State of Wonder Part 6

aYou could have told me last night that you meant to go today.a She was a fine-boned woman of indeterminate age who wore her black hair in a single braid in the manner of the Lakashi. She folded her letter into thirds and ran her tongue along the glue strip.

aNothing happens here,a Alan said. aNo one needs that much time to write a letter.a Dr. Budi reached into the pocket of the cotton smock she wore and pulled out several small bills which she handed over to Dr. Saturn along with the envelope. Then, without further conversation, she returned her attention to her work. In her devotion to her task, Dr. Budi was an archetype of a particular sort in the medical community, as much as the ill-tempered surgeon or the addicted anesthesiologist. Any time a group of doctors came together, there was always the one whose car would be in the parking lot when the others arrived at dawn and whose car would still be there when the others pulled away after midnight, the one who was standing at the nursesa station at four a.m. reviewing a chart when it wasnat her weekend on call, the one the other doctors privately ridiculed for having no life and yet with whom they felt a gnawing and irrational sense of competition. What was remarkable was how ably Dr. Budi filled this role even when there was no hospital, no parking lot, and no patients. When all they did was work, Dr. Budi worked more. She claimed that she had already read all the Dickens.

aHave you ever been to Java?a Alan Saturn asked Marina. aAnywhere in Indonesia?a She had followed him down to the dock with the Lakashi, not even asking herself why she was doing it. A departure, an arrival, she was beginning to see their appeal as a diversion. She was certain one of the men was wearing a pair of her pants rolled up at the cuffs. Pieces of her clothing walked by her from time to time and there was nothing to do but watch them pass. She shook her head.

aItas my theory that Budi is more suited to the tropics than the rest of us. This air, these smells, they must be second nature to her. She looks up so seldom I imagine she thinks sheas home.a Dr. Saturn was working to loosen a knot in a rope that held the pontoon boat to the shore and in his struggles he made the knot more intractable. Easter came down the dock and thumped him on the shoulder. His point was clear. aNow, take Nancy and me coming from Michigan,a he said, awell, thatas going to be harder. It doesnat matter how long weare here or how often we come, we never fully acclimate. The foreignness of the place is always going to be a distraction for us.a aDr. Swenson was born in Maine and she doesnat seem distracted.a aDr. Swenson may never be cited in conversations about how normal people respond to their environment.a Some freakish brand of great white bird with a wing span of a pterodactyl flapped down the river towards them. It had a bare black head, a long black bill, and a red ring around its skinny neck. They all stood paralyzed by the sight of it, watching until it took a hard left into the foliage and vanished. Dr. Saturn formed his hand into a visor against the afternoon sun. aAnders would have known what that was.a After a flurry of turning pages, Benoit held up the picture of the bird in Andersa book, thrilled to have found it so fast. He showed it to Dr. Saturn, who nodded approvingly at the correct match. aJaribu stork,a Dr. Saturn said.

Benoit, one of those young men who hoped for a career in tourism, had as a child been collected for a missionary school that had popped up briefly several tributaries away. Thanks to a group of Baptists from Alabama he could read and write in Portuguese and had memorized Bible verses which he could recite at will, skills that had made him one of the least contented members of his tribe. Marina came over to look at the picture.

aIave brought hats!a Nancy Saturn said, coming down to the water. aI have two. Now you can come with us.a She handed Marina a wide brimmed hat and when Marina hesitated, Dr. Saturn took it from his wife and put it on Marinaas head. The age span between the Drs. Saturn was greater than the span between Mr. Fox and Marina. One could imagine, though it had not been said, that he had once been her teacher. Marina recognized the way the wife leaned towards the husband when he spoke as it was not unlike the way she had often leaned towards Dr. Swenson. In one late-night conversation over a bottle of pisco brandy in which the first Dr. Saturn was holding forth on matters of tropical medicine, the second Dr. Saturn actually took a notebook out of her pocket to write down something he had said. She was discreet, and the paper might have gone unnoticed had Dr. Swenson not asked her rather loudly if she wasnat capable of simply relying on her memory. Dr. Swenson leaned decisively away from the female Dr. Saturn, whom she clearly regarded as a gate-crasher, a hanger-on, though the younger woman, a botanist with a degree in public health, was probably best qualified to be of assistance. Certainly her credentials were closest to Dr. Rappas. aI never rely on my memory when Iam drinking,a was what Nancy Saturn had said.

Easter turned the key and the motor of the pontoon boat began to spit and cough. All of the Lakashi pressed forward now and Marina felt herself jostled from side to side by the shirtless men in running shorts and the women with their pregnant bellies. She found herself looking at their ears and the strings of seeds and animal teeth around their necks and suddenly she realized she had not dreamed of India all week. Her father, who had been missing from her life for so many years, was gone again, and for an instant she had a vivid recreation of that hollow, hopeless feeling of having lost him in the crowd. As she wondered if the Lariam was out of her system now, a mosquito bit the back of her knee.

aJump!a Alan said, jumping onto the boat himself with the rope in his hand. Immediately the current caught the boat and pulled it away from the shore. He turned around and reached his hand to Marina. aThe entire tribe is going to be on board in five seconds,a he called. aHesitation is the same thing as a straight-up invitation around here.a It was true, the Lakashi were poised to begin boarding, all of them. Benoit pushed ahead of the pack and jumped without solicitation. He clearly meant to go somewhere, and Nancy followed him. Two more Lakashi leapt onto the boat but before they had gotten their balance Benoit tipped them back into the water, and then Marina jumped without ever meaning to go. Easter laughed at her flat-footed landing and she went and stood behind him, both of her hands on his shoulders. Every night they went to sleep separately, he in his hammock and she in her cot beneath the netting, and every night his dreams woke them both. His dreams, not hers, and she would go and scoop him up, bring him back in with her where they would sleep out the rest of the night in her little bed. They had gotten good at it. In only a week they had learned how to stretch and turn in unison.

The Lakashi were wading into the river and with the cross of breaststroke and dog paddle they favored, they swam. Marina looked at their dark heads in the water and wondered if she would have swum out too, just to have something to do. Nancy Saturn removed her hat and waved it at them, showing the short auburn hair she cropped herself. She called out an enthusiastic series of farewellsa"goodbye in English and tchau in Portuguese and then some sort of humming sound followed by a high pitched cry that essentially meant I am gone from you in Lakashi. After her fourth or fifth repetition they finally turned around and swam back to shore. It wasnat as if they ever would have caught the boat. Easter was gunning the engine now that Dr. Swenson wasnat on board.

aThey only want a little recognition,a Nancy said, watching and waving as they fell farther and farther behind. aIf you donat acknowledge what theyare doing they just keep doing it. Frankly, I donat think theyare such good swimmers. You canat have half the tribe drowning on the way to the trading post.a aNancy would have made a great social behaviorist,a Alan Saturn said, dropping a very tan arm over his wifeas shoulders. aDr. Rapp would have loved her. There were so many things we missed back then that Nancy picked up on the very first time she came out here.a aYou knew Dr. Rapp?a Marina asked.

Nancy raised her eyebrows briefly and then sighed with the recognition of what was to come. aHow in the world did you miss that lecture?a she said, stepping out from under her husbandas arm and rifling through her bag for sunblock and bug gel. She handed one tube to Marina and began to use the other on herself.

Alan Saturn lifted his sunglasses to better show the delight in his eyes. aI was his student at Harvard! I was actually enrolled in that famous mycology class the year he broke his ankle in New Guinea and wound up coming back to teach for the entire semester. Those were the lectures that were published by Oxford University Press, and there have been no end of papers written on them. Iam sure you must have read some of them. There were a great many legends built up around that class. It was listed in the catalogue every year but Dr. Rapp virtually never made his way back to the classroom for more than a day or two. In reality it was taught by some graduate student who had been in the field himself and was qualified to do no more than read the notes and mark the tests. So while Studies in Mycology was considered to be one of the seminal classes at the university, no one but rubes actually signed up for it. Signing up for the class was as good as admitting you had no idea what was going on, so who better than me to enroll? When people realized what had happened, that the great man himself was coming back to teach, you had a situation where seniors and graduate students and in some cases faculty members were making cash offers to freshmen to give up their seats. I for one stood firm and was rewarded fortunes beyond that fifty bucks I turned down. I got to know Dr. Rapp that semester, I made sure of it, and so I was asked to travel with him in the Amazon for the next three summers in a row.a aIs that how you met Dr. Swenson?a Marina thought of her teacher taking the trouble to catch the red-eye back from Manaus. To the best of her memory Dr. Swenson hadnat missed a single class.

