What is possible to know for certain of Ma’anu Wei is confined almost exclusively to the records of her secondary school education, which are extremely limited, as they were preserved solely as proof of her failure: her father had paid in full for the diploma Ma’anu Wei, then called Dena, never earned, so to prevent extended dispute with the father, the school kept only those documents which indicated that its services were fully rendered. The student’s failure to graduate was a fault all her own. There are no known police records of the incident abroad that was said to have produced her son, apparently born mute. Only he survives, but in a state of mental captivity; the gestures that escape his tormented form offer little to the pursuit of his mother’s history. What we have pieced together is therefore undoubtedly a deficient account of the life of our subject, but as far as the available evidence may attest to it, the account we offer here is precise.
I’ve written the tale I’ll tell my son. It is a cautionary one: I once walked along a road atop a cliff when I met a boy from a land he could not name. I asked him why this was so and he said that in his language there was no word for this land that would distinguish it from any other. Said I to the boy, you speak a particular language that comes from a particular land, yet the language cannot name its place? Nor can it name itself, the boy said. I asked the boy, can the people of this land name themselves? We cannot and we need not, the boy said. Oh, I said to the boy, I would like to follow you home. Was this because I wished to live in a land without names? Or did I wish to travel to this land in order to be the first to name all that was in it? The boy did not ask me why I wished for such a thing. He only said, you can’t follow me there. So it was I who asked why. Was the passage difficult? Or would I not be permitted entry? No, said the boy. It is because I myself can’t return home. Why? I asked again of him. Is it because you were lost when I found you here, wandering along the cliff road? No, the boy said. I was home when I walked the cliff, until you spied me, and I spoke of my land to you, you who cannot understand anything unless it is named. I have thus named my homeland, and so it has ceased to exist.
Two separate hospital records confirm that Dena Mann shared the day of her birth—indeed, the very hour—with that of her mother’s death. As for the grief of the widower Rene Mann, not much is known: while a great deal remains of Silvia Augustine Mann’s life—photographs, documents, mementos—these were preserved by the Augustine family estate, not by Mann himself (Silvia’s parents, citing irreconcilable religious differences with their son-in-law, were able to retrieve all valuables and ephemera shortly after their daughter’s passing). Whether Mann would have clung to these reminders is questionable; he is, after all, the confessed destroyer of all that Dena might have left behind from childhood. While we will never know if Rene Mann aimed a camera at his child in her youth, we know for a fact that there survives not a single snapshot. All records and artifacts—all except one—were lost in a fire that consumed the Mann household twenty years, almost to the day, after Dena’s birth. The law determined that the fire was set by Mann himself.
Dena Mann was enrolled at the religious secondary school at the age of fourteen. The education offered up at this boarding school for girls is apparently one of great rigor: many classroom hours, many lessons to be completed in libraries and rooms at night, fewer school vacations (the institution operates on its own cycles of ceremony and observance). Even a poor student such as Dena would have read and written a great deal. Once again, the transcripts that remain from Dena’s time at the school diligently document her failures, particularly in punctuality, decorum, languages, and the sciences, yet we must concede that we see much evidence in the girl of the spirit of erudition and religious practice. The school dutifully recorded the fact of Dena’s repeated applications for admission to the overseas program that allowed certain pupils to live, study, and worship in one of the regions called (in typically oblique fashion) “the enclaves” of the faith’s “forefathers.” The program was, however, only open to students at the honors level, so for Dena it was but a distant dream. The school preserved its letters of rejection in order to document that it was Dena, not the school, who arranged for the trip abroad in her final trimester of study. This came barely three months before commencement—with grades just above failing in most subjects, for Dena Mann, graduation would not have been a crowning achievement, but a diploma was anticipated nonetheless.
