I glanced at my phone, but there was no return text from Ella, nor Hana, nor anybody else in my ever-shrinking world who I had drunk-texted. I turned to Max lying next to me on the bed in the Royal Hotel, a two-story colonial built in the late 1800s in the town of Featherston, north of Wellington in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. If you blinked, you would have missed the tiny rural town driving through. Max’s fur felt comforting under my cadenced petting. I could still see him jumping onto the dash, and every time it unspooled in my mind, I grew tearful.
I had wended my way to Featherston as one of the last events on the book tour planned by Hana. Booktown, as it was dubbed, was some kind of weekend festival of all things books, but with Hana gone, I had lost all interest in the tour and was now going through the motions, performing things obligatorily. I had no idea what I was even there for. Book signing? A reading? Without Hana I was rudderless, adrift in a country I had not come to know so much as expatriate to in order to escape my life in America.
A text notification popped up on my phone from Mary Biggs, one of the founders of Featherston Booktown, the official name of the festival. She and her husband were waiting for me downstairs in the restaurant.
I rolled off the bed and staggered wearily to my feet. Every bone in my body creaked, every muscle ached, every archetype in my psyche advising me how to live this life of mine demolished. The world had gone permanently out of focus, and I was weaving blindly, rudderlessly, in a fog of my own devising. Driving the camper van alone had exhausted me, depleted me emotionally, left me drained and plundered of energy. All alone now, I worried about making it the remaining five hundred miles up the North Island to Auckland and my ambivalent, still undecided, flight back to California.
I picked up Max from the bed and administered his oral supplement of calcitriol. Once in every five applications he threw it up, and this was one of them. That meant something was upsetting him.
“Oh, Max man, what’s going on? Huh?” His back arched, he retched a foamy substance onto the carpet for the third time. I found a towel in the bathroom, soaked it with hot water, returned, and cleaned up the minor mess. I petted Max on the head. He always felt better after throwing up. “Okay, no calcitriol today,” I said, lifting him up and placing him back in his carrier. I reached a finger in through the wire mesh door and touched his nose. “I won’t be long, little guy. I love you.”
I showered, shaved, said goodbye to Max one more time, then, slipping into my only decent coat, trudged down the groaning wooden steps to meet the docents orchestrating my next event on the New Zealand book tour. A part of me had wanted to cancel, but given the Biggs were hosting me in their historic hotel and I had somehow made it all the way to Featherston, Pyrrhic victory though it was, it seemed like a shitty thing to bail on them.
Mary and Peter Biggs were waiting for me at one of the restaurant’s tables. It was in between lunch and supper, so the dining room was empty, ghosts of its past eerily shifting about on its faded trompe l’oeil walls and ceiling. The Biggs were a couple in their sixties, and they seemed excited to meet me. Peter, the more gregarious of the two, stood to greet me with an outstretched hand.
“You must be Miles Raymond?”
“I am,” I said, taking his hand in mine briefly.
“Peter Biggs.” He gestured to his wife, who dreamed a warm smile up at me. “My wife, Mary. We’re the founders of Featherston Booktown. Have a seat.”
I settled into a chair, trying not to appear jaded, but the strain must have shown in my expression.
“How’s the book tour been going?” Mary said.
I performatively enlarged my eyes and shook my head as if: You don’t want to know. “Quite an adventure all in all,” I finally said. “I haven’t witnessed the end of the world, but I have glimpsed it,” I added.
They looked at each other and chuckled nervously (had they seen the social media posts of the Cougars of Christchurch and Wrekin debacles?). Mary returned her gaze to me, the gentle wrinkles lining her face suggesting wisdom and deep-rootedness in Featherston. “Where’s your publicist, Hana? Such a bright, beautiful young woman.”
It was as if someone had slid a knife into my heart and twisted it a quarter turn. It wasn’t until Mary Biggs had mentioned Hana that I realized how much I missed her. “She . . . had to leave the tour for reasons too complicated to go into.”