Nancy Saturn smeared a great handful of white paste across her face and began to rub it in. aTo know Martin Rapp was to know Annick Swenson.a aDonat ruin the story,a Alan said to her. He turned his attention back to Marina, that untapped source of listening pleasure. aAnnick is several years older than I am, of course.a This news was delivered for his own vanity, as Alan Saturn, with his thinning white hair, enormous white eyebrows, and perilously slender ankles, could easily have been taken as older than Dr. Swenson. The only thing that made Dr. Saturn seem younger was his younger wife. aShe was coming down here years before me. They were, shall we say, quite inseparable in the field.a aShe picked the boys who went on the trips,a Nancy said. aOnly boys. She held interviews in his office at Harvard. She was the one who picked Alan. Dr. Rapp didnat have the time to fill the rosters himself.a Marina could see him then, a tall and lanky undergraduate, a canvas rucksack on his back. aYou knew him too?a she asked Nancy.

Nancy gave a small, snorting laugh and applied a layer of sunblock to her breastbone, reaching into the collar of her shirt to do the job right. aI came after Dr. Rapp.a Alan Saturn was ignoring her now. He was launched. A giant tree had fallen into the river and the roots and branches reached up through the water as if begging to be saved. A bright yellow bird with a long, slender neck sat on one of those branches and watched the boat as it passed. Benoit, having spotted the bird, began his frantic turning of pages. aMartin Rapp was more than my teacher. He was the man I wanted to be. He was fully engaged with his life every minute that he lived it. He didnat trudge along doing what someone else told him to do. He was never a cog in the wheel. He held his head up and looked at the world around him. Now, my father was a very decent man, worked as a tailor in Detroit back when there were men in Detroit who had their suits made. He worked until his hands were so twisted with arthritis he couldnat hold a needle. If a man came into the store and told my father what he wanted, the only word my father had for him was yes. It didnat matter if it was a ridiculous order, didnat matter if this guy showed up on Saturday morning and wanted his suit for Saturday night and there was already work piled to the rafters, my father said yes. And once my father said yes it was as good as done because that word was all he had in the world. He spent his life in the backroom of a store and the only thing he knew about his environment was that needle going in and out of the cloth. He did all this so my brothers and I could go to college and not be tailors and have the luxury of telling somebody no someday. So off I went to Harvard, the tailoras boy from Michigan. The next thing I knew I was sitting in a lecture hall and in walked the great Martin Rapp, his ankle sunk in a plaster boot, his crutches swinging forward. He came up to the lectern and he said, aGentlemen, close your books and listen. We have nothing less than the world to consider.a We were awestruck, every last one of us. We would have sat there for the full four years of college. I remember everything about that day, that room, the giant blackboards, the light coming in those leaded glass windows. What I saw in front of me was the character of a man. It was the most remarkable thing, and Iave never had that experience before or since. It was some sort of aura he had. From ten rows away I knew exactly who he was and I knew I would follow him anywhere.a aHere,a Nancy said to Marina, atake the sunblock and give me the bug gel.a Marina took the sunblock but there was only so much sunblock could do. As careful as she had tried to be she was as dark as the natives now. Her own mother wouldnat recognize her.

aListen to her,a Alan said, declining to take the paste himself. aWe didnat have sunblock back then. It was a melanoma that killed Dr. Rapp in the end. By the time they found it, it had spread everywhere there was for a melanoma to go. I cannot imagine all the years he spent in an open boat with no more than a straw hat and a white shirt for protection. Itas amazing he lasted as long as he did. I came back to Cambridge to see him in the end and he was every bit himself. He was interested in his own death, fascinated by it. He was taking notes. He was in his eighties then, he couldnat go out to the sites anymore. When I asked him if he still did his meditation he said to me, aWhy would this time be any different?a That was the thing most people never knew about him: if he was in his house in Cambridge or he was in a tent in the driving rain outside Iquitos, he always meditated, and thatas back in the days when only a handful of Indians and maybe a few Tibetans had even heard the word. He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it. But we were undergraduates and for the most part we couldnat find our asses with our hands and so we followed his compass instead. Until we knew how to be men by our own standards we tried to be men like Dr. Rapp. We never would be, of course, but it was still a noble goal. I look out over this river now and I can see him, paddling the canoe along with the rest of us. In fact we would have stopped paddling, crying like children about our blisters and our splinters, and he would just keep on. He wouldnat say a word and then all of a sudden he would turn the boat so hard we would nearly capsize. He would take it to shore and the next thing we knew he was in the water and then into the jungle, gone. Gone! And there we were, alone. Ten minutes later head walk back out with a mushroom in a bag, a specimen that had never been recorded before. Head be writing up the coordinates and taking pictures of the site, and then he was cleaning off the knife head used to cut the mushrooms from the tree on his handkerchief, the surest sign that the discovery was now complete. Everything he did was orchestrated, every movement was beautiful. We boys would scramble into the jungle trying to figure out what head seen and how head known those mushrooms were there, and when wead ask him he would say, aI keep my eyes open.a a Alan Saturn was moved by the memory. a aI keep my eyes open.a That was the lesson. I have to tell you those were the happiest summers of my life.a Looking along the edges of the river in the blinding daylight, the mesh of the jungle as tight as twenty chain-link fences stacked together, Marina could imagine that reaching in to pluck a single mushroom from the forest floor must have been an act akin to pulling a full grown sheep from a top hat, at once dazzling and pointless. Easter turned back from the steering wheel of the boat and waved to her. Benoit looked for birds in the trees.

aSo why didnat you go back with him after that?a aMalaria,a Alan said, and gave a sigh for the memory of what he had lost. aI got it in Peru the summer after my junior year. Dr. Rapp had had malaria who knows how many times. He said Iad pull through it fine, but I didnat do so well. After I got home I ended up having to sit out the first semester of my senior year. By the time the summer came around again and Dr. Rapp was putting his crew together I was probably back to ninety-five percent but my father wouldnat let me go. I shouldnat blame him, I suppose. He thought he was protecting me, and I couldnat make him understand. My father had never seen the world so he didnat think it was much of a crime to keep me from it.a Nancy Saturn looked at her husband, great streaks of unabsorbed white paste still standing on her chin and around her ears. She waited for another minute to see if there was anything else forthcoming and then she asked him, aFinished?a aThose are some highlights,a he said.

aAs many times as Iave heard this story there are two things that never sit well with me,a she said.

aTell me,a Alan said.

aWell, first, your poor father. Why must he always be made the drudge in opposition to the free spirit of Martin Rapp? He didnat want his son who still had occasional relapses of malaria to return to the jungle where head gotten it in the first place? That doesnat seem so criminal to me.a Alan Saturn considered his wife thoughtfully for some time, chewing over her criticism. He brushed some sort of leggy cricket out of his hair. aYou have a valid point,a he said finally. aBut this is the story of my life, the story of how I related to my father and then later to my mentor, who, it is obvious enough, was a father figure to me. Iam not misrepresenting my father. I say heas a hard worker, a provider. But if I lean towards Dr. Rapp as a role model then thatas my choice to make.a Nancy waited a long time before shrugging her shoulders. The shrug appeared to cost her something. aI can see that.a aI hear you, though,a he said. aAnd I appreciate what youare saying.a Marina wondered if they had been through a great deal of marriage counseling or if it was possible that this was the way they had spoken to each other all along. It was such a long time ago that she had been married. She couldnat imagine she and Josh Su had, in their twenties, ever had such an exchange.

aYou said there were two things,a Alan said.

aAnnick Swenson.a aShe isnat in the story.a aShe is implicit in every story about Dr. Rapp. Your story tells as much by what you leave out as what you put in.a aI leave out what was private in his life. Those matters didnat concern me and they didnat concern science.a aListen to him,a the second Dr. Saturn said, turning to Marina. aWhat is this, Meet the Press?a She pivoted back to her husband. aIt absolutely did concern you. When oneas role model brings his mistress along trip after trip with a dozen boys and you are one of those boys then it concerns you. It concerns you when you later go to his house and have dinner with your mentor and his wife.a aDr. Swenson was his mistress?a Marina said. Just saying it brought a sour taste to her mouth. It was, she thought, a terrible word, and in no way representative. A mistress was a woman who waited in a hotel room.

