The People in the Trees (44 page)

He had grown up well; he was a man. In one hand he clutched his spear, and his other hand rested on his hog, which was as mean-eyed and mud-flecked as all the other men’s hogs. But still I knew it was he: in adulthood he had the same somehow noble, well-composed face, the same lift to his chin, the same calm eyes. He would be married now, I imagined, and perhaps have a child of his own. Had his
days as someone who lurked in the forest at night or embraced other boys under a tree ended, then? Or if I crept my way through the dark that night, my arms aloft as before, would I find myself being led to him once again, standing still and silent, waiting for me to happen upon him?

I could think of so much I wanted to say to him, and yet in the moment nothing would come forth, and so in the end I only nodded at him. After a long pause, he nodded back, and then turned and made his silent way off the path and into an uncharted part of the forest, his hog swaggering alongside him. In seconds he was gone, the thin trees he’d pushed aside to make room for him slapping back into place at once, erasing his presence completely.

I stood there watching the place where he’d disappeared. Had he remembered me? It seemed impossible that he hadn’t. And yet the interaction had the strange effect of making me doubt that I had actually ever met him before. That night in the forest, when I had crashed through the underbrush with my hands stretched out before me, running until I encountered him, had been one of the loneliest and most desperate moments I had had on Ivu’ivu. When I had found him, I had been so grateful—not just because of the kindness he had shown me, but because it seemed as if he had been planted there to remind me of my own presence, my own realness. I often felt this way on Ivu’ivu, as if I were floating away from myself, my atoms rearranging themselves so that they were no more permanent or tangible than sunlight, so that the more time I spent there, the less certain I was of my own existence. I could have been lost that night in the forest. But I hadn’t been. He had found me.

One afternoon I took a break from my scheming and turtle-searching and, for lack of anything better to do, followed Tallent and Esme for a bit as they made their rounds through the village. (Meyers had invited me to go look at some doubtless fascinating fungal fringe he’d discovered a short way downhill, but I had declined.)

However, watching Tallent and Esme sit at the edge of the village and scribble away in their notebooks was not much more interesting. After a while, Esme marched off to harass the poor woman
who was guarding the meat hut, and I sat next to Tallent in silence, he scribbling, I staring at the small, busy lives before me, trying to see in the older children those whom I might have known as babies.

I was thinking about the lake of turtles and all the paths I might still have to explore when a toddler bobbled up to me, holding a piece of grass in her hand. She was probably a little over a year, unusually fat for an Ivu’ivuan, and had a sort of solemnity about her that reminded me of the boy, to whom my thoughts returned again and again.

“Hello,” I said to her. “What’s that you have?”

She stared. I have never found it difficult, as some do, to speak to children. All one has to do is pretend that they’re some kind of intelligent farm animal: a pig, perhaps, or a horse. In fact, one should be much more intimidated by the prospect of speaking to a horse, since they can often be quite quick-witted and possessed of a great disdain for those they feel are not worthy of their attention.

At any rate, we had a nice exchange, the baby and I, which ended with her giving me the grass (and I thanking her) and then her bungling away. Somewhere in the middle of this interaction I became aware that Tallent had stopped writing and was watching us, and as she left, he said, “You’re very good with children.”

“Oh,” I said, surprised. It had never occurred to me that there might be two different categories of people—those who were good with children and those who were not—and that I might be in the former group.

“Do you want children of your own?” Tallent asked.

This was even more surprising. You must remember that in the fifties, people, especially men, did not ask one another if they wanted children. It was assumed that you would have them, and liking them or not had very little bearing on the matter. It was simply something you did: you got married, you got a job, you had children. You might have a single child or many, your wife might be beautiful or not, your job dull or exceptional, but those were the only variations. So, “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never thought about it.” And I hadn’t.

“Mmm,” said Tallent. “I think you will.”

I found his confidence irritating. He had a certain talent for
being able to make me feel like a creature from a book he had studied, who was doomed to fulfill a certain destiny whose shape only he knew.

“Do you?” I shot back at him.

He paused then and was thoughtful, which I hadn’t expected. “I don’t think so,” he said at last.

“Why not?”

“It just isn’t for me,” he said, and smiled—not at me, but at something in the distance, as if at something or someone he recognized. I followed his gaze, fearful that he might be regarding Esme, but when I looked, there was no one there, just the square, empty for once but for the fire, the air around it blurring oilily in the heat.

It was not until the twenty-sixth day that I finally made my way back to the lake of turtles. There they were, paddling toward me, as friendly and gently inquisitive as cows, and there I was, lifting two of the smaller ones, each about the size of a large dinner plate, out of the water and putting them into the punched-hole cardboard carrying boxes I had brought with me.