“That’s too bad,” said Mary. Peter drew an accompanying, complementary expression of empathy.
“What did she tell you about our festival?” Peter said.
I shook my head. “Not much. Something about a Māori ceremonial thing.” I upturned my hands and showed them the symbolic emptiness of my palms. “After that, I assumed there’d be a book signing at one of your local bookstores, and that was it.”
Mary and Peter exchanged looks of surprise bordering on alarm.
“What is the agenda?” I said in a tired voice.
“Well, we have a lot planned for you,” said Mary, leaning forward on her elbows and smiling.
“You’re our celebrated international guest of honor this year,” Peter added, sitting back in his chair, straightening tall and proud.
“I am?”
“Hana didn’t tell you?” Mary said, taken aback.
“I lost my support crew. I’m a soldier of one on a battlefield of books.” They chuckled at my mordancy. “All I had was an address and a brief description. I typed the address into Google Maps, and somehow, through a treacherous fog and on narrow roads, without my copilot, Jack, I made it here to Featherston and your lovely Royal Hotel. To be truthful, I don’t know how I made it.”
“It’s been quite a journey for you, hasn’t it?” observed Mary, laying a comforting hand on my forearm for the briefest but sincerest of seconds. “A book tour in the dead of winter in New Zealand, my Lord.”
Peter got down to business. “Miles, as our honored guest this year, we’ll be taking you in a few moments to the main venue for the opening ceremonies. There you’ll be given a pōwhiri.”
“A pōwhiri?” I said, squinting my eyes in incomprehension, vaguely recalling Hana had mentioned it the fateful morning she told me she was leaving the tour.
“It’s the traditional Māori welcoming ceremony, the one your publicist alluded to,” Mary explained. “Hana worked with us and the local iwi to make it happen.”
I recognized the term iwi as Māori for tribe and nodded assent, not aware approval was required.
“After the pōwhiri, we’ll be brought in,” continued Mary. “I’ll give a few opening remarks, and then you’ll be introduced and give a talk.”
“Pardon?” I patted my pants pocket to ascertain my vial of Xanax was where I always kept it secreted.
“Hana didn’t describe to you how the pōwhiri works?” said Peter.
“No. She’s a woman of few words. She was fond of springing things on me at the last moment. What do you want me to talk about after this pōwhiri? Who’s the audience?” I said, waking up.
“Talk about Aotearoa New Zealand,” Peter counseled, “and your impressions of it.”
“Remember,” said Mary, “you’re the honored guest of this year’s festival. People are looking to your opening remarks as a celebration of the future of books.”
A celebration of the future of books? I spoke in my head. What the fuck am I going to say?
Anxiety jarred me awake as Peter and Mary drove in a clock-ticking silence from the Royal Hotel to the venue for the opening ceremonies of Featherston Booktown. A light rain had drawn curtains across the landscape, and an icy wind was blowing in from the south off Lake Wairarapa, a sizable body of water south of Featherston.
Peter parked in a special VIP space in front of a large, windowless facility, and together we climbed out of their vehicle and started up a short flight of cement steps. A large banner, snapping horizontal in the freshening wind, announced “Featherston Booktown.” We were met on the pathway to what I surmised was an auditorium by a Māori woman in her thirties.
“She’s the kaikaranga,” Mary said.
“She starts the pōwhiri, the welcome,” Peter explained.
“What do I do?” I said, hands thrust nervously in both pockets, digging for purchase on reality.
“Nothing,” said Peter. “Go with the flow, you’ll be all good, mate.”
“Hi, I’m Manaia,” greeted the woman, extending her hand. “You must be Miles Raymond?”
“Yes,” I said, taking her hand in mine.
“We are honored to have you here this year.”
“I’m honored you would have me.”
“Peter, Mary, good to see you,” said Manaia, addressing them. “Shall we begin?”
