It wasnat a bad idea. She was tired. Still, she had the feeling that vigilance was in order. Didnat someone need to stay awake and watch the jungle? Didnat someone need to make sure the child did not fall overboard?
Easter got up and spread out the fabric with both hands, holding it open for her like an envelope and nodding instructively, as if perhaps the operation of a hammock was confusing to her. So he would watch the jungle. He would make sure she did not fall into the water. Obediently, she sat down, she lay down, and when she was settled in, Easter put his hand on her forehead and held it there as if she were a sick child. He smiled at her, and smiling back she closed her eyes. She was on a river in a boat in Brazil. She was in the Amazon taking a nap with Dr. Swenson.
She had had a good imagination as a child, though it had been systematically chipped apart by years of studying inorganic chemistry and charting lipids. These days Marina put her faith in data, the world she trusted was one that she could measure. But even with a truly magnificent imagination she could not have put herself in the jungle. She felt something slip across her rib cagea"an insect? a bead of sweat? She kept still, looking out through the top of the hammock at the bright split of daylight in front of her. The midday heat tacked her into place. She thought about medical school, the fluorescent halls of that first hospital, the stacks of textbooks that made her back ache as she lugged them home from the library. Had she known that Dr. Swenson caught the last flight to Manaus after Thursdayas lecture on endometrial tissue, would she have wished that she could come along? Could she have seen herself in the Amazon at the side of her teacher on an expedition that forged ahead in scienceas name? Dr. Swenson certainly had no trouble envisioning herself in the Amazon with Dr. Rapp when she was a student. Wasnat it possible that she could have managed the same? Marina attempted to shift the knot of her hair to one side so that she was not lying on it so directly and in doing so set herself back into a gentle rocking. The answer was no. Marina had been a very good student, but she only raised her hand when she was certain of the answer. She excelled not through bright bursts of inspiration but by the hard labor of a field horse pulling a plow. On the few occasions Dr. Swenson noticed her she had approved, but she had never been able to remember Marinaas name.
When the rocking stopped Marina tilted her hips back and forth to start it up again. There were layers upon layers of scents inside the hammocka"the smell of her own sweat which brought up trace amounts of soap and shampoo; the smell of the hammock itself which was both mildewed and sunbaked with a slight hint of rope; the smell of the boat, gasoline and oil; and the smell of the world outside the boat, the river water and the great factory of leaves pumping oxygen into the atmosphere, the tireless photosynthesis of plants turning sunlight into energy, not that photosynthesis had an odor. Marina inhaled deeply and the scent of the air relaxed her. Brought together, all those disparate elements turned into something wholly pleasant. She wouldnat have thought that would be the case.
Marina closed her eyes. She could feel the boat wagging gently in the current of the river as it pulled on its line. She could feel the light and layered motion of the water coming up through the boat and up the poles that held the hammock and from there into the hammock and into her bones, and that was the movement that sent her to sleep.
Her father was there, but he was in a terrible rush. She was going back to the university with him. He was late for the class he was teaching and the streets of Calcutta were packed in a human knot, more and more people pushing to find their place on the pavement, so many students rushing to get to class themselves. She held his hand as a way to keep from losing him in the crowd and she thought of how they must look, the two of them holding hands. When a woman walking quickly in the opposite direction with a sack of rice on her head wedged herself between them as if there was no other way she could possibly go, Marina latched onto the back of her fatheras belt before he had the chance to slip away. She was trying to outsmart the dream. She knew it well enough by now. Her father was so fast! She was looking at the little bit of gray in the back of his hair, which was still very thick and mostly black, when suddenly a man with a cart full of bicycle tires rushed at them. How could he get so much speed in this crush? The dream was intent on its own historical set of rulesa"it is written that the two of them must be divideda"and so he rammed his cart between them as if he meant to go through her arm. The blow hit her with such velocity that she went flying up into the air. It was like a dream, and for the instant she was above the crowd she saw everything, all the people and the animals, the terrible shacks that lined the road to the grand houses, the beggars and their bowls, the gates of the university, her fatheras slim shoulders as he dashed ahead unencumbered by her weight. She saw everything, the impossibility of everything, before she crashed down on the pavement, the entire weight of her body coming onto her elbow.
aIs it a snake?a Dr. Swenson shouted at her. aHave you been bitten, Dr. Singh?a Marina was on the deck of the boat. It was a very slight distance to fall. Suspended in her hammock she had been no more than three feet off the ground, but be that as it may the ground had come up hard and knocked the wind out of her. When she opened her eyes she saw feet in tennis shoes and beside them, small brown feet. She took another minute to breathe.
aDr. Singh, answer me! Is there a snake?a aNo,a Marina said, her left cheek pressed hard to the filthy wood.
aThen why were you screaming?a The boat was moving now and Dr. Swenson gave Easter a poke in the shoulder and pointed him back to the wheel. They had resumed their journey at some point and for a minute there had been no one driving.
Oh, she could think of so many reasons to be screaming, not the least of which was the fire in every bone on the left side of her body. Marina eased over onto her back. She moved her left fingers gently and then explored the range of movement in her left wrist. She moved her feet from side to side to complete the inventory. Nothing broken. The fabric she had been sleeping in was now hanging just above her face. aI was having a dream.a Dr. Swenson reached up and unclipped Marinaas hammock from the pole and then walked around her to the other side to take the hammock down. It had the effect of someone throwing open the draperies. The sunlight flooded her vision. Without intending to, Marina was looking up the bottom of Dr. Swensonas shirt and saw the soft white ledge of her belly where it met the line of her drawstring pants. aI thought you had been bitten by a snake.a aYes, I understand that.a Marina was shivering slightly in the heat. She closed her right hand, tried to feel her fatheras belt.
aThere are lanceheads in these parts and they arenat geniuses for hanging on to their branches. It is as stupid a snake as it is deadly. Everyone here knows someone who met their end stepping on a lancehead. They are perfectly camouflaged and they do nothing to get out of the way or make their presence known except for sinking their teeth into your ankle. Easter once kept me from putting my foot in the middle of one all coiled up in our camp. It must have been two meters long and it didnat look any different from a pile of leaves and dirt. Even when he showed it to me I didnat see it at first.a She stopped and gave herself a quick shake.
aWas I about to step on one?a aThey do occasionally fall into boats,a Dr. Swenson said tersely. aThey like to get under things or into things. A hammock is a reasonable place for a snake to hide. It was startling, your screaming. I had to turn you out to see if there was a snake in there with you.a aYou turned the hammock over?a Marina had assumed she had thrown herself out in the course of her dream.
aOf course I did. Did you expect me to find the snake without waking you?a Marina shook her head. Had there been a two-meter snake in her hammock, flinging it onto the ground while flinging Marina on top of it would likely not have saved her from being bitten, but where snakes were concerned people often made hurried decisions. She closed her eyes and covered them with both hands. Dr. Swenson would have thought she was thinking of the snake but she was thinking of her father. No one said anything for a while and then she felt something very cold tapping against her shoulder.
aSit up,a Dr. Swenson said. aDrink a bottle of water. Sit up now. Thereas ice on the boat. Do you want any ice?a Marina shook her head.
aIce is a luxury confined to this moment. If you want any ice, this is your chance. Sit up now, Dr. Singh. I canat stand to see a person lying on this deck. Itas vile. You had a dream. Now sit up and drink your water.a Marina sat up and then, remembering the cockroaches, she pulled herself back onto the box of grapefruit juice. Her head hurt. Then she noticed that the box she was sitting on was covered in letters, letters she was sure hadnat been there earlier. It was a printed uppercase alphabet of an irregular size, or most of the alphabet. The letter K was gone, and when she moved her thigh she saw the Q was missing as well. Some letters, like the A, were perfectly rendered, while others, R and Z, were backwards. At the end of the string of letters were two words, EASTER and ANDERS, followed by a rudimentary drawing of a snail. Marina touched her fingers to Andersa name. aWhatas this about?a aThat is one of the many legacies left by your friend Dr. Eckman. Iam sure there are more I have yet to come across. In the brief amount of time he was with us he managed to teach Easter the fundamentals of table manners as well as the alphabet, or most of the alphabet. I see the K is missing.a aAnd he can write their names.a aI thought it was interesting that those were the two words he chose to teach the boy. Easter, well, that makes sense, but Anders? Still, he was very sick at the end. Maybe he felt it was a way to be remembered.a Marina could see him sitting on a log, a pad of paper out across his knees, Easter pressed in close beside him. Of course he could teach a boy how to make his letters. Head done it three times before. It wouldnat make any difference to him that Easter couldnat hear. This is who you are, Anders tells him, pointing to Easteras name. Then he points to his own, This is who I am.