aThis is what I meant by private,a Alan said pointedly to his wife.

aMrs. Rapp lives in Cambridge and has three daughters. She is ninety-two. We send her grapefruit at Christmas. Iam not saying people donat have affairs, even very decent people, let us be so lucky as to fall into that category. But we cannot unbraid the story of another personas life and take out all the parts that donat suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do. He was a great scientist, I will grant you that, and by all accounts a true charismatic, but he was also deeply unfaithful to two women and frankly that bothers me. It bothers me that the man you say you wanted to become was a lifelong philanderer.a aWhen did this start?a Marina asked.

aWe can take the life apart. We do it all the time.a The veins on Alan Saturnas temples were pressing forward with their new influx of blood. aPicasso put his cigarettes out on his girlfriends and we donat love the paintings any less for it. Wagner was a fascist and I can hum you every bar in the opening of Die Walkre.a aI donat know Picasso and I donat know Wagner!a aAnd you didnat know Dr. Rapp!a The shouting caused Benoit to raise his eyes from the field guide he was studying. He pointed to the top of a tree and said in English, aLook!a But neither of the Drs. Saturn looked, nor did Marina, and of course Easter missed it completely.

aI know his wife!a Nancy said, her voice high. aI know his mistress! If I didnat know those two women I feel certain youad be right. It would be just another bit of gossip from the annals of history, but that isnat the case. You canat separate it out when itas someone you know. I can tell you he wasnat a good man.a aHe was the greatest man I ever knew.a aHe left you with a tribe of Indians in Peru when you had a fever of a hundred and five!a aAnd they took me to Iquitos and eventually I got to Lima. It wasnat as if he stretched me out next to a log in the jungle and walked away. We all understood the terms of the agreement going in. Anyone who slowed down the group would be cut from the group. Dr. Rapp was there to work and we were there to learn.a aYou were nineteen years old and he was picking mushrooms!a Nancy Saturn had a wild look in her eyes, as if she were telling the story of what had happened to her child and not her husband. aHis mistress must have been through medical school by then. At the very least you would think she could have stayed with you.a Alan Saturn would have stormed away at this point, the desire to leave her was plainly twitching in his muscles, working through his jaw, but they were on a boat on a river in the jungle. aThe incident you are referring to happened a very long time ago.a His voice was steady and low. aI clearly made a mistake in confiding it to you.a aIam your wife. It would have come out eventually.a Nancy Saturn was not in the least bit ready to break away. She saw she had a game advantage and did not blink.

aYou knew nothing about Annick and Dr. Rapp?a Alan said to Marina finally. There were still sparks of rage in his voice even when it was directed to her.

aNot a clue,a Marina said. She would have liked to separate herself from the Saturns now, to find a place on the boat without roaches where she could sit down, because even though she could say that based on the information that had been presented Alan Saturn was wronga"Dr. Rapp had behaved badly, and Nancy Saturn was right, such matters were worthy of judgmenta"she found herself siding with Alan because there was much in his single-minded devotion to a mentor that sounded a familiar note. In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.

aYes,a he said, trying to slow his breathing, perhaps another learned technique. aWell, a private matter.a Nancy opened her mouth but he put his hand gently on her forehead and used his thumb to rub in a clot of sunblock that was clinging to the roots of her hair. He cleared his throat. He was trying very hard to settle them both. aYou see that river there?a He was speaking to Marina. He nodded towards a tributary. It would have been easily missed, the small opening folded into the jungle so discreetly. aYou follow that river to the Hummocca tribe. Itas two or three hours from here. They are the closest tribe to the Lakashi and yet in all the times Iave been here Iave never seen them.a It was his one heroic attempt to change the subject. He took his hand from his wifeas head and there passed between them a tacit agreement. They were on a boat. They were not alone. They would find a way to stop this.

aDr. Swenson said that Easter was Hummocca,a Marina said, understanding that her part in the play was to pretend that nothing had happened.

aNo one really knows,a Nancy said, weighing her words out carefully. aBut itas the only logical explanation. The Jinta wouldnat have left him.a aDid anyone try and take him back? See if they were missing a boy?a Marina looked over at Easter but he did not turn his head in the direction of the smaller river. Benoit was showing him a picture. He was steering with one hand.

aTribes are like countries,a Alan Saturn said. aThey each have their own national characters. Tribes like the Jinta are essentially Canadian. Other tribes, like the Hummocca, are more North Korean. Because we have no direct contact with them we have very little information about what they do, and the information we do have keeps us away.a aDr. Swenson has seen them,a Marina said. aShe told me so when we were coming in.a aAnd thatas all sheas told you,a Alan said. aThe story doesnat go any farther than that one piece of information: sheas seen them and they frightened her. Just the idea of Annick being frightened of something is enough to keep me away.a aTheyare cannibals,a Nancy said.

aThey were cannibals,a Alan said, awhich is only to say a small part of the meat was eaten in rituals, not that they subsisted on a regular diet of human flesh, and there havenat been any reports of it happening in the last fifty years.a They had passed the opening in the jungle now. Looking back over her shoulder Marina found it nowhere in evidence. Had they turned the boat around she wasnat sure that she could find it. aNo reports in the last fifty years, but it doesnat sound like anyone is going up there taking regular surveys about their habits.a aTheyave shot poisoned arrows at traders,a Nancy said. aEither theyare not very good shots and the arrows have landed wide of the boats, or they are very good shots and they mean it to be a warning. If Easter were at some point in his life a Hummocca, no one has plans to send him back.a When they arrived at the trading post it seemed less like Canada and more like Florida. A dozen or so tourists had come with their guide in an open boat from their eco-lodge to watch the Jinta children in their grass skirts as they twitched their nonexistent hips in time to the thundering rhythm of drums. The drums were played by middle-aged men, shirtless and thick, who were most likely the fathers. The fathers had run stripes of what looked to be red lipstick down their noses and across their cheeks and thrashed their heads from side to side like members of a garage band. The drummers were good but their children were better, their wrists encircled in tufts of grass. There were twenty of them or more ranging from very tiny to a few who were slightly bigger than Easter, and they stamped out a complicated pattern of footwork and then hopped in a large circle on one foot while sounding out the hue and cry of warriors. The tourists, enchanted, took pictures with their cell phones. A girl of ten or twelve with a red hibiscus tucked behind her ear stepped forward to dance a solo with a boa constrictor around her neck and so nicely did it hang and sway from her arms that one could not help but be reminded that a feather boa was made to imitate a snake. The mothers of the dancers quickly spread cloths on the ground and set out an array of small blow guns, tiny carved white herons, and string bracelets woven with red seeds. Having been given an opportunity to shop, the white women began bartering, wanting a bracelet and a necklace for the price of the bracelet alone. One of the women handed her husband the camera and then came and stood beside Marina. aTake my picture with this one,a she said. aSheas twice the size of the rest of them.a Marina, in her Lakashi dress, put her arm around the womanas waist so that her own red seed bracelet would show in the picture.

Easter went and stood beside one of the men with a tall kettle drum and put his hands on either side of the base. After a minute he began to nod his head in time. A boy came out with a three-toed sloth and hung it around a touristas neck and the animal, barely awake, tilted back its head and seemed to smile at her. The sloth, for posing in pictures, was an even bigger hit than Marina. A heavyset woman in a dirty T-shirt and cutoff jeans then arrived with a struggling fifty pound capybara in her arms. She held it on its back the way one would a baby, possibly thinking the large rodent would take a nice picture as well, but the animal squealed and writhed and then finally bit her so that she was forced to drop it and watch it sprint away into the undergrowth, shrieking in fear. That was when two very old men in enormous feathered headdresses came skipping slowly out of a thatched hut shaking rain sticks, and the dancing children fell into a line behind them. The elder of the two men, the one with no teeth, stopped and took Marinaas hand, tugging at her gently.

aYouare supposed to dance,a Nancy said.

aI canat do this,a Marina said.

aI donat think thereas any choice.a Marina looked at the crowd and then at the Indians and the message on every face was exactly the same: no choice. And so she took the chiefas hand which he then held high above his head, about the level of Marinaas cheekbone, and together they did the slow skip forward while the men beat their drums and the tourists took their pictures and the children followed with their dances, their snake and their sloth. In this group Marina danced with the people who were not white while the white people watched them. It would never have been her preference to be part of a tourist attraction. One of the children handed her the sloth and she took it. She hung it around her neck and continued her dance, feeling the soft, warm hair against her skin. Had anyone given her a choice, she would have chosen instead to be back on the porch behind the storage shed beneath her mosquito netting reading Little Dorrit. Still, she knew it was somehow less humiliating, less disrespectful, to dance with the natives than it was to simply stand there watching them.

