PART ONE

The sun appears on the horizon, its light piercing through our window, and my father stands and walks over to my sleeping-place.

Every morning he wakes while it’s still dark and spends his first hour readying himself for the new day. He is the head architect of our village, but before that he is the head of our household. He first checks that no mishap has occurred overnight—he makes sure all our possessions are still in place; he prepares a breakfast of berries, grasses and perhaps some leftover meat; he performs any particular chores that need to be done; and after doing all these things he sits down to think. To think about the state of the world, to think about the things that are wrong in our village. To think about what might be over the vast horizon that surrounds our island.

As soon as a glimmer of sunlight appears in the window, sparkling in golden jubilation over the waters between the horizon and our shore, my father stands and comes to wake me. “Son,” he says, “Wake up. It’s time to leave.” I roll off my bed of reeds, still drowsy, dress in my hunting clothes and step outside our house, where my father is waiting for me. “Let’s go,” he says as he hands me my weapon. Today it’s a spear, meaning we will hunt mo'aki. I follow him behind our home, out of our village and up the hill into the forest.

The ground is rough; it takes a sure foot to keep pace with my father and run without falling. I know where we’re headed, for we go this way every few days—it’s where the mo'aki gather in the morning. After running through the thickets of the forest for several minutes, the trees are sparse—and quite a bit wider. We slow to a careful walk, creeping between the trees with our eyes and minds acute, looking about for any sign of movement. From time to time a bird might leave its perch, creating a ruckus in the canopy above, or a small creature might scurry by, but we’re not concerned with those things: Right now we are only searching for mo'aki.

We find them. Twenty or so of the large creatures, gray and black with large bodies and no neck. They have tiny heads with long snouts that reach to the ground. They move slowly with a sway, their hair rippling as their muscles work beneath taut skin. They are almost silent, quietly cooing each other and moving soundlessly. We circle them slowly, also careful not to make a sound, and mentally formulate a plan of action. It is not necessary for either of us to discuss this plan with the other, for it’s always the same: First, find a strong one standing idly. My father finds his target first; I find mine soon after. A moment later, we raise our spears in unison, aim our strikes and release our weapons.

Instantly the mo'aki are uproarious. When they are in leisure the mo’aki move surprisingly slow. But when provoked, they move surprisingly fast. And recklessly. I marvel at the flurry of motion that, not a minute ago, was a number of distinct bodies. From many, one.

Lying motionless amidst the chaos are two dead mo'aki, perfectly impaled by our spears. My father and I enter the fray immediately; eager to catch a mo'aki standing idly and kill it. We remove our short-knives from their sheaths and lunge dexterously in one motion, slashing in expert movement. In a short time, the mo'aki are gone. All but the dead ones, of which there are three.

Sparkling, scarlet blood covers the scene of the ambush. It gathers in pools where the mo'aki fell, soaking the leaves. It drips from the branches of nearby trees, running down the trunks in branching veins. The sunlight shines in the tiny droplets of blood that splattered everything in sight. A million little bulbs of light, suspended in the trees, glittering like the sunset. The blood is a beautiful thing.

We tie the legs of the mo'aki and carry them on our shoulders—I carry one and my father carries two—back toward our home. A successful hunt.

The walk back is harder and seems longer—the mo'aki are heavy. Now, though, there is no need to walk carefully, so we bend our legs and step heavily. The birds above scatter and cry as we head toward our village. The creatures on the ground scamper away in the shadows.

In time we come to the top of the last hill before our village, and we look down over the arrangement of grass and wooden buildings. Many of them—most importantly the store in the center—were designed by my father. Everybody in the village had a hand in their construction, but I can tell by the glimmer in my father’s eyes whenever he looks at the buildings that he thinks of them as his own.

We continue walking forward, the mo'aki forcing us downhill. Something seems wrong: The village is too still, too quiet, even though it’s early in the day. On any other day, I could hear the sounds of the village coming to life, the rising sun giving birth to a new day. It’s something ineffable, and usually unnoticed. Until it’s not there, that is. I dismiss this all, though, as something of my imagination and I focus instead on the hoots of the creatures in the forest far behind me as I continue walking. I smile at my father walking beside me, but his eyes are fixed on the village and he doesn’t see me.

We reach the bottom of the hill and arrive at our village. We wind between the buildings and walk straight to our house, neither of us saying a word, and hang the mo’aki on the hooks on either side of our front door. Once my father finishes hanging his, he disappears inside the house, leaving me to finish hanging my mo’aki alone.

Our house is in the heart of the village and, standing outside alone now, I realize again how unnaturally quiet it is. I finish hanging my mo’aki and watch the blood as it runs from the hook and down the creature’s body, dripping onto the ground with soft plunks. I look at the sun, now well above the horizon and shining over our village, and I search for birds in the sky. There are none. Plunk after plunk collects in a small shining puddle of blood.

My father startles me as he storms out the front door. “They’re not here,” he says. I do not ask who; I know “they” to be my mother and sister. On any other day, my mother and sister would be preparing breakfast for themselves and me, or gathering and distilling water from the ocean, had they already finished preparing breakfast. But today is not any other day. Today is today.

I follow my father down the path toward the village center, and I imagine what’s going through his mind. He is generally level-headed and rational; even when an inscrutable problem arises, he simply and silently works to correct it. It’s something I admire about him. How he wastes neither time nor energy, where other men in the village get angry or become violent, and I can hear them yell from far away. But today, he is visibly nervous; the muscles in his back are tense.

As we round the path along the village store, we are stopped by a group of people clustered in the path in front of our elder’s hut. Murmuring hushedly to themselves, the people clamor to get closer to the door. My father and I walk closer to them and suddenly—with shrieks and yelps—the crowd shouts loudly with surprise as the people jump back, making room for something. Now they begin chasing forward. Amidst the clatter, I cannot discern anybody’s particular speech. I don’t know what’s happening. I look to my father, and he seems just as confused, although I can tell by his eyes that he is only scanning the crowd for my mother and sister. “Do not worry,” I say, although it’s not my place. “It looks like the whole village is here.” The speed of the crowd picks up, and we must hustle to match them. We are running toward the ocean.

As we chase after the villagers, I see that they are chasing after the elder, who is hunched and hobbling like a monkey. They are not chasing to try and catch him, but only out of curiosity to see where he is going. In our village, only one person sees the elder every day: his witch doctor. The rest of us see him every twentieth night at the village meeting, which is held in the stone circle on the beach. Besides that, he never leaves his hut. You can understand the commotion.

It strikes me that this is the first time in all my life I’ve seen the elder in the daylight. He is not wearing any of the ceremonial jewelry or the headdress that he always wears at our meetings, and I think that I would not have even recognized him, but for the distinct design of the tattoo on his back. His skin is very light—he looks sickly—and his hair is long and tangled.

After a few moments we arrive at the stone circle, and the elder rushes to the center while the villagers stand at its circumference in speculation, just like in our meetings. The sun is high in the sky and its reflection shines off the water, the sand and the roofs of our huts. The waves lap the shore with a soft, even rhythm. Everyone’s eyes are on the elder but mine; I look from villager to villager. Finally I find my mother and sister standing across the circle, but they do not see me. I turn to tell my father, but I can tell by his face he already sees them.