“Let’s do it, Manaia,” Mary said, clapping her hands together and holding them prayerfully.
Manaia turned to the auditorium and, with hands cupped around her mouth, blasted out a call in a Māori dialect, a language I obviously didn’t understand a word of. It was more of an ululation than a call per se, the beginning of a spoken-word song, quite beautiful in its hauntingly sonorous, heart-piercing expression. Then, issuing from inside the auditorium, came an echo of her call in the same strange ululating voice. Manaia called back, her reply call seeming to grow in both volume and intensity. Her call was again responded to from inside and a sung dialogue broke out, one in my ears and another calling from seemingly the catacomb of the auditorium.
“This is the karanga,” Mary whispered into my ear. “The call to be accepted from the iwi.”
“What if I’m not accepted?” I joked to assuage my nervousness.
Mary laughed. “I don’t think it’s ever happened.”
As the karanga continued, we followed Manaia up the footpath, inching closer and closer to the auditorium’s entrance, drawn by the powerful magnet of the disembodied singing voice. Soon we were in the foyer, and the karanga’s ululations from inside were loud and filled my ears with a ballad of reverberant mystery. A few back-and-forth calls later, and our small party was led down the left aisle into an auditorium that seated some five hundred high school boys and girls dressed in uniform! Their youthful faces all turned to me in unison with expectant expressions when we entered and were escorted down the aisle to the foot of the stage. My heart pounded uncontrollably. There was a powerful buzz in the auditorium, the walls holding the moment in a kind of human pressure cooker.
The leader of the iwi, a tall Māori man, stood up from a chair where he and a few other prominent tribespeople were seated. Pressing his mouth to a microphone on a stand, he introduced Mary Biggs.
Mary stepped up to the stage, accepted the microphone from the Māori leader, who towered over her, and commenced a rehearsed speech. “Welcome, everyone, to Featherston Booktown. Twenty years ago, before you were born, Featherston was going through a hard time. Drugs, poverty, crime. The town’s leaders decided to do something about it. So we created Featherston Booktown. The idea of a booktown had its origins in Wales back in the early sixties and has spread to many countries, but it had never been done in Aotearoa New Zealand before.” She cleared her throat. “A tiny town that gives itself over to all aspects of the written word. In short, to books. The writing, the production, the selling, the entire process. We didn’t know if it would succeed. But here we are, alive, thriving, with over ten thousand expected this week to celebrate authors and their books and the people who publish them and the folks who sell them. Featherston has turned a corner. By embracing the culture of books, we have transformed this town, once ravaged by drugs and crime, into a cultural magnet of what we like to believe is a burgeoning pilgrimage honoring the written word.”
Polite applause greeted her when Mary paused to gather herself. She held up her hand to signal the students to quiet down.
“This evening we have a special, honored guest. A decade ago, when he, in his own words, ‘had nothing to live for,’ he wrote a novel that was turned into an internationally famous movie. Since then he has relocated to Aotearoa on our South Island and has been writing a new book. That book, A Year of Pure Feeling, has been published. When we found out he was planning a book tour, Biggsy and I”—she turned to Peter and they exchanged triumphant smiles—“decided he should be our guest of honor this year.”
I turned ninety degrees and stared into the sea of faces of the high school students. Shockingly, a number of them had copies of my book clutched in their hands! It stabbed me in the heart again Hana couldn’t be here to sit next to me and feel what I was feeling and to know she was the sole reason for that rhapsodic feeling. I had come a long way from the Cougars of Christchurch to this moment, and I wondered if it had been her grand plan all along, to cap this tour with such a moving tribute to someone as misanthropic and mistrustful of the world as me.
Mary interrupted my musings and snapped me back to attention. “And so without nattering on, I want to welcome California author . . . Miles Raymond.” Mary turned to me and began clapping and beckoning at the same time for me to come up onto the stage.