Dollars accumulated in a woven basket, offerings to the gods. The letters were given to the touristsa guide, who said he had two hours off in Manaus the next day and would mail them himself. Benoit had been talking to the man the entire time and receiving strong advice on the importance of English and German. He should speak Spanish as well. Portuguese was nothing more than a baseline accomplishment.

On their way back from the trading post, Marina and the Saturns gave Benoit all of their attention. They looked at every bird and monkey he pointed to and when he found the correlating picture in the book they told him how to pronounce the words in English, spot-billed toucanet. Alan had brought binoculars and showed Benoit how to use them. Perhaps the tourists had rubbed off on them because they behaved as tourists now. They kept their collective gaze focused on the water and the leaves and the sky and scarcely looked at one another at all. They caught a glimpse of pink dolphins and discussed birds. They took a few unnecessary turns up very small tributaries because Benoit pointed them out to Easter and Easter, being free of all agenda, was happy to oblige. Marina and the Saturns had burned through so much emotion earlier in the day that now they all felt remarkably placid, or perhaps only exhausted. They had not passed another living soul since they left the Jintas and the world seemed something silent and wide, belonging only to them. On the left there was what appeared to be a crisp field of floating green lettuce. Benoit tapped at Easteras arm and the boy turned the wheel and took them in.

Beneath the sounds of bird calls there was the most delicate sound of crunching, as if the boat were making its way through a lightly frozen pond in December and the ice, half the thickness of a window pane, was breaking apart to let them pass. Marina leaned over the front of the boat and watched the lettuce compact beneath the pontoons while behind them the plants knitted themselves back together, smoothing over the path they had made without so much as a damaged leaf. We are here, Marina thought, and we were never here. It was a green so much brighter, so much fresher than anything shead seen in the jungle. Long toed birds strolled across the delicate meadow with such confidence it was tempting to think those tiny floating plants might hold the weight of a single pharmacologist. The question then was whether the water was a foot deep or twenty feet deep. Benoit smacked at Easter again and held up his hand and Easter stopped the boat. Benoit lay down on his belly then, his head and shoulders over the side. He had seen something. The Saturns came and leaned over him, Marina leaned over him. aIs it a fish?a Nancy said. aPeixe?a Benoit shook his head.

aI donat see anything,a her husband said.

Easter kept his eyes on Benoit, who, without looking at his captain again, pointed his hand to the left, to the right, and then a little back. Easter held the throttle low and scooted the big boat around in the smallest possible increments until Benoit, every ounce of his attention fixed into the sweet spring of lettuce, abruptly raised his hand and Easter killed the engine altogether. The silence was startling. The budding naturalist, still flat on his stomach, then dove that same hand down through the leaves and began to pull the colossus of all snakes into the boat.

Human instinct dictated first that the snake must be kept away from the face, and so Benoit straightened his arm to rigid as if wishing to cast it away from his body while holding on too tight for the snakeas comfort. The reptileas long, recurved teeth snapped ferociously into the air, diving towards Benoitas wrist while Benoit whipped the head from side to side, buying time until he could close the distance between hand and head. He rolled onto his side and then his back, managing somehow to pull the first half of the reptile on board while it flailed like a downed electrical wire. At its neck the snake was as big around as Benoitas wrist, and from there its body, smooth scales of darkest green with black blotches on the back and then creamy light underneath, swelled into a size more in keeping with his thigh. The snake kept pulling up and pulling up, more and more of itself slithering up and onto the deck in thick, muscular rolls where it sought to make its way onto Benoitas body, extending out against him, kneading him, while Benoit struggled mightily to keep their two faces apart. Do not let the faces touch.

aPut it back!a Nancy screamed in English, the language that stood between Benoit and his dream of being a tour guide. aDrop it!a aFuck!a Alan Saturn said, and then repeated the word endlessly for good measure.

He had caught it sure enough but he hadnat caught it close enough to the head. There was too much available snake above Benoitas hand, and the snakeas enormous gaping mouth sought purchase, its jaws opening wider than such a little head should reasonably dictate. In a flash there was evidence of many rows of smaller teeth lined up and waiting to clamp into skin. Only by swinging it wildly did he keep the snake from sinking into his wrist. Benoit seemed fixated only on the six inches of the snake between the top of his fist and the tip of its tongue while completely ignoring the enormous body that was working its way heavily onto his own body now, and Benoit, who was wet with sweat and the water the snake brought on board, was laughing. There on his back pinned like a wrestler in an unsporting match, he roared with a powerful joy while he tried to work the one hand upwards with the assistance of the other hand. Easter, ever helpful, grabbed onto the lower half of their guest and tried to pry it off of his friend. There was too much coiling and uncoiling for an accurate measurement but the snake appeared to be fifteen feet long, eighteen when it stretched. Benoit appeared to be five feet, five inches, and he was outweighed by as much as fifty pounds. The three doctors pressed away, screaming various invectives in an unhelpful language. Marina wanted to jump in the water and to run across the lettuce with the long toed birds, but who could say the snake didnat have a family down there? There was an odor none of them recognized, the smell of a furious reptile, an oily stench of putrid rage that sunk into the membranes of their nostrils as if it planned to stay there forever. The back half of the snake whipped up and made itself a knot around Easteras slender waist and wrapped and wrapped and at the moment its head swung past, Easter reached into the air, his hand a quarter second faster than the snake, and grabbed its throat just below the head, well above Benoitas fist. Easter had caught the snake that Benoit had caught.

Oh, the whooping! The triumph and revelry! They shook the jungle with their screams, Benoit and Easter, for sure enough Easter was screaming, and the sound was so piercing, so much like the agony of death, that all three doctors were sure the boy was bitten and they lunged forward with the instinct of human decency to save his life. But Easter was grinning madly as he gripped the snake while Benoit, who was considerably stronger, held fast below. They looked into the creatureas mouth now like a carnival attraction while the tongue, a silvered spark of light, licked towards them.

aItas a fucking anaconda!a Alan said. aHe caught an anaconda with his hands!a Alan Saturn seemed to be at the perfect intersection of the thrilling achievement of the Lakashi, the terror of Marina and his wife, and the rage of the snake, whose eyes had focused into two pinpoints of murderous desire.

Easter coughed.