Suddenly the elder raises his hands into the air, head tilted upward and eyes closed tightly and begins to waddle in circles. The villagers are all staring at him, confused. “Should we help him?” they ask themselves. “I think we should, but I want to see what he’s going to do.” Nobody says a word, but everybody knows everybody else is thinking the same thing. Here and there the villagers look to one another, but most of them are transfixed with the elder.

“My children!” shouts the elder, after a string of incomprehensible cries. All heads snap to face him—somehow even the ones that already were. His joints shake visibly; I can hear them creaking. “Today I was thinking. And I discovered something... Something we need to do.” I am staring at the elder, begging him to continue. I assume everyone else is too, but I cannot make myself avert my gaze.

“The trees,” continues the elder, his body twitching. “The trees grow upward, they grasp for the sky. Each passing day the trees get taller.” He shudders, then bows down until his nose touches his knees and suddenly whips upward in involuntary convulsion. He continues as if nothing happened, “The trees want to reach the sun. That is the noblest goal.” He pauses. “We are better than the trees. We can reach the sun also, and we will do it first.” The elder closes his eyes and inhales.

“When I was meditating today, I saw us. We were cutting down trees to build a tower. The highest tower to ever be built. A tower so tall we could climb it and speak to the sun.” The elder pauses for a minute and shuts his eyes peacefully. The villagers look at each other, eager to hear their neighbors’ thoughts. They begin to talk quietly—unsurely—offering their opinions on what the elder might have actually said and whether they heard him correctly and whether he was crazy and what a magnificent meditation he must have had in order to leave his hut in broad daylight...

“Children,” says the elder, cutting off their conversations. “We will start work immediately. You,” he says, pointing to my father, “You will come with me now. And you—,” he points to another man, “—also. And you, and you.” Without more words, the elder pushes his way through the crowd, back toward his hut. The four men he selected follow him and the rest of us stand and stare as they file by.

We stand transfixed, all lost in thought. All I can think of is what my father will tell me when he returns from the elder’s hut.

A few minutes pass and the villagers, a few at a time, step out of their trances, look around and wonder why they’re standing on the shore. They shrug to themselves and return to their homes, trying along the way to remember what they were doing before being interrupted by the morning’s ordeal.

As the last few are leaving, I stand and look at the horizon. It separates the dark blue of the ocean from the light blue of the sky with a clean, severe cut. The horizon itself is not a thing, but rather is the name we give to the imaginary line between earth and sky. It is something that isn’t a thing, and I wonder what is beyond it. I trace the horizon with my eyes from left to right, as far as it spans, and slowly move my eyes along the water toward the shore. Far away, the water is smooth, but up close it is jagged with waves and surf. The sky seems lighter near the horizon. There are no clouds. A slight breeze blows, barely detectable. I can only sense it because it brushes my hair slightly. With it wafts a scent—the smell of cut open mo’aki. I realize I should be helping my mother and sister prepare the mo’aki. I turn and walk back home.

When I get home two of the mo’aki are already gutted and the other is headless, positioned on its back with a belly-wound running from its neck to its tail. The halo of blood around it grows slowly. The liquid covering its entrails sparkles in the sunlight; my sister is bent over the creature with a knife in her hand, ready to remove the glistening organs. It’s a site I see every day of my life, but I can never help but stare and think. I wonder whether my body looks like that on the inside. My belly rumbles.

My sister digs the knife into the mo’aki and begins scooping out its entrails. She frees their tubes from the body, bundles them tightly in her hands and tosses them onto the pile of organs from the other mo’aki. She does this without emotion. When we were younger, I remember she was disgusted by the task, but she has grown used to it.

Once the entrails are removed, my mother helps my sister break and cut off the legs of the mo’aki and then crack the torso into a few manageable pieces. Now I help them. We each pick up a section and begin to peel back the skin with a knife. It’s hard, breaking the connections between skin and muscle that aren’t meant to be broken. I poke the knife in the small space and gouge it carefully along the muscle’s surface, so I don’t tear the skin.

Soon, enough is disconnected from the meat that I don’t need the knife anymore. I grab the skin in one hand and pull; the skin comes free with a thousand dull snaps. Once all the skin is removed, we scrape the fat off the meat and tear out the bones, until all we have in our hands is a tender slab of muscle. We pile up the muscles on top of a sheet of reeds and reach for the next mo’aki section. Soon there are no more. Just a pile of skin and bones, and a lot of meat, to show for it.

My sister goes into the house. A moment later she emerges with the water-bucket in her arms and heads toward the shore, and my mother goes into the house and gets her cooking herbs. I prepare to build the fire.

First, I gather scraps of leaves from the ground around our house and bring them to the fire-pit. Now, I get my bow and wrap a stick in its string, and position the stick next to a small piece of wood that I hold with my foot. I hold a cup-shaped rock in my hand and use it to cover the stick—this way it can rotate freely. Rapidly, I lunge the bow forward and backward as I push down hard on the stick. After a few moments, I check the piece of wood under my feet and see it has begun to blacken. I move it closer to the stick and repeat the process until a lot of it has blackened. “A lot” is when it starts smoking. I sprinkle some tinder over the smoking, black wood, cup my hands over the pile and gently blow at it. The tiny glimmer of a yellow flame emerges and grows quickly. A fire is born.

I position the spit-apparatus on either side of the growing flame. These are stalks with forked ends that serve to hold the spit, a long and narrow stick, directly above the fire. I don’t put the spit in place yet; it would burn up without any meat on it, and I’d have to fashion a new one. I made that mistake once, and now I am always careful.

My sister returns with the bucket full and together we plop the slabs of mo’aki muscle into the water. My mother emerges from the house, followed by a sprinkling trail of green flakes; her clenched hands are so full with her blend of herbs that many fall out as she walks. It doesn’t matter, because herbs are plentiful. She walks to the bucket, my sister and I kneeling on either side, and she drops in the herbs with a whip of her wrist. They tarry in the air, fluttering downward like lazy insects, and land in the bucket—well, most of them do. The first few flakes sit on the water’s surface, but as more hit the surface and their weight compounds, they fall through.

The meat will soak in the water for some time, and then my mother and sister will move the slabs of meat from the bucket to the spit, where they will cook. In the meantime I go to the other part of the village to my teacher’s hut for today’s lesson. I am training to become a sculptor, to make statues and bowls from stone and wood. All boys my age take up a trade—sculpture, wood carving, architecture, philosophy, medicine. Every day after hunting with our fathers, we train with an expert while our mothers and sisters prepare the food. Depending on the trade and the teacher, we may train alone or in groups. My lessons are always one-on-one; my teacher tells me that this is better for concentration and precision.

I enter his hut. It’s dim inside, the only light coming from a few small holes in the roof. “Come in, sit down,” my teacher says to me before I see him. He’s sitting on his stump, his pale body lurching as he carves a block of wood. He motions for me to sit down at my stump, where my materials are already laid out. We exchange our usual greetings as I sit down and get ready to work. From his words, I gather that he wasn’t at the shore this morning.

“I don’t bother myself with all that,” he says. “Whether the elder knows what he’s doing, or really believes what he says—it’s not my concern. I am here carving wood, just as I was yesterday, just as I will be tomorrow.”

“But don’t you ever want to do something else? Something different?” I ask him.

“Why would I? I do not decide when it rains,” he says.