The religious tradition into which Dena’s mother Silvia Augustine was converted at marriage, and into which Dena entered at birth, is heavily shrouded in what we can only call an opaque obscurity. Our work has found repeated obstacles in the elusiveness of religious authorities and laypersons alike, all of whom share a confounding tendency to invite us into some places and bar us from others, to engage readily in conversation, then obfuscate with allegory and figures of speech. Our work will be hopelessly stymied as long as it is confined to the information willingly shared by the adherents of this faith and to legal records visible to the public eye. For the time being, we can only surmise that it was her religious passion that drove young Dena to make the unsanctioned pilgrimage that would lead to a crime never prosecuted, a birth never accepted, and the accidental island detour that is, ultimately, the impetus for our labors here.
My canoe moved toward the shore even when there was no tide left to carry it, only the clearest coating of water against the sandy floor. Then at last it stopped. I sat awhile, staring at the coastline. Bright sands, bordered off afar by thick greenery. So thick I could not see through it. How heavy I felt then, no longer carried by the waves that had sickened me even as they held me up, kept me from the depths. How my tongue swelled in my mouth, my skin ached. My legs had bent before me in the narrow hull of the canoe for so long, I did not think they would permit me to stand. But I could bear the rigid seat of the canoe no longer. I lifted myself out of the boat and stood. The wet sand held my bare feet buoyantly, a velvety carpet on which I strode as if in a dream, as if sleepwalking, toward the shade, toward the green. I had crossed the threshold between light and shadow, my eyes struggling to find sight in the sudden darkness of the trees, when I heard a footstep drawing near. I was awakened now, but I was still. My vision had not yet adjusted to the dimness and I could advance no further, not without fear of misstep. Instead I stood there, nearly blinded, until the footsteps were upon me, and, as if it had materialized from the leaves, there appeared the shape of a human being. A young man. His gaze fell from my face, where it had not lingered long, to his right hand, which he lifted from his side and held out to me. I lifted my own right hand in order to clasp his—despite all that had happened, the fresh memory of a vile touch, I wished powerfully to return this stranger’s greeting. It was only in the split second before I’d covered his palm with my own that I realized what I was about to suppress. Understanding came only in that split second, so as for that time, I understood too late.
Dena Mann’s secret passage to the land her faith holds sacred took place in the spring season. It is relevant that this is apparently a time of much holy activity in the foreign region, when the children born in the previous year experience what is called an “outdooring,” an event in which a certain spiritual danger to the newborn is lifted and the child is permitted to wander the world freely. “Delilah,” a former classmate of Dena’s, described the event to us, speaking on condition of anonymity. Delilah was clearly disdainful enough of her schoolmate to attest to the girl’s improper conduct, but at the same time, her evident distrust of our project made her a rather defensive informant, eager to set the record straight on the finer points of ritual. The coming-out event, she told us, entails a sort of parade of the new mothers and their children, while the community’s other women and children line their path, “there to pledge support, on that day and all others.”
Delilah explained: “The men don’t attend the procession. It’s a sign of their collective faith that they fear no danger to their women and children on their outdooring day. I was stepping into line with my classmates when I heard that one of us had seen Dena, wandering among the women as they cooked late into the previous night. Dena wasn’t supposed to be there at all, so it was obvious she was attempting to hide from our chaperones while she took in whatever she could. But she wouldn’t have been there to witness the procession: as is the tradition, those of us who lined the marchers’ path stood shoulder to shoulder, one person deep; no one stood behind us, and before us were only the marchers. This is because we were not afraid, we were safe on outdooring day. You say Dena might have concealed herself at a window or behind a tree, but I say that’s impossible. No one is to attend the procession who isn’t among the marchers or those who line their path. To do so would be to invite disaster for all the children honored that day. That’s why I believe what Dena said later: she was hidden at the hall, where the men waited for the feast. That’s where she would’ve been detected.”