Maybe Marina understood before he did but of course that would be impossible to say. In a moment everything was clear to her and she stepped through the wall of her own revulsion and fear and took the tail end of the snake that was pressed into Easteras hip. Its flesh was at once clammy and dry, cool despite the terrible heat of the day. She had once dissected a snake in a college biology class, a small black garter snake long dead and stinking of formaldehyde. She had cut it down the center and pinned it open on a wax-bottom pan. To the best of her memory that was the only snake she had ever touched. She touched the second one as she worked to pull it from the boy. When she had pried a little of it loose she moved her hands up the body, hand over hand like she was working her way up a rope, except the end of the rope then began to wrap around her wrist. It was a muscle like nothing she had ever encountered. It did not fight against her. It did not notice her. She pulled. Easter coughed again. Benoit could now see the problem as well: his friend was wrapped inside the snake and the snake had figured out a way to loosen the hand that held its neck. Benoit slid his hand up to cover Easteras hand just as Easteras hand fell away. Easter tried to work his own small hands between himself and the snake and when he exhaled to get just his fingertips in between them the snake felt the movement of his breath and squeezed. Easteras eyes shot first to Marina and there she saw the very soul of him in his fear and she pulled and Alanas hands were by her hands and they were pulling together, all of them, Benoit from the throat while Nancy Saturn cried for a knife, a knife, and then aJaca!a But Benoit could not hear her now. He was frozen to the snake that was in the business of killing his friend who may have been eleven or twelve but was very small for his age.

aTell me there is a fucking knife on this boat!a Nancy said. Easteras lips were turning blue. From either the lack of oxygen or the weight of the snake he went down on his knees. It occurred to Marina that his spine could snap. They all went down to their knees. Marina knew there was a machete strapped to the steering column of the boat, the knife that Easter had used to trim away the branches when he tied the boat to a tree. In an instant she was up. The knife was nearly as long as her arm, as heavy as a tennis racket, and she put the blade just above Benoitas fist and with a single pass sliced off the head. It would have been the greatest moment of her life had cutting off the head killed the snake but the beheading changed nothing. On the deck the busy head continued to snap its murderous teeth, moving in a slow circle as the jaw opened and closed, while its body went about the business of strangling a boy.

aJesus,a she said. She could see the tendons standing out on Benoitas neck, she could see his crooked bottom teeth, his open jaw jutting forward in the exertion, the blood of the headless snake running down his arm. While Benoit continued to pull the top of the snake, the Saturns continued to pull the bottom, and in the middle Easter continued his death. Marina began to saw into the rolls of headless snake, her hand at Easteras head and the point of the machete at Easteras toes. Her objective was to cut through both coils simultaneously as she doubted there would be time to do this twice. At no point did Easter make a sound. He would not use another teaspoon of breath. He stayed stock still inside this jacket and kept his eyes on Marina. First there was a large vertebral column that required Marina to lean in as she sawed, as much as she would have leaned in to saw apart a human wrist with a long knife at a bad angle. She had worried about pressing too hard and cutting into Easter, but Easter was still very far away. She cracked the vertebra in the first coil and then worked the knife from side to side to break the second bend. She then cut through the ribs, the thick muscles that ran down to the belly scute, the cloaca. When she was very close to Easter she put the knife down and ripped the bit of the snake that was left with her hands. The heavy weight of the snake worked in her favor then, tearing itself as it fell to the deck.

Nancy Saturn picked the boy up, light as air this child, and stretched him out beside his murderer and blew into his mouth and blew, her lips reined in to cover so small a mouth. With one hand behind his neck she tilted back his head and with her other hand she blocked his nose and she blew until she saw his chest rise and none of them could tell whose breath it was. She stopped for a minute. It was his. Shallow and uneven at first but his own. She lifted up his shirt and lightly touched the red welts across his torso and Alan Saturn kneeled beside her and put his ear to Easteras chest. Benoit crouched away from them, his head against his knees, his back heaving with his breath, while on the other side of the boat Easteras eyes blinked. Marina sat down beside him then in the widening pool of blood and took his hand.

It was still daylight when they got back. Alan Saturn was driving the boat and even though a couple dozen Lakashi were waiting on the shore the branches they held in their hands had not been lit. When they saw the boat they stood up to watch but they did not jump or cry out. It could have been because the travelers had only been gone for half a day and it could have been because Dr. Swenson was not among them. Either way, everyone on the boat was relieved, though there was more to celebrate now than there had been in all their lives combined. But when Alan Saturn pulled up next to the little dock and the Lakashi came on board the boat, the calling and crying broke forth in earnest, not the theatrical display of the week before but a deep and abiding joy Marina had not seen. Three men picked up the three large chunks of the snake from the blood-slicked deck and a fourth man picked up the head, the very head Marina had meant to kick into the water though she had been unwilling to touch it again even with her foot. They carried off the pieces of the snake, each as heavy as a small tree, and hoisted them about their heads to show the ebullient crowd. There would be anaconda for dinner tonight. It would be a feast to tell the grandchildren about years from now. So many Lakashi slapped their hands against Benoit they were beating him. They held out their chunks of snake in a rare offer of inclusion towards the Saturns, who leaned into each other fiercely and declined. Easter stood to walk but when he started to sway almost immediately, Benoit lifted him into his arms and the Lakashi cheered for them while the boy cried out in pain. Marina led them back to the porch and had Benoit put Easter in her bed and when Benoit was gone she crawled beneath the net herself to lie beside him. They were alive and together and they reeked of snake.

It wasnat long before Dr. Swenson came and found the two of them there in the little bed, shoulder to shoulder holding hands, small Hansel, big Gretel. Easter had fallen asleep taking shallow breaths through his mouth, but Marinaas eyes were open wide. Even after all this time it still wasnat completely dark. aThe Saturns told me what happened.a Dr. Swenson reached beneath the net and touched his hair.

aI donat know what happened,a Marina said, her eyes straight up to the point where the net knotted together. aIt doesnat make any sense. He saw a snake in the water and he pulled it onto the boat? Why would he do that?a aBenoit wants to be a tour guide and the stock and trade of an Amazon tour guide is the ability to pick things upa"tarantulas, Caiman lizards, all sorts of ridiculous things. Pulling an anaconda into a boat is an extraordinary accomplishment. Iave never seen anyone manage it, and Iave seen people try. Had it ended better he probably would have asked you to write a letter to the National Board of Tourism.a aItas a miracle the thing didnat bite one of them. Iall be seeing those fangs for the rest of my life.a Dr. Swenson shook her head. aTeeth,a she said, anot fangs. Iam told the bite is extremely painful and itas a monstrous business getting the head disengaged, but it isnat a poisonous snake. What that snake was doing to Easter was a much more serious business than biting.a Marina turned her head to face her mentor. aWhat about his liver, his spleen? If we were home I could take him for a CT.a aIf you were home he wouldnat have been squeezed by an anaconda. He would have been hit by an SUV while riding his bike. His odds were better against the snake.a aWhat?a aItas dangerous here, you donat need to tell me that, but itas more dangerous there. This is where he understands things, he knows how to get along. Maybe heas cracked some ribs, but you watch him, heall be fine. Dr. Eckman had ideas about taking Easter home with him. He felt if the hearing loss were nerve-based he might benefit from a cochlear implant, but you canat change people like that. You canat make a hearing boy out of a deaf boy, and you canat turn everyone you meet into an American. Easter isnat a souvenir anyway, a little something you pocket on your way out to remind you of your time in South America. You kept your head, Dr. Singh, you saved his life. I commend you for this. But if you think the reward for saving the boyas life is keeping the boy, then I must tell you this is not the case. A simple thank you will have to suffice. He is not available.a It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Marina to tell Dr. Swenson that she had no idea what she was talking about, when what Dr. Swenson was saying was perfectly clear, she had simply put it into words before Marina had made it a complete thought, the same way she would answer the questions on Grand Rounds the split second before Marina had them formulated in her mind. Marina was in fact moments from coming to the conclusion that the thing to do would be to take Easter home with her, that it was what Anders had wanted, that it was what she wanted, that in some bizarre way this was the child of their union, the product of the seven years Anders and Marina spent together in a cramped lab. Easter was her compensation for what she had lost. Dr. Swenson had simply seen it before Marina, and in seeing it, she cut her off at the pass. aIt was horrible,a Marina said weakly, wanting at least some sympathy for what she was being asked to forfeit. She meant the snake.

aIam sure it was.a Dr. Swenson put her hand against the boyas forehead, checking for fever, and then dipped two fingers into his neck to count his pulse. aDid you ever want children of your own, Dr. Singh?a And there she was again, anticipating the next emotion, following Marinaas train of thought backwards: I cannot keep this child. I should have had a child. She wondered if she were particularly transparent or if Dr. Swenson just had a special knack for reading her. aThere was a time,a Marina said. She could not make peace with the stench of the snake. She was amazed that Dr. Swenson hadnat commented on that.

aAnd that time has passed?a Marina shrugged. It was a peculiar kind of therapy, lying flat out with the child you had only now realized you wanted while being asked if you had wanted a child. aIam forty-two. I seriously doubt my life will change so much in the next year or two that it would be possible.a She was no longer sure about what she wanted from Mr. Fox, and hers was not an age for indecision.