“Well,” I say. “When I look at the birds in the sky, when I see them flying, I think of the places they can go. The things they see. I like looking at the ocean and thinking of what’s out there. What I’d see if I could fly out there.”

“We aren’t birds,” my teacher tells me. “We don’t come and go. This is our life, on this island. This is my life, in this hut. This is where we were born; it’s where we’re meant to be. You can embrace that, or you can waste your time dreaming about how things could be different.”

“But it’s not a waste, dreaming. Do you really think that?”

“Dreaming is a waste if you don’t do anything to make it reality. It’s like a story with no ending.”

“But we can’t fly. How could I ever see what’s out there, past the horizon? Since we can’t, isn’t it just something fun to imagine it?” I wait for an answer, but it doesn’t come.

I look back down at my bowl and scrape the inside with a sharp rock in terse strokes. We continue working in silence—from in here, we can only faintly hear the sounds of the village, and even those are muted. My teacher offers me some advice every now and then (somehow, without even looking up), and in time I finish carving my bowl.

“You may go now,” my teacher tells me. “I will show you how to burnish it tomorrow,” and I get up to leave. He is still working on the block of wood, which has now taken the form of one of the small, decorative figures my teacher is famous for making. I’ve never seen one like it, though: Its cuts are more deliberate, more severe. Its face is more weary. It looks sad.

I walk back to my home, and my father is there, sitting on the mat. The mo’aki is cooking on the spit, and the smell is delicious. Someone in the village is playing drums, and the soft beats dance around my head.

“Well, what happened?” I ask him right away.

“The elder wants me to design the tower,” he says. “Everyone will help build it. He wants to start tomorrow.”

“What do you think?” I ask him.

“About the tower? We could use every tree on the island and never reach the sun. But the elder’s got the idea in his mind, and he won’t listen to reason. I can’t argue with his vision.”

“But Father, why would you even begin if you know you’re going to fail?” I ask him.

“I have to try. Not only because it’s my duty, but because it’s my work. If I didn’t try, I would be failing myself,” he says as he gets up to go in the house.

“But if you know you’ll fail, you will, don’t you think?”

“If the tower is a failure, it won’t be me who failed. I’m going to begin planning before the village meeting tonight,” he says as he walks away. He does his drawing by carving on reeds, which he stores in a special area of our house. My mother and sister come outside when they see him get his drawing things—they know better than to bother him while he is working.

The mo’aki smells finished. My mother and sister go to the spit with a large bowl and remove the slabs for dinner. We eat outside; my mother gives my father food inside. The neighbors are also eating outside, and we chat with them about nothing—about the weather, the morning, tomorrow.

After dinner we go off to visit our friends. My sister and I go together; we’ll play games with the other children. We might go to the shore and play in the sand and water. My mother visits with the other mothers; they sit and talk. My father stays and works.

Some time later, while we’re playing stones at the foot of the hill, we hear a drum rhythm that we all recognize as the call for the village meeting. The call has always interested me; it’s performed with only two drums, but it sounds like a thousand. Low, heavy beats mesh with light pangs. Their energy pulls the villagers from their homes. They look confused, stepping out of their front doors and looking around—the village meeting shouldn’t be for 12 more days. They probably figure it has something to do with what happened this morning, so they shrug and call their families and start walking toward the shore.

“We should head over there,” says one of my friends.

“Yes,” I say as I go by my sister. The rest of us stand up and we all walk to the shore.

On the beach is a familiar scene: A small fire burns inside the great stone circle, which is already surrounded by people, all sitting. The elder sits on a rock near the fire, his head slightly bowed. He looks angry, or perhaps nervous—the light from the fire casts flickering shadows on his face; it’s difficult to see what he’s thinking. I look behind me and see people streaming from all paths of the village. By the looks of it, almost everyone is here. The meeting will begin soon.

After a few moments, the elder stands and says, “Good evening, villagers! I am glad to see you all here; no doubt you were confused to hear the call today, for our meeting should not be for 12 more days.” As he speaks, he walks in a circle, looking eye-to-eye at his audience. “I have decided to move it to today,” he continues, “because of what happened this morning, which I think all of you know about.

“Like I said earlier, we will begin work right away on the tower. In my vision, we were constructing the tower in the summer—so it shall be. I have met with our chief architect and some key tradesmen of our village, and I am proud to say that we can start as soon as tomorrow. I am also proud to say the project will involve every one of you. The trees grow alone, and that is why they never reach the sun. Let us learn from their example, for if all the trees in the world were to stack on top of each other, surely they would reach the sun. That is what we must do, all working together.

“Now, the tower will be built in the space near the village store. It will be narrow, and tall of course. We will climb it by ladder, and there will be a landing every so often. Builders, tomorrow morning you will come to that space and we will begin building. Your students will accompany you. Woodsmen, you will give the rest of the men lessons in felling and cutting trees. All of you will report to the forest tomorrow morning. Again, the students as well. Before you report to work, though, you will hunt with your families in the morning, and bring your game directly to the village store. Women—young and old—you will spend the day preparing food for the workers. Some of you will cook and some of you will gather. From now until we finish, what food is yours belongs to everybody.

“I want to stress the importance of this task. The sun planted this thought in my mind so that we may have an opportunity to speak to him. Even I can only wonder what beautiful things he has to say to us. He, the creator of all we know. This is a chance that generations of our ancestors would have given anything for. We should be excited to have it. You should be excited to be able to make it a reality.”

He stops talking and looks into the fire, reflecting for a moment. He looks back up and says, “Are we in agreement?” The crowd answers affirmatively. If any one of them thinks the elder is mistaken, or crazy, none of them show it. As we walk away, back toward our homes, I am surprised to hear a lot of excited talk: “We could talk to the sun! I can’t wait!” “What do you think he has to tell us? It must be important.” “The sun—that’s so high. I bet you can see the whole island from there!” So many heads are turned up toward the sky.

I wonder whether I’m the only person who thinks the task is impossible. No matter how inspired, no matter how ambitious we are, I don’t think there are enough trees, like my father said. And who knows what else may happen while we build the tower. The elder, of all people, should know better than to upset the balance of things. I suppose he assumes that the sun will protect us as we work to meet him. But if he wanted to talk to us so badly, couldn’t he just come down here?

I thought my father thought like I do—he ought to know the tower will never be finished. But he works as if he doesn’t. Is he too timid to disobey the elder? Is that what this is about? How can one man be so powerful that none of us can cross him? I know he was placed here by the sun—or rather his ancestors were—but he seems just as human as I am. There is so much about the world I don’t understand.

When we are back at home, I ask my father, “What does everybody else think of the elder’s plan?”

He smiles at me, but it’s a sad smile. “I think most people are excited,” he says. “A few doubt him, but they wouldn’t dare show it, not even to their close friends.”

“But how can that be?” I ask. “It seems too obvious that it’ll never work.”

“People trust in the elder. For most of them, he’s all they have. He was brought down, through the generations, from the sun himself, so people see him as the authority. Whatever their intuition tells them, the elder is always right—never to be questioned.”

“Do you think of him like that?” I ask. It’s something we’ve never discussed before. It’s never been important.

