State of Wonder (20 page)

Marina remembered that cup of sludge Barbara Bovender had brought her from the shaman’s stand and wondered if she was no more than a Westerner given to the charms of boiled tinctures. It was a cure she would never admit to now.

Dr. Swenson brightened for a moment. “I’ll tell you what the locals do have a real genius for, and that’s poison. There are so many plants and insects and various reptiles capable of killing a person out here that it seems any idiot could scrape together a compound that would drop an elephant. As for the rest of it, people survive regardless of the care they get. The human animal is too resilient for it to be otherwise. It is not for me to meddle.”

“I appreciate your point. It’s only that I believe in the moment—the child, the blood—it would be hard not to act.”

“Then perhaps it will actually open up some of my time to have you here. I’ll send the daily medical emergencies to you.”

Marina laughed at this. “Then I know they’d be better off with the local medical care. I haven’t threaded a needle in nearly fifteen years.” Suddenly Marina realized she couldn’t remember sewing up that last woman she’d operated on. She remembered lifting out the infant, and at that instant realizing what she had done. She remembered one of the nurses taking him away, but what came after that? Where was the needle? She didn’t leave the patient there, uterus and abdomen open to the world, but she could not find a picture in her memory of closing.

“It comes right back,” Dr. Swenson said. “You were my student. Believe me, I pounded it all in there.”

Marina was still looking for the conclusion to the surgery in her mind when she had another thought. “What about Dr. Rapp?”

“What about him?”

“Wouldn’t he have sewn up the girl’s head?”

Dr. Swenson snorted. “He most certainly would not have, and not because he wasn’t a medical doctor. He had a perfect understanding of human physiology and the steadiest hands I have ever seen in my life. He could have grafted a vein by a campfire had he thought it was necessary. But Dr. Rapp had no self-aggrandizing notions about his role in the tribe. He never set himself out to be the great white hero. He never took a single specimen more than what was absolutely needed. He disrupted nothing.”

“So he would have let her bleed to death.”

“He would have respected the order that was in place.”

Marina nodded, thinking perhaps she was luckier than she realized to have found herself with an expedition still capable of making errors of compassion. “Is Dr. Rapp still alive?”

She might as well have asked if President Kennedy had survived his assassination attempt. “Do you read, Dr. Singh? Do you live in this world?”

It was a beautiful question to be asked by a woman on a boat who was taking her down a river into the beating heart of nowhere. “I do,” Marina said.

She sighed and shook her head. “Dr. Rapp died nine years ago. It will be ten years this August.”

And Marina, sensing that sympathy was in order, said that she was sorry to hear it, and Dr. Swenson thanked her.

“Were you studying mycology at the time? Is that how you came to work with Dr. Rapp?” It seemed possible, after all; anything was possible. She may have been coming down here as an operative for the CIA.

“I was a student of Dr. Rapp’s, and the location of his classroom was unpredictable. I followed him through Africa and Indonesia, but the Amazon was the source of his most important work. He studied botany, and I was free to study the workings of a true scientific mind. As an undergraduate at Radcliffe I wasn’t allowed to take his class at Harvard, Harvard couldn’t have stood for anything as radical as that, but Dr. Rapp let me travel on the expeditions. He was the first teacher I encountered who saw no limitations for women. As it turned out he was the only one.”

They were quiet for a long time after that, both staring off at different aspects of the jungle as it rolled past them, the same bit of scenery recycled indefinitely. Two hours later, Easter left the protection of the right-hand bank and crossed the width of the Negro to the left. There he turned up a tributary that was in every way similar to the countless other tributaries they had passed, and while it was unmarked, it was the exit ramp from the interstate, the one that would eventually take them to the street where Dr. Swenson lived. No other boats followed them though the entrance was wide at the mouth. In a matter of minutes the nameless river narrowed and the green dropped behind them like a curtain and the Negro was lost. Marina had thought that the important line that was crossed was between the dock and the boat, the land and the water. She had thought the water was the line where civilization fell away. But as they glided between two thick walls of breathing vegetation she realized she was in another world entirely, and that she would see civilization drop away again and again before they reached their final destination. All Marina could see was green. The sky, the water, the bark of the trees: everything that wasn’t green became green.
All in green my love went riding.

Dr. Swenson announced that lunch was now in order. “The boy deserves a break. He stands up there so rigid that I think he would shatter if a nut hit him just right. There is no way of communicating that one should relax, do you realize that? You can shake out your arms and swivel your neck and it all looks like nonsense.” Dr. Swenson put her hands on her thighs and pushed up but she did not stand. She was thicker around the middle than she had been in Baltimore and the weight and the long time sitting seemed to keep her tied to her case of hash. Dr. Swenson, so far as Marina could calculate, would be in the neighborhood of seventy. It was possible at this point that even Dr. Swenson was tired. Marina stood up and extended her hand. Dr. Swenson rubbed her knees for a minute, looking pointedly away, then she took the hand. “Thank you for the assistance,” she said. She stood up and then let Marina go. “These are different days. For all I know about the body this is still not what I expected.” She went over and tapped Easter on the shoulder, then made a turning motion with her wrist and pointed to the shore. He nodded, keeping his eyes ahead. “He won’t go in right away,” Dr. Swenson said, coming back to where Marina was standing. “There’s a spot he likes where he can tie up to a tree. The anchor makes him nervous. It’s not reliable. Once he dropped it off and we had a devil of a time getting it back in the boat. There’s a lot for an anchor to get caught on in this river.”

