The People in the Trees (47 page)

It was very rare, but every other year or so the villagers would lose someone to the forest: a hunter, usually young and inexperienced, would venture deep into the trees on his own and never return. Sometimes he would be lost forever. The Ivu’ivuans had a saying for such events—“Ka ololu mumua ko,”
The jungle devoured him
. The odd thing was that they would never consider that the disappeared person had died; he was simply away, unable to find his way home but alive all the same, trying and trying and trying to return to the village.

Many theories have since been proposed about Tallent’s disappearance. He had gone to find more dreamers. He had followed a dreamer into the forest. He had gone mad. He had found another, more secret society and gone to live among them. He had discovered something glorious. He had discovered something terrible. He had been murdered by the villagers and taken away at night. He had become obsessed with a species of flower he had found. He had run away with one of the village women, one of the village men (preposterous, as no one from the village was missing). He had yearned to escape civilization and had gone to found his own. He had escaped from the island in secret and was living under an assumed identity in Hawaii, teaching at the university there. He had killed himself. He was alive still. He knew exactly where he was going. He had no idea where he was going.

I cannot claim to know what happened to him. But I think about
him often, more often than I think anyone would expect. When he vanished, I am afraid I have to admit, something I had once had vanished as well: the ability to care as intensely, one might diagnose it, but something else as well. I wonder sometimes, if he had remained in our world, how I might be different, how I might ultimately have found satisfaction other than in the ways I eventually did. And I suppose that if I were made to come to a conclusion, I would have to say that I too think that the jungle devoured him, and that somewhere he walks through it still. Indeed, I sometimes see him, very gaunt now and pale, having spent years and years under the dark canopy of trees, lifting his face to the small droplets of sunshine that the deepest part of the forest allows to penetrate. I never see him in the company of others but rather wandering in the forest alone, his clothes now mere scraps, decorations, a piece of bamboo for a walking stick, his beard scraping his rib cage. I wonder, has he eaten a bit of turtle to stay alive? Does he sing, or talk to himself, for company? Does he remember me? Did he ever find his way back to the village, and did he perhaps visit it once a year or so, standing hidden behind a tree, watching it change so profoundly that after a certain point he never returned?

In my imaginings I sometimes call out to him, and sometimes he turns, and his eyes are bright and luminous and starved, and I am in those moments breathless, at the rapaciousness of his hunger and the keenness of his searching, and I am unable to say anything but stare at him, until he silently, with one thin and darkened hand clutching at his stick, turns back away from me—and is gone.

IV
.

Well, what more is there for me to say on this matter? You know, we all know, what happened next. There were endings, but none of them were happy. Whenever I am asked, I cannot help but be brisk when relating what followed, for it is too difficult for me to make the story into what it ought to be: a saga in itself, a long death that spirals down slowly to the ground.

It was an end full of ironies, as such sad and bad endings often are. Shall I tell you of how the pharmacists and neuroscientists and biologists hurried home with their carrier bags heavy with turtles, and how test after test proved what I already knew and had already
tried to tell them: that the mice (and later the rats, the rabbits, the dogs, the monkeys, the who knows what else—there were rumors, but none were ever definitively proven) lived double, treble, quadruple their natural lives, but all of them, every one of the survivors, went slowly but irreversibly and horribly mad? The mice kicking and mewling; the cats, their mouths fixed open into soundless yawps, beating themselves against their cages; the dogs tearing out their own eyes with their paws; the monkeys, the closest to us in temperament and sensibility, who chattered and chattered until one day they chattered no more, and whose eyes grew so blank and unfocused one could look in them and see anything one might wish reflected in them: the sea, the clouds, a lake of turtles.