It is here that Delilah ends her account, a truncation that comes as no surprise, as this is where reports diverge. Ma’anu Wei would later reveal to her father that one of the husbands awaiting the feast found her loitering outside the celebration hall. Ma’anu Wei left no written account of her son’s conception. Nor would Rene Mann speak of the thing, until he was forced to do so in court—but even then he voiced persistent, vehement objections, not to his questioners, but to the reliability of the claims set forth by his own flesh and blood. He related no fact he did not dispute, no accusation he did not doubt. The transcript of his report is not worth including here, as it is riddled with the speaker’s own interruptions, and then the further interruptions of lawyers and judge, all insisting that the man cease to interrupt himself. From that chaos, we’ve extracted the following: according to the account the girl shared with her father, the individual who encountered her outside the celebration hall was, to Dena, a man of her own people—a new father, celebrating an event that concerned his wife and infant child—and she saw no reason not to trust him completely. While Dena insisted to her father that she couldn’t have expected the disaster she said followed, she also shared that it wasn’t long after the events of that fateful day that she was able to see herself through the man’s eyes: to him she was not at all a sister, not a daughter of this man’s people, but a foreigner, an exotic curiosity. This is where the father’s protests finally eclipse the narrative. Under what conditions the foreign man took the virginal Dena is unclear, but her claims that she saw no reason to fear him suggest it wasn’t difficult for him to coax her to a place where he could have his way with her. We know only that Rene Mann refused to accept that his grandson was born of a rape committed by a man of his own people. He would, throughout the trial, denounce the child as not just a bastard, but as a creature not from his faith, a scourge that to Rene Mann, it seems, was also far from human.
To my baby boy I sing with hands once callused by the journey of silence and shame. Baby boy, for you my hands split open and soften and sing. They sing you, baby boy, they sing this world into being.
These words come from the handwritten journal of Ma’anu Wei, the only object preserved from the devastating fire besides Ma’anu Wei’s child himself. The journal—a haphazard assemblage of musings and stories, some clearly invented, others possibly transcribed, and much that is likely a truthful report of Ma’anu Wei’s own adventures—will provide the information most crucial to our discussion here, as it is the only known account of Ma’anu Wei’s experience after the alleged assault, when Dena fled the region she’d longed to visit, and disappeared from view, never to return, in a sense, since the individual who appeared on Rene Mann’s doorstep two springtimes later was no longer a girl, but a woman—the mother of a boy more than a year old—and was no longer Dena: she now bore the name Ma’anu Wei. To fill in this two-year blank we must turn to the journal. It is, in fact, the curious matter of the information recorded there that has sparked our pressing inquiry.
Ma’anu Wei, they have named me. It is beautiful, but I know it is sad. This is the way they have found to say “Them.” There was no such word in their language until my arrival. It is a rare joining. Us, Not. Ma’anu Wei. They are kind, but when they speak me, their wrists are bent with sorrow.
Whether the defiled young Dena boarded a ship bound for home and then abandoned that vessel for a smaller one, or whether she actually fled by canoe from the start, we can’t be sure. The journal makes clear, however, that the holy city in which the outdooring and alleged crime took place lies on an as-of-yet unknown body of water. Surely the girl’s devastation would have clouded her already questionable and immature judgment; the theft of a canoe and panicked paddling toward the horizon therefore seem possible, however unwise. The sections of the journal recounting Dena’s passage to the island are numerous, dispersed throughout the text rather than confined to their chronologically appropriate place within the otherwise well-ordered narrative. These fragments also feature some of the least decipherable language in the journal, though not in such a way as to prevent an extraction of the crucial information common to them all: the author writes of a turbulent, harrowing journey that would have brought her life to a watery end had the tide not drawn her canoe, and her exhausted body with it, to a sandy shore.
I would not make this mistake again—never again would I stifle the world in an outstretched hand. In the shade the trees sent me as a gift I remained quiet and still. The young man’s hand spoke of my swollen tongue, and it spoke of drink, and then his hand spoke of cup, and he filled it in a stream. The cup was not there until he spoke it, and he spoke it with an outstretched hand. Did my thirst summon it, then? I am certain it did not, since the end of my thirst did not banish it, nor did I hold it close in fear of future need. He spoke the cup. If he ceased to speak it, the cup did not cease to exist, but it was not there, or rather, it was not cup. It was not his filling of it, or my drinking from it, as it had been a moment before. How different this is from the porcelain mug I had from my mother, the one my father rescued from my grandparents’ reach. In my home that mug was understood in terms of its inception—for me, my mother’s having of it—and its end, which I dreaded as if I had returned to the womb to live in fear of my mother’s death. The mug gave me a precarious kind of joy. I held it in my hands and thought, it is here because it has not yet perished. And perish it did, with my father’s anger, into a thousand shattered pieces. And so the mug had its death, and again my mother went from me. Not so here. Here the cup is endless, as are all things. How do I explain? Words fail me. As they always have. Perhaps in this I have found one thing beyond this island that is eternal.