“I think,” he starts. “Well, you oughtn’t to worry so much about what others think. Worry about yourself. I used to be like you, but somewhere along the way I changed.” He pauses. “Try not to let that happen to you—keep your eyes wide.” I nod, and notice that my mother and sister have already gone to bed. “You should go to bed too,” my father says. “So should I. It looks like we all have a long day tomorrow.”

In the morning, my father wakes me up, just like every other day. “Son,” he says. “It’s time to go.” It isn’t for a few minutes that I remember all of yesterday’s strange events, and it takes a moment for me to realize they weren’t just a dream. My father and I are walking up the hill to the forest, knives tucked at our left sides. Knives today—that means monkeys. I am doubly sure because my father carries a basket of chopped fruit; we use those to capture the monkeys in our traps. We use the knives to kill them.

Many years ago, the villagers didn’t know how to catch animals. All they ate was fruit and herbs, and of course one day they ran out of fruit. They were starving, and many people died of hunger. One day a man was walking alone on the beach, wondering what he could do to save his family. His wife and children were sick, their bodies thin and frail. They say the man was speaking to the moon, looking for an answer. The moon didn’t say anything, but apparently he heard the man for, as the story goes, as the man was walking, he saw something glint near the forest. Curious, and hopeless, he decided to see what it was.

As he neared the glinting object, he saw it was a pot—the brightest, smoothest pot he’d ever seen, immaculately crafted from some cold, yellow material. Besides its shocking appearance—he saw himself reflected in it—the man noticed the pot smelled of the ripest fruit he’d ever smelled. Overtaken by hunger and greed, he reached his hand into the narrow opening of the pot and grasped inside. He felt chunks of fruit, perfectly cut, and he grabbed as many as would fit in his hand. But when he tried to remove his hand from the pot, he was devastated: His hand wouldn’t fit. He was stuck!

Confused (it must have been because of the hunger, for his mistake seems obvious to me), he tried again and again for a few minutes, but no matter how many times he tried, his fist wouldn’t fit through the pot’s opening. He eventually realized the fruit he was holding was to blame; he dropped a few pieces and tried again, to no avail. He found that even when his hand held only one chunk of fruit, it was too big to fit through the opening—his hand itself was the exact size.

Just then, they say, a monkey howled in the forest, and an idea occurred to him. He picked up the pot—it was heavy—and carried it into the forest. With only his hands, he dug a hole big enough for the pot, the moon smiling above him. When the pot was hidden underground, he retreated and hid behind some foliage. Even from there, the smell was tantalizing. Soon enough, a monkey crept up to the pot’s opening, and stuck his hand in.

The ground rumbled for the monkey’s screeching howl. From his hiding place, the man could see the monkey jumping up and down in terror—he was stuck. The unbearable noise continued for a few minutes before the man realized what he’d done. Once he did, he sidled up to the monkey, who was too excited to notice, and twisted its head, killing it. The noise terminated like a dying ember, and the man shook the monkey’s corpse free. He dug up the pot and carried it and the monkey back to the village—a walk that would have been much more difficult without the excitement of the kill.

It was the middle of the night when he returned, but they say the man was shouting victoriously, probably louder than the monkey had screamed. “I’ve killed a monkey!” he said. “I know how to do it!” People emerged from their homes in tired astonishment, and they celebrated. Over the next weeks, the people ate monkey for all meals, and the sick eventually became well. The fruit trees bore again, and all became well.

Today, there are similar pots planted throughout the forest. Anybody can use them, as long as they’re cleaned afterward. That’s most of the work.

My father and I walk around to a few of the pots and push chunks of fruit into the openings. It seems a waste to use perfectly good fruit only as bait; I always salvage it when I clean the pots. Once all the pots are stuffed, we walk away, slowly and quietly.

It’s only a moment before we hear a familiar sound: the obstreperous hoot of a monkey. The sound, pervasive as it seems, is easy to trace, and my father and I walk toward it. We see the monkey, hopping about madly, and close in. I can only imagine how that man so long ago could restrain himself from laughing—because I never can. It doesn’t seem to matter, though; we don’t even have to sneak up on the animal, because it’s so preoccupied. It’s almost too easy. My father grabs the animal by the head, the most immobile part of the animal, and slits the monkey’s neck with his knife.

“Dig out the pot and take it to the edge of the forest,” he says. I begin scraping away the dirt. Almost immediately, we hear the familiar howl from another one of our traps. My father goes alone while I’m working on this one; he leaves the first monkey’s corpse for me to carry as he goes to retrieve the second one.

By the end of it, we have three monkeys, and I find myself on the beach cleaning out the three pots and eating the fruit that the monkeys couldn’t get. I fill the pots with water, swish them around, turn them upside down and pound on the bottoms. A few repetitions on each pot, and they’re all clean. I carry them one by one back to the forest and bury them again, then head into the village.

I walk to the clearing near the village store, where the elder instructed us to meet. The place is crowded; women flood in and out of the store, and men fill the clearing, chatting in small groups. I notice they’ve clustered in a ring, leaving a large open space in the middle of the clearing. I make my way through the crowd to see what everyone is avoiding, and I am surprised—though I know I shouldn’t be—to see it’s just a large square carved in the ground, no doubt where the tower will grow. It’s interesting that something so simple as a carving in the ground, so powerless, can control so many people. Well, I suppose the square isn’t really doing the controlling... What it represents is.

I see my father inside the square, his back to me, talking to some men—I recognize them as the other men the elder chose yesterday morning. I don’t see the elder anywhere; it seems my father and the others are in charge.

After a moment, my father calls to the group of men and boys in front of him. “Builders!” he says, and they nod. He turns around to face the majority of us, and says, “Those of you who are trained woodsmen, you are responsible for assembling teams of men who are not, and teaching them. You are all woodsmen now. You will fell trees and bring the logs here for the builders. Three teams will be responsible for making rope from bark—I’ve already spoken to your leaders. I will be here with the builders; we will begin with the logs in the store. If everyone is in agreement, then let’s begin.”

Instantly, the crowd erupts in noise. The banter of the boys underlines the loud, low calls of the leaders. I look around and find some of the other boys in sculpture, and I walk over by them. They’ve already teamed up with a leader, so I join their group. Our leader is a man I’ve seen before, but I don’t know anything about him. When the noise quiets a bit, he tells us.

“I am a woodsman,” he says. “Now, so are you boys. Together we’ll chop down trees and cut them into logs.” He keeps it short, and beckons us to follow him. There are four of us; the three boys are my friends. We follow our leader into the forest, and after some time of walking, we stop at a tree.

“This will be our area, and this is our first tree,” he says as he points to the tree in front of us. As he talks, my friends’ and my eyes trace the tree upward, to the sky. There aren’t any clouds. “We use these tools,” he says as he reveals five small, thick knives, one for each of us. “And you hold it like this,” he demonstrates, “and take it to the tree like this.” He clenches the knife with his fist and swings his arm downward, pushing the knife into the trunk of the tree. He does this again and again, chipping away the bark until the white meat of the tree is visible, slowly getting torn away.

“Two of you can do a tree at a time, one on each side,” he says. “You two”—he points to me and another boy—“continue on this one. You two, take that tree. I’ll do this one.” My friend and I work, chipping away at the tree, until it wears thin and begins to lean toward me. I call to our leader, and he comes over. “Move out of the way,” he says to us. “You two, watch,” he says to the boys at the other tree. He grasps the trunk high above the cut, and leans into it, pushing the tree down. It snaps where we had cut it, and breaks free from the land. The trunk looks much more severe lying on the ground.

