On a warm afternoon I stepped into a small laboratory looking out over the sea. Sea wind and bright light came in at the window. On the table stood bottles of a thick oil and slender glass instruments. Unlike everyone else I had met, the person standing there was young. A very young woman. She was dropping a bead of the sticky oil onto a glass plate and holding it up to the light.
"What are you making?" I asked.
"I'm fixing a medicine." She looked up. Her eyes were clear and steady. "There is a disease called leprosy. A very old disease, one that will later be called Hansen's disease. The flesh breaks down and the face is disfigured, and people were afraid of anyone who had it. They drove them out from among the healthy and sent them to an island across that water. Parted them from their families for good. In the old days they gave a sick man a bell to ring as he walked. To say: unclean, stand aside. People erased from the world while they were still living. For thousands of years no one could cure it, and all anyone knew to do was to be afraid and send them far away." She looked out at the far water for a moment. "There was exactly one thing that worked on it. An oil pressed from a certain tree — look, it's thick like this. So thick the body won't take it. Rub it on and it doesn't soak in; swallow it and it comes back up; put it in with a needle and it knots into lumps under the skin. The medicine existed and could not be used."
She held up a glass instrument. "I found how to break that oil into small enough pieces that it can pass into the body like water. Now it can go in by needle. The body takes it." She took a moment with her words. "Now they won't have to carry people off to the island. They can be cured at home. Without being parted from their families."
"And the one who did that," I asked. "Does the world remember you?"
She smiled faintly. A shadow passed through it that did not belong to her age.
"I am going to die soon," she said evenly. "I am twenty-four. Not long after finishing this work. When I am gone, a man at this same school will publish the method as his own. He will put his name on it. And then even the people who are no longer shipped to the island won't know who made the medicine that let them stay home. I have no time to set it right. I go too early, being too young. And a young woman — one from a position people were already inclined to look down on — the world will want even less to believe she did this."
She looked down at the thick oil again. "And strangely, that isn't what hurts most," she said. "More than whether my name is written down, what is real is that those people get to stay at home. Some mother will get well holding her own child. Some husband will get well lying beside his wife. Someday a young man will not board the boat to the island, and will simply stay beside his mother. He doesn't need to know my name. That's right, that he shouldn't have to. He only has to be beside his mother. I won't see it. But it will happen whoever publishes it and whoever doesn't. No one can take that from me."
"Are you not afraid?" I asked. "To go this early."
She thought a moment. "It would be a lie to say I'm not. I'm only twenty-four." She smiled faintly. "But when I think of those people going home from the island, it seems my short life isn't quite empty-handed. Measured by length it is short. Measured by what is in it, it isn't."
I looked at that young face. The world would soon cover her name with another name. And yet — if there is someone who did not cast out even one of those the frightened world exiled to islands, but was the first to take them in his arms — I wanted to know him. The one I had been searching for might be exactly that. And watching these twenty-four-year-old hands cut the sea route to the island, one more thread of rain was added over my longing for him.
As I left the laboratory she had already bent back over the glass plate. Out the window the island lay faint across the water. Toward that island where people were carried who could not come back, a boat was moving slowly. An empty boat with no one aboard. Someday every boat on that sea would be empty like it. She would not see that day. Without seeing the boat, she let the next drop fall onto the plate.
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