Shall I tell you of how by the time telomeres were discovered, and then by the time genetic sequencing became sophisticated enough to conjecture exactly how the opa’ivu’eke was affecting normal telomerase, there were no more opa’ivu’ekes to be studied?
⁷²
Shall I tell
you how the lake had long been scooped clean, and although in the 1970s a group of a dozen scientists went back to dredge it and then walked the length of the river, its entire reach from the top of the island to its bottom, they never found another opa’ivu’eke? Shall I tell you of the recriminations, the desperation, the bemoaning of years wasted, the millions of dollars spent, the agony of knowing how close we were to eternal life and how it once again eluded us, all dreams of godliness turned into water glugging down a wide-mouthed drain? Shall I tell you of the disbelief, the plans that were made and then had to be scrapped for age-retarding drugs, for anti-aging skin creams, for elixirs to restore male potency? Shall I tell you of Pfizer’s sorrow, of Lilly’s dismay, of Johnson and Johnson’s agony, of Merck’s rage? Shall I tell you of the years of feckless, fruitless, desperate attempts to re-create the effect using every sort of turtle on the planet? Of months waiting for the mice to continue beyond their natural lifespan, and then, upon watching them die, beginning anew with a fresh batch, and a new Hawaiian sea turtle, a new leatherback turtle, a new Galápagos tortoise? Shall I tell you about trying to re-create the effect using every animal, every plant, every fungus, that could be harvested from Ivu’ivu? The sloths, the hogs, the spiders, the vuakas, the toucans, the parrots, the hunonos, the manamas, the kanavas, the weird lizardlike things, the fuzzy gourds, the palm leaves, the seedpods—shall I tell you how the island was stripped of everything, whole forests razed, whole fields of mushrooms and orchids and ferns picked like fat red strawberries and shiny green lettuces and loaded onto the helicopters that were now able to land directly on the island because so many trees had been felled that there was open space aplenty?

Shall I tell you what happened to the chief, how in the early 1970s he was lured to the United States by Johns Hopkins, where he was presumably stuck and measured and leeched of fluids every
day, and may be still, for no one, no one, has ever heard of him or mentioned him again? Shall I tell you about Lawa’eke, who around that time simply disappeared and was never found again? (Shall I tell you how Pfizer accused Lilly of kidnapping him, and how Lilly blamed the University of Minnesota, and how the University of Minnesota blamed the University of Hamburg, and how the University of Hamburg blamed Merck, and how Merck said nothing?) Shall I tell you of the reports of other dreamers being found, stumbling, disoriented, through open plains that had once been forests, blinking in the sudden unfiltered light? Shall I tell you how there were rumors that there were dozens of them, scores of them, hundreds of them, but that I never saw them for myself—that there were stories that they were divvied up like candies by the pharmaceutical companies and flown away to live their lives in sterile labs, where they may be living still, punctured with needles, their arms sprouting tangles of IVs, their legs harvested for scrapings of skin, of muscle, of bone?
⁷³
Shall I tell you how in 1966, when the first institutional review boards monitoring the use of human subjects in research projects was established, I nearly lost my dreamers, and by 1975—after Willowbrook, after Tuskegee, after the birth of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research—I had lost them for good?
⁷⁴

Shall I tell you of the scores of people (Sereny, Esme, the entire Stanford University Anthropology Department,
Harper’s Magazine
) who made me their enemy, who accused me of, variously, withholding the truth, distorting the truth, ruining a civilization, and ruining mankind’s hopes?
⁷⁵
Shall I tell you how bad followed bad to Ivu’ivu, how after the pharmacists flew out for the last time, they were replaced with fleets of missionaries, who were this time able to accomplish what their predecessors could not? Shall I tell you of the hundreds who were converted, how the remaining villagers on Ivu’ivu, their forests denuded and trampled and shorn, were taken over to U’ivu in boatloads to live in a tin-and-wood village on the eastern side of the island built by a particularly energetic group of Mormons from Provo?
⁷⁶
Shall I tell you how, when one of those
transplanted villagers—the chief’s proxy—tried to initiate the a’ina’ina ceremony, he was put into jail (a structure that had never existed until then, the U’ivuan king preferring more straightforward punishments such as abandoning the miscreant or casting him out to sea)? Shall I tell you how it was rumored that after Ivu’ivu had been picked clean of its wonders and exhausted of all its plants and fungi and flowers and animals and was left with only its beauty and mystery, the United States military—no, the French; no, the Japanese—was using it to test nuclear warheads? Shall I tell you how the king’s son, Crown Prince Tui’uvo’uvo, now the king himself, was whispered to be a puppet of some foreign military and how he took to strutting about U’ivu in an epaulet-trimmed wool jacket that he wore atop a sarong, his face vivid with sweat? Shall I tell you how there are really no new stories in cases like these: how the men turned to alcohol, how the women neglected their handiwork, how they all grew fatter and coarser and lazier, how the missionaries plucked them from their houses as easily as one would pick an overripe apple from a branch? Shall I tell you of the venereal diseases that seemed to come from nowhere but, once introduced, never left? Shall I tell you how I witnessed these things myself, how I kept returning and returning, long after the grant money had disappeared, long after people had lost interest, long after the island had gone from being an Eden to becoming what it was, what it is: just another Micronesian ruin, once so full of hope, now somehow distasteful and embarrassing, like a beautiful woman who has grown fleshy and sparse-haired and mustached?