aDr. Eckman wrote everything out for him, a sort of study chart. Easter practices constantly. I let him keep Dr. Eckmanas pens when he died. For a while he was making letters all over his arms and legs but I put a stop to that. I donat know how much of the ink is absorbed through the skin but it canat be good for a child. Itas a bad habit when thereas plenty of perfectly usable paper. I donat know what he thinks the letters are exactly, but he remembers them, most of them. He gets them in the right order.a aMaybe he thinks of them as something that belonged to Anders.a Dr. Swenson nodded. She watched the boy watch the river. aEaster cries out in his sleep. Itas the only time Iave heard his voice, but he has one. Months go by and I donat hear him, but since Dr. Eckman died heas had nightmares every night. Itas a terrible sound he makes.a Dr. Swenson turned then and let her eyes stay on Marinaas. aItas a shame you canat talk to him about it. Itas something that the two of you have in common. I will assume that the issue for you is mefloquine and that Mr. Fox did not send me a doctor with a debilitating mental illness.a aIam taking Lariam.a She wished she could bring back the box of grapefruit juice for Karen. It was, all things considered, a remarkable achievement.
aIave seen my share of screamers down here but when it happens I never think of Lariam. In the moment I always think itas a snake.a aBetter to be safe.a Dr. Swenson nodded. aLariam is for tourists, Dr. Singh. I sincerely hope you are a tourist, out of here in the next canoe. But short of that I suggest you throw those pills in the river. Do you think I take Lariam? A person canat live here having screaming nightmares and paranoia and suicidal fantasies. The jungle is hard enough without that.a aI havenat been suicidal.a aWell, good for you. It can still come. I knew a young man who walked into the river one night and didnat walk out. The natives saw him, thought he was going for a swim.a aI donat take it because I enjoy it, believe me.a aEver more the reason not to take it. It affects certain people quite seriously. I would say given this display that youare one of them.a Marina drew a slow breath in, held it, let it out. She could feel herself coming back even as the fire was raised in her arm. aAll the same though, Iad rather not get malaria.a aWell, I wouldnat say itas rampant. I havenat gotten it, or I got it once but it wasnat here. And there is after all a cure.a aWas Anders taking Lariam?a Dr. Swenson put her hands in her hair and gave her scalp an aggressive scratch. aHe didnat scream in his sleep so we never had the opportunity to discuss it. Are you asking me if Dr. Eckman died of malaria?a It hadnat been what she was asking, though it was a perfectly reasonable question. aIt seems possible.a aMalaria is something of a specialty of mine,a Dr. Swenson said. aSo I can tell you no. Not unless it was P. falciparum that turned cerebral. That would be a true rarity, of course, there isnat a great deal of P. falciparum in these parts.a P. falciparum, P. vivax, P. malariae, and there was one more. When was the last time Marina needed to know the strains of malaria?
aP. ovale,a Dr. Swenson said.
aYou think he might have had P. ovale?a aNo, thatas the one you canat remember. Mention a strain of malaria to any doctor and they try to remember the other three, but no one remembers P. ovale. You see very little of it outside West Africa. Do you have the same dream every time?a Marina had been too recently asleep to understand everything, too recently on this boat, too recently discussing snakes, too recently in Calcutta, too recently with Anders. P. ovale? aMore or less.a aI find mefloquine interesting in that way, how it taps into a single pocket of the subconscious. You could just as easily use it as a treatment as you could a preventative medicine. Thereas no sense suffering in advance. It wouldnat do you much good with cerebral malaria but as I said, that would be an extremely rare presentation in Brazil. What are your dreams about, Dr. Singh?a What are your dreams about? her mother asked her when she was a child screaming in her bed. What did you dream? Mr. Fox asked, his hands holding the tops of her arms. aMy father,a Marina said. aIam with my father and then weare separated somehow. I canat find him.a Dr. Swenson stood up with some difficulty. The interview had reached its conclusion. aWell, that doesnat sound too bad.a Marina would concede the point. When presented as a single sentence without embellishment it didnat sound bad at all.
Seven.
At dusk the insects came down in a storm, the hard-shelled and soft-sided, the biting and stinging, the chirping and buzzing and droning, every last one unfolded its paper wings and flew with unimaginable velocity into the eyes and mouths and noses of the only three humans they could find. Easter slipped back inside his shirt while Dr. Swenson and Marina wrapped their heads like Bedouins in a storm. When it was fully dark only the misguided insects pelted themselves into the people on board while the rest chose to end their lives against the two bright, hot lights on either side of the boat. The night was filled with the relentless ping of their bodies hitting the glass.
aDr. Rapp used to say how easy it was for the entomologists,a Dr. Swenson said, turning her back to the onslaught. aThey only had to switch on a light and all their specimens came running.a Marina was less comfortable in the jungle now that she couldnat see it. She felt the plant life pressing against the edges of the water, straining towards them, every root and tendril reaching. aNot only do the specimens come to you, they then have the decency to kill themselves.a aThis is worse than a hailstorm,a Dr. Swenson said, spitting a small winged beetle onto the deck. aWe can do without the lights.a And then she turned off the lights.
In an instant the veil of insects lifted and Marina saw nothing as she had never seen nothing before. It was as if God Himself had turned out the lights, every last one, and left them in the gaping darkness of His abandonment. aShouldnat Easter be able to see where heas going?a she asked. She could barely hear the sound of her own voice over the engine. A boy who could find a single branch in a thousand miles of uninterrupted trees could surely find his way home in the dark. She was the one who wanted the lights back on.
aOpen your eyes, Dr. Singh,a Dr. Swenson said. aLook at the stars.a Marina put her hands out in front of her and batted at the air until she found the rope at the edge of the boat. She held tightly to it when she leaned to the side. Beyond the spectrum of darkness she saw the bright stars scattered across the table of the night sky and felt as if she had never seen such things as stars before. She did not know enough numbers to count them, and even if she did, the stars could not be separated one from the other, the whole was so much greater than the sum of its parts. She saw the textbook of constellations, the heroes of mythology posing on fields of ink. She could see the milkiness in everything now, the way the sky was spread over with light. And when, finally, she could tear herself away from the theater above them to look forward again she saw yet another light blinking like a mirage on the horizon. It was small and orange and as they came towards it, the light appeared to stretch into a single line, and when she thought she had the line fixed in her vision it broke apart. It scattered and spread, bits of it popping on and off. aThereas something up there,a she said to Dr. Swenson, and in another minute she said, aItas fire.a What she meant to say was Turn the boat around.
aIndeed,a Dr. Swenson said.
It was a dozen fires, and then the fires tripled, and then Marina could no longer count them. What had been a line had spread into layers, and in those layers the circles of light lifted and fell. Was the fire in the tops of trees? Was it somehow burning in the water? Easter turned the lights of the boat back on and instantly the fire began to leap. A ululation of voices exploded the night, the ringing sound of countless tongues hitting the roofs of countless mouths. It filled the entire jungle and poured up the river in a wave.
There were people on the banks of the river.
They were going to meet the tribe. That had always been the point of the expedition, so why hadnat Marina thought of it before now? What had made the jungle so uncomfortable all this time was its absence of people. All the jungle had offered thus far were plants and insects, clinging vines and unseen animals, and that was bad enough, but now Marina realized that people were truly the worst-case scenario. It was like being alone on a dark city street and suddenly turning a corner to find a group of young men staring menacingly from a doorway. aLakashi?a Marina asked, hoping they were at the very least facing a known factor.
aYes,a Dr. Swenson said.
Marina waited for a moment, hoping for more than a one word affirmation. She was on an unnamed river in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night feeling very much the same way she always felt with Dr. Swenson, like Oliver Twist holding up his empty bowl. Would it have been too much to ask for the simple acknowledgment that these were no doubt unfamiliar circumstances? Dr. Swenson could have even extended herself enough to tell the story of the first time she had encountered the Lakashi, Lucky for me it was daylight then, or, I certainly was grateful that Dr. Rapp knew what to do, but that of course would require Dr. Swenson to be someone else entirely. The boat crept its way towards the waving, spinning flames until they were close enough that Marina could just make out the shape of heads behind each of the fires, every man and woman waving a burning stick, children holding slim burning branches, jumping and calling. She could see the trails of sparks as they splintered off and flew in every direction, extinguishing themselves before they touched the ground. In their magnitude those sparks were reminiscent of stars. The sound was also more nuanced the closer they came to it: too forceful for any flock of birds, too rhythmic for any animal. Marina remembered a funeral her father had taken her to as a child, thousands of lights in paper cups floating down the Ganges, the people crowded onto the banks, walking into the water, cutting through the night air filled with incense and smoke. She could smell the rot of the water beneath the blanket of flowers. At the time the spectacle had frightened her so badly she buried her face in her fatheras shirt and kept it there for the rest of the night, but now she was grateful for the little she had seen. It didnat explain what was spread out before her but it reminded her of all the things she didnat understand. aWhat do you think has happened?a Marina asked. Some of the people on the shore were dropping their fire now. They were walking into the water and swimming towards the boat. It was quite clear to Marina how people could get on the boat but she wasnat able to see how she could get off.
aWhat do you mean?a Dr. Swenson said. What do you mean, Dr. Singh, when you say stage-two cervical cancer?
Marina, beyond words, extended her open arms to the shore ahead.