The other boys finish stabbing at their tree, and knock it down as our leader did to ours. “Now,” says our leader, “we cut off all the branches, and then cut the trunk in half. You do that simply, with the knife.” It’s easy enough; the branches are much smaller than the trunk.

Some time later, we have six admirable logs, clean of branches. “Now we must carry these to the store. They’re heavy,” says our leader. We carry them two logs at a time, two or three people to a log. Once we drop the logs off in the village, we trek back into the forest to cut down more trees. We repeat this all day: chopping trees, knocking them down, cutting off the branches and carrying them to the village. The novelty of doing something new wears off quickly; I’m not used to working outside, and I am tired.

By the end of the day, we’ve cleared out a fair area in the forest. Looking up, a large hole in the canopy is open to the sky, allowing the bright air to reach the forest floor, which had been much darker when we started. Whereas the forest is emptier, the store is much fuller, and the beginning skeleton of the tower is standing, held together by bark rope. Moreover, the scent of cooked meat and chopped fruit wafts throughout the village, and I see people casually rubbing their bellies.

Everyone is hungry; we’ve only taken one quick break to eat during the day, and I hear some groups complaining that they didn’t eat at all since breakfast. All day the women have been preparing food and the smell is complex and tantalizing. Dinner seems about ready.

“Good job today, everybody,” says one of my father’s colleagues. “The women have prepared for everybody a feast; the food is laid all down that path.” Immediately people head where he pointed, eager to fill their stomachs.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much food in one place in my life; we never have village-wide feasts like this. I think the village used to, long ago, until the population grew too large. There are piles and piles of meat and uncountable bowls of berries and chopped fruits. People walk around, sampling from each of the areas, chatting joyously. The glow from the fires of the houses along the path give a warm, orange glow to the twilight.

As time passes, people fill and begin to leave. Women begin to carry the leftover food from the path into their homes, for tomorrow. I meet up with my father, mother and sister, and together we walk back to our house. Along the way we chat about our days, chopping down trees and supervising building and preparing food for the entire village. All of us have worked hard all day, all experiencing new things. For a while, I forget that it’s all in the name of an egregious project.

The closer we get to our house, the more things return to normal. The smell of dinner that still lingers in the village center is not detectable here, and when I look over my shoulder I see no sign of the tower. From here, it’s easy to forget that today was unlike any other. Though I feel guilty for it, I am also strangely happy. It’s easy to fall asleep.

The next day—the next several days, actually—are the same: I hunt with my father in the morning, then I join my team to chop down trees all day, and we feast as a village afterward. It’s new and interesting at first but, after a few days, it’s tiresome. The work is hard and thankless.

At the end of each day, while I’m walking back to my house with my family, I look over my shoulder toward the tower. For a few days, I can’t see anything over the houses, but soon enough, the tower rises ominously, spying over the houses. It has no walls, only posts at each corner, and a ladder running up one side.

As the tower gets taller, the tone of the village gets more somber. Maybe it’s just me, though, given my bias. Even so, my teammates and I hardly talk while we work, where we used to pass the time telling stories. When we walk toward the village from the forest, the sight of the tower kills any sense of accomplishment for having chopped down another set of trees, where it should make us more proud.

I also notice that the forest is thinner now—when I look at the tree-line from the beach, patches of light poke through, laughing—and every day that passes, the nightly feast is more sparse. The hunters say it’s harder to come by monkeys, birds and mo’aki, and it gets worse every day. I think everybody notices these things, but nobody wants to be the first to mention them. My father and his colleagues try to keep the people enthusiastic by speaking loudly and making grand gestures toward the success of the tower; I can’t tell if they know it doesn’t help.

I haven’t even seen the elder for days, and this is his own project. He used to stand at the tower’s base, looking upward proudly, first every day all day, then only in the evenings. Then he stopped altogether. I think it’s unlikely that he gave up on his project but, if he did, I would not be surprised to find that he kept us working on it anyway. Some people say he’s ill, or busy receiving more visions involving the sun, or simply saving his energy for the long climb to the top of the tower when it’s finished. Nobody knows, and nobody wonders, and that’s what’s wrong with the people in this village. But I am only a boy. I can’t do anything about it, especially now that my father is heading the project, so I continue working, just like everybody else.

PART TWO

The work has been going on for some time. So many days, I think everybody has lost count of how many.

But today is different. It’s the morning, and everything has stopped. My father woke me up and, as soon as he did, I knew it. Instead of going hunting, we joined the many others at the beach. Together, we are standing, our backs to the sea, looking at the tree-line, in shock.

After so many days of doing the same thing, something is different. After so many days of doing the same thing, some line was finally crossed. Together, we look at the tree-line, or what once was the tree-line, and see only a handful of trees. Not too long ago, the forest was lush and the tree-line was full. Now it looks like the mouth of an old man, his teeth rotting, spaces between them. And in front of this, impossible to miss, is the tower, like a sick thorn growing out of the island, spreading its misery over the village.

As we stand here, people trickle in from the village. Some come straight from their homes; they felt it as soon as they woke up. We see other people walking down the hill carrying their hunting things, retreating because there is no longer anything to hunt. “How did this happen?” someone asks. “Just yesterday there was food; we could eat. Now what are we going to do?”

“We’ll do what we can,” says another man. “Today we can eat the leftover food from last night, and surely there is some fruit to be gotten, and some leftover meat at least.”

“That will feed us today, but what about tomorrow?” says the first man.

“I think the best thing will be to meet tomorrow when it comes. It’s important that we share everything, that we help each other.”

“No, I’m through with that. I’ll feed my family, myself and my neighbor, but I’m not going hungry for the entire village. And there won’t be enough anyway. Sure, we could share for a few days, eating little and getting hungrier and hungrier, and then we’ll all starve together! Wouldn’t it be better if some of us live on, even if most people go hungry?”

“It’s that tower, that vile tower,” says someone. “It was a terrible idea from the beginning, and nobody realized. I don’t care if the elder had a vision from the sun. Look where we are now. And where is the elder anyway? No one’s seen him for ages.”

“But it’s the sun! Look into the sky: Besides all this, the sun is all we have. It was what we had first and what we’ll have last. If we can’t trust the sun, what can we trust? So right now we need to trust that the sun knows what it’s doing, and we’ll end up okay.”

By now, most of the villagers are with us on the beach. Similar conversations spout up among every group of a few people, all raising the same complaints and questions. I hear raised voices here and there, angry people proclaiming they knew the tower was a terrible idea from the beginning. They should have raised their voices earlier. I stay near my father and listen to all the people around me, absorbing the myriad sounds. All but one of my father’s colleagues have joined him; they whisper to each other.

A cold worry sits on the heads of the villagers. They look into each other’s eyes critically, occasionally stealing glances at the pathetic tree-line. I hear the angry inflection of questions. My father and his colleagues are worried just like everyone else, maybe more. They feebly try to hide it.

Weeks ago, when I began to notice the forest thinning—I wonder now whether anyone else noticed it too, and I curse myself for not pressing the issue with my father—it was easy to pretend everything was all right. As time passed, surely everybody noticed what was happening; I think everyone just denied it. Now, though, nobody can do so. Nobody can pretend everything is all right. The truth is too urgent to hide behind our eyelids.

