The Signature of All Things

glimpsed in the corners. There were sometimes living Tahitians haunting these grim locales, too, but The Boy was never among them. They took her to a small settlement on the banks of Lake Maeva, where the women still dressed in grass skirts, and where the men had faces covered with macabre tattoos, but The Boy was not there, either. The Boy was not in the company of the hunters they passed on these slippery trails, either, nor on the slopes of Mount Orohena, nor Mount Aorii, nor in the long volcanic tunnels. The Hiro contingent took her to an emerald ridge on the top of the world, so high that it seemed to bisect the very sky—for it was raining on one side of the ridge, but sunny on the other. Alma stood on this precarious peak with darkness to her left and brightness to her right, but even here—at the highest imaginable vantage point, at the collision of weather itself, at the intersection of the pô and the ao —The Boy was nowhere to be seen.
    Because they were clever, the children eventually gleaned that Alma was looking for something, but it was Hiro—always the cleverest—who realized she was looking for some body .
    “He not here?” Hiro asked Alma with concern, at the end of each day. Hiro had taken to speaking English, and fancied himself quite supreme at it.
    Alma never confirmed she was looking for a person, but she never denied it, either.
    “We find he tomorrow!” Hiro would swear every day, but January passed and February passed and still Alma did not find The Boy.
    “We find he next sabbath!” Hiro promised—for “sabbath” was the local term for “a week.” But four more Sabbaths passed, and never did Alma find The Boy. Now it was April already. Hiro began to grow concerned and morose. He could think of nowhere new to take Alma on their wild jaunts around the island. This was no longer an amusing diversion; this had clearly become a serious campaign, and Hiro knew he was failing at it. The other members of the contingent, sensing Hiro’s heavy spirits, lost their joy as well. This was when Alma decided to unshoulder the five boys of their responsibilities. They were too young to be carrying the burden of her burden; she would not see them weighted with by worry and responsibility, just to chase down a phantom figure on her behalf.
    Alma released the Hiro contingent from the game and never went hiking with them again. As thanks, she gave each of the five boys a piece of her precious microscope—which they themselves had returned to her nearly intact over the last several months—and she shook their hands. Speaking in Tahitian, she told them they were the greatest warriors who had ever lived. She thanked them for their courageous tour of the known world. She told them she had found all that she needed to find. Then she sent them off on their way, to recommence their previous career of constant, directionless play.
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    T he rainy season ended. Alma had been in Tahiti for nearly a year. She cleared the moldering grass off the floor of her house, and brought in new grass once more. She restuffed her rotting mattress with dry straw. She watched the lizard population diminish as the days grew brighter and crisper. She made a new broom and swept the walls free of cobwebs. One morning, overcome by a need to refresh her sense of mission, she opened Ambrose’s valise to look yet again at the drawings of The Boy, only to find that—over the course of the rainy season—they had been utterly consumed by mold. She tried to separate the pages one from the other, but they dissolved in her hands into pasty green morsels. Some sort of moth had been at the drawings, too, and had made a meal of the crumbs. She could not salvage any of it. She could not see a trace of The Boy’s face anymore, nor thebeautiful lines made by Ambrose’s hand. The island had eaten the only remaining evidence of her inexplicable husband and his incomprehensible, chimeric muse.
    The disintegration of the drawings felt like another death to Alma: now, even the phantom was gone. It made her wish to weep, and most certainly made her begin doubting her judgment. She had seen so many faces in Tahiti over the previous ten months, but now she wondered whether she truly could have identified The Boy at all, even if he had been standing in front of her. Perhaps she had seen him, after all? Mightn’t he have been one of those young men at the wharf in Papeete, on the first day she’d arrived? Mightn’t she have walked past