Dr. Swenson looked down at the men who swam towards them. They kept their long throats stretched up like turtles so that they could avoid getting water in their open mouths as they called and cried. Then she looked back at her guest as if she could not believe she was yet again being bothered by the timid rabbits and their foolish questions. aWeave come back,a she said.
Marina turned away from the ebullient welcome, the burning and hopping and splashing, the never-ending sound of la-la-la-la-la, and turned back to Dr. Swenson, who was nodding her head towards the masses with a sort of weary acceptance. aYou were only gone for a night.a aThey never believe it. It doesnat matter how many times I tell them. Their sense of time lacksa"a But she didnat finish her sentence. The boat had sharply listed to the right as the men began to hang on to the pontoon on one side and then push themselves up. The case of grapefruit juice slid abruptly, hitting Marina in the ankles and very nearly throwing her into the ones who were just now pulling themselves out of the water. She caught a pole and righted herself. This was the reason Marinaas father always insisted on renting a pontoon boat in those early summers: not only was it easier to navigate and impossible to sink, it would have been very easy to reboard if one of them had fallen over. But no one ever did fall over. The theory was not put to the test. Dripping, the men hoisted themselves on to the deck and stood. They were considerably smaller than Marina, though taller than Dr. Swenson, wearing nylon running shorts and sopping T-shirts that advertised American productsa"Nike and Mr. Bubble. One of them wore a Peterbilt hat. They slapped their open hands against Easter, his arms and shoulders and back, as if he were a fire that they were putting out. Easter, clearly pleased, slapped them away. There were seven men on the boat, and then there were nine, all of them crying out with piercing intent. The black water was churning with swimmers and from time to time Easter would swing down the light and shine it into the water which served to consolidate the men like tarpon. They looked up and waved. No one could fault Easter for driving over them, they were swarming, but when the slow moving pontoon pressed against a shoulder or head the man simply sank beneath it and then popped up again later, assuming it was the same man popping up there. How many boats throughout history had been met by such enthusiastic locals? On the deck a man was looking up at Marina now and he touched her cheek with a wet hand without making eye contact. Two men behind her petted her hair. A fourth man ran his fingers down her forearm in a way that was almost too gentle to be endured. It was as if she were being greeted in a school for the blind. When a fifth reached up and cupped her breast, Dr. Swenson clapped her hands together sharply.
aEnough of that,a she said, and the men with their hands on Marina jumped back onto the toes of ones standing behind them who were waiting their turn, which caused all of them to still their tongues in their mouths and look at Dr. Swenson with expectation. In that moment Marina knew two things for certain: the Lakashi did not speak English, did not know the word enough, and that despite this minor hindrance they would do whatever Dr. Swenson told them. The snap in Dr. Swensonas voice had driven Marinaas pulse higher than the men with their wet fingers. They, after all, seemed more curious than menacing. In this hierarchy, Dr. Swenson was the uncontested kingpin and Marina felt herself to be closer to the natives than to their ruler. aGo on,a Dr. Swenson said, and pointed to the side of the boat, where one by one they walked obediently off the edge, often landing on some unfortunate in the water. aThey are an extremely tactile people,a Dr. Swenson said when the last one had disappeared with a splash. aThey donat mean anything by it. If they canat touch it, it doesnat exist.a aThey donat touch you,a Marina said, running her sleeve over her face.
Dr. Swenson nodded. aAt this point they know I exist. Iave been able to do away with the rest of it.a There was a narrow dock sticking out of the bank, a single, beckoning finger, and Easter brought up the boat snug alongside it, at which point the men handed their burning sticks to the women and boarded the boat in an orderly fashion, picking up boxes and baggage and carrying them off into the night. Most of them gave Marina a tap on the shoulder or stopped to touch the side of her head, but there was work to be done and no one lingered. Now it was the women who were singing out, and as Marina left the boat with Easter and Dr. Swenson they raised their torches overhead to cast a wider band of light. They wore homemade shift dresses in dull colors and kept their hair in long braids down their backs. There were children tied across their chests in slings, children holding on to their ankles, children balanced on hips, their dark round eyes reflecting the fire all around them. Dr. Swenson trudged up the dirt path into the jungle, nodding from time to time at the women who trilled their vowels in rapture. The children on the ground reached out and touched Marinaas pants, women ran their fingers around her ears and tapped at her collarbone. Occasionally a child, a very small one, would extend a hand to Dr. Swenson and the mother would snatch it back.
aThey didnat know you were coming tonight,a Marina said, hurrying a bit to be closer to Dr. Swenson. She even went so far as to put a hand on her arm. aSometimes you stay longer in Manaus, two nights, three nights.a aSometimes I stay a week,a Dr. Swenson said, looking forward. aI donat enjoy it but it happens.a A pregnant woman reached into the path in front of them and pulled back a low-hanging branch from a tree.
aBut if they have no sense of time, and you have no means of contacting them, how do they know when youare coming back?a aThey donat.a aThen how did they know to stage all of this tonight?a Dr. Swenson stopped and turned to Marina. The terrible darkness was broken apart by so many separate fires that the shadows, like the voices, came at them from every direction. From time to time a chunk of burning stick would fall into a pile of leaves. It was hard to understand how the entire forest had not been reduced to a pile of smoldering ash. aI suppose they do it every night when Iam gone. I donat actually know. You can ask Dr. Nkomo in the morning. Iam going to say good night, Dr. Singh. Easter will get you settled from here. Iam tired now.a As she spoke the words, Dr. Swenson began to weave a bit from side to side and Marina took a firmer hold on her arm. Dr. Swenson closed her eyes. aIam alright,a she said, and then she looked at Marina. She seemed to struggle for her breath. aSometimes this is more difficult than I had imagined.a Dr. Swenson held out her hand and a woman standing beside the path, a woman with one sleeping child tied across her chest and two more children, twins perhaps, holding either calf, took that hand and led her forward into the night. As Dr. Swenson walked away, all the light and sound went with her, the crowd formed itself around the fire she was holding. It should have been Marina who asked for a torch because before very long she was standing alone in the dark.
She would have worried about Dr. Swenson then, how the Amazon appeared to be defeating her, but instead thought of the lanceheads. She wondered if they slept on the ground or in the trees and, if it was in the trees, did their coils ever loosen in the night? Her best bet was to follow the crowd, to stay within the light, but after taking a few steps she felt uncertain as to where she should put her feet. There was so much crackling and breaking all around her. Small thorns tugged at her clothes and she was certain something was crawling on her neck. Just as she was about to call out she saw a light coming up from the direction of the dock, a light that formed itself in a long, steady beam. A flashlight! She felt as if she had never seen anything so modern in her life. Clearly it was Easter who was coming for her. Easter didnat use a flashlight like a boy. He kept the light focused on the path. He didnat shine it in Marinaas eyes or illuminate the tops of trees. When he got to her he took her hand and together they walked further into the jungle. There was a sort of narrow path, although it could have been nothing more than a random break in the growth of underbrush. Marina stayed one step behind Easter, putting down her feet in the places from which his feet had been lifted while Easter cleared everything in their way, low-hanging vines and spiderwebs of such size and strength they could have easily ensnared a small pig. Marinaas attention was so wholly focused on her feet that she didnat see where they were going until they stopped. The place that Easter brought her to was a tin box built onto stilts. He leaned over and lifted up a rock, took out a key, and unlocked the door. Marina had not expected a door in the jungle, much less a lock. Inside the room Easter swept the flashlight over a table and some chairs, stacks of boxes, some of which she thought she recognized: the juice, the hash. They were in the storage room. Easter, who kept hold of her hand even now, led her to the back of the room where they went through a second door and out onto a wide porch, or maybe it was a room as well. It was hard to tell. There was no breeze other than what was stirred up by a hundred thousand wings of flying insects. Easter pointed the light to a long column of mosquito netting that was suspended from the ceiling and fanned out over a cot. He pointed to her, to the cot. All of this would be different in the daylight. Nothing would feel so daunting once she could properly see.
When she sat down on the edge of her bed, Marina realized that in her concern about fire and snakes and the wandering hands of the natives she had walked off and left her suitcase on the boat, and while she would have liked to change out of her clothes and brush her teeth she wasnat even sure where she could find a basin of water. She could imagine no pantomime for Easter that would express her desire to be accompanied back to the boat and she wasnat about to make the trip on her own, and so she decided to forget about the whole business. What she would have liked was the telephone. She should have called Mr. Fox before they left Manaus. She knew by now he would have left a dozen messages and that when she listened to them in the morning she would be able to chart the panic mounting in his voice. It had been nothing but petulance on her part, his punishment to spend the day not knowing where she was, and now that it was too dark to try and find the phone there was no way to comfort him. Or maybe he would think she was halfway to Miami now, coming home on the next flight the way she had told him she would, although Marina didnat think he had ever really believed her.
