The People in the Trees (48 page)

Shall I tell you how I was always wrong—eighteen, nineteen, twenty times wrong—and how although I was always wrong, I didn’t stop, I couldn’t stop, I was searching, searching, searching.

Or shall I perhaps tell you of a trip I made in 1980, the trip that, although I was not to know it, would eventually destroy my life?

By this time I had twenty-six children in my care—more than I needed, of course, and more than I wanted. By now the public perception of my extravagant collection had altered considerably and in certain quarters had become yet another measure of my monstrousness. When I first began accumulating my children, I was of course treated as something of a hero—an odd hero perhaps, barely on the right side of eccentricity, but a hero nonetheless. I was a single man, I was a noted scientist, and yet here I was, opening my house (an eight-bedroom Colonial just outside town that I had bought with some of my inheritance) to these undernourished and primitive orphans, whose pitiable state was compounded by their being dark-skinned and flat-nosed and completely uneducated.

I would estimate that my heroism ran out after I brought back my ninth child. Suddenly, as if a bulletin had gone out to the brayers and opinion-sharers and women of the world generally—for it was women who seemed to have the strongest feelings about my personal doings, as women often do—I was an object of suspicion. Why did I need all those children? Why did I have all these children and not a wife? What exactly was I trying to do? There was something unhealthy about it all, wasn’t there? The suspicions never morphed into outright accusations, but I could feel them there, held just under the tongue like a dissolving cube of sugar. I am convinced that even Mrs. Tomlinson, a local woman I had engaged to serve as a housekeeper-cum-nanny (I hired her on the basis of her looks alone: she was dense and sturdy and florid, a Dickensian scullery maid grown
up and out and come to life in modern-day Maryland), who liked to ostentatiously share with me the many times she had defended me to her girlfriends and sisters-in-law, doubtless shared her theories with those same girlfriends and sisters-in-law:
Well, what
does
he need with all those children, after all?
(At the time they were easy to dismiss, but in retrospect, I would agree with them: there was something fevered and grotesque, alarming even, about the rate at which I adopted these children.)

And then in 1974 I won my Nobel and once again I was the hero, my “miscalculations” (as the
Times
characterized my apparent failing of the dreamers; in the same article I was also blamed in a roundabout way for Tallent’s disappearance and the destruction of Ivu’ivu) balanced against my obvious humanitarian inclinations, the one-man charity show I was running with as much color and élan as P. T. Barnum. In the months of interviews that followed, I was asked about the island, the dreamers, Tallent, and the turtles (and to a lesser extent about my work and its implications), but mostly I was asked about my children: Could I pose with them? Had they had a hard time adjusting? Did I have any favorite stories about them? They were always looking for these stories, anecdotes about the children’s adorableness, and I never had any to provide: they were children, after all, and their store of adorableness was rather shallow. Again and again I was asked why I had adopted them, a question I found difficult to answer. The truth would be distasteful, and the lies—because I wanted to help the less fortunate; because I loved their company—seemed laughably simplistic and banal. But to my surprise, the interviewers all jotted down my responses without question, and later I would read my own words back to myself in their papers or magazines and see myself called “a loving papa” or “a doting father” and marvel.

On U’ivu, my Nobel made no difference; there, I was the white man who came twice a year and on whom all sorts of unwanted children could be foisted. It was one of the central ironies of the place that the very people who had enabled me to discover immortality were so far from immortal themselves. Uva had died in 1965, at the age of fifty-six; Tu had died shortly after. Some of their children—Uva’s son, who had pressed his child on me; Tu’s daughter, whose
twin sons were now in my care—were dead as well, their brief lifespans hurried to a premature close by alcohol.

I had the strange sense sometimes as I walked through Tui’uvo, its thoroughfares wide tracks of footstep-engraved mud, its boundaries stacked with the debris of long-abandoned and improbable projects—here a sagging sack of concrete, slit down the middle and dribbling silt that was once meant to built a roadway; there a pyramid of orange-rusted rebar bound together with frayed lengths of palm-leaf rope—that I had landed in the wrong place, and that somewhere on the other side of the island lay the capital as I had known it. What
was
this town, with its increasing number of beggars (I always wondered whom they were begging from, as no one in the town had any money and the foreign visitors who had once descended here in great busy flocks were long gone, a decade gone, never to return) burning small, sullen fires by the road’s edge, and the slumping shacks, the palm leaf freckled with dark dots of mold? The only new structure was the king’s residence, with its long, ugly façade of cement, its surface perforated by small glassless windows. The king had run out of money before he could complete its painting or roofing, and so the whitewash stopped abruptly halfway through, and the entire thing was crowned with a flat top of layered palm leaves; they were new, at least, but the effect was curiously like a toupee, because no one in the village remembered quite how to knit together a roof that would be both protective and elegant.