Marina looked over the side of the boat. She couldn’t even imagine it. “How long have you been coming out here?”

“Dr. Rapp first found the Lakashi”—Dr. Swenson craned back her head, looked towards the tops of the trees—“it was fifty years ago, I suppose. I was on that trip, standing right on the stage of history. I remember coming down this very river for the first time. It was a glorious day. I had no idea that I would be coming back for the rest of my life.”

“It doesn’t seem that anything much has changed,” Marina said, looking to the riverbank and the straight wall of plant life, not a single person on the shore now, not a hut, a boat, in any direction.

“Don’t be fooled by the scenery,” Dr. Swenson said. “Things were very different then. You didn’t turn a corner and find a square mile of forest burned into a field. You didn’t see the constant smoke the way you do now. And the Lakashi, even they’re different. They lose their skills as fast as the basin loses forest. They used to make their own ropes, they wove cloth. Now even they manage to buy things. They cut down two or three trees and tie them together, float them to Manaus and sell them, that’s enough money for kerosene and salt, a river taxi ride back home, maybe some rum if they can strike a good deal, but for the most part they are terrible at dealing. They pick up clothing in town, the very junk that Americans drop off at the Salvation Army box. One time when I was visiting, this was years ago, the tribal elder, a man they called Josie, met me at the dock wearing a Johns Hopkins T-shirt. I had left my class at Hopkins that morning and flown to Brazil and taken a boat down a half a dozen splitting rivers only to be greeted by a Johns Hopkins T-shirt.” She shook her head at the memory of it. “Dear God, he was proud of that shirt. He wore it every day. In fact he was buried in it.”

“So you would teach all week and see patients and then fly down here on the weekends?”

“Not every weekend, nothing like that, though if there had been enough time or enough money I might have. There was so much work to do down here. I would leave late Thursday night after my last class. I only had office hours on Friday, and I didn’t keep office hours. I never believed in them. Questions are for the benefit of every student, not just the one raising his hand. If you don’t have the starch to stand up in class and admit what you don’t understand, then I don’t have the time to explain it to you. If you don’t have a policy against nonsense you can wind up with a dozen timid little rabbits lined up in the hall outside your office, all waiting to whisper the same imbecilic question in your ear.”

Marina clearly remembered being one of those same Friday rabbits herself, waiting for hours in the chair beside the office door until another student coming down the hall had the decency to explain that she was waiting for nothing. “The department chair didn’t mind that you didn’t keep hours?”

Dr. Swenson lowered her chin. “Did you attend parochial school as a child, Dr. Singh?”

“Public,” Marina said. “And so you came back on Sunday and taught Monday’s class?”

“It was a red-eye coming back. I’d land Monday morning and have the taxi take me straight to campus.” She stretched her arms overhead, the straying springs of her white hair reaching out in every direction. “I never looked my best on Mondays.”

“I never noticed,” Marina said.

“That’s one thing I have to give to your Mr. Fox: he made it possible for me to stay down here and do my work. I can’t say I am undisturbed, as he makes every effort to disturb me himself, but I am free of the madness that comes from trying to conduct meaningful research when your subjects are in another country. I’ve been down here full time for ten years now. The first three years I pieced together grants but the constant search for funding was more time consuming than flying back and forth to teach. There wasn’t a major pharmaceutical company in the world that wouldn’t have been willing to foot the bill for this but in the end Vogel won. I give credit where credit’s due.”

Easter slowed the boat and then put it in reverse, which, with their forward momentum, achieved a sort of churning stillness. He steered it into what appeared to be a slight indentation in the solid wall of trees and then took the rope that was already in his hand and flung it over a branch that hung out over the water at a better angle than all the other branches.

“Well, that worked out nicely,” Marina said when the rope was safely caught. She would rather talk about branches and rope than
her Mr. Fox
.

“It always works out well. That’s Easter’s tree. That’s the one he waits for. He knows exactly where to go.”

Marina made a slow circle. Thousands of trees, hundreds of thousands of trees as far as she could see on both sides of the river without a single clearing. Branches ad infinitum, leaves in perpetuity. “He remembers one branch? I don’t see how it would be possible to remember one branch.” From time to time a flock of birds would explode shrieking from the tangled greenery but the jungle looked so impenetrable that Marina couldn’t imagine how birds were able to fly into it. How could one bird ever make its way back to the nest? How could Easter remember the best place to tie the boat?

“It has been my observation that Easter remembers everything,” Dr. Swenson said. “When I said I believed that his intelligence may be above average I didn’t mean it sentimentally.”

Every act the boy performed was done with a graceful efficiency of movement: he shut down the engine, tied a knot, turned around to nod at Dr. Swenson.

“Very good!” she said, holding two thumbs up.

Easter smiled. The minute they were properly moored he became a child again, the one that Marina had