Peter gave me a nudge and I ascended the stairs with shaky steps, my legs vibrating in nervousness. Mary stepped back from the microphone and I approached it with mounting anxiety. I was greeted by thunderous applause, and I waited for it to subside. Even a raised hand by me didn’t quiet the students immediately. I had no idea where it was coming from. Were they applauding enthusiastically, the cynic in me reasoned, because the tradition of the opening ceremony of Booktown Aotearoa called for it?
“Hello.” I brought a fist to my mouth and cleared my throat. “Yes, I’m Miles Raymond. I’m not sure I’m as internationally famous as Ms. Biggs here introduced me as, but that’s no way to begin a speech, is it?” I paused, blinked and nodded, and then almost went blank. I blinked back tears welling in my eyes. “I’ve given a few talks in my day, but tonight’s has me feeling the most nervous I have since my mother gave birth to me in a taxicab.” Raucous laughter greeted the admission of the truth of my birth. “I had no idea about this, this gathering with all of you, when my publicist signed me up for Featherston Booktown. It wasn’t until moments ago that I realized what a pōwhiri even is.” Scattered laughter relaxed me. “It’s quite poetic in its otherworldliness, and I mean that as a compliment.” I inhaled deeply. “When I look into all your fresh youthful faces, I think back to when I was your age, and now knowing what I know, what I’ve experienced, what I’ve accomplished, and how I’ve often failed, I’m loath to say anything for fear I will scar you for life,” I finished in a rising, exclamatory tone, gaining confidence from the positive audience reaction. I gazed into the eager, young, blushing, and ruddy faces of New Zealand’s future and was suddenly at a loss for words. “If I told you what I thought about the future of planet Earth, you might leave here with a feeling of hopelessness.” I turned to Mary and fixed my eyes on hers. “But after Ms. Biggs’s speech about how books, the culture of books, an art form I have suffered for and given my life to, has transformed your town and revitalized it and summoned it hope, it would be churlish of me to lay on you a bleak, dystopian lecture. This—I’m just now realizing!—is a festival of hope, however microcosmic it is in your tiny town of Featherston. Like all hope, only a seed needs to be sown somewhere, anywhere, and it has the chance, if watered, if attended to, to grow into something that spreads across the oceans to other countries and becomes a permanent fixture. And to think books—books!—are at the center of this revolution . . . I cannot in all good conscience go to the dark side here tonight. I simply cannot.” The audience went blurry as I stood there blinking back tears. “I have a special needs cat. He can run but he can’t jump, but yesterday he did something remarkable. He leaped from the passenger seat of my camper van up onto the dashboard . . . across a chasm of hope. He took a risk and he made it. And now risk is etched in his brain as a plausible strategy going forward. If you don’t take risks, you won’t live life, you won’t cross that chasm like my cat, Max. Like me.”
I bowed my head and stared down for a moment at my scuffed shoes and denim pant legs. I realized I was wandering into the realm of the unwell and tried to regroup. Hesitancy about whether I should continue or politely thank them and wish the festival a great success lowered me to a moment of uncharacteristic speechlessness. With great effort, I gathered myself. In the cauldron of emotion I was experiencing, there was something else I needed to say. “A couple weeks ago, a young woman named Hana Kawiti showed up at Prophet’s Rock Winery, where I was staying, and announced herself as my publicist for this book tour I’ve been on in your sublimely beautiful country.” I chronicled the book tour in a synoptic but humorous narration, omitting the profane parts, at Mary and Peter’s behest when they had instructed me on the drive over how R-rated I could go. There were moments I had the students jackknifed over in their chairs laughing uproariously, but all along I kept reeling it back to Hana. “And then Hana had to leave my book tour for reasons I profoundly regret. To not have her here tonight evokes in me a great sorrow, is a hole in the sun of her being.” I cupped a hand over my mouth and raised my eyes to the ceiling. “This was her doing.” I gestured to the iwi members sitting alongside me. “You are her people. This beautiful pōwhiri you have extended to me and her not being here to experience it with me lances my heart with an ache I’m at a loss of words for.” I closed my eyes and tears leached from their corners, coursed in rivulets down the sides of my face. The five hundred strong could feel my emotion emanating out to them in waves of irremediable grief, and it was transmitted back to me in their hushed countenances, their mesmeric stares, their blinking eyes. “Instead of tonight being about my story, my journey,” I soldiered on in an emotionally trembling voice, “I want tonight to be about Hana Kawiti, in absentia, and this extraordinary Māori pōwhiri you’ve staged on my behalf, and which I don’t deserve, and which I had no idea was forthcoming when I drove into Featherston last night.” With closed eyes, I looked inward. Hana’s visage loomed in my imagination, and I could clearly see her wry, radiant smile effloresce and suffuse me with its warmth. “Thank you, Hana, for making this wonderful tribute happen. I’m not sure I’m deserving of it, so I’m dedicating it to you. Thank you from the bottom of my wretched heart.”