That is eternal. Much of the journal is given over to poetry and parable and symbol, all of which could be dismissed as the fanciful scribblings of a troubled young mind. Let us be clear: we have closely considered what little is left of the life of Ma’anu Wei, and our powers of observation are not compromised as were those of our subject when she still walked the earth—walked, it would seem, in extraordinary places. What we propose here does not involve the pathetic fallacy so anathema to science. The childish Ma’anu Wei writes of singing hands and the so-called lives of inanimate things, but our concern here is entirely pragmatic. There is a bold distinction to be made between sentiment and vision. The former compromises human progress; the latter is essential to it. Men have been brought to the gallows for lesser propositions than ours. We know too well where we would be without their worthy follies.
Two years after her disappearance, Ma’anu Wei returned to her father’s home. There she devoted herself to the care of her child, primarily through silent gesturing. She had forsaken all communication with the civilized world. According to his later testimony, Mann soon resorted to threats—mostly to the child—in order to coerce a story from his daughter that would explain her absence and her offspring. The months they spent together in the Mann household in the summer and fall following her return must have been miserable ones. In late October, on a crisp autumn evening, a group of neighborhood children found the home ablaze. What was first investigated as an accident, then as a possible prank by the same children, and finally as a deliberate crime committed by Rene Mann himself, resulted in the complete loss of the house and everything in it—and in an end to the unhappy life of Ma’anu Wei. She was found by firefighters before the building’s collapse, but not until after she’d been smothered by smoke in the closet of her own bedroom, where she sat with her son in her arms, the child wrapped in a kind of bedroll. Authorities responsible for deciphering human behavior at a time of danger such as this one report that when a body is found lifeless in a closet, it is often that of a visitor unfamiliar with the building’s design; it is not uncommon for strangers to open a closet door seeking exit only to find themselves trapped and overcome. Ma’anu Wei, as Dena Mann, had lived fourteen consecutive years in that room, and occasional months after that, before she opened the closet door and entered the space where she would await her death. That she hid the child there with her is a reality at first too disturbing to confront, but confront it we will, as we believe her intent in this act was not what it may seem.
Not a thing in this world is ours—but anything might be spoken. He speaks the rains that fill the cisterns. He speaks the cisterns’ depths, speaks away fissures and mud. He knows nothing of my life before. I dare not speak it here. But I remember. I see myself there. A thing exists, as does its name, whether I speak it or not—though I am sure to name it anyway, as if to grasp it all around, as if to say, I know this, I hold its beginning and its weight, the heavy promise of its end. That is the stance, one of grasping hands, always poised to ward off the inevitable slipping away. How exhausting that was. How I am now reborn. Spoken. How is the old life now remembered? Was I even alive? No. I was simply not yet dead. Here there can be no such waiting, when life must be spoken all around. Here we speak the child who will not know death.
Rene Mann was dragged from the house in a state of rage. He resisted his rescuers, such that four firefighters were called upon to pull him from the wreckage, though no one at the scene could determine if his refusal to leave his burning home was due to his concern for Ma’anu Wei and her baby, or if it betrayed a death wish of his own. His trial was not held to decide his guilt in the matter of the arson; once investigators narrowed the source of the fire to the kitchen and then more specifically to several household substances stored under its sink, he confessed to that crime. The question the law was compelled to answer was whether Rene Mann intended, when he set his house ablaze, to murder his child and grandchild. The collected evidence implied this might have been so. Mann neither denied nor confirmed the charge, so the prosecution and defense battled it out in court, forcing whatever they could from the defendant, which amounted, in the end, to the venom he harbored toward his deceased daughter, whom he felt had fabricated the account of her rape, and toward her living son, whom he felt was fathered in even more loathsome circumstances than rape itself. Indeed, as we have stated, Rene Mann, who remained silent at every moment when speech might have saved him, went so far as to suggest the baby was not of man born. This may have sealed his fate: an unsympathetic jury convicted him of murdering his own daughter and, finding it too late to plead his insanity, Mann’s attorneys managed only to confine his punishment to a lifetime in prison.