She took off her shoes and pointed to Easter. You sleep? He turned the flashlight to a wall six feet from the foot of her bed and showed her a hammock, an empty casing waiting for a boy. Then, handing her the flashlight, he pulled off his shirt and climbed inside while she stood there shining the light in his direction, dumbstruck by the little hanging cocoon he made. By her good fortune, she was sleeping in Easteras room. She tried to imagine it was a stroke of extraordinary kindness on Dr. Swensonas part when in fact it was probably the only bit of available space covered by a roof. It didnat matter; she realized now she could never have slept there without him. In her cot, beneath her net, Marina could easily calculate the ways in which her circumstances could have been worse. She stretched out and clicked off the light, listening to the steady breathing of the jungle. This was better than the Hotel Indira. The cot was no less comfortable than that bed. Clearly the Lakashi were prepared for guests no matter how insistently Dr. Swenson claimed to dislike them. People had come and stayed here before and probably they had all lain beneath this mosquito net thanking God that Easteras hammock was six feet away. Marina opened her eyes. In the dim light of the moon she looked into the white cloud of her net. Anders would have slept here. Easter was with him when he died, thatas what Dr. Swenson had said. She sat up. Anders. It came over her, this dark, this porch, this cot. In his fever he looked through this net. Marina got up, put her feet back in her shoes. There had to be a pen somewhere. She got the flashlight, checked the small figure of Easter supine in his cloth. She had nothing, not a handbag, a rucksack. She went back into the storage room. Now that she held the light she could see that it functioned as nothing more than an outsized closeta"boxes and boxes, plastic bins, plastic tubs, boxes of food, bottles of water, smaller boxes of test tubes and slides. She found a broom, a pile of cloths, a giant spool of twine. There was not a drawer or a shelf. There was not a logical place to put a pen, there was no logic to any of it. And then she remembered that Andersa pens had gone to Easter when he died. That was the boyas legacy, a handful of Bics. She went back to the sleeping porch, shined the light on some buckets, traced the beam of light around the line where the wall met the floor, and there, just beneath the hammock, she saw a metal box, bigger than the kind used for documents and smaller than the kind used for tackle or tools. She went down on her knees and reached beneath the boy, slid the metal over the rough hewn planks of flooring. There was no lock, just a fold-over hasp that kept the box shut. On the top was a small metal tray full of feathers and she held them up in groups of two and three and four, more than two dozen feathers in colors Marina had never realized feathers came in, lavender and iridescent yellow, each one perfectly clean, the barbs zipped up tight. In the tray there was a rock that in its size and marking looked startlingly like a human eyeball. There was a perfect fossil of a prehistoric fish pressed into shale and a rolled-up red silk ribbon. Beneath the tray was a blue Aerogram envelope with the word EASTER written on the front and when unfolded read: Please do all that is within your power to help this boy reach the United States and you will be rewarded. Take him to Karen Eckman. There was his address, his phone number. All expenses will be reimbursed. REWARD. Thank you, Anders Eckman. Beneath that, the note was written out again in Andersa college Spanish. He did not speak Portuguese and so the Spanish was his best chance. Marina sat back on her heels. There was a pocket-sized spiral notebook that contained the alphabet, a letter on each page, each of them printed in uppercase, and at the end the word Easter and then the word Anders and then the word Minnesota. Andersa driveras license was in the bottom of the box along with his passport. Maybe Easter had wanted his picture or Anders wanted him to have it. There were three twenty dollar bills. There were five rubber bands, a half dozen pens, a handful of coins, American and Brazilian. Marina was dizzy. She had meant to wake the boy up, to write the word Anders, one of the three words he knew. She would point to the word and then point to her bed. Did Anders sleep here? but she didnat have to ask the question now. She put everything back the way she had found it. She arranged the feathers, closed the lid, and slid the box to the wall. She turned off the flashlight and followed the moon back to Andersa bed and crawled inside. He had shown her his passport the day it came in the mail. The cardboard cover was stiff. His picture captured nothing of him. Even the color was off. The picture on his driveras license was better. aYou didnat have a passport?a she asked him.
aI did,a he said, sitting on her desk and looking over her shoulder so he could see it again. aMy junior year of college.a Marina looked up at him then. aWhere did you go?a Marina regretted that she had never spent a year abroad. She could never bear the thought of being so far from home.
aBarcelona,a he said, lisping shamelessly. aMy parents wanted me to go to Norway. But who leaves Minnesota for a semester abroad in Norway? When I was there I never thought Iad go home. I used to write the letter in my head to my parents, explaining that I was meant for sun and sangria and siestas. I was the happiest American in Spain.a aSo what are you doing here?a Anders shrugged. aMy time was up. Somehow I wound up going home. I went to medical school. I never went back.a He took the passport from her and looked at it again. aDonat you think the picture is good? I look so serious. I could be a spy.a Marina didnat dream that night. Whatever price the Lariam exacted on her subconscious had been paid that afternoon on the boat, but at some point when she was asleep and dreaming of nothing she was awakened by a breathless cry, the high, hopeless call of an animal in a trap. Marina sat up. aEaster?a she said. She turned on the flashlight and saw such a struggle in his hammock that her immediate thought was a snake. She leapt to her feet, meaning to grab the edges of the fabric and flip it over, to save the boy from what was devouring him, but by the time she had made it out of her net she understood what was happening and she took just a second longer to listen to the sound of his voice, then she reached inside and put her hands on his shoulders. She knew how to wake a person from a dream, how no one ever did it and how it should be done. She shook him gently, letting him flail beneath her hands. He was sweating, shaking, his eyes rolled back. She made all the appropriate sounds he couldnat hear. She whispered, Okay, itas alright now. She could not have stopped herself. She took him in her arms and let him cry against her neck while she made him promises, her hand tracing circles in the narrow space between his shoulder blades, and when he could breathe easily again and was falling back into sleep she straightened his hair with her fingers and turned to go back to her bed and he followed her there and climbed beneath the net. Marina had never slept with a child before, not since she was a child herself and had slumber parties with other girls, but it wasnat a science. She made a space for him beneath her arm and pulled his back against her chest and before there was another thought they were both asleep, safe in the white tunnel of net.
At some point during the night the fire juggling, fiercely screaming Lakashi had been replaced by a working-class tribe, a sober group of people who went about the business of their day without fanfare or flame. Marina found them by following a path to a clearing on the banks of the river, although when she had walked through this spot the night before she would have sworn it was solid jungle. There were women washing clothes in the river and washing children, women gathering sticks into baskets and braiding the hair of girls, every movement they made exposed to the merciless sunshine. There was a large assortment of naked toddlers slapping the water with their hands and stamping in puddles, so many toddlers and crawling babies that Marina wondered if she had wandered into the tribal day care. There were fewer men in evidence but still there were a handful of them carving down the inside of a very large log. They were shirtless, shoeless, and when Marina walked by them they gave her a brief, disinterested glance as if she were a tourist and they had seen her kind before. Boats, of course, were key to river life, and other logs carved into boats were jumbled together on the shore, and in the water a man was paddling away. Two small girls came by wearing shorts and no shirts, each of them with a tiny monkey around her neck that held on to its own prehensile tail with its hands to form a clasp. The monkeys both swiveled their heads towards Marina and showed her their pointy yellow teeth in extravagant smiles. The monkeys alone looked her in the eye. Then one of the monkeys caught sight of some infinitesimal life form in the hair of his little girl and reached up and snatched it off her scalp and swallowed it.
Marina had not as yet been able to locate the two people she knew on this river. Easter was not in her bed when she woke up this morning, not in his hammock, and she marveled at the thought that anyone could be quiet enough not to wake her, especially a child who was himself unacquainted with sound. She hadnat found Dr. Swenson yet either but that she imagined would be more of a challenge. Dr. Swenson was either standing right in front of you or she could not be located, and in this case there was no waiting outside her office door hoping she would turn up.
