The People in the Trees (33 page)

He gave a shout as well, but I think it was just to echo mine, for when I knelt down beside him—there was a crack in the canopy above us, and a little moonlight leaked through, enough for me to see the outlines of his features—he seemed calm, and his eyes met mine without fear or suspicion.

It did not take me long to identify him as the boy from the first a’ina’ina. He was, as I have said, an exceptionally beautiful boy, slim and well assembled, with unusually good posture, although what was most striking about him was the steadiness of his gaze, which I could feel upon me, even if I could barely see it in the poor light.

But it was disconcerting to come across him here, so deep in the
forest, holding himself so still, almost as if he had been waiting for me to find him, although that of course would have been impossible.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him gently, although he could not understand me and so said nothing.

“What is your name?” But still, naturally, there was no response.

I pointed to myself. “Norton.” I pointed to him:
And you?
But he only cocked his head, the way the chief had, before righting it and looking at me again.

“It’s late,” I told him. “Shouldn’t you be at home?”

But then, before I could keep speaking, he placed one of his hands on the side of my face. It was such a strange gesture, so shockingly intimate and adult—pitying, wise, maternal, even—that I found myself very close to tears. It seemed in that moment as if he were offering me a sympathy I had not even known I had been craving, but feeling his hot, dry palm on my cheek—a boy’s palm, when I later examined it, sticky and faintly dirty and scuffed with small cuts, but underneath soft and somehow innocent—I felt the unhappiness and loneliness of the past few days, the past four months, the past twenty-five years, press upon me like a great, bony mass.

We stayed in that position for what felt like a long period, me in my painful crouch, he before me, my cheek tipped now into his hand. Above us the moon glided behind a cloud, and it was then, in the absence of light, that he reached down and lifted my hand and placed it solemnly on his genitals.

I immediately removed it. By now the darkness was so complete that the only part of him I could see were his eyes (and he mine), and in them I saw nothing that one might expect: nothing keen or conniving, nothing eager or lascivious, nothing hungry or fevered. I do not know how to explain it better; I do not wish to be sentimental and say that they had a wisdom, or any sort of special intelligence, but I do think it fair to say that they did contain, at the very least, a kind of gravity.

He took my hand again, very gently, like a seducer, and began to move it across his body. Once again I pulled it away, and once again he patiently replaced it.

I am being bewitched
, I thought as we went back and forth, my hand now feeling almost disconnected from my body, a floating white bird moving on its own accord through the darkness. The boy
shifted position then, to lie down against the base of the tree, and tugged at my other hand.

Oh, Tallent
, I thought.
Oh, Esme, save me. I am being held captive. I am being spellbound
. I may even have said this aloud. But they didn’t come, of course, and the forest remained quiet, the only sound the boy’s breath, his face blurring in and out of focus as the moon revealed and concealed itself in an endless flirtation with some unseen lover.

IV
.

Something had been troubling me about my conversations with Mua, particularly my most recent one.
Why
was he a mo’o kua’au? What made him one? Yes, he was forgetful, and yes, he perseverated, and yes, he could quite often be very dull (I have not recounted here the numerous boring and repetitive conversations I had with Mua over these months), and yes, his short-term memory was very poor indeed (the day after our hike to see the opa’ivu’ekes, I asked him a question about it, and he had no memory of our trip; indeed, my insistence made him frightened and anxious), but his long-term memory was excellent, and his attention span, while by no means admirable, was no shorter than that of a child. Certainly all of these things combined to become very annoying, but was it really so bad? Was it worth abandoning someone simply because he was forgetful and repetitive?

I had been working on a list of the dreamers’ approximate ages, and now I separated them into two smaller lists: one group that was apparently known to the village, the other that apparently was not.

Except for Lawa’eke’s father, the chief and Lawa’eke were the oldest people in the village. We had, in a subsequent conversation, gotten both of them to confirm unambiguously that they knew Mua,
Vanu, Ivaiva, Va’ana, and Ukavi and that they remembered them being taken into the forest. But as hard as we tried, we could not get them to recognize Eve, Vi’iu, or Ika’ana. Esme, being Esme, attributed their ignorance to willfulness. “Of
course
they know them,” she insisted. She was, however, unable to explain what benefit to them there might be from denying knowledge of the others. “They have their reasons,” she’d say—she saw conspiracy even in this simplest of civilizations, a civilization so guileless that its people didn’t even bother to conceal the fact that they abandoned their elders once they began to stray from the obscure behavioral strictures that governed their society.

I, however, thought there was a much easier explanation: surely the reason that the three dreamers remained unknown to Lawa’eke and the chief was that they were so old they had been exiled when the two men were very young, too young to remember? This absolutely made sense in Ika’ana’s case: if he was 176 now and he had begun becoming a mo’o kua’au at, say, 110, he would have been escorted away well before either of them had even been born.

That left the mystery of both Vi’iu and Eve. Vi’iu, I suspected, was younger than Ika’ana, though perhaps not by much. He had not, it seemed, been alive during Ka Weha, for example, but when Ika’ana spoke of it, he nodded wisely, in the way of someone who had heard about the event so often that he had almost forgotten that he had not experienced it. But he was very impaired, there was no doubt of that: I remembered how poorly he had performed on the basic neurological tests I had given him, how he was unable to identify any of the objects I had placed before him, how his attention drifted the moment I began to speak to him.