All that was left to be decided was the fate of Mann’s grandchild, a boy who could not simply find placement with surrogates. Even the most compassionate of volunteers were sure to balk at the reality of Ma’anu Wei’s son. The boy’s developmental progress has not matched that of other children, but to call him held back or slowed down would be misleading. He is, instead, something of an other. His daily behaviors call to mind the exact opposite of deceleration: he is in a constant state of swift activity, a silent flurry of hands that never ceases, except in sleep. The child was brought to us first for evaluation, then for safekeeping until the courts could determine the fate of his remaining kin. (Here, of course, we refer to the sentencing of Rene Mann; no member of the Augustine family would claim him.) Now he has found with us a permanent home. When even our most reliable tests yielded nothing—not particularly low scores, nor the kind one might find in the disabled savant, but something indecipherable, as if the usual measurements would not suffice—we sought outside interpretation of the child’s hand gestures from leading experts. Their findings are conclusive: the boy’s hand movements follow a system that can only be described as alogical, and as such, they follow no system at all.
In her narratives of her life on the island, Ma’anu Wei speaks often of a sort of hand signaling. We believe this is a crude—but notably singular—mode of communication to which she and her island hosts were forced to resort when their language differences inevitably thwarted them. It is interesting to note that the disappointed young woman seems to rationalize this necessity until it becomes for her a nobler mode of existence. She insists that the islanders never used their mouths or throats to make sound, but surely there were ample exceptions to this rule: how else would she have found verbal expression for the name Ma’anu Wei? Yet her insistence on a language conveyed solely in the movement of hands is absolute and unrelenting. Young Dena’s frightening, solitary journey into the unknown would have been enough to send her into a state of instability in which the world would take on any meaning she sought desperately to assign it, her attempt to order what had been disordered, to restore a sense of humanity in her own self—indeed, even to place herself in a position superior to those she felt had wronged her. Thus it seems Ma’anu Wei devised an explanation for the life of signs to which she was confined in her time on the foreign island. In embracing that existence, she in turn condemned her son to a permanent form of confinement, one from which he might never escape.
Why must sound come from the mouth and assign a thing its meaning? Mouths, they have taught me, are for eating. They are the locus of input (except when something is amiss, such as when my stomach was so violently emptied as I weathered the beatings of the sea—the holiday food I had taken from the women’s tables the previous night was not mine to keep. Nor did I want it any longer). Hands (on the other hand!) are the locus of creation. Why, then, would anyone speak the world with teeth and tongue? The world need not be consumed. A thing need not be conquered for it to be. Before, I would not have believed this to be true. But now I have lived it myself.
The orphaned child of Ma’anu Wei lives with us in an endless state of frenetic gesturing that no one can understand; perhaps he moves only in the hope of provoking reply from the mother forever gone from him. He came to us with nothing but a bedroll so smoke-damaged we had no choice but to have it destroyed. It was the attentiveness of the orderly charged with its disposal that led to the discovery of the artifact sewn into the bed’s worn lining, a discovery that can only be—while we await the cooperation we seek—of provisional importance, but might one day be looked upon as unprecedented, even world-altering. This artifact, of course, is the journal, which, as we’ve acknowledged, is comprised of the musings and delusions of a damaged soul. But it is the subject of these musings, as seen by the scientific eye, that we cannot dismiss. The duration of Dena’s disappearance (as confirmed by the courts), the secretiveness of her people, the concrete details so elaborately preserved in the journal, and, most of all, the enigmatic case of the surviving boy, all turn our attention urgently, inexorably, toward the mysterious island. In her irrational flight from humanity, the girl who would become Ma’anu Wei may have stumbled upon the one earthly people civilized humanity has yet to know. They live in seclusion, their lives untouched by the habits and malpractices that taint every other corner of our world. It is possible that with her death, Ma’anu Wei bequeathed us the opportunity we have all mourned as irreversibly, utterly lost.