The pontoon boat swayed lightly on its rope at the edge of the dock exactly where it had been left the night before and Marina took this as a sign that for the moment all was well. When she went on board the men who had been scraping at the log stopped what they were doing and stood up straight to stare at her, their curved knives tapping against their thighs. It was a matter of seconds before she established her bag was not on board. The deck was empty and there was no place a piece of luggage could be hidden away. Marina ran her tongue over her teeth and thought again of her toothbrush. The morning was already hot and the air was thick with the smell of leaves rotting and leaves unfolding. Down by the water the mosquitoes helped themselves to her ankles and dug a well into the nape of her neck. One flew down the back of her shirt to bite beneath her shoulder blade in a place she would never be able to scratch. She wanted this suitcase much more than she had wanted the one that never arrived in Manaus. She wondered if somewhere in the storage shed where she was sleeping there might be a case of insect repellent, and for the first time she considered the word insecticide in relation to the word homicide. Suddenly she felt a shift among the Lakashi, a collective straightening of spines that was followed by an animated chatter she could not parse into any words she knew. Then she saw a very tall black man as thin as a drinking straw emerge from the jungle, his small wire glasses glinting sunlight. He dipped his head in every direction in a gesture that was less than a bow but considerably more than a nod, and from every corner the people stood and dipped their heads in return. A few of them called out a phrase of greeting and he repeated it back to them, capturing perfectly the same rhythmic swing at the end of the sentence that threw the crowd into raptures. The women held up their babies and wagged them towards him, the men laid down their knives. They proceeded then to engage in a sort of call-and-response, a person in the tribe throwing out a phrase and the tall man repeating it. No matter how complicated a sentence they served he managed to volley it back. The Lakashi were rocking side to side in complete satisfaction, at which point the man gave a much lower bow that seemed to indicate it had all been great fun but now was the time to return to work.
aDr. Singh, I presume,a he said, walking around a fire to offer his hand to Marina. He wore khaki pants and a blue cotton shirt that looked as if they had been banged out repeatedly on rocks. aThomas Nkomo. It is a pleasure.a His English was so musical and so clearly not his first language that Marina wondered if he had learned to speak it through singing.
aA pleasure,a she said, taking his long, thin hand.
aDr. Swenson told us you would be returning with her. I had wanted to meet you last night, to say welcome, but with everyone turning out to greet you I could not even get close.a aI donat think it was me they were coming to greet.a Dr. Swenson told him she would be returning with her?
aThe Lakashi like to make things happen. Theyare always looking for reasons to celebrate.a Marina nodded to the crowd behind them who had sat down to watch their conversation as if it were a theater piece. aYou speak their language beautifully.a Thomas Nkomo laughed. aIam a parrot. What they give me I can return to them. It is the way I learn. They know some Portuguese, the traders come through or they go to Manaus, but I make an attempt to speak Lakashi. One must not be shy where language is concerned.a aI wouldnat know how to start with this one.a aYou must first open your mouth.a aDo you understand Lakashi?a He shrugged. aI know more than I think I do. I have been here two years now. Thatas time enough to pick up something.a Two years? Just behind the thick scrim of leaves Marina could make out the shape of some huts, a vague outline of civilization. Was there a sort of suburb in the trees that she couldnat see, a place where people could bear to live for years at a time? aSo youare working with Dr. Swenson?a Surely Vogel knew and failed to mention to her that they were paying other doctors to work on-site.
aI am working with Dr. Swenson,a he said, but he sounded like he was parroting again, that he either didnat believe what he was saying or he hadnat understood the question, then he added, aOur fields of research overlap. And you, Dr. Singh? Dr. Swenson tells us you are employed by Vogel. What is your field?a aCholesterol,a Marina said, thinking that in all probability no one in the rain forest had ever considered their cholesterol nor did they need to. There were so many lanceheads to step on. aI work as part of a group that does long-range tests with statins.a With that Thomas Nkomo put his long, elegant hands together and pressed the tips of his fingers to his lips, his head moving sadly, slowly from side to side. She saw his gold wedding band bright as a beacon against his skin. The Lakashi, who never stopped watching him, were leaning forward now, concerned to see the distressed look on his face. It was a very long time before he said anything at all. aYou are here about our friend then.a Marina blinked. Of all the other doctors who had come here before her the chances were good that only one of them was interested in cholesterol. aYes.a He sighed, his chin down. aI had not put this together but of course, of course. Poor Anders. We have missed him very much. How is his wife? How are Karen and the boys?a Car-ron was how he said her name. It had never been feasible for Karen to make this trip and yet Marina wanted her there to see the suffering on Thomas Nkomoas face, to be the recipient of such gracious sympathy. aShe wants me to find out what happened to him. There has been very little information.a Thomas Nkomoas shoulders slumped forward. aI donat know what to say. How can we explain this to her? We thought he would recover. People in the jungle get extremely sick, fevers are common things. I am from Dakar. In West Africa I can tell you that the very young will die suddenly and the very old will die slowly but the people in the middle, healthy men like Anders Eckman, they pass through these illnesses in time. We are doctors here.a He covered his heart with his hand. aI am a doctor. I was not expecting this.a As if in response to this show of emotion the Lakashi stood abruptly and gathered their children and their knives. They made quick work of putting twigs and clothing into baskets and in less than a minute every last one of them had retreated into the jungle. Thomas Nkomo glanced nervously at the sky. aWe should go now, Dr. Singh. The storm will be heavy. The Lakashi have the most uncanny meteorological abilities. Come with me, then, yes? I will show you the lab. You will be impressed by what we have made in our primitive circumstances.a To the west she could see the storm heading up the river and feel the sudden shift in the texture of the air. Dr. Nkomo put his hand against her back. aNow, please,a he said, and they began to walk quickly in a direction Marina had not been in before. Birds came reeling past the water and dived straight into the canopy overhead while other things, things that Marina couldnat make out exactly, darted up trees. Then there was a single, nuclear flash of lightning that was followed some milliseconds later by a clap of thunder that could have cracked the world in half, and then, because these things come in threes, there was rain. Marina, half blinded by the light and deafened by the boom, suddenly thought she would drown standing up.
There had been many occasions in Manaus when Marina had outrun a storm, or outrun the worst of it, she had pounded up the street in her flip-flops, finding shelter beneath an awning before the sky broke apart, but to run in a jungle one must have been born in a jungle, otherwise the roots and vines are snares, leg breakers, with mud that slicks the landscape into oil. The Lakashi had long since vanished with the birds and those other skittering unknowns, all of them back to home and nest and hole, leaving the place empty for Marina and Dr. Nkomo who made slow progress on the uneven path. Every drop of rain hit the ground with such force it bounced back up again, giving the earth the appearance of something boiling. Marina moved her hands from tree to tree, steadying herself on branches, trying to regulate her breath in the flow of water.
Dr. Nkomo tapped one of his long fingers against her fingers. aExcuse me, but it is not the best idea,a he said loudly. aYou never know when there is something hiding in the bark you shouldnat touch.a Marina pulled her fingers back quickly and nodded, then she turned her palms up and washed her hands in the rain.
Dr. Nkomo went on, more or less shouting to pitch his voice above the roar of the storm. aI leaned against a tree once and a bullet ant bit through my shirt, bit into my shoulder. You may know it by the genus, Paraponera?a He removed his glasses, which the rain had rendered useless, and put them in his shirt pocket. aIt was only one ant, as long as my thumbnail, and I was in bed for a week. No one likes to complain of such things but the pain was memorable. No bullet ants where you are from, is that correct?a Marina thought of the crickets and the meadowlarks, the rabbits and the deer, the Disney book of wildlife that slept in the wide green meadows of her home state. aNo bullet ants,a she said. Her scalp was soaked, her underwear, the ground beneath her feet loosened as streams of water sluiced between the trees. They heard a high whistle piercing through the thunder and wondered if it was their imagination. Imagination played a major role in the jungle, especially during a storm. They stopped and waited until the whistle came again and then a silence. Marina turned her head and saw that what she had taken for a tree to her left was actually a pole. There were four poles, and five feet above her head there was a platform, and above that a palm roof. Four Lakashi leaned over the edge, watching. Dr. Nkomo looked up, waved, and the four waved back.
aIt is an invitation,a he said to Marina. aWe should go up, yes?a Marina, who could barely hear for the water building up inside her ears, climbed the ladder first.
The single wide, open room that was the house was miraculously dry given the absence of side walls but the roof was several feet wider than the floor in every direction and dipped down low on the sides. Marina and Dr. Nkomo both looked up instinctively to admire this barrier between the rain and their heads while one of the women sat on the floor intricately knotting three very long palm fronds together into shingles as if to demonstrate how such things were possible. She was so taken with her work that she seemed not to notice the arrival of the guests, and yet Marina was certain she had been leaning over the edge of the floor and staring at them thirty seconds before. The sound of water pummeling palm fronds was infinitely more gentle than the sound of water beating against her skull and she was grateful to this woman for the work she did. Two men, who may have been thirty or fifty, came over to slap their hands against Dr. Nkomoas chest and back, though the slaps were more respectful and restrained than the ones that had been meted out to Easter the night before. Then, chatting endlessly with one another, they picked up pieces of Marinaas sopping hair, examined her ears briefly, and let the hair drop. A much heavier woman in her sixties or seventies was chopping up a pile of whitish roots using the floor as her cutting board and the same knife that had recently been in the employ of the boat builders. Because there were two men in the room there was a second similar knife on the ground behind her. There was a teenage daughter, replete with pimpled skin and bitten nails, who cast her gaze aimlessly around the room as if she were hoping to catch sight of a telephone, a sprinting toddler of two or three who wore a very small version of the crude shift dress that all Lakashi women seemed to wear, and a naked boy baby crawling at a good clip across the splintered planks. Marina quickly calculated the speed at which the baby was traveling and the remaining length of the floorboards and immediately leapt across the room, catching the boy by his small brown foot just as his left hand had reached into the empty air in front of him.
aAaaahhh!a the crowd said, and laughed. Marina, breathless, looked over the edge where the water from the roof churned into a pit of mud and vines like it was pouring off Niagara Falls. She dipped an arm beneath the childas midsection and carried him back to the center of the room again. The baby was laughing too. What was the joke, exactly? That she really thought he was going to go over the same way she had thought that Easter would not break the surface of the water again? That this was how they ensured an intelligent race, by letting the careless babies fall like ripe fruit from the trees? She held the child beneath his arms to face her. He was no doubt thinner than the average American model but very healthy, kicking and gurgling with pleasure. The toddler stopped her running for a minute to pick up the unemployed knife and began to knock it against the floor behind the older woman. The baby then urinated on Marina, a long exuberant stream against the front of her already soaking shirt. The men laughed harder now and the women laughed more sedately, shaking their heads at all the silly foreigners in the world who donat know enough to hold a baby in the right direction. The toddleras knife got stuck in the floorboards and after a momentary wail she pulled it out and plunged it back again, missing the old womanas back by six inches. aCould you pick up that knife?a Marina said to Dr. Nkomo.