aThere will be nothing but time, donat you understand? Thatas what the Lakashi are offering. If I can have a child at seventy-three, then why shouldnat you have one at forty-three, forty-five? Iall tell you the truth, Dr. Singh, what I have discovered about these trees is not what I expected. It will not be what your pharmaceutical company expects. It is something much greater, much more ambitious than anything we had hoped for. That was Dr. Rappas great lesson in the Amazon, in science: Never be so focused on what youare looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.a Marina was sitting up now. She had disengaged her hand from Easteras though the two were fairly stuck together from where the snakeas blood had dried and sealed them into one unit. She came outside her net. aYouare telling me youare pregnant?a Dr. Swenson blinked. For a moment she looked more surprised than Marina. aYou thought I was fat?a aYouare seventy-three years old!a Dr. Swenson folded her hands on top of her stomach in a universal gesture of pregnancy. It was something Marina was sure she had never seen her do. Her shirt rode up and showed the roundness of her belly. aI know you have seen women here who are my age or older and they are pregnant. Iave heard you comment on them.a aBut theyare Lakashi.a Marina wasnat sure if what she was saying was racist or scientific. This distortion of biology is for them, not for us. She could still hear them singing by the river, beating on drums, no doubt tenderizing the snake before they held it on sticks above the fire, or whatever one did to cook a snake in these parts.

aThey are Lakashi indeed, so that is the question. We know that if they eat the bark consistently from the onset of first menses their ova appear not to deteriorate. But Americans wouldnat feed their daughters a monthly pill from the time theyare thirteen on the off chance the child will want to wait until sheas fifty to reproduce. What we have to find out is whether or not the bark can reinvigorate the reproductive capacity of the postmenopausal woman.a aAnd youare the test case? You couldnat find someone else to do this?a aThere are no postmenopausal Lakashi. Thatas the whole point.a aThen you get a Jinta. You donat take it yourself.a aHow quickly we put our medical ethics aside. I developed this drug. If I believe in it, and clearly I do, then I should be willing to test it on myself.a aWho is the father?a Dr. Swenson looked at her with the gravest disappointment, the disappointment she reserved for first year medical students. aReally, Dr. Singh, you are not serious.a Given the circumstances of the day, Marina would have sworn that there was nothing left to upset her, and still she felt her hands shaking. aI understand that you are conducting an extremely limited initial trial on yourself but the end result of this experiment will be a child and, with all good wishes for your longevity, you may not be around as long as you might like to look after it. If there is no father in the traditional sense, then what happens to the outcome?a aThere are plenty of children around here. Do you really think one more is going to break the tribe? I am very well regarded. Any outcome of mine, as you so warmly describe this child, would be welcomed and well cared for.a aYouare going to leave it here? Annick Swensonas child will be raised by the Lakashi?a aThey are a decent, well-organized people.a aYou went to Radcliffe.a aI didnat love it.a Easter slept through all of it. Marina looked down on him in the bed. His shirt and arms and face were smeared with blood. Somehow in all of this she hadnat noticed it before. She would get a cloth and wash him. She could wash him while he slept. aImagine Dr. Rapp fathered a child down here,a she said, remembering the example of Alan Saturn in his argument with his wife and working to calm her voice. aShould the son or the daughter of the greatest mind in botany just wander around in the jungle for the rest of his or her life, not having any access to their own potential?a aDo you think his children arenat here? Do you honestly think such things never happened? You should ask Benoit to take you to the next vision quest or whatever you want to call it.a Dr. Swenson shook her head and then walked over to sit in the one small chair in the room. She sat on top of Marinaas second dress and her other two pair of underpants as the chair was where she kept her things. aI am very tired, Dr. Singh,a she said and pushed back her hair with her hands. aI have sciatica in my left leg and the child is sitting on my bladder. It begins to thrash whenever I lie down. I am glad to have conducted this piece of research on myself because it makes me realize something I might not have otherwise taken into account: women past a certain age are simply not meant to carry children, and I can only imagine that we are not meant to bear them or to raise them either. The Lakashi are used to it. This is their particular fate. They can hand off their infants to their granddaughters. They donat have to raise them. That is the only reward for these late-life children: you know they wonat be your responsibility. I had never felt old before this, that is a fact. I have avoided mirrors my entire life. I have no better sense of what I look like at seventy-three than I did at twenty. Iave had some arthritis in my shoulder but nothing to speak of. I keep on. I have kept coming down here, kept up with my work, Dr. Rappas work. I have not lived the life of an old woman because I was not an old woman. I was only myself. But this thing, this child, it has made me firmly seventy-three. It has made me older than that. By straying into the territory of the biologically young I have been punished. I would have to say rightfully so.a Marina looked at her teacher, looked at her feet filling out a battered pair of Birkenstocks, looked at the way gravity pinned her to the chair. She asked the most ridiculous question of all, only because she had been so recently asked herself. aDid you ever want to have children?a aWhat is it you said to me just now? There was a time? Maybe there was a time. To tell you the truth I canat remember. From where I sit I would tell you that having a child is akin to plotting your own death, but I delivered thousands and thousands of babies in my day and it seemed at least in that moment many of the mothers were happy. I know it wasnat like this for the young.a Dr. Swenson closed her eyes and though her head stayed balanced and upright she seemed to be asleep.

aShould I walk you back to your room?a Marina asked.

Dr. Swenson considered the offer. aWhat about Easter?a Marina looked back at him, noted the regular rise and fall of his chest. aHeas not going to wake up. Heas had a long day.a aThatas the one you want,a Dr. Swenson said, bringing their conversation back to its beginning although this time she seemed to be offering him up. aOne whoas older, one whoas smart, one who loves you. If someone ever told me I could have had a child like Easter I would have done it, only I would have done it a long time ago.a Marina nodded, and using both of her hands she pulled Dr. Swenson up from her chair. aWe can agree on that.a aYou were smart to stay with us, Dr. Singh. I kept waiting for you to go, but Iam starting to see that you are genuinely interested in our work.a aI am,a Marina said, realizing for the first time that she hadnat been thinking about leaving at all. Then she took Dr. Swensonas arm and together they walked down the stairs and side by side on the narrow path back through the jungle to the lab.

At the lab, Marina borrowed some soap and a pot, and when she was in the river took off her dress and held herself under the warm clouded water for some time. There was a complicated, ineffectual shower rigged up behind the lab that required hauling bags of water up from the river and running them through a filtering system but it would have been no match for all she was hoping to remove. Bringing her head above the surface, opening her eyes to the light falling at a low slant across the water, she was surprised to find that she no longer felt afraid of the river. She would have thought it would be the other way around. She scrubbed her dress and then used the rough fabric of the dress to scrub herself, then sank a final time and swam back into her clothes. She emerged dripping from the water still stinking, though perhaps not as much. Then she convinced the Lakashi women to let her put a pot of water down at the edge of their fire and while she waited for it to heat up a woman came and sat behind her, combing out Marinaas wet hair with her fingers and then braiding it. If there were men in the tribe who hoped to one day escape their circumstances by becoming naturalists, the women all seemed to share a common dream of hairdressing. There was no more denying their desire to groom than one could stop those little African birds from riding on the backs of crocodiles and pecking out insects, and while Marina had fought them at first, pulling their hands from her hair whenever they gathered it back, she had finally given over to it. She had learned to relax beneath their touch. While the woman braided and tugged, Marina watched the river, counting the fish that popped the surface. She counted eight in all.

When her hair was finished and the water was hot enough she carried it back to the porch. It was finally getting dark and the evening was lovely and young. While the bats spun out of dead trees to announce the dusk, Marina washed the snake off of Easter. He woke up just enough to squint at her vaguely while she worked her cloth down his arms and between his toes. She wiped his face and rubbed his hair and was very gentle as she wiped down his stomach and chest which were already blossoming into a spectrum of purple and green. When she was finished he turned himself over with great difficulty and let her do the other side. She spread a clean sheet beneath him the way she had seen nurses do, it was a skill she had forgotten she had: change a bed with someone in it. So he had been a cannibal once, if only in another lifetime. In light of all that had happened it was hardly worth mentioning.

Nine.