Last and least, then, there was Eve, who was her own special problem. Even in the company of the dreamers, she remained singular. There was so much she could not do! She could not speak, she did not listen, she could not interact with the others, she was without shame or manners or niceties or logic. Often when I regarded her from a distance, I felt as if I were watching something inanimate that had been unlawfully given breath—she staggered about and yelped when she felt like it, and crammed things into her mouth, and scrutinized the inconsequential, and ignored the fascinating. With
her coloring and lumpy shape, she occasionally resembled nothing so much as a sweet potato, one set upon two legs and plopped amid us. It was not a life, but that she breathed and sighed and ate.

And then suddenly I realized: this was what being a mo’o kua’au must be.
This
was what they were afraid of;
this
was the end of the story. I flipped back in my notebook, looking for Tallent’s definition of a mo’o kua’au, which I had written down after our conversation all those months ago—“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”—and knew: Eve was a fully transformed mo’o kua’au. She was what the others would become. All it took, it occurred to me, was time.

I flew back toward our camp. “Lawa’eke’s father!” I screamed as I ran. All we had to do now was ask Lawa’eke’s father to identify Ika’ana and Vi’iu, who would surely have been alive and been present in the village at the same time. We would also ask him to identify Eve; if he couldn’t, it would confirm what I suspected—that Eve was so old that not even Ika’ana and Vi’iu knew her from the village. That would make her well over two hundred years old.

“Lawa’eke’s father!” I shouted at Tallent, who was, with Fa’a, leading some of the dreamers back from the stream. When he saw me, he passed them to Fa’a and started walking toward me.

“Tallent,” I gasped; I could feel myself grinning. “We need to talk to Lawa’eke’s father
right now
.”

He may have said my name, but I was talking too fast, and he stopped to listen to me and my theories, which I knew, knew for certain, were correct—I had never been more certain of anything, it seemed, and the feeling was exhilarating. Exhilarating and also somehow completely natural, as if such a feeling were my birthright.
This
, I caught myself thinking, was what my life should be like
—this
sensation,
this
breathless excitement.

“Norton,” said Tallent finally, when I was at last able to calm myself, “Lawa’eke’s father is gone. They took him into the forest last night.”

I was of course devastated. I railed away at Tallent, demanding that he retrieve for me the chief (so I could what? Shout at him? Rebuke him?) or the hunters who had taken him (who had yet to
return), and that we ask to borrow one of the hogs to sniff a path toward Lawa’eke’s father (I had no idea if hogs were even capable of doing this). I was also struck by the unfairness of the entire situation. Here we were in a place where nothing—sometimes almost literally nothing—happened for days and days, and then, exactly when I needed things to remain the same, they suddenly changed.

But finally he was able to convince me that there was nothing to be done. “But we can still test your theory,” he said sensibly (not that I was in any mood to be sensible). “If what you’re saying is correct, Ika’ana should remember Eve.”

“Why?” I asked sullenly.

“Because she can’t be so old that she’d have left before Ika’ana was even born,” he said. “That would make her, what? Almost three hundred years old? That’s impossible.”

He was so grave, so certain, that I wanted to laugh. Ah, how quickly we had grown accustomed to this absurdity, this world in which 300 years was an impossibility but 176 was not! Who knew—perhaps 300 years was not impossible at all. Perhaps Eve was 300, 400, 500, 1,000 years old. Perhaps she had been exiled long before Ka Weha, long before Ika’ana had been born, so long ago that monstrous opa’ivu’ekes roamed the land by the thousands, so long ago that the trees around us had been saplings, tender and girlish, and from where we stood, she would have been able to see in every direction the blue sky and the blue sea, stretching before her in endless planes.

As it turned out, however, Tallent was right: Ika’ana
did
remember Eve. She had been exiled when he was a young boy, after Ka Weha (when he was five o’anas) but shortly before, he thought, his a’ina’ina. He didn’t know how old she was when she was taken, but Tallent and I had determined, based on the others, that people began exhibiting symptoms of mo’o kua’au-ness anywhere between, say, 90 and 105. Even if Eve had experienced an early onset, it would still make her today no younger than 250. How, I wanted to ask Tallent, was
that
possible?

She had had children, but none of them, according to Ika’ana, had lived to sixty o’anas, and neither had her husband. She had had grandchildren as well, but none of them had lived as long as their grandmother either. In the end there was only Eve, living in the forest alone for more than a century, trudging up and down its hills,
eating her grubs and manama fruits and whatever else she could find, with only herself for comfort, her whole world at once oppressively narrow and oppressively huge. The forest was all colonies of like creatures: the families of vuakas, the trees dangling their bunches of manama fruits, the sloths and the spiders and the copses of orchids each with their companions. And then there would be Eve, an explorer searching for nothing, adrift in a sea without any memory of what she had once sought or of what she wished to return to.

“I was surprised when she found us,” murmured Ika’ana, his eyes, as usual, focusing on nothing. “I had not thought of her in many years. Many, many years. But then I saw her, and I thought,
Oh, it is you
. And it was.”

“Ika’ana,” I said, struggling to keep the anger from my voice, because I knew it was unfair, and not productive anyway, “why did you not tell us this before?”

Then he did look at me. “You never asked,” he said.

I may not have been discovering everything I needed to at the pace I had hoped, but (as I tried to reassure myself) each new revelation did lead to the next question I needed to answer. I now had some notion of how old Eve was and what a mo’o kua’au was. Further questioning of Ika’ana had revealed that Eve had not been born a mute, which meant that her silence, her antisocial behavior, were a result of brain damage or deterioration or lack of social interaction, not a congenital condition.