Dr. Swenson would no doubt have argued for respecting the natural order in which babies sailed off the edge of a flat earth and toddlers played with the knives they would one day need to understand in order to feed themselves. These children had escaped without major injury before Marina arrived and chances were no doubt good that they would continue to exist after the company departed, but still, Dr. Nkomo was willing to pry the knife from the unwilling hands of the little girl, and when he had handed it to one of the men she put her face down on the floor and wept. The woman weaving shingles stood up and said something to Dr. Nkomo, pointing at Marina, pointing at him. The teenage girl came and took the baby away.
aHave I done something already?a Marina asked.
aIt is something about your clothes,a he said. aClothes is the only word I recognized, and maybe I am not sure of that.a The older woman now got up stiffly from the floor and began to unbutton Marinaas shirt. Marina caught the womanas fingers and shook her head but the woman simply waited until Marina let her hands go and then she started again. Her touch was both patient and persistent. It made no difference to Marina that there was urine on her filthy, soaking clothes but there was no way to explain that. When Marina stepped away the woman followed her. She was considerably shorter than Marina, they all were, and so Marina was left to look at the part in her gray hair, the long braid that went down her back. Her dress pulled against her belly and her belly pressed against Marinaas groin. The womanas belly was high and hard and suddenly Marina saw the womanas arms were thin, her face and legs were thin. Only her stomach protruded. Marina considered this as she stepped away from her again and again until it seemed possible that they might both go over the edge. Marina stopped, considering the ways to extricate herself while the woman resumed the work with the buttons, her stomach pressed against her, and then she felt the baby kick.
aMy God,a Marina said.
aI think she wants to wash your shirt,a Dr. Nkomo said, seeming deeply embarrassed. aOnce they are on to an idea it is very difficult to dissuade them.a aSheas pregnant. I felt the baby kick,a Marina said. aIt kicked me.a The baby kicked again as if grateful for the recognition and the woman lifted her face and shook her head at Marina as if to say, Kids, what can you do? Her forehead was deeply creased and her neck was wattled. There was a dark, flat mole of an irregular shape on the side of her nose near the eye that could have been a melanoma. Buttons undone, she helped Marina out of her shirt and Marina let her take it. What was it that Anders had said? Lost Horizon for ovaries? How many children had this woman undressed and how many of the people in this tree house were her children? The toddler weeping for her knife? The woman weaving the roof? The men waiting to get back to carving their boat? The other woman came with a rag that was small and not particularly clean and rubbed down Marinaas arms and back, rubbed her stomach and neck. She touched Marinaas bra and said something to the older woman who leaned her nose between Marinaas breasts to inspect the lace edge of the white cups more closely. Dr. Nkomo busied himself with the toddler, his back decisively pointed in her direction, but the other two men folded their arms across their chests, watching the show with interest, and Marina was not bothered by any of this. She had been kicked by a fetus whose mother was at the very least sixty and could easily have been more than seventy. The teenage girl stood in front of Marina and held up her arms until Marina understood that this was an instruction and not a game. She held up her arms as well. It was the girlas clear intention to drop a shift dress over Marinaas head but the height discrepancy between them did not allow for it and so Marina pulled it on herself. No sooner was it covering her head and somewhat twisted than one of them pulled down her pants and began to rub her legs with the cloth as well. She stepped up obediently, one foot and then the other, and the pants were taken away. Marina stood there like the others now in her loose trapeze dress full enough to take her through an entire pregnancy because among the female Lakashi all clothes were maternity clothes. Without zippers or buttons, Marina saw the way in which they looked like candidates for a rustic insane asylum. The outfit was considerably shorter on her and the women poked at her knees and laughed as if there was something vaguely scandalous about knees. The women sat down on the floor and Marina sat with them and put her hands back on the womanas stomach, waiting for the baby to move again while the one who made shingles pulled back Marinaas hair with a carved comb and braided it more tightly than her own mother had ever managed to braid it when she was a child. The teenage girl bit off a single piece of the palm frond with her teeth and tied off the end of her braid while the baby swam beneath Marinaas hands. She would say six months along. Marina realized then she had not touched a single pregnant woman since it stopped being her business to touch them. How could that be possible? After all the countless bellies she had run her hands over in her training, how had she let them all go?
aYou knew, didnat you, about the Lakashi, about why Dr. Swenson is here? Anders told you?a Dr. Nkomo asked, the little girl in his lap, playing with his glasses. She was gentle as she folded the arms in and out.
aIad been told, but I canat say I necessarily believed it. Itas something altogether different to see things for myself.a aItas true,a Dr. Nkomo said nodding. aI had read Dr. Swensonas papers but I was still very surprised. I have thought too much about the fertility and reproduction of mosquitoes and not enough about the fertility and reproduction of women. Thatas what my wife would say. She says if we wait much longer for a baby she will have to come and live among the Lakashi in order to get pregnant.a Marina reached back and moved the base of her braid back and forth, trying to loosen it up before it gave her a headache. aI thought your research was in fertility with Dr. Swenson.a aAh,a Dr. Nkomo said, taking his glasses back from the little girl and in doing so breaking her heart all over again. aWe work together. We are colleagues, but we do not share the same field of study. Our fields overlap.a Their hosts followed the conversation intently, their faces turning from speaker to speaker as if they were watching a tennis match. aWhat is your field of study, Dr. Nkomo?a aPlease,a he said, acall me Thomas. I suppose you would say I focus on the drugas off-target toxicity, except in this case it isnat toxic. The drug has exhibited benefits unrelated to fertility.a There were questions to ask, namely what the benefits were and who was paying for his research, but at that moment Easter appeared over the top of the ladder, every bit as wet as he had been coming up out of the river and over the side of the boat. Marina understood the look of panic on his face. He was sure she was dead as she had been sure he was dead. His eyes went quickly around the room, passing over her and stopping only briefly on Thomas Nkomo. He started to go down the ladder again but she stood up quickly and when he realized it was her in that dress with her hair braided he bounded up the last few rungs of the ladder, his T-shirt stretched out by the rain, the mud making a solid cake up to his knees. He began slapping his open hands against her arms, her hips, her back. He could not stop himself. She was his responsibility and he had lost her.
The Lakashi nodded and clucked their tongues and pointed at him but Easter would not look in their direction and so they gave up. There was no teasing the deaf if they refused to look at you.
aThe rain is letting up,a Thomas said, craning his head to look beyond the edges of the roof. aOr maybe itas stopped now and the trees are just dripping. Itas very difficult for me to tell the difference between the current rain and the continued falling of the rain weave already had.a aI donat mind getting wet again.a Marina put her arm around Easteras shoulders. She was thinking about his box, the pens and feathers, Andersa open letter to the world on his behalf.
aThen we should go.a Thomas began a series of deep nods around the room.
aHow do you say thank you?a aTo the best of my knowledge the word doesnat exist in Lakashi. Iave asked other people that question and no one comes up with anything.a Marina looked at her hosts, who stared expectantly as if they were hoping she would figure it out. aWhat about in Portuguese?a aObrigado.a aObrigado,a Marina said to the pregnant woman but there was no change in expression. She put her hand on the womanas belly again but the baby was quiet.
Easter tugged at the cloth of Marinaas dress, then he held out his shirt, pointed at his shirt, and then pointed at her. Marina looked around the room. There were a few hammocks strung between poles, some piles of blankets and clothes on the floor, some baskets with roots and some baskets with twigs, but she did not see her shirt and pants. In truth, if he hadnat mentioned her clothes she probably would have gone right down the ladder without them, she was so distracted by what she had seen. She shook her head. Easter then went to the pregnant woman and held out his shirt to her between two fingers and pointed to Marina. The woman seemed to have no idea what he was getting at. Marina did a pantomime of unbuttoning her shirt, taking her fingers down the front of her dress where the buttons would have been, but again the woman shrugged.
