63 Fa’a was the third son in a well-respected clan of wild boar hunters who were known throughout Tavaka for their generosity and bravery. But so strong was the U’ivuans’ distrust of Ivu’ivu that his extended journey there — in the company of three ho’oalas, no less — greatly damaged his and his family’s reputation. When it was revealed that he had died on the island, his family (although not, significantly, his wife) denounced and later disowned him. Norton later told me that he heard whisperings among the Tavakans about Fa’a’s suspected fate: that he had been eaten by the Ivu’ivuans (a persistent fable), that he had become one of them, and, most damningly, that he had become the very thing that he had gone to search for, that not-human, not-beast hybrid that roved the island still — a mo’o kua’au.
It is unlikely that Fa’a would have confided in Uva and Tu that he had, however accidentally, come into contact with an opa’ivu’eke; the taboo was simply too powerful. But it is likely that they somehow contrived a story that rendered them unwilling participants in Fa’a’s scheme and therefore blameless. At any rate, they joined the rest of the family in excluding Fa’a’s wife and children, although they reportedly did give them gifts of food and supplies on an occasional basis.
The fate of Fa’a’s wife and children remains unknown. Because all U’ivuans share a single family name — in this case, all three of them would have been Utuimai’ele, or “Of Tuimai’ele,” because they were all born during that king’s reign — Norton would later find them impossible to track down. Given their elusiveness, he would conjecture that they might eventually have been forced to disown Fa’a as their husband and father in order to reenter society, or, alternatively, that they decided to undergo conversion at the hands of the Christian missionaries who would come to dominate island life in the following decade.
64 Norton later compiled many of these illustrations and descriptions into a book called The Painted Sea: A Naturalist’s Guide to Ivu’ivu (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972). He is in fact credited with discovering both the orchid (Miltonia perinia) and the insect, a relation of the staghorn beetle (Draco perinia). Excellent examples of the latter are on view at the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution, but botanists have been unable to create ideal situations for the orchid to thrive anywhere but in the upper Amazon region of Brazil and in the Wai’ale’ale Valley of Kauai, Hawaii.
65 Tallent had in fact made a map of the route to the turtle lake on their first excursion to it with Mua, but Norton was too intimidated to ask to borrow it — although he did tell me that he rummaged through Tallent’s bag one night when he was asleep but was unable to find it. Unfortunately, this map is now lost to scholars, along with Tallent’s other papers.
66 The hundred that had been raised from the age of fifteen months.
67 “Mental Deterioration Observed Among Subjects After Having Consumed the Opa’ivu’eke Turtle of Ivu’ivu,” Annals of Nutritional Epidemiology (January 1958), vol. 47, 259–72.
68 For at least a decade after their arrival in the States, the dreamers continued to manifest (physically, at least) the reflexes and health one would typically associate with a sixty-year-old. In later years their cholesterol levels, heart rate, lung capacity, and bone density would worsen dramatically, which Norton attributed to their compromised diet and lack of physical activity. However, without access to a control group on Ivu’ivu, this is impossible to conclude definitively. (For further explication, see note 74.)
69 The move to NIH marked the end of another chapter as well. In the month before Norton left Stanford, the remaining mice from the first group of his initial experiment died, at the age of 120 months. Group C expired shortly after the move to NIH, as did the pinkies from Group B, all around the ages of 118 to 121 months — more than six times their natural lifespan.
70 This specimen is still at NIH and can be viewed by special request.
71 Uva would have been about fifty-two at the time.
72 Norton had proven incontrovertibly that the consumption of the opa’ivu’eke would grant its subject an impossibly extended lifespan. What he did not know — nor indeed did anyone else — was how. This was not Norton’s fault; the difficulty was that the science simply did not exist even to give a name to the problem, much less to provide its solution. You must remember that what we now know as the study of genetics is a very, very immature field; as Norton notes, by the time the science was available to theorize that the opa’ivu’eke prolonged an organism’s life by inactivating telomerase, it was too late. (Simply stated, telomerase is the naturally occurring enzyme that degrades telomeres and thereby limits each cell’s number of divisions; in the absence of telomerase, cells become “immortal” and the person ceases to age. What is theorized is that while the opa’ivu’eke stopped the action of telomerase in most of the body’s cells, it for some reason failed to cease the process in certain parts of the brain. This is why, although the body and certain parts of the mind — especially the part governing hearing and gross motor skills — remained remarkably intact, the parts of the brain that control fine motor skills, sight, and reason were not similarly affected.)
This, however, is the story of science. A man discovers something. He doesn’t know what it is or what it’s for or what it might solve, but he knows he has unearthed another piece of a puzzle whose entire shape and picture and form he can only guess. He spends the rest of his life trying to find that next piece, but because he doesn’t even know what he’s looking for, it is very hard work and he is unlikely to find a solution. Then comes a man from the next generation. He sees the piece of the puzzle that has been found and he finds the next. So now there are two pieces. And then there are three, and four, and five. But at no point, no matter how many pieces there are, is any one man ever able to say he knows what the puzzle’s ultimate shape will reveal. When he thinks he is working toward a picture of a horse, he will suddenly find a fish’s fin and realize he’s been wrong all along. Then he thinks he’s trying to build an image of a fish, but the next piece that slots into place will be a bird’s wing lifted in flight. To be a scientist is to learn to live all one’s life with questions that will never be answered, with the knowledge that one was too early or too late, with the anguish of not having been able to guess at the solution that, once presented, seems so obvious that one can only curse oneself for not seeing what one ought to have, if only one had looked in a slightly different direction.
73 For years Norton petitioned the various pharmaceutical companies that were thought to have imported mo’o kua’aus to their labs for news of the four dreamers — Ivaiva, Va’ana, Ukavi, and Vi’iu — he had left behind. Perhaps not surprisingly, he was disappointed time and again, and today it is unknown whether the dreamers he was forced to abandon were captured or eluded their fate by either hiding (which seems unlikely) or dying (for which one can only hope, for their sakes).