There’s no sense placing blame or asking why things couldn’t be different. None of it matters. The future matters. I can’t help but to imagine it in my mind: With no more trees, we have no more wood. No more work on the tower, obviously, and no more fire, except if we use the tower for firewood. But the forest wasn’t just wood: The animals lived in the forest, and we’ve killed them all for our feasts—many of them became leftovers that went bad.

No matter what we do, the animals won’t come back. There aren’t anymore animals on the whole island. Just tiny bugs. Now all we can eat are the fruit from the few trees left, and whatever bugs we can scrounge up. There’s no way we can feed everybody. People will go hungry; they’ll get sick. People will die.

My belly feels like it’s sinking in my legs. Picturing our doom, my mind is shadowy and my eyes are wide in my own private terror. Does anyone else realizes the severity of what’s happened?

I’m shaken from my thoughts as the chattering around me ceases. Urgent footsteps and hushed reactions pulse through the crowd, but I can’t find the source. After a moment of searching I see the last of my father’s colleagues emerging from the swarm of villagers to meet my father and the men at his sides. They wear shocked and flustered faces, as if they’d prefer him not to act so urgently in front of everyone else. When he reaches them, he stops for a moment to catch his breath, his arms flailing with anxiety, and whispers to them sharply. I cannot hear what he’s telling them, but I can feel its gravity.

After an eternity of conference, the whole village staring with their ears, the man turns to face us. “I have spoken with the elder,” he begins with hesitation, calculating every word. “He knows your concerns, and he told me to announce that we will suspend work on the tower. He is awaiting a vision from the sun to guide his final decision, but as of today nobody is to work on or touch the tower. You are all to return to your regular occupations.” He pauses and nods carefully, as if he knows more than he said, and backs off to stand with his colleagues.

The instant he does so, the crowd explodes with heated questions. The loudest among us try to make their voices heard—Why couldn’t the elder come speak? Where is he? What do you expect us to eat? I’m a forester, what’s my “regular occupation” now? What are we going to do? There’s no way we can survive!—but all together their voices blend into an incomprehensible, hysterical squall.

From the middle of the crowd, the loudest shouters sound quiet and distant. Background noise. What I hear most clearly are the quiet voices, concerned people muttering to their neighbors or musing to themselves: What am I going to do all day, besides dwell on my hunger? How can my sick child become well without food? I can’t be friendly with my neighbors anymore; they are my competition for food. Now that I think of it, I haven’t seen the elder in weeks... I try not to listen, because their words sharpen my own fears. I can’t, though, so I stand silently, waiting for something to happen.

And above all this, its shadow shrouding my insignificant village, is the tower. The greatest structure that has ever been built, easily the tallest in the world, a triumph of concept, something no one ever considered possible, the result of the combined and earnest effort of every single member of this village—but also the most evil.

The most useless. Especially now that no one is to touch it. We can’t work on it and we can’t dismantle it and we can’t even climb it. I picture the village operating as normal, but under the haughty supervision of the tower. Except the village will never operate normally again, not without any animals or trees.

The elder is supposedly the one person in this village gifted with foresight. How could he not have the foresight to predict this?

Above the tower, on his throne in the sky, sits the sun. He stares back at me and burns my eyes. I look away.

Once my eyes adjust, I realize that nearly everyone has left. A few others stand in clusters, still speculating. My father and his colleagues stand nearest to the water, talking. Judging by the emphatic gestures one of them is making, they are discussing something important. I turn around and head toward my teacher’s hut.

As soon as I enter, my teacher greets me. “Sit,” he says. “I’ve missed your company.” He talks calmly, unworried. “Where have you been? Your bowl still needs to be burnished.”

I’m confused by his words. “Haven’t you heard? The entire town has been working on the tower for weeks. Everybody. None of the boys have been going to their lessons. I learned to fell trees, and chop them into logs.”

“I’ve heard about that tower,” he says after a moment. “But I haven’t seen it.”

Before I ask, “How could that be?” he tells me: “I don’t leave my home. I actually can’t remember the last time I’ve gone outside. But I don't miss it. There’s only misery out there. It’s much nicer in here, calmer.”

“But how do you eat? Where do you get food from?”

“A woman brings me food, and logs to carve every now and then. The food I have here will last for a while.” He points to a pile of darkness in the corner. “I don’t eat much.”

“And you never want to see the light outside? Or walk around?”

“I have all the room I need to walk around in here. And enough light comes through that hole in the roof.”

“But why don’t you go outside? I don’t understand.”

“For the same reason you don’t leave the island. You live on the island. I live in my hut.” He stands, walks to a shelf and picks up my bowl, along with another piece of wood. “Here,” he says as he hands them to me. “You must finish what you’ve started. All that’s left is to burnish it. You do it like this: Use this piece of wood and rub the bowl firmly, in one direction. Easy. Keep doing that until it catches the light. It may seem tedious, but it’s the most important step. That’s often how things are, actually.”

As I do this, I think about what he said. It seems so absurd to me that he doesn’t leave the hut—that’s something I never knew about him, or even thought to wonder about.

“But there’s no way to leave the island,” I say after some time of silence. “We can play in the water but would drown if we went too far out. And for you, it’s easy to just walk outside the hut.”

“There is a way to do anything,” he says, smiling at me for the first time. “What it comes down to is what we’d like to do, and I’d like to stay in my hut. If you’d like to leave the island, then the only thing stopping you is the idea that you can’t do it.”

Now I understand what he meant before, about dreaming being a waste. Dreaming for the sake of dreaming, telling myself that it’s only a dream; that’s the waste. I think my teacher is right, I think there really is a way to do anything. And if that’s the case, then there’s no point in dreaming anything, because I’d be better off planning how to do something.

I continue burnishing my bowl. I stop from time to time and look at my hands; they are red and imprinted with the pattern of the wood. As I work, the imprints on my left hand get more and more severe while the imprints on my right hand get less and less severe. After a while, I can tell the bowl is smoother. I stop for a moment, draw the bowl closer to my eyes and examine it closely. It’s very smooth; I run my fingers along it and can hardly feel a bump.

I look up at my teacher from time to time. He is tidying up around the hut, moving things here and there. In the shadows, neglected against the wall, is the statuette he was working on the last time I visited him. When it was still in progress, I thought it looked sad. Now, shrouded in darkness, it wears the distinct expression of terror. At some point my teacher notices me looking. “Good work,” he says, noting my progress on the bowl. “You’re about halfway done. Keep going. You’ll know when you’ve finished. It really will catch the light.”

I can’t believe it. Looking at the bowl, I can’t imagine it could get any smoother. But I trust my teacher, so I continue burnishing. My hands move by themselves while thoughts race through my head. The events of the past few days blur in my memory. I think about the words of my father and his colleagues and my teacher, and the shouts of the villagers. I think about a million other things I can’t explain.

After some time, I snap back into reality and look at the bowl in my lap. My hands have stopped moving, and I notice they feel numb. The thing they hold, the bowl I carved myself, now shines with the gloss of a fish’s scale. The piece of wood I was holding with my other hand has all but disappeared; it’s a tiny scrap. I look up at my teacher, who is looking at me.