I stayed where I always did, in the second grandest and only other cement building in town, a six-room inn in which I was always the only guest. In my room was an approximation of a bed (an ancient iron bed frame, a large muslin pouch half stuffed with crunchy bits of palm husk for a mattress) and a crucifix, made from bamboo and easily the prettiest thing in town, hanging on the wall. The inn was near the water, and from its roof, where I ate my dinner of Spam and chunks of boiled sweet potato, I would watch the sky turn so dark that eventually Ivu’ivu would seem to disintegrate into the night, its bulk receding into the black. No one was allowed to travel there any longer, on penalty of death; the king was rumored to be convinced that someday the scientists and the money would return and was planning to offer it to them for a huge ransom when they did. In
the meantime, though, it was the property of whichever government had paid him for its use. But then I heard other rumors as well: that on the far side of Ivu’ivu was a team of scientists (from where, no one could say) who were scouring the island’s underwater caves for any remaining opa’ivu’ekes, or that the king was using the island as a penal colony, where the punished would live the rest of their lives in near isolation. And sometimes I thought,
There too is Tallent
, and I would picture him, his face lifted to the sun, moving uphill through a mist of ivoried butterflies.

Because I had grown to realize that I made these trips as a form of self-punishment, I never spared myself anything. I sought out the most depressing sights: the squalor of the town, of course, and the contrasting tidiness of the missionary camp on the north side of the island, where the jungle had been so eradicated that you often felt like you were in Montana. Here there was a different kind of awfulness: no alcohol, no begging, no fires, but U’ivuans working as messengers, and farmhands, and housemaids, and always smiling, smiling, smiling. But the worst thing was that none of the U’ivuan men who worked for the missionaries had their spears; they had given them up to become Christians, and the sight of them without their spears was somehow obscene, as if they were missing their heads. Even the most destitute, the most unrecognizable of men in Tui’uvo kept their spears; often it was the only thing they had.

I went to Iva’a’aka, where once were great fields of vegetables and groves of trees, destroyed long ago when Lilly bought rights to the land to begin a turtle breeding farm. Now the lake it had created was a brackish swamp, its water as black and thick as petroleum, the earth around it foul and greasy with poison, the air ahum with the ever-present tornadoes of flies drawn to the smell of death. The few seasonal workers from U’ivu who lived there stood guard over this sewagey mess, their eyes fixed on the horizon, waiting for the plane that would bring their employers back.

It was an island of waiters, where once waiting had been a foreign concept. This had never been a culture obsessed with the past, and why should it have been? Nothing ever changed. But now that everything had, all its inhabitants could think about was what they had lost. And so they remained frozen in their vigilance, toggling between hope and despair, waiting for their world to be restored.

It was my last day and I was leaving for the field to catch my flight. As always, I had packed sample boxes to secrete and protect any interesting clippings I might encounter, and as had been the case for the past several years, I left with them empty.

As always, I walked down the main street—stickier than ever with mud after a sudden rainfall—through a phalanx of outstretched hands, the corps of U’ivuans appearing suddenly and mutely before me, ready to take whatever I might have to give them. I had grown used to this as well and was prepared with pocketsful of things I thought they might use: not money, but dried scraps of mango, handkerchiefs (which they could use to clean their spears or diaper their babies), nuts, and penknives for the ones who seemed particularly pitiable.

At the field I waited. Some company—Merck, I had heard—had, in a last burst of investor’s optimism, paid to have a runway constructed but had abandoned it before its completion, and so it, like much of the island, was left half finished and half not, of less use to anyone in this state than it had been before. Now weeds and tiny, furly trees thrust through the tarmac, buckling the surface into a series of blackened soufflés.

A man came slowly toward me. For whatever reason, very few islanders lingered about the field—maybe from habit, since it had once been the king’s hunting grounds, or maybe from fear, as they did not like the airplanes—and I watched him, fanning myself in the heat, as he approached. As he drew nearer, I saw at once that he was Ivu’ivuan. You could always distinguish the Ivu’ivuans: they were slightly smaller than the U’ivuans, and darker, and something about them seemed permanently nonplussed, disoriented, no matter how long they had lived on their new island.

This man was older, maybe in his early forties, and seemed more defeated than most; his spear was gouged at its tip, and its shaft was thorny with splinters. He wore a sarong that had once perhaps been dark blue, and I could smell the alcohol sweating off him, as sweet as rotting roses. But for all that, he was oddly confident, and when he beckoned me, I found myself following him.

On the edge of the field was a clutch of ragged and dispirited-looking
guava trees, and the man pointed to a bundle of cloths, as colorless as his sarong, secreted between them. When I did not move to collect them, he gave them a kick with his toe and the cloths turned over and I saw that it was a child. The man barked a command and the child stood. He wore only a T-shirt, one more holes and rips than actual fabric, and his hair was so magnificently snarled that I remember thinking, almost reflexively, that I would have to shave it off and begin anew.

But then I remembered myself and told the man that I didn’t need any more children.

The man gaped at me in apparent disbelief. I had said no to parents before, of course—especially when the children were noticeably deformed—but they usually accepted my rejection quietly, resignedly, and nodded at me before returning to their perch at the edge of the road. But this man, it appeared, would be different. I must take the child, he told me, and then when I refused, he repeated it again: I must take him. I didn’t want the child, I told him. I had no more room for children.

“But he is such a small boy!” he told me, and then, when he saw me unmoved, his tone changed and he became placating: Would I not please take the child? He knew I was a rich man, and a good man. He even knew my name. “No-ton,” he said. “No-ton, please take the child.”