That is why the journal is but an insufficient inkling, the mere beginnings of a monumental quest. Were we to gain direct access to this people, we could study them in a manner of which that poor, self-exiling child was incapable. We would study them, and, importantly, their land: Rene Mann concedes in his arson testimonies that his daughter returned home in a state of extraordinary robustness; the same was true of the child she brought with her (and is true of the boy still). A glance at any one of the journal’s pages will confirm that the castaway, and later her newborn child, never went without; indeed, as Ma’anu Wei would have it, no islander ever found himself without shelter or food or drink—in Ma’anu Wei’s fanciful terms, they “spoke” their need and it was answered. The girl’s life before she reached the island was such that even a modest existence, if freer than the previous one, may have seemed a paradise, but we see reason to heed her earnest claims that on this island, no one experiences our all-too familiar anxieties, those desperate fears that accompany the sense of imminent loss so common to our world, a world of scarcity and disease and very often, on the personal level and en masse, of dread. We don’t propose to have uncovered a Garden of Eden (we’ll leave such inquiries to the devout). But we will say this: our forests are spoiled, our rivers run dry. Some would argue the time hastily approaches when the earth will offer up no more of its former riches. This outlook stems from the belief that we have mined its every corner, probed its every possibility. But in the naive words of Ma’anu Wei, we may have discovered one more.
And there is more: the islanders aren’t merely supplied their every need. These people, Ma’anu Wei says, do not know death. She tells us repeatedly that the lives on the island know no end. Here we might be privy, at the very least, to a culture that suffers no illness. Indeed, if these people are shut off from our disease-ridden world, they may know none of its blights. Scientific logic will dictate that untouched by the world, the islanders live on borrowed time; the world will one day find them, and kill them upon contact. Without disputing this reality, let us consider its inverse: untouched by what ails our world, they are, as of yet, entirely unharmed by it. From these people we may have much to learn.
What is it to know immortality? We venture that only the mortal himself can say: it is to contemplate a life that extends beyond his farthest comprehension, his farthest reach. Who is to say, then, that science cannot witness such a life—or that such a life cannot exist? We will therefore say it ourselves: these people do not know death. The islanders live as immortals. We will say “as immortals” because it is not within the bounds of our discipline to go so far as to call them immortal; we will not, however, dismiss any possibility, when the account left us by Ma’anu Wei has significantly broadened possibility’s margins. To what extent might they broaden still? That depends on the fate of our investigation. We must be permitted to reach this island.
He who greeted me in the trees. All along his hands led me to understand. It was his hands that spoke me—Ma’anu Wei—so I could be here among them. It was his hands that spoke his world so I might see it. So my baby boy might find his way to me. The child had fallen asleep at my breast when once more his hands opened—I believe he meant to speak the bed for baby’s sleep—and instead of bed there appeared a word. We both saw it. I saw it in his hand and in his face. Not the bed itself but the word that was bed. How could this be? His hand curled ‘round the word, unsure what was to be done with such a thing. And a thing it was, a thing that was nothing else but a word. I saw the pain in his hand and in his face, and to save him from both, I did the only thing I could. I seized the word and, opening the mouth that had for so long been free of words, I swallowed it whole.