Thomas then said a word, basa or basi, which was probably the word he believed meant clothes, but it was met with the same blank expression as the Portuguese word for thanks. He held out his own shirt and pointed to Marina. The younger woman took her place on the floor and resumed the twisting and knotting of palm fronds as if there had never been visitors at all and then, in what was the most damning gesture of false innocence, the teenage girl sat down to help her. The baby was settled on the floor and given a palm frond to play with and he put the tip of it in his mouth and sucked contentedly.
aI believe youave been scammed,a Thomas said.
aOut of my clothes?a Marina couldnat quite imagine such a thing was possible even as she stood there in a smock. Easter crossed the room and started digging through a pile on the floor and one of the men came over and smacked him on the side of the head with the flat of his hand.
aThis isnat good,a Marina said. aI donat know where my luggage is.a aThe bag you came with from Manaus?a Thomas said. aWasnat it on the boat with you?a She turned to him. Suddenly the dress felt very small. aOf course it was on the boat with me but, my God, coming into all that fire and screaming, all these men climbing on board from the water, and then the next thing I knew Dr. Swenson was going up the dock. I wasnat going to stay there and find my luggage.a aOf course,a Thomas said. He did not offer her a single word of encouragement. He did not tell her as anyone would that this was a very small village and surely there was no place for her bag to go. The teenage girl was up now, slapping at Easteras hands, and then the littlest girl, the toddler, came over and she hit him as well. aWe should go now, Dr. Singh,a Thomas said.
aPlease,a she said, surprisingly heartbroken over such a small loss. aCall me Marina.a
Eight.
Marina had been in the jungle for a week before Dr. Alan Saturn, whom she thought of as the first Dr. Saturn, said he would borrow Easter and the boat and make a trip to the trading post two hours away to mail some letters. (The trading post was not a trading post at all but a larger village down river where the more advanced Jinta Indians had their camp. They were, for a small price, willing to hold letters and money until a trader passed through from Manaus, which they did with some frequency. For a larger price, the traders would then take the letters back with them to maila"no small request as the mail was going to Java and Dakar and Michigan and they themselves were not men born with a natural inclination to stand in long post office lines.) Once the trip was established, everyone save Dr. Swenson broke from work to sit down for some time after lunch to commit themselves to paper. Dr. Budi gave Marina three blue tissue Aerograms from her considerable stack and Alan Saturn said he would stand her for the stamps. Marina, whose luggage had yet to be recovered, had spent the past seven days in her Lakashi dress, though she had been given an identical spare out of either guilt or compassion by an anonymous tribe member. Nancy Saturn, the second Dr. Saturn, had given her two extra pairs of underwear and Thomas Nkomo had a toothbrush still in the plastic wrap. He put it in her hand very discreetly. It seemed to Marina that these were among the kindest gifts of her existence.
aThis is why I donat loan out the boat,a Dr. Swenson said, looking around the lab as the doctors scattered with paper and pens, those charming dinosaurs of communication. aOnce you say itas leaving no one seems to think thereas any work to do.a But work was all there was to do. Marina had been set up in the corner of the lab and been given the job of running tests on the compound for stability, to see whether it was degrading with heat and exposure. Like Anders, she was a small molecule person. Their work had been in pills and while it wasnat an exact match for the task at hand it was comfortably within her realm of experience. There was enough data piled up to keep her busy for years and she wondered if that wasnat Dr. Swensonas objectivea"to keep her busy. It was possible that they were feeding her problems they had already solved as a means of placating her or testing her competence. They had mice after all, they were clearly already onto testing the concentration of the compound in blood levels. Still, she knew that if she stayed in her corner looking over what they had given her she would be much more able to make a realistic assessment of how far they were from a first efficacious dose. She could sidle over to Dr. Budi from time to timea"Budi was in charge of clinical research organizationa"and ask her questions about the Lakashi blood work. She could see now how ridiculous it had been to simply ask Dr. Swenson over dinner what her progress was. Working here she had the chance to make her own assessment, and that was what Mr. Fox had wanted all along.
And besides, if she wasnat working, what was she going to do with her days? The jungle, with its screeching cries of death and slithering piles of leaves, was hardly a place to go walking alone in the afternoons. Two of the young men from the tribe had dreams of learning English and German and becoming tour guides at one of the eco-lodges hundreds of miles away. They had seen the great white hope of the cruise ships while riding bundles of trees to Manaus. They had met the naturalists when visiting the Jinta. Because they were always looking to practice, they were willing to take a restless doctor into that deeper place off the available paths where the afternoon light was filtered out by leaves. With a great deal of hand gesturing, a few common words in four different languages, and a couple of glossy field guides with the name Anders Eckman printed inside the front cover, they would endeavor to give jungle tours, pointing out the neon colored frogs the size of dimes that contained enough poison in their clammy skins to take down twenty men. The scientists all agreed that they had never been deep into the jungle for more than eight minutes without thinking they would give everything they owned to be led safely out.
Sometimes in the late afternoons when the generator stumbled from the burdens of overuse and the scant electricity in the lab clicked off altogether (save the backup, backup generators that kept the blood samples in the freezers flash-frozen to arctic levels), the heat drove the doctors, save Dr. Swenson, into the river to swim, though the river was even worse than the jungle because in that murky soup there was no telling what was coming at you. As they treaded the water slowly, hoping not to kick up an attractive splash, the conversation turned not to the spectacular moth with wings the size of handkerchiefs that for a moment hovered over their heads, but to the microscopic candiru fish that were capable of swimming up the urethra with catastrophic results. Marina, who had no alternative, swam in her dress and hoped that in the slow agitation of her strokes she was washing it. They kept an eye out for water snakes whose heads rode the surface of the river like tiny periscopes, and reminisced about the vampire bats that had tangled their claws in the mosquito nets over their beds. No one stayed long in the water, not even Dr. Budi, who apparently had been something of a swimming star in Indonesia when she was a girl.
For entertainment not reliant on nature, there were outdated scientific journals and old New Yorkers but invariably something had eaten through the most interesting paragraphs. Dr. Swenson had a complete set of hardbacked Dickens and she kept the books wrapped separately in heavy pieces of plastic tarp and tied with twine. She would loan them out and then do spot checks to make sure they were being read with clean hands. A cinnamon stick was lodged in the plastic wrap of each volume, as ants, Dr. Rapp had once told her, would always avoid the scent of cinnamon. Dr. Swenson believed that ants would be the standard bearers for the end of civilization.
Other than the brief and unsatisfying diversions of walking and swimming and reading, all that was left for Dr. Swenson and Dr. Singh, Dr. Nkomo and Dr. Budi and the two Drs. Saturn, was the lab, and the lab was not unlike a Las Vegas casino. They existed there without calendar or clock. They worked until they were hungry and then they stopped and atea"opening a can of apricots and another can of tuna. They worked until they were tired and then they went back to their cots in the small ring of huts that sat behind the lab like the bungalows at the Spear-O-Wigwam Summer Camp for Girls at Mille Lacs. They read some Dickens before they went to sleep. At the end of her first week, Marina was halfway through Little Dorrit. Of all her possessions lost and gone she was particularly sorry to be without her James novel.
As for the Lakashi, they were patient subjects, submitting themselves to constant weighing and measurement, allowing their menstrual cycles to be charted and their children to be pricked for blood samples. Dr. Swenson deserved the credit for that and she accepted it readily, telling stories about the tireless cajoling and gift giving that had once been required for even the most basic examinations. aI tamed them,a she said, taking not the least discomfort in the word. aIt was our lifeas work, Dr. Rappas and mine, earning their trust.a But if she taught them to tolerate her research she had not made them good company. They rarely offered to share their dried fish and regurgitated manioc root, not that anyone wanted it, but it was the most basic lesson in any Introduction to Anthropology class: the sharing of food was the primary symbol of harmonious communal living. Then again, Dr. Swenson strictly forbade the sharing of the scientistsa food among members of the tribe as she believed that a jar of peanut butter was more corrupting to indigenous ways than a television set, so it was possible that the Lakashias unwillingness to offer up their bread was only a matter of passive retaliation. It was Easter alone who ate from both tables, or, more accurately, both pots. The Lakashi didnat knock on the door of the lab to extend an invitation on the nights they decided for no discernible reason to dance until three in the morning, and they left no note when they cleared out, all of them together, which they did from time to time, leaving behind the most unnerving silence. When they came back twelve hours later they were red-eyed and quiet, walking on their toes in their collective indigenous hangover. Even the children smelled of a peculiar smoke and sat like stumps on the bank of the river, an entire line of them staring straight ahead without scratching their insect bites.
aWe used to call it a vision quest in honor of the indigenous Americans,a Dr. Swenson had said when Marina ran to the lab in a sweat-soaked panic asking what had happened to everyone. She had been in camp three days when, in the manner of a horrible scene from a science fiction movie, they all disappeared. aThat was the perfect name for what they were doing until it also became the name of a video game and the rallying cry for every pack of middle-aged New Agers who were looking to legitimize their interest in psychedelics. I donat have a name for it anymore. I wake up and see theyare gone and I think, Oh, itas time for that again.a aHave you ever gone with them?a Marina asked.
