Well, that is not wholly true: I would do so again. I would not even have to consider it for a moment.
Two years later, then: I had my own lab in the Virology Department at the National Institutes of Health, where I would serve for the rest of my career. Cheolyu had returned to Korea, where he would eventually run his own lab at Seoul National University. I still had the dreamers under my care, although I saw less and less of them. They were forever supervised by those running various tests on them: bloodwork and physical and mental and reflex exams.68 The institute had converted a spare lab into a very nice, snug space and outfitted it with trees and a leafy floor, and they were given attendants to help wash and clothe them, because although the space was windowless — we didn’t want such a foreign view, of the trees’ bare black limbs, to worry or distress them — the lab could be chilly at night and it wasn’t practical for them to go naked. We had also slowly converted them to a Western diet, and there was much to learn there about the effects of weaning a primitive group of people off a fully hunted-and-foraged diet and putting them on a more processed one. I am sorry to say that they were nearly insensate by this point, and the first time I saw Mua in a wheelchair being pushed back to their sleeping quarters after a day of tests — his head lolling back stupidly, his arms arranged slackly in his lap, his eyes open but skidding about — I felt a pang, remembering how quickly and purposefully he had once walked through the forest, how he had stretched his short legs into splits in order to straddle the enormous tree roots that calved from the ground. It was necessary, this work, and their decline was inevitable, but I still sentimentally wished it could have gone better for them.69
The opa’ivu’ekes had not fared much better, and I admit now that I had underestimated how important their context was to their survival and well-being. There were many failed attempts to encourage them to mate, and still more to make them adhere to a regular diet. It occurred to me (belatedly) that I had never thought to properly investigate exactly what the opa’ivu’ekes ate, and so much time was lost in trying to find the right combination of food — the closest we got was a mix of sardines and various lettuces and fiddleheads — that would both tempt them and help them maintain their equilibrium. But as time went by they grew steadily more listless, and finally we killed the two older ones — one we preserved,70 one we dissected — and concentrated our efforts on the younger ones, although the results were not encouraging.
I was more and more away from the lab, giving lectures here and there, writing papers, and so on, and therefore it was not until the end of 1961 that I was able to make my next visit to Ivu’ivu. Stories had reached me from different sources about how the number of researchers on the island at any time now surpassed the population of villagers themselves, about how a small settlement of tents had gone up for the roving brigades of Pfizer and Lilly scientists who traveled to and fro on their own planes and own motorized boats and who glared at one another across their self-imposed demarcation lines, each group determined to beat the other, about how swaths of the jungle had been trampled and cleared and the lives of animals and plants disrupted. Meyers called me from Cal one night, his stammer worse than ever; he had just returned from the island, he said, and described a scene that sounded like something out of a hellish version of Bruegheclass="underline" a filthy village square, dirt-smeared and fetid, and choking black fires and people everywhere.
I hoped Meyers might be exaggerating — I did not consider him wholly reliable on non-fungus-related matters — but it was with some trepidation and even reluctance that I set out on my journey. Now that I was a government employee, there was no waiting about for a transport to the island on which I might be able to beg a spot, and I sat in my seat at the back of the tiny plane, waiting for the jouncy landing that greeted one’s arrival on U’ivu. But to my surprise, our touchdown was smooth, silken almost, and when I stepped out of the plane, I saw the first major change: a runway, albeit just a length of perfectly planed dirt, but with all the bumps and stones and bits of shrubbery I remembered from the past removed. Indeed, the whole field had been razed and was now just a great acreage of emptiness: no grass, no little white flowers, just dirt so flat and clean it looked swept. I could feel something shift deep inside me: the first stirrings of dread.
I was met by a guide, one I’d not had before. He could have been anyone, but he spoke a little English, and he was wearing a sarong in dull mustard below a white man’s undershirt that was far too long for him. His hair was cut, cropped close around his ears. He led me not to a horse but to an orange-rusted jalopy, a Frankenstein of a car, cut and soldered from many pieces and makes, of which he was very proud, and drove me haltingly over to the dock, where a new deck had been clumsily built. There stood the boatman — the one from my original trip all those years ago, who pretended now, as ever, not to know me — but his vessel was, if not new, newer at least, and fitted with a proper motor that roared and belched as we bounced across the sea. And then, in half the time as before, there was Ivu’ivu, but as we rounded the corner to pull into the lagoon, another shock: the jungle had been pruned back so far that there was now a real beach, a scoop of mucky gray sand, the greenery forming an untidy hairline to its rear. On the sand was a beaming man, waving his arms at me as the boat dredged itself up onto shore.
“No-ton! No-ton!” said the man, and I realized with a start that it was Uva, though not the Uva of my memory.71 This Uva was wearing pants — khakis, far too large for him — and a real button-down shirt, albeit one that had obviously been washed and rewashed and patched with runnels of stitches so dense they looked like scar tissue. His hair, like the boatman’s and the guide’s, had been hacked away at as well, and the bone had been removed from his nose, though on either side of his nostrils he carried a dark brown stain where the holes had closed over and healed.
“How you?” asked Uva, smiling proudly, and this — his newly acquired English, and his pride in it — made my skin prickle for some reason, and the enormity of the island’s changes loomed large and clear in my mind.
Everywhere were differences. A real path had been dozed uphill, and although we still had to traverse it by foot, Uva now pulled my supplies in a wheeled cart. He was not used to wearing so much clothing and sweated copiously. At one point he fumblingly unbuttoned his shirt partway, and when I took off my own to encourage him, he gazed at my nakedness longingly before turning away and buttoning back up: you could almost see the determination in his face, his new dedication to being fully clad. But why? I wanted to ask. One of the things the Ivu’ivuans had gotten right, after all, was their adherence to their own nudity; in such humidity, clothes were not only foolish but ill-advised.
As we went, I could not help but study the treescape around me, trying to map the developments. Was it quieter than it had been last time, less filled with birdcall and monkey screech and insect flutter? Were there fewer manama trees and less fruit on the ground? Did the kanava trees seem less grimed with vuaka shit than they had before? Did that moss always look so trodden, or had someone recently walked across it? Was the passage between that stand of palm trees always so forgiving, or had it been widened recently by hand? Was that a white card, a botanist’s label, affixed to that orchid, or was it in fact a butterfly, its wings folded into a flat square?