Let us now revisit some of the more preposterous passages from the journal of Ma’anu Wei. Her greatest fascination is with the islander she calls “he who greeted me,” whom she has elevated, in her writings, to the rank of demiurge—a sacrilege no father can bear, let alone one as pious as Rene Mann. Still, this “young man” rescued her, made her life possible when it had very nearly found its end. No wonder the young Ma’anu Wei was enamored of this islander; a great majority of her anecdotal entries suggest that with him, she and her child formed, in fact, a little island family. The word family, used by Ma’anu Wei herself, should give us pause: we can’t know if the island culture would allow this man to adopt another father’s child—the child of rape—as his own. But what if the child is not the result of rape, a child of calamity; what if he is the life-affirming child of new love, that love which was indisputably, in ways both practical and emotional, the girl’s salvation? What if the boy in our care is the biological offspring of this mysterious island tribe? We have little with which to confirm this hypothesis. Yet we mustn’t forget that Rene Mann cruelly dismissed his grandchild as the progeny of some other species. Judge and jury concluded that this stemmed from the man’s inability to endure his daughter’s disgrace. But perhaps in this there is something more.
We are convinced this something more is worthy of rigorous investigation. If the origins of the child can be called into question, so, perhaps, can the conclusions already drawn in the matter of the fire. We have not yet mentioned a fact that appears in the public records of Rene Mann’s conviction: though the flames had already begun to devour the closet when Ma’anu Wei’s body was found inside, firefighters testified that the door was locked when they reached it. Examinations of the damaged jamb could not determine whether the key had been turned from the inside or out; as trial evidence this detail was deemed inadmissible. Thus a significant stone has been left unturned. What if Ma’anu Wei could bear her suffering no longer; what if it was she who chose to defy the material confines of her father’s house, and to hasten the end on which her journal so frequently muses? If Rene Mann set his house on fire, he may or may not have confined his own child and grandchild to that fatal enclosure, may or may not have intended to kill. If, however, Ma’anu Wei was responsible for the blaze, and, having completed her handiwork in the kitchen, gathered her baby in her arms and climbed the stairs to her bedroom, this leaves little doubt as to her intent. If we are to travel down this path, we must confront the fact that the mother’s love is undeniable—perhaps not for her own life, but certainly for the life of her son. How, then, could she commit such an atrocity?
Ma’anu Wei had lived two years in an alternate world, and her return to civilized society seemed to have little bearing on that assumed existence. She did what she could to live as she had before, as her son always had, no matter how it isolated herself and her child, no matter how it enraged her father. No matter who set fire to the Mann household, we believe that as the flames spread, Ma’anu Wei retreated with her son to the bedroom and shut herself in the closet with the intent to leave the earth that had forsaken her at every turn except one, the one that was now closed off to her. But just as she despaired at the memory of a life better lived, the very same memory inspired hope for her child. On the island, she believed, life was without end. Is such a thing possible? That is for us to ask. The question would have meant little to Ma’anu Wei, who, in her capacity to replace one shattered system of belief with another equally fervent one, left the world without a single doubt that her son would remain eternally safe within it. He was of the island born; to Ma’anu Wei, this meant he would not die. And was she not proven right?
Then it happened again. He brought forth the hands that had spoken cup and bed and rains and trees and bird and beast and all the world as it was and could be, but this time in his open hand there lay a word. I vaguely recognized it, or rather I recalled the word from other times—for indeed, it was the word word itself—but I hardly knew what it had to do with the thing he’d meant to speak. Again it sat heavily between us, a word that was a thing in the world. Again I took it from him and this time ground it in my teeth. I tasted its bitterness. This time, I knew it would not cease, and that I could not consume every word that fell from his palms—surely I’d choke. I did not have to think long to know what had brought this upon him. It was the thing that was not them—it was I. Ma’anu Wei.
Here is how I know.
How could the hands that spoke the world into being—cup, family, mountain, shoe—explain themselves? Only by creating something they’d never spoken before. For me alone, his hands spoke speaking, and out came words. But words were not things in the world, or at least they had not been, until Ma’anu Wei. If his hands could speak words that were nothing but names, what other emptinesses might be forced from them in time? How soon before they would be too many, and he would be forced to eat his own words, how soon before they sickened him, and escaped his mouth again? How soon, I asked myself, sheltering the child in the shade of his new sorrow, how soon before mouths spoke things, and hands were forgotten, except as the tools that brought things to mouth? All things, then, would speak of nothing but their end. His hands cannot speak this truth, so it will be mine alone. I will have to leave the island. I am overcome at last by the anxiety that is my permanent affliction—I have always foreseen this end. It is he who has decided for the baby boy. He has spoken him to me as the island’s gift. In return I’ve made my own promise. We will leave the island, but this child will never live by mouth, only by hand. I’ve sworn it as only I can. On a life that knows its end.