Dr. Swenson was working through a complicated looking equation in a spiral notebook but she didnat seem to mind carrying on the conversation while she wrote down strings of numbers. There were computers in the lab but between the undependable electricity and the overpowering humidity that from time to time seized the generators like a fever, everyone was more inclined to do their important calculations by hand, proving legions of math teachers correct. aNo one goes with them now. In retrospect, I think it was only Dr. Rapp they were inviting and the rest of us held his coattails. Once he stopped coming on expeditions, the Lakashi simply went out in the middle of the night while we were sleeping. Never have I known a people who could one hour be as loud as a blitzkrieg and the next hour maintain perfect silence while walking through dried leaves. They can move their entire operation out of here without breaking a twig.a Marina waited for an answer to the question she had asked but Dr. Swensonas attention had fallen back to the math before her. It occurred to Marina that these sorts of conversations were exactly the reason the Bovenders worked so hard to keep Dr. Swenson separated from society. Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to oneas partner on both the left and the right. aBut you did go?a Dr. Swenson glanced up for a moment as if surprised to see Marina was still there. aOf course, when I was younger. It seemed fascinating at the time, as if we had discovered something central to the identity of the people. It was very important to Dr. Rapp, it was important to the entire field of mycology. I picture all those students now, boys from Park Avenue and Hyde Park and Back Bay who had spent their previous summers in the Hamptons scooping ice cream, all marching off into the jungle ready to ingest anything that was given to them. The way they opened their mouths and closed their eyes you would have thought the Lakashi were distributing communion. Actually, the ceremony would have made a striking program for interdisciplinary studiesa"biology, anthropology, world religion. I certainly found it compelling as a medical student to see how long a person could sustain such a low heart rate. In the whole lot of them there wasnat a pulse over twenty-four. I once brought a cuff with me and monitored the Lakashi and the students every twenty minutes for five hours after they had reached a state of unconsciousness. Their diastolic pressure ticked in slightly above dead. I was only testing for my own interest but if I could have put together a committed control group it could have been an important study over time.a aDid youa"a Marina wasnat exactly sure how to phrase the question.
aI did, of course, but mycology was never my field. I was more interested in recording the subjects. Let the botanist take notes on his own trip, I say. I was of great assistance to Dr. Rapp in this way. He never had a graduate student who was willing to abstain for purposes of observation. I didnat mind that, of course, I was glad to help the science. The real problem was the Lakashi themselves. Once the women realized I wasnat going on the trip anymore they started piling all the babies around me, all the children. I put a quick stop to that.a aThe children were participating?a aI suppose that conflicts with your ideas of good parenting. In retrospect, I can see how you would have preferred me to stop them, but I didnat know you at the time.a aThatas fine. Iam not interested in the children,a Marina said, and in fact she was telling the truth. From what she could tell, the Lakashi children were constructed out of titanium. They ate random berries and were bitten by spiders and fell out of trees and swam with piranha and they were fine. She could hardly see how a regular dosing of hallucinogens could make a difference. aBut when you did go on the trip, as you say, did you enjoy it?a Marina had given her youth to studying, believing all the propaganda of the dangers of drugs while her worshiped professor was spending her weekends in the Amazon eating mushrooms. She felt she deserved to know at least secondhand if it had been any fun.
Dr. Swenson took off her reading glasses and pressed her fingertips hard against the bridge of her nose. aI keep hoping that you are more than you show yourself to be, Dr. Singh. I am just on the verge of liking you but you dwell on the most mundane points. Yes, of course it was interesting to take part in the ritual, that was what we had come here to do. It was slightly terrifying the first time, all of the screaming and the smoke, in that way it was a little like your experience coming up the river at night, except that you are all very close together in one giant, enclosed hut. Seeing God was worthwhile, of course. I doubt seriously that anything in our Western tradition would have shown Him to me so personally. I remember Dr. Rapp would feel quite humbled for several days after the experience and would continue to see a great deal of purple. We all would. But in the final assessment I am a person who loathes vomiting, and there is a great deal of vomiting involved in the Lakashi ritual. It is an unavoidable part of the program. The body isnat capable of processing that amount of poison withouta"a Dr. Swenson, who was sitting on a low stool in front of a table she used for her desk, closed her eyes as if she were remembering the experience. She kept her eyes closed for entirely too long.
aDr. Swenson?a She held up her hand and shook her head almost imperceptibly, warding off further questions. Then she stood up, looking watery and pale, and, going quickly out the door, vomited next to the front steps.
Dear Jim, It is true that no one here has a telephone. I believe it has something to do with the humidity, which is the enemy of all machines. While I am told there is an Internet connection in a village several hours west of Manaus (which is nowhere near us anyway) it only works when there have been two entire weeks without rain, which means de facto no connection. The second phone you gave me, along with my second suitcase, disappeared after my arrival in the Lakashi Village. I have been a poor steward of my belongings. It has been so long since Iave been able to tell you where I am that I worry by now you must think Iam dead. I am hoping the mail service comes through for me and you get this letter quickly. Iave been here a week and this is my first hope of getting a letter out of the village, though Dr. Nkomo told me that when Anders was here he would stand on the banks of the river with a letter in his hand and watch for any passing dugout canoe. What I most want to say is that you shouldnat worry about me. Life among the Lakashi has been better than expected. I have a small job in the lab and over time I feel I will be able to discern how much real progress has been made on the drug. While everyone is friendly no one is particularly forthcoming as to what aspects of the research they are responsible for. I will tell you that the pregnancies are astonishing. Ages are difficult to document in the older members of the tribe (Dr. Swenson began to document the children when she first arrived fifty years ago) but there are pregnant women here who seem clearly to be in their seventies. The more I see the more I understand your commitment to this drug, no matter how much time it takes to reach the first human dose.
Marina was at the end of her fold-over sheet and she hesitated at her closing. Love was not a word that had made its way into their parlance and yet she was certain it was implicitly true. She couldnat see how, given all that had happened, that there would be anything shocking about its introduction here. And so she wrote it in ink, Love, Marina. She followed this letter with very brief notes to her mother and Karen in which she used most of her paper explaining why the note was so short. After all, the boat was leaving soon and she didnat want to keep anyone waiting. She promised to start longer letters immediately and save them for the next departure.
It was true that Anders had been impatient with the mail system, several people had commented on that. He would take Easter to the river and they would stand for hours waiting for anyone to paddle past, then when finally someone did, he would have the boy swim out with the letter and the money. Dr. Budi said he tried to get a letter in every boat that went by just to increase his chances that one or two might actually find their way home to his wife. But after a while he was too sick to go down to the water himself, too sick to spend so many hours in the sun, and so he sent Easter alone. It did not require a great deal of inquiry on Marinaas part to put this together, nor much conjecture to fill in the missing pieces: Anders, sick, wrote letters to his wife. Easter, worried, did not want to leave Anders for the amount of time it would have taken to find a boat going past. The traffic on their little tributary was thin at best and on some days not a single person floated by. While Easter would have understood the ritual of giving the blue envelope to someone in a boat, he could not have understood what a letter was or what it represented, only that Anders wrote and wrote. He would have only just come back to the sleeping porch and his friend would want to send him out again with another envelope.
The first time Marina found one of those blue paper rectangles in her bed, perfectly sealed and addressed to Karen Eckman in Eden Prairie, she froze as solidly as a blood sample in the very bottom of the freezer. She leaned over the railing and shined the flashlight into the night jungle looking for a flash of Anders running away, her heart in full arrhythmia, but it didnat take her long to figure out who had delivered it. For Easter, these envelopes were his most precious possessions and therefore his best gifts, and because he knew he had come to them through a direct act of disobedience, they carried the added enticement of guilt. The letters were so secret he would not keep them in his lock box with the feathers. Wherever they came from he doled them out slowly, one every other day, every third day, beneath the sheet, beneath the pillow, folded in her extra dress.
Let me tell you the virtue of fever: it brings YOU here. I would have preferred it take me home and once or twice thatas happened but for the most part YOU arrive at 4:00 and take me out of this bed and we walk through the jungle, and Karen, you know EVERYTHING about the jungle. You know the names of all the spiders. You are afraid of nothing. I am afraid of nothing when you are here. Let me live in this fever. It is so much worse now, the hours I am well Then nothing. Maybe these were the letters Anders didnat finish, the ones he started and forgot, and Easter picked them up off the floor while Anders slept and tucked them away. Of the three she had received so far two were only paragraphs and the third was a scant two sentences: What was the name of the couple who lived next door to us in the apartment building on Petit Court? I see them here constantly and I cannot think of their names.
Dr. Swenson had gone to her room at the back of the lab after being sick, and by the time she returned everyone had finished his or her letter except for Dr. Budi who seemed to approach the question of what to say as a spatial problem. She would stare for a long time at her paper and then turn her eyes up to the ceiling as if trying to calculate exactly how many words she needed to express her feelings and how many inches there were left on the paper for those words. Dr. Swenson returned after lunch looking like nothing had happened and when Marina started to ask her how she was feeling, Dr. Swenson waved her away. aFine,a she said, without waiting for the question.
Alan Saturn stood in front of Dr. Budi and tapped the table with his fingers. aGive it up,a he said.