear Fa’a and Tallent speaking to each other, and eventually, when Fa’a fell back, I asked Tallent what they’d been saying. “He’s upset,” said Tallent, and he sounded upset as well. “He says we should never have tied them to the tree.”

“But the cord’s easy enough for them to break.”

“That’s what I told him,” said Tallent. “But he says he never should have told them to stay. He says they’ll never break the cord—they’ll just sit there, waiting for us to come back, because we promised we would.”

“But won’t they forget we said that?”