“You already know that you’re done. Be proud.” He smiles. “Now you may go. I have nothing more for you today.” He motions me to take the bowl with me. I’m excited to show it to my father. As I leave my teacher’s hut and walk toward my own, I look at the water past the shore. Instead of dreaming about what might be over the horizon, I think about how I might get there.

My whole family is at home when I arrive. My mother and sister have prepared some food, and my father is sitting on the ground. He rises when I enter. “We are better off than most families,” he says. “We have some food from storage. Mostly herbs and greens, yes, but at least we won’t go hungry. For now, anyway.”

I nod and show him my bowl. “I finished this today. It’s what I’d been working on with my teacher.” I hand the bowl to my father, who lifts it close to his eyes and examines it. He rubs his fingers along its contours to evaluate its smoothness.

“This is well-made, Son,” he says. “It’s only a shame that soon we won’t have any food to keep in it.” Of course he’s right. It’s funny: The bowl is a beginner project in woodcarving, fitting in its everyday usefulness. And I finish mine at a time like this. “Anyway,” he continues, “you should be proud of your work. You’ll be a great sculptor one day. But now, let’s eat.”

He carries my bowl with three others to the pot of food my mother and sister prepared, and he fills each of them with a green soup. We sit and eat silently, listening to the sounds outside. I can faintly hear the waves on the shore, breaking with soft calamity. Every now and then I can hear the call of a bird, distant. And from more than one place in the village, I hear crying. I look at my family, and I see that their eyes are heavy, darkly sunken into their blank faces. I wonder if I look like that.

We finish eating, and my sister collects the bowls to take them out to wash them. My mother begins tidying up, and my father moves to his workplace. No one asks me to do anything, so I leave to go visit my friends at the shore. They all seem sad; I can tell some of them haven’t eaten all day, and I feel guilty that I have.

“My mother says we only have enough food to eat once a day, and that we’ll do it at night,” says one of them. “I can’t remember the last time I was this hungry.”

“Well we don’t have any food stored at all,” says another. “My father is out collecting bugs and foliage right now. I wanted to go help him, but he told me ‘No’ and walked away. I couldn’t understand it.”

“We don’t have any food either, but we have some wood left that we trade to our neighbors for food. But it looks like soon we’ll run out of both food and wood. I don’t know what we’ll do then.”

While my friends are talking, I keep quiet. What could I possibly contribute besides “I just ate”? While they hungrily sulk, I have food in my belly. But even my own fullness won’t last long. I know my family has more food than most, since my father is the village architect, but it’s not infinite. As I listen to them talk, I stare up the hill overlooking the village. A few trees still sit there, trying hard to stay strong. I wonder if it’s as hard for them as it is for my friends.

Hours later, when it’s dark, I find myself on the shore again, by myself. Even a few days ago, if I came out here at this time, I’d see countless billowy columns of smoke rising from the village before me. Indications of the fires they come from. Indications of peace and prosperity. Tonight, though, there is only one, and it meanders in the wind like a lame animal, lost and afraid.

I wake up in the morning to the sun’s warmth on my face. I keep my eyes closed for a while, then open them slowly. I stretch as I come to life, not rushing. Just like I did when I was little.

A few moments pass before I realize where I am and who I am. My stomach grumbles, and I remember the village crisis. My body freezes and my heart begins to pound, as if panicking will make things better. It’s not logical and I know it, but I can’t help but rise in a flurry and run outside. As if this urgency will make the trees grow back.

There’s nobody outside. I look all around me, around our house near the middle of the village, and not one person is about. Just a few weeks ago, the paths would have been clamoring. How things change, and how quickly. I continue to circle, scanning the horizon. And as my eyes pass over the hill, my back to the sea, it strikes me: No trees. Just last night, there were at least a few trees up there, as near to death as they may have been, but now... nothing. Just a few weeks ago, the horizon was tall and lush. A tree-line. Now, though, it’s perfectly flat. Alien. How things change.

I can’t help but walk toward where the tree-line used to be. My legs move on their own, my mind entranced. As I pass near the village store, though, I’m shaken by voices. People. A group of villagers stand between the tower and the store, apparently arguing. I stop to listen.

“No more trees,” says someone.

“Yeah, well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, wasn’t it? They weren’t going to grow back anytime soon,” says someone else.

“But with no trees, we’ll have no fire. No way to cook anything.”

“No way to keep warm,” says someone new.

“Like I said: It was bound to happen sooner or later. What’s the difference between today and tomorrow? Things happen when they happen.”

“But we could have had another day to plan, if we had trees for another day.”

“Would we have? Have we done any planning, real planning, as a group, over the past few days? Has anyone even bothered to look at his neighbor without furling his eyebrows? One more day wouldn’t have made a difference. And it doesn’t matter anyway. There’s no sense arguing over something that’s already happened.”

“And besides,” says someone. “There were only a few trees left anyway. A few measly trees. Wouldn’t have done us much good.”

“But even not much good is better than no good.”

“The fact remains: We don’t have any wood. No fires.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Well, there’s a lot of wood here,” says someone, pointing to the tower. “Why let all this perfectly good firewood go to waste?”

“But we were ordered not to touch the tower. The elder said so.”

“The elder? Ha! When’s the last time you saw him? If he cared so much about what we did, he would make himself shown. Way I see it: no village meeting, no regulations.”

“But he’s the elder. He doesn’t have to convenience us; he’s descended from the sun.”

“If you believe that. But who cares what he says anyway? If there’s wood here to use, and this good-for-nothing tower’s certainly not of any use standing, then why not?”

“As far as I see it, that tower’s cursed. There’s been nothing but bad since we started building it. Nothing good’s come of it, and I want nothing to do with it. You’d have to give me all the food on this island and I still wouldn’t use a log from it for anything more than throwing it into the sea.”

“What have you got to cook, anyway?” said an old man who hadn’t spoken yet. “All anyone’s eating lately is grass and bugs. If you try and heat it, the grass will shrivel up and disappear. And the bugs, they’re too measly to go on a spit. We’re better off just eating them raw.”

In the end, no one touches a log from the tower. Some people because they realize the futility of gathering firewood when there’s no food. Some out of respect. Some out of obedience. And some out of fear. The crowd slowly dissipates, walking away from the tower, to wherever they might have been going before the argument. The tower stands, alone and triumphant, its shadow reaching across the village.

I remember that I, too, was on my way somewhere before getting interrupted. I look up the hill far in front of me; I still have a long way to go. I stand, transfixed. After a few moments my leg moves forward, a single step. And the following steps are easier; they happen on their own. As I walk through the village, I notice people moving in their homes, working for themselves.

Not long ago, when we had food, they were eager to share with each other. It’s easy to give to others when you have enough for yourself. And when the famine began, when people started to realize the gravity of what happened, the villagers were more united than I’d ever seen them. More willing to share than usual. Clamoring to help each other in a time of crisis. But as things got worse, as their hunger pains sharpened, they grew more and more reserved. And so suddenly. Now everyone lives for himself and his family, and pretends nobody else exists. I’m not sure which is better.

I make my way to the foot of the hill, and begin to walk up. It’s a slight grade on this side of the village; the path my father and I always took to go hunting is much steeper. I don’t have to focus on moving, so I’m free to experience the world around me. I feel the breeze, the sun looking down on me. I feel the sorry grass beneath my feet, and I think how soon that too will be harvested for food. Just like the forest, its older brother. The more scarce things are, the less it takes to satisfy us. I feel hungrier than I’ve ever felt, and I would be ecstatic to taste even a bite of fruit. Something that, weeks ago, I would have tossed into the bushes without a second thought.