I waited for the applause, but the cavernous room had instead fallen eerily into silence. Had I said something inappropriate? Baffled, I started away from the microphone, but Mary held up a hand and motioned me with a wagging index finger to return to where I had delivered my speech. Stupefied with confusion as to what was next in the program, I did as instructed.
A moment later, one of the iwi’s other luminaries stood from his chair. He raised a wireless microphone to his mouth and called out to the audience in the Māori dialect of their iwi. There ensued a great, collective commotion as all five hundred uniformed teenaged men and women rose from their seats. From the crowd another iwi member, a young man with curly dark locks, standing off to the side, flanking the packed auditorium, raised a microphone to his mouth. He called out something in Māori, and the five hundred young men and women began to perform what the Biggses told me was called the haka. All the students’ movements now were in sync. Their chanting voices harmonized into one unified whole. The haka burst out as a kind of warlike address, fierce in its bellicosity. Their eyes were fixed on me as they pounded their chests and arms with their fists, alternating their blows. They seemed to descend into a collective trance. Several of them had their tongues stuck out and wagging grotesquely. The thunderous chant, or song, in Māori, was powerfully emotional. At first I thought they were assailing me in a kind of tribal derision of my foreignness, but as it continued, in rises and falls as the leader on the floor urged them on to spectacular heights of loudness and fierceness, I realized, in a moment of transformation, riveting me with its sonic power, the haka was a demonstration of their respect, a bonding with their honorary guest, the closure of the pōwhiri.
The students poured their hearts and souls into the ceremonial rite in a performance both breathtakingly surreal and palpably moving. The stomping of their feet, the guttural voices that rose from their souls, the sheer expenditure of energy, the letting go of all inhibitions, the booming noise of the words they were chanting I didn’t understand; after all I had been through, it sheared my heart in two in a way I have never experienced in my home country, in my life. It was beyond a polite applause. It transcended cheering. In its ritualistic enactment it gathered up the recipient of the haka and swept them (me) off their feet, thundered me into a kind of ineffable submission.
Tears, unbidden, sprang to my eyes. What a moment! Two minutes of ear-deafening acclamation sundered in seconds to a thrumming silence, the auditorium vibrating. It ended abruptly, not with a decrescendo but rather like a cleaver slamming into a block of wood. All one could hear was their collective exhalations from all the energy they had expended. At the leader’s instruction the young men and women, spent from the two-minute, exhilarating performance, sat back down in their seats in unison, their foreheads perspiry, their expressions fixed in a theatrical ferocity. It was an astonishingly cathartic moment. Every anxiety and ambivalence and dark dagger of depression had vacated me. I felt like I belonged to the world again, a world I never felt like I belonged to. Here, in the tiny town of Featherston, a town that had decided to revitalize itself on the foundation of the written word, my faith in humanity had been unexpectedly, if temporarily, restored.
When the haka had ended, the silence that ensued was more profound than any I had ever experienced. Not even death, I concluded, would be this transporting.