The child brought to us from the scene of the fire made no noise, only waved his arms in mournful patterns for much of the night. This, however, was the only mark left on him by the blaze. His skin seemed to have suffered not a single burn or lash in a conflagration that consumed just about everything it touched. His small lungs should have filled with smoke more rapidly, and his demise should have come much sooner, than his mother’s. Is this child, the so-called island’s gift, an “immortal,” unscathed by that which would fell any ordinary man? With what we have in our midst, we can only determine so much. To risk the child’s life would mean to squander future opportunities of which, at this early stage, we can only begin to dream. Yet to overlook the evidence revealed to us only accidentally, to fail to seek out the island, would be to neglect the very pursuit of truth that propels the wheels of scientific inquiry. And to stand in the way of such an inquiry would be to commit nothing short of a crime against humankind.
Why has this island remained undiscovered until this late hour? Why did we require pubescent naiveté and private tragedy to lead us to this crucial frontier? Again, we will leave the more existential musings to philosophers and to faith. We ask these questions more directly, and desire answers more concrete. We have witnessed firsthand the inscrutable ways of Rene Mann and his fellow worshippers. Perhaps the island is yet another secret this religion wishes to keep. We have known of ancient peoples carried by the smallest and most primitive vessels to neighboring lands, separated permanently from their origin, begetting a people of their own. The islanders cannot live far from the coastal region where young Dena fled to the sea; we have considered the possibility that they are exiles of her faith, a people banned from the “enclave,” illegitimate children of the so-called forefathers, or that they are descendants of a lost tribe. But this seems unlikely: Ma’anu Wei describes the island inhabitants as so very alien, and she is so very willing to trust them (from the first moment of contact, so soon after the betrayal by her own kind), that we must entertain the possibility that they are not at all of Dena’s people. Who are they, then, and why have they managed to remain undetected even in our time?
We might go so far as to presume that to our own leadership the island is, in fact, nothing new, but rather a secret hoarded for itself, away from the science that might make use of it. We can imagine all sorts of reasons for an omission of this magnitude, but respect for the idiosyncrasies of an age-old faith is not among them. If our governing bodies have kept the island—and all it might promise—from our nation’s greatest minds, their duplicity bears the darkest of implications, not just for our own nation, but for all mankind. No one familiar with power doubts that it is to suffering a most beloved sycophant.
Or perhaps on this point, we are mistaken: perhaps until Ma’anu Wei, the island was entirely unknown. The past, at this stage, need not matter, only what lies ahead. Our appeal is not merely for the loosening of restrictions, the unfurling of maps, the throwing open of waterways and vaults; it is for resources, it is for cooperation, it is for the sanctioning of a quest that will have repercussions for human life on this planet as we have come, at this desperate juncture, to know it. We may set our sights, now, on another world. That we must do, with or without support. If the island exists, why should we not find it?
Have I dreamt it? Or did it dream me? In my name is a word never known to the island, until I came to it, borne by loss. It is a noise made by mouths, meaning that which is not, and its sound is of weeping. Wei, Wei, Wei.
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Eliezra Schaffzin is a recipient of the Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction (judged that particular year by Brian Evenson). Her collection of very short stories, Tiny Creatures, was published by Ethel, a micro-press. One of its tiny tales, about a tardigrade, was a finalist for the SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction, and another, “Triptych: Little Deities,” won the Los Angeles Review Award for Flash Fiction. Sometimes her work lies awhile in a DIY literary crypt and then undergoes a rude awakening. She wrote “Ma’anu Wei: What We Know Thus Far” in 2007. Her website is eliezraschaffzin.com. | |