It was on the fourth morning after the trip to the trading post that Marina saw Dr. Budi and the second Dr. Saturn walking through the jungle. It was very early, much earlier than she normally would be out, but something had crawled beneath the net above her bed and bitten her near the elbow and the bite, now swollen and hot, had prevented her from going back to sleep. She used what scant morning light was available to inspect the snakeas long-lasting tattoo that had deepened the color of Easteras bruises to eggplant and spread from his armpits to his groin. When she had assured herself yet again that these bruises were merely horrible and not a sign of some underlying medical catastrophe, she dislodged herself from the sleeping child and went in search of the coffee that Dr. Budi, always working, was sure to have made. It was still fifteen minutes short of full daylight when she saw her colleagues on the other side of a giant termite mound, the ground between them trembling with industry. She waved and called good morning and they stopped abruptly, looking at her as if she were the last person they had ever expected to see in the Amazon. After a pause, Dr. Saturn leaned down to whisper something in Dr. Budias ear and Dr. Budi, after what appeared to be consideration, nodded her approval. The two doctors then made their way towards her, cutting a wide berth around the termites.

aHowas Easter?a Nancy Saturn said.

Marina gave Nancy the credit for saving Easteras life, for having the presence of mind to say the word knife when Marina was still attempting to win a wrestling match with a snake. It was Nancy Saturn who had set their salvation in motion. aHe was sleeping when I left. Dr. Swenson gives him half an Ambien at night now, otherwise the pain wakes him up.a aBlessings from Allah on that,a Dr. Budi said, nodding.

aWeare going out to the trees,a Nancy said casually, laying her hand on the bag of notebooks that hung across her chest. aWhy donat you come along?a Before Easteras accident, if pulling a snake into a boat can be called an accident, Marina had asked several times to see the trees, but her requests had been met by a vague evasivenessa"they had already been or this wasnat the week to go. Since the anaconda, she had frankly forgotten about them. Her notions of what was important had shifted. The jungle was not short on trees and she had seen many of them. It was difficult to imagine that some would be so substantially different from the others. Still, now that the invitation had been extended she accepted with pleasure, feeling that her patience had been noticed and rewarded.

In fact, she had written just such a sentiment last night to Mr. Fox, sitting on the floor of the sleeping porch and using the chair as a desk because Easter had already gone to bed. (Since the snake, his hammock had hung empty until a marmoset took it up for afternoon naps. It was a filthy little creature.) I find myself following your advice now that I have no direct way of reaching you. You would tell me to wait and observe. You would tell me there is more to this situation than I could immediately understand and you would be right, just as you were right to tell me to come here and right to tell me (I know this is what you would say) to stay. Look how agreeable Iave become since Iave been gone! I can hardly believe how close I came to getting on the next flight home. I would have suffered through Manaus only to miss the very thing I had come for.

Far to the west, Budi and Nancy and Marina heard a rustling of branches as two young women laughing and talking in what Marina still considered to be an impenetrable language passed at a distance, nodding their heads with disinterest when they spotted the doctors. One of the older women was walking from the direction of the river holding the hand of a young girl. Three more suddenly appeared from behind a large, dead stump. aYou would think they all had alarm clocks,a Nancy said as more and more women stepped from the underbrush and headed in the same direction. They were on a path Marina didnat think she had been on before although she couldnat be sure. Paths opened up when she studied the undergrowth carefully and then disappeared as soon as she turned her head. She had a mortal fear of following one path into the jungle and then being unable to find it again when she was ready to go out. If Marina had it all to do over again she would have brought sacks of red yarn with her so she could tie one end of the ball to the foot of her bed every time she entered the labyrinth.

aIt is the Lakashi biological clock,a Dr. Budi said, and Nancy and Marina laughed. Dr. Budi smiled shyly, having made so few successful jokes in her life.

It wasnat often that Marina dwelled on the contents of either of her lost suitcases but there were moments, and this was such a moment, when she would have liked a real pair of shoes instead of the rubber flip-flops. She would have liked a long sleeved shirt that would have saved her arms at least from the smaller thorns, and a pair of pants to protect her from those random blades of grass which when brushed past at exactly the right angle could slice the shin like a razor. The small amount of blood that beaded and then seeped from her leg was an advertisement for all she had to offer. It felt as if they were going a very long way, but distances, like directions, were hard to measure. It could have been that this particular path (were they on a path?) had more fallen trees lying across it that required clambering over, more mysterious sinkholes of standing water heralded only by a sudden sponginess underfoot. It could be that they were only two or three straight city blocks away from their destination but that distance was meaningless given the obstacles they had still to overcome. Marina brushed her hand across the back of her neck and dislodged something with a hard shell. She had learned in time to brush instead of slap as slapping only served to pump the entire contents of the insect, which was doubtlessly already burrowed into the skin with some entomological protuberance, straight into the bloodstream.

The Lakashi women were singing now. No, they werenat singing. It was just that so many of them were talking at once and when their voices came together it sounded vaguely like a section of Torah as sung by a group of bar mitzvah boys whose voices had yet to change. aDo you know what theyare saying?a Marina asked.

Nancy shook her head. aI catch a word every now and then, or I think I do. We had a linguist with us for a while. He had been a student of Noam Chomskyas. He said the language wasnat particularly difficult or even interesting, that all the languages in this region of the Amazon came from a single grammatical base with variations in vocabulary which meant at one point the tribes must have been connected and then split apart. It made me wish we had a language that was a little bit more obscure so we might have kept him. He made us some charts with phonetics so we can put together some basic phrases.a aThomas is very good at it,a Dr. Budi said. She held up her arm and the other two women stopped and waited while a very large, low slung lizard dragged itself across their path, its loose green skin hanging over the rib cage like chain mail. aI donat know that one,a Dr. Budi said, watching it carefully.

Nancy leaned over to peer at the lizard as if it were someone she could almost place, then she shook her head. aNeither do I.a It was another twenty minutes past the lizard before they came to a clearing, or, if not a clearing, a place where fewer, thinner trees stood farther apart from one another, and all the trees were the same. There was no thick coat of undergrowth covering the ground, just a light wash of grass, there were no hairy ropes of vines strangling the trees, only the smooth, straight expanse of bark. Sunlight fell easily between the pale oval leaves and hit the ground in wide patches. aItas beautiful,a Marina said, dropping her head back. Such sunlight, such pretty little leaves. aMy God, why donat they live here?a aToo far from the water,a Dr. Budi said, looking at her watch and making a note of the time.

A dozen Lakashi women were already there. Marina knew most of them by sight even if she couldnat properly reproduce the series of tones that made up their names. Over the next few minutes two dozen more arrived and took their places against the trunks that were a buttery yellow color and ranged from ten to twenty inches around. Without ritual or fanfare, with no apparent consideration, the women went for bigger trees, the ones already bitten, and left the saplings alone. Pressing in like a partner for a slow dance, they opened their mouths and began immediately to scrape their teeth down the bark. The jungle on this morning was particularly quiet and so it was possible to hear them, a small sound amplified by so many women making it at the same time.

A few stragglers wandered in and stopped to greet the women at the trees around them who stopped their biting and chewing long enough to receive the greeting and return it. Two of the women who had a great deal to say to each other took opposite sides of the same tree and from a distance they appeared to be kissing. Women who had brought their children left them in a pile in the center of the trees and the older children herded the younger ones back when they tried to crawl away. One of the older women went into the group of children and led a girl of twelve or thirteen to a tree and the others stopped all at once, turning their heads from their trees to watch her. When the girl tilted her face to the side, looking uncertain of how she should approach it, the others hooted lightly and slapped their trees to make a kind of tree-plus-human applause. The thin branches trembled and shook the delicate leaves from side to side. The girl, whose hair was unbraided and disheveled by sleep, looked embarrassed to be the center of so much attention. She then began to nibble at the bark. After the others felt certain she was performing this primal act correctly they all went back to their work. From the nubile to the beldame they scraped and chewed without pleasure or distaste. They had turned the fairly exotic act of biting a tree into nothing more than factory work.

aThis is important,a Dr. Budi said to Marina. aThe girl has just completed her first menstrual cycle. The Lakashi rituals are very brief, unsentimental. You are lucky to see such a thing on your first day.a Nancy Saturn turned some pages in her notebook. aI didnat realize Mara was menstruating.a Dr. Budi held up her book. aI have it.a There were more than enough trees for everyone, maybe two hundred of them spread over two acres of land. The tallest climbed to a height of sixty or seventy feet, but there were plenty of new trees coming up as well. In the places where a tree had been recently eaten, the absence of bark left a mark that was soft and white; growing back, it was the palest of yellows and then darkened over time so that most of the trees at the height of a Lakashias head appeared to have been banded by decoupage.

