The Last True Sentence

Chapter Eight: Marginalia

The real center of the case was not in the courtrooms, but on the margins where Celia Munro had been fighting her stealth war, an indictment whose significance lay in a new way of doing things. A literary foundation named Archive of Resistance approached Iris in November with an offer to save Celia's letters and footnotes in a collection of writing to combat violence for women. The curator, Dr. Adisa Okafor, was a young Nigerian-American scholar, and a personal connection with the theme: her own aunt was a journalist who was killed for her work. Adisa flew to Washington and had tea with Iris in a Dupont Circle diner where they chatted for hours, and the tea was cool.

“Celia's annotations are not just evidence,” Adisa said, as if in an evangelical manner. “They're a philosophical act,” she said, “because it's a text that's trying to cancel out her and the other victims. It's a real-time correction of the stories of the perpetrators; we want to make a book of your letters, the footnotes, contextual essays. We'd like you to write the introduction.”

Iris hesitated. For years she had lived her life without much attention, and she was suddenly being called upon to do the same once more. Adisa's faith was contagious. Celia's voice had been silenced for decades, and now it was time for her to come out and be heard. Iris agreed. She transferred her digital files to the letters and assured her that she would try to write an introduction that would pay homage to the courage of Celia, as well as to the linguistic structure from which her words had emerged.

The project brought Iris into Celia's life. Adisa found Celia's mother, Elena Munro, who was in a care facility in Astoria, Oregon, with her assistance. Elena was eighty-six, weak, and her mind was as broken as shards of glass, but she was still very sharp in the middle. Upon arriving with a bouquet of wildflowers and a folder of Celia's poems, Iris's hands shook as she reached her fingers to the photocopied pages.

Elena said her voice was a wisp, “She was always fixing things.” As a child, if she made a mistake in a sentence, she would correct it, and I would find the school books full of notes in the margins; the teachers would say “she is a pest”. There was a dry laugh, she said. “She hated lying,” she said, “But she couldn't stand lying.”

In 1990, Iris found out that Celia had met Roy at a writers' retreat in Port Townsend. She was twenty-seven and a modestly reputed, but honest poet. Roy was magnetic, older and already ailing from the literary scene. They started a correspondence which morphed into a relationship, the only communication being in letters, as Roy became more and more paranoid about phones. Celia was his de facto editor, reading the early versions of what was eventually to become The Last True Sentence. Over time, though, she began to see his fiction start to appear in the newspapers, with details matching unsolved crimes from which she was able to deduce similarities. She began to make a file containing his drafts and make notes on them. She admitted in her last letters to a friend that she had no intention of sending him letters and would head to the police. Two days later she vanished.

Last time I spoke to her, she said to me that she was working on something important, that she was writing between the lines so that someone could find the truth; I didn’t understand then, but I do now.”

Iris put her hand on the other's and said that never again would Celia's words be forgotten. She collected hours of oral history, and she was able to record Elena's memories for the archive. It was a celebration and a confrontation: Celia Munro was not a ghostly footnote but a fully fledged human, whose last act of resistance was finally given voice.

Back in Washington, though, Iris immersed herself in concocting the training program for the FBI. She developed exercises to enable agents to recognize the "linguistic fingerprint" and to analyze shifts in pronouns and inconsistencies in tense, as well as listen for the "voices" that attempt to correct dominant stories. She took those footnotes of Celia as a case study, seeing them as a form of 'marginalised speech', speech that challenges the centre. The agents were the first sceptics, but they came to know the nuances. After a listening session, one young trainee, named Priya, confided to Iris: “You have taught me that listening is not only a passive skill, but an investigative skill as well.” Iris could feel a sliver of lost purpose in that old fire that had beckoned her to the Bureau before it all fell apart.

But Barrett Cole's journalism loomed over all of that, anyway. The other article he published attacked her credibility, claiming she was a mentally deranged woman who had gotten herself to believe that her lover had murdered a poet and Iris was making money off of a dead poet's dreams. The attack was obviously intended to be used in conjunction with the defence's tactic to be used at the next trial. Iris knew that she had to face the story head-on. She was asked to take part in a televised debate with Dr. Harold Fenwick, an expert for the defense in the area of linguistics.

When the debate was held, she spent the evening in a New York studio, and illuminated by the lights, no shadows could be seen. Fenwick was a corpulent, aged professor, whose smile was patronizing. The moderator started out with the "dual voice" theory. Fenwick believed that every novelist uses more than one register and that the “Syntax voice” was Roy's attempt to write in a noir style. Iris responded with data: the contraction-free pattern in the passages from the Syntax letters, journals, and published works was not only statistically unusual when compared with Roy's other letters, journals, and published works, it also had a frequency distribution that did not follow the pattern of any literary genre but that of the linguistic profile of people with DID. Then she pivoted.

In the seminal paper you published in 2011, you suggested that a change in the frequency of function words is a sufficiently large drop, below a certain threshold, to suggest a separate authorial identity in the passage from the Roy manuscript. The Syntax's passages in the Roy manuscript are three times as large as that threshold. Is it now that you are giving up your own method, or is it that you use it as and when you like?

There was a hush in the study. Fenwick's smile faltered; he stammered about context and artistic license, but it was done. The video was shared all over the world. Avoiding previous indecision, public opinion started to take a stand on Iris's conclusions. The debate was a success, but it wasn't without personal risk: The following day, a threatening letter was received at her apartment, bearing a copy of the “last true sentence” with her name in place of the victim. It was traced by the FBI back to someone who was a fan of Roy and believed in the manuscript being a scripture to him. She has a heightened level of security.

Iris was determined to stand her ground. She would go on working, buoyed by Celia's encouragement. One evening she sat in her apartment with Leo, who was stoking the fire in the hearth, and read one of Celia's poems to him:

In the margin I write, therefore I am.

The center is an imaginary place, a seat of air.

The truth lay in the cracks and carets, corrections

In all of the lawful little refusal of the tyrant's grammar.

Iris said, “She knew”. She knew she would not live, but she wrote anyway, “that's how I want to be courageous, that's the kind of courage she knew she would write with.”

Leo lifted his glass of water up. “To the margin-writers.”

Iris clinked it to her lips. It was a quiet gesture, almost a ceremony, a toast to those women who are on the outskirts, who shape the story.