The way down was not difficult, but it was slow. I had thought about how I might successfully mark my path but had concluded that there was no way of doing so without letting others benefit from it. I could not risk, say, nailing stakes into the earth or scratching symbols on trees without reasonably expecting that some future seeker (though at the time I wasn’t wholly convinced there would be as many as Tallent had predicted) would find and follow them himself. So in the end I had to resort to sketching a highly detailed map, marking each turn and change of direction not by landmark—for indeed, the tree I might recognize as a sapling today would be something unrecognizable two or three years from now—but by the approximate distance that separated each one from the next. And of course I had to keep putting the turtles down to make another notation and then picking them up again.

Once I had reached the manama tree at the back of the ninth hut, I crouched behind it and waited for the last of the light to leave the sky; Esme and Tallent had, on this trip or the previous one, finally been invited to join the dinnertime feasts by the fire, and they could
spend hours there without looking around them. Meyers generally spent his evenings back at the camp, dusting his precious fungi with one of the many stiff-bristled brushes he had brought and breathing humidly through his mouth. I crept around the back of the storage houses and toward my old tree, where I piled small branches and handfuls of moss on top of the boxes to conceal their presence. I had brought with me some turtle-food pellets I’d bought at an animal supply store back in California, and when I placed some before the opa’ivu’ekes, they stared at them for a moment or two before eating them and I sat back, relieved.

Later, herpetologists would write papers detailing the species’ many unusual traits and characteristics, but all neglected to mention the one I found most appealing and singular about them, which was how they could project an almost canine friendliness combined with a feline centeredness. After eating, they padded about me for a few minutes, and when I stroked their carapaces, they did not retreat or take offense but merely shut their eyes and enjoyed it, much as their predecessor had done all those years before.

As I sat there with them, my thoughts turned to that conversation I’d had with Tallent about children. Over the past two weeks, some of the only comfort (and certainly the only amusement) I’d found had been with the village’s children. I would encounter them playing on the borders of the village as I slumped back to the camp from yet another unsuccessful day of hunting for the lake of turtles, and after watching them, I began to see games and playacting emerge from what I’d previously been able to view as only a chaotic ruckus. They had one trick they especially enjoyed performing, in which two children would face each other, each with a bit of plant husk balanced on a finger. Then they’d twirl them around faster and faster, and whoever managed to find just the right speed so the husk remained on his finger would win.

There was one child in particular whom I particularly enjoyed speaking with and watching. He was maybe seven or eight, and in his stillness and attentiveness he reminded me somewhat of the boy. He wasn’t a social outcast or anything of the sort, but he did seem apart from the others; when they played throwing games, or chased one another around the village, or dared one another to go another foot and then yet another past the manama tree behind the ninth
hut, shrieking with fear and triumph as they ran back downhill, he would instead watch, a finger at the edge of his mouth and a worried expression on his face. I was moved by this frown of his, which was so adult and sad and somehow wise on a person so young. As he grew to know me and trust me, he would sometimes place a small hand on my arm or sit next to me and press his body against mine, and I would find myself babbling on to him, telling him about my life and the lab and Owen, none of which he could understand and all of which he listened to quietly, as if my words were a warm rain, so comforting that he felt no need to seek shelter.

One very hot afternoon, after his peers had gone galloping off toward the other end of the village, I realized that the boy had fallen asleep against me. I had been hoping to make one final sally uphill to look for the lake before the day passed, but something—maybe the deep contentedness of his breath—stopped me from moving, and I instead maintained my position and let him sleep.
I could have a child like this
, I thought. And then,
But I do not want a wife
. It was an impossibility, and even here, so far from home and its leaden social demands, I could not think of a way in which I might have one and yet not the other. I did not know a great deal about women then, but even my limited exposure to them had taught me that they were simply not for me. A wife! What would I discuss with her? I imagined days sitting around a plain white table and sawing away at a piece of meat burned crisp as toast, hearing the clop of her shoes as she walked across a shining linoleum floor, her hectoring conversations about money or the children or my job; I saw myself silent, listening to her drone on about her day and the laundry and whom she had seen at the store and what they had said. And then I also saw a different set of images: me lifting a sleep-heavy child and placing him in a bed, me teaching him about insects, or the two of us hunting beetles or butterflies together, visiting the sea together for the first time.

But that night, awake on my mat, what I mostly thought of was the heat of that young body next to mine, the smallness of his hand. I felt both as if they were still upon me, and then mourned for what I had never had and what I probably would never have a chance to have again.

III
.

Nothing had changed; everything had. Back at the lab, the mice were still alive (dopier and less mouselike than ever; they had developed a new habit of falling on their sides and kicking and screeching, apparently unaware of how to flip back onto their feet, that was fascinating and alarming to witness), as were the dreamers. I showed them the opa’ivu’ekes in the hopes of extracting some sort of reaction, but they merely blinked at them and then ignored them.

But those—and Cheolyu, of course—were the only things that remained from the life I had left not six weeks before. And here marks the beginning (although I was not to recognize it until much later) of my new life, and of a sustained period of time that was marked by both horrors and wonders. Every day, it seemed, so many things happened at once that it is very difficult for me to chart the events of the next few years in any linear fashion. What I can say, however, was that Tallent was proven correct.