Shall I tell you of how in the end the only person with whom I could chart the island’s changes—each, inevitably, an insult—was Meyers, the only other person who, like me, kept stubbornly going back, first with funding and then with his own money? Shall I tell you of one day in the spring of 1968 when we were walking through Tavaka (now a miserable, cluttered little town and renamed Tui’uvo, after the new king) and two small children—one a boy, one a girl, obviously siblings, the boy about five (or so I thought at the time) and watchful, the girl around three and giggly—began following us around? Shall I tell you of how Meyers and I bought them manamas, speared on a stick and rolled in grainy sugar, that were being sold by a deflated-looking woman from her tin-tabled stall, and watched
as they devoured them, the sugar stubbling their faces like beards? Shall I tell you how day after day they trailed us, as close as hens, and after we had returned from an exhausting, depressing trip to Ivu’ivu (coming back in the boat, which now had such a powerful motor that its nose heaved up from the water at a terrifying angle before smacking back down into it, we had avoided looking at one another, for to look would be to see our own sadness mirrored), they were there waiting for us, crouching on the dock like bookends? Shall I tell you how, after asking person after person who cared for these children—the girl Makala, the boy Muiva—and receiving nonanswers, or no answers at all, Meyers and I, almost as a whim, an impulse acquisition, took them back to the States with us?

Shall I tell you how Muiva was my first child, although of course I did not think of him at the time as my first, simply as my only, and my own? And how even after I learned that he was not five but seven, and even after I learned how much I had to teach him—how to eat, how to use the toilet, how to speak English; he was not unlike Eve in certain ways—I loved him anyway? Shall I tell you of what a sweet boy he was and what joy he brought me, and how the dream I had had on Ivu’ivu of carrying a sleeping child to bed was just as satisfying as I had hoped it might be, so satisfying in fact that I began to want to repeat it again and again? Shall I tell you of how I began to adopt other children—how once I began to pay attention, I found there were dozens, scores, who were parentless or as good as, their parents were so useless, so lost to alcohol and God—initially only boys, because I thought I could relate to them more easily, but then girls as well? Shall I tell you how Uva’s son brought me his own toddler, a two-year-old named Vaia, and asked me to take him with me? Shall I tell you of how when Meyers died in 1977, after a very quick bout with stomach cancer, I took Makala into my house as my sixteenth child, and, I thought, my last? Shall I tell you of how I was wrong, and then wrong again, and with each trip I made back to U’ivu—a biannual event that I had learned to dread even as I had accepted that it was inevitable—I would find myself returning with another child? Shall I tell you how I always looked for those two boys—now men, now undoubtedly with boys of their own—who were lost to me, the one from the a’ina’ina and the one who would lean against me and doze, and how I searched for and
hoped for something of them in every new child I collected, how I wanted to see the same steadiness in their eyes, feel the same trust as they leaned against me? Shall I tell you how with each new child I acquired, I would irrationally think,
This is the one. This is the one who will make me happy. This is the one who will complete my life. This is the one who will be able to repay me for years of looking
.