It was easier to breathe in this place, and so easy to see! In every direction the vista was open. No more wondering what might be tearing through the jungle with its wet jaws hinged open. aI never thought there would be so many trees,a Marina said. aI didnat picture it like this.a aItas actually just one tree,a Nancy said. She was counting the women and marking them present by name in her notebook. aTheyare Populas, like Aspens, a very rare phenomenon. Itas a single root system. The tree is cloning itself.a aVery delicate,a Dr. Budi said, nodding to herself.

aThe root system changes the acidity level in the soil so that nothing much will grow here except for the trees and a little bit of grass. In a sense you could say the tree poisons the area it inhabits to make sure that nothing else will survive in its space and take the nutrients out of the soil or grow taller and block out the sunlight.a aExcept the Rapps,a Dr. Budi said. aThe Rapps thrive right where they are.a She pointed the tip of her pen towards the clusters of mushrooms that grew near the base of the trees, each cap a perfect golf ball on a tall, slender stem. The Rapps were a most unearthly shade of pale blue. They came so close to glowing in the light of day that she wanted to come back with a flashlight and see them in the dark. Marina couldnat imagine how she had missed them.

aPsilocybe livoris rappinis,a Nancy said. aThey are considered to be the greatest single discovery in mycology. There has never been any evidence that this ecosystem is duplicated anywhere else in the rain forest, anywhere in the world. These trees youare looking at here, these mushrooms, this is it. As far as we know, these are the only Rapps in the world. Your passport to spiritual enlightenment.a aYouave tried them?a Nancy Saturn closed her eyes and nodded slightly, holding up one finger.

aVery sick,a Dr. Budi said. aInteresting, everything you see, but too sick.a aSo if the mushrooms are Rapps, are the trees called Swensons?a Marina asked. There was an inordinate number of lavender moths the size of quarters bobbing through the sunlight. Marina didnat remember seeing them before but then it would be difficult to notice such a small moth in the workaday tangle of vines that suffocated the rest of the jungle.

aThe trees are called Martins,a Dr. Budi said. aTabebuia martinii.a aItas actually the Rapps weare protecting,a Nancy said. aAll the secrecy about the work and the location, itas so no one can find the Rapps. Scientifically, itas the Martins that have presented such remarkable potential. The Martins really may prove to be one of the great botanical discoveries of our age. But people have been trying to get their hands on the Rapps ever since Dr. Rapp started writing about them. If the greater world knew where they werea"a Dr. Budi covered her eyes with her hand and shook her head.

aExactly. This place would be overrun, drug dealers, the Brazilian government, other tribes, German tourists, thereas no telling who would get here first and what sort of a war would ensue. The only thing I know for sure is that the Lakashi would be destroyed. Their entire existence is built around Rapps and while they have easily a hundred times more mushrooms than they need for their rituals they have no interest in drying and storing them. The Rapps present three hundred and sixty-five days a year and so the Lakashi just assume theyare always going to be right here under the trees. Iave been trying to grow Martins and, subsequently, Rapps, for three years now, and Iam not talking about growing them back in Michigan, Iam talking about growing them in the lab from root dissections, the same soil, the same water, and I canat do it.a aYou will,a Dr. Budi said.

Nancy Saturn shook her head. aItas too soon to say.a Dr. Saturn and Dr. Budi announced that they were talking too much and the window of time for work would not stay open indefinitely. They excused themselves and began going tree to tree asking the women questions that involved the use of four or five words of Lakashi. Nancy took a cuff out of her bag and was checking Maraas blood pressure. Marina took the opportunity to look at the trees: a small plastic placard, numbered and dated, had been staked in front of each one. She ran her hands over the scarred bark, sniffed at the wood. Had she seen them by a lake in Minnesota she wouldnat have given them a second look, or maybe one glance back, just because she had no memory of seeing such yellow bark. The Rapps she would have noticed, looking down at the small clump near her feet. They were like a cluster of exotic sea creatures that had washed up a thousand miles inland. How in the world had Dr. Rapp found this place? How had he known to look past the fire waving tribe on the shore and go a mile into the jungle? Marina cut a path between the trees. What a pleasure it was to walk! What a pleasure to take a large step and be able to see where her foot was landing. She raised her arms above her head and stretched. One by one the women stepped back from the trees and began scratching out whatever splinter of bark had lodged between their teeth with their fingernails. Budi picked a handful of women out of the crowd and wiped down their fingers with alcohol swabs and then pricked them to draw the small pipettes of blood. After making notes she carefully pressed the tubes into a small metal case. On the other side of the stand, Dr. Saturn went through a more challenging interaction as she handed three of the women long cotton swabs and waited while they reached beneath their dresses, made a quick flick with the wrist, and handed the swab back to her. Dr. Saturn then tapped the swab on a slide and on a piece of litmus paper.

aWhat in the world are you doing?a Marina asked.

aChecking the levels of estrogen in cervical mucus.a Dr. Saturnas carrying case was a more complicated affair and she sat down on the ground to make her notations on the test tube where she deposited her swabs. aThe slides are for ferning.a aNo one does ferning anymore,a Marina said. It was the slightly arcane process of watching estrogen grow into intricate fern patterns on slides. No ferns, no fertility.

Dr. Saturn shrugged. aItas very effective for the Lakashi. Their estrogen levels are quite sensitive to the intake of bark.a aHow in the world did you convince them toa"a She wasnat sure of the appropriate word. Self-swab?

aThat,a Dr. Saturn said, ais Dr. Swensonas genius. The training was in place a long time before I arrived. I cannot imagine how terrified of her they must have been to have gone along with it. These days it doesnat even seem to register as an invasion of privacy.a The third Lakashi woman handed over her Q-tip without fanfare and Nancy bowed her head as she accepted it.

When the Lakashi had finished what had been asked of them, they walked off in groups of two and three and four, not looking back at the trees or acknowledging the scientists. They picked up the children who were too small to walk reliably and let the others trail behind as best they could. They were done.

aDo they come every day?a Marina watched as the entire lot of them receded into the thickening woods as if a school bell had been rung. They left without so much as a glance back to the doctors or the trees. Their work was done.

aThey chew the bark every five days, though the entire female sector of the tribe doesnat come on the same day. Their visits are regular. How they figure the five days is beyond us as they have no apparent system for marking time. I can only assume that it has at this point become a biological craving. They donat come when theyare pregnant. In fact the bark repulses them from what seems to be the moment of conception. Dr. Swenson confirms this. Because of this pregnancies seem especially long out here. We know about them for a full thirty-nine weeks. They also donat come when theyare menstruating, though conveniently theyare pretty much on the same cycle so we get a few days off every month.a aAll of them?a Nancy nodded. aIt takes the new girls a while to get it straightened out and no one is perfectly regular after giving birth, but other than that.a Dr. Budi walked over to a tree near her and looked to find a place where the bark was darkest yellow and dry, then she leaned towards it and bit, her teeth making that same scraping sound. aYouall try it?a she said, looking back at Marina.

aI should take her vitals,a Nancy said, pulling out the blood-pressure cuff again. aBudi, take her temperature.a aWhy would I?a Marina said.

aWe need people to test. People who arenat Lakashi. We do it.a aBut Iam not going to get pregnant.a Nancy Velcroed a cuff around Marinaas arm and began to pump it tighter and tighter. Dr. Budi held up a flat plastic thermometer and Marina, sure of nothing, opened her mouth.

aYou would not be alone in that,a Dr. Budi said.

aBelieve me, there are plenty of things to test you for. You donat have to get pregnant.a aThomas will tell you,a Dr. Budi said, and then as if on cue, Dr. Nkomo broke through the thicket outside the stand of Martins and was walking towards them.

aI see I am sufficiently late,a he said, bowing his head to the three women.

aMen and women donat come to the stand at the same time,a Nancy told Marina. aThe women chew the trees and the men gather the Rapps.a aDivision of labor,a Dr. Budi said. Nancy removed the blood-pressure cuff and pressed two fingers to the side of Marinaas wrist to find her pulse.