Soon I reach the top of the hill, and the view is not heartening. The forest, the lifeblood of my village, now desolate. From here I can see the sea on the other side of the island, whereas only a few weeks ago I wouldn’t have been able to see more than a few feet into the foliage. The sun bathes patches of earth that it could never reach before. A sea of stumps and dead leaves and animal carcasses.

I walk to where the last trees were. The stumps are fresh-cut, haphazardly. Besides the signs of their hasty removal, it’s as if they simply disappeared. I don’t know what to think. I head back toward the village and the rest of the day passes slowly.

The next few days come and go and nobody notices. By now, even my family’s run out of food. Yesterday’s dinner was the last time I ate, though I didn’t know it would be. I knew the day was coming, though. I’m not so shortsighted to think that going hungry is something only everybody else had to do. Now I’m just like all the others and, though I’m worried for myself and my family, it’s relieving that I won’t have to feel bad when I talk to my friends.

A few more days pass, and nobody notices.

Today I realize what hunger is. So many times before, I felt a clench in my stomach after it’d been a few hours since I ate, and I’d say I was hungry. I wasn’t really hungry then, just anxious, maybe. I don’t know what to call it, but it’s certain that it wasn’t real hunger, because that’s what I’m feeling now: It’s as if my stomach were trying to swallow itself, and it’s far from painless. It comes in waves, and each time it’s worse. My body burns like the sun every time it happens. My mind screams, just like every monkey that gets its hand stuck in a jar.

A few more days pass, and my body gets used to not eating, except for little things I find here and there. We are all scavengers now. The pains are less and less frequent, and I find I’m able to relax. To not think about doom, but to think about how I’m still alive. If people seldom left their homes before, now it’s a genuine rarity. Maybe they stay inside to keep out of the heat or to conserve their energy. Maybe to care for their dying elderly and young. For me, though, I really prefer being outside. Walking, doing something. Doing something is better than doing nothing, and feeling the sunlight is better than being cooped up inside all day. I don’t know how my teacher does it. But then, we’re different people.

Every night, I walk on the beach. It gives me a chance to reflect on things, to be without anybody else. It’s much different than walking alone in the daytime, because in the daytime I can still see the village and the people—and the tower. At night, it’s just me and the sand beneath my feet, and the stars. The stars seem more brilliant every day, shining on, ignorant to my village’s problems.

I’ve been walking like this for several nights, but I haven’t seen a single fish washed up on shore. I’m not sure what it would mean, if I did. In the past, whenever a fish washed up on shore, we would have a special gathering in its honor. Fish are good luck, since they’re descended from the sun, like the elder. They say the whole village used to celebrate for two days whenever a fish appeared, but that was long before I was born. I think about it, and I can’t remember the last time a fish washed up. I guess we’re out of luck.

I look out at the sea, the wide field of black. It seems endless, but it’s not: The sea ends in the center of my vision, where the invisible horizon converts it into the starry sky. I look out, and everything is black, with a blue tinge. The bottom half desperately empty, and the top half spotted, like the contrast made by the dark grains in the sand beneath my feet. With nothing to see, I can hear and smell so much better. I hear nothing but the soft crashing of the waves. I smell something that I can’t describe in any way but with the word “sadness.” I smell sadness.

I turn around, and I vaguely see the tower rising above the village. It takes a few moments to properly discern its structure. So glaring in the daytime, it’s almost as if it doesn’t exist at night. Looking at the tower, I see sadness.

I go for a walk the next evening, the sun’s blood running across the sky in streams. Days have passed without anything significant happening. How can that be? My father, my mother and sister sit at home with nothing to do. I go on walks like this because I can’t bear to see it. My father leaves from time to time. None of us knows where he goes, but if he hears any news while he’s out, he certainly doesn’t mention it to us.

I’m sitting on the beach, facing the village, all the sound in the world on my back. In front of me sit the houses, full of dying, miserable, hopeless people. Beyond them, the broad, sad hill where the forest once flourished. And above all this rises the tower, its unfinished peak stirring the bloody sky. The moon is rising faintly, the only peaceful thing I’ve seen all day.

Suddenly I’m on my feet; I have an idea. Before I know it, I’m walking toward the tower. I’m at the foot of the tower.

Everyone in the village is dying. But what can they do but sit around and die? There’s nothing else to do. After all, every moment we’re living, we’re dying. But what a terrible way to be, saying that nothing more can be done except to give up. I remember what my teacher told me: “There’s a way to do anything. What it comes down to is what we’d like to do.” Before I know it, I’m climbing the tower.

Sitting in their houses, with nothing more to eat, their fates are sealed. There’s nothing uncertain about their futures: They are going to die. And they’re not doing anything about it. One arm goes up, and then the other; my feet step up with my arms. Maybe they don’t realize there’s something they can do, or maybe they just don’t want to.

Soon I reach the top of the tower. I scramble onto the landing and can’t help but look down; the village is tiny below me. As high up as I am, I wonder how much higher the tower would be had it been finished. Up here, the wind is much stronger. I take a few moments to look around and examine the endless horizon. I can trace it, uninterrupted, in a complete circle.

I examine the landing I’m on and see it’s comprised of two halves. They aren’t fixed yet, so while I’m sitting on one half of the landing, I can pick up the other. It’s heavy. I lift it up on it’s side—it’s about as tall as me and almost as wide as my arm-span. I handle it awkwardly for a minute, shuffling my hands to get a better grip. I set it back down carefully and think for a moment, then begin heading back down the ladder.

When I get to the first landing, which isn’t too far off the ground, I get off the ladder. These sections of the landing are fixed with rope. It’s difficult, but I can untie the knots. In time, the landing comes free, and I lift it off the logs it was resting on. I tilt it upward and grapple with it. I’m not afraid this time; there isn’t far to fall. I turn around, carefully hugging the landing piece, and I begin walking down the ladder backwards. I go slowly to keep my footing.

By the time I reach the ground, the landing section is too heavy to carry by myself, so I let it drag on the ground as I pull it, my knees bent. I don’t worry about seeing anyone or anyone seeing me as I walk through the village; I don’t encounter anyone. Before I know it, I’m at the shore.

Ceremoniously, I drag the landing piece into the water, and let it float while I’m still holding onto it. I’m about to make the biggest decision I’ve ever made, and I have no uncertainty about my choice. I can either do nothing, or something. It’s an easy decision. I push myself onto the landing section and now I, too, am floating. Lolling back and forth with the waves.

I think I’ll miss my family and friends, but is anybody else worth my life? Maybe. But what about after they’ve forsaken their own? I think about these things as I drift farther and farther from the village. I resolve not to look back, though, only forward. So I say my last goodbye to my village as I turn around and face the horizon, the journey in front of me. By now the sun’s set, but it leaves an orange tint in the hazy sky. No longer bloody, the sky is joyous. The moon smiles down on me.

Every few seconds the waves pull me farther from the shore, but the horizon never gets closer. There’s always more to go. More to do.

I don’t know where I’ll end up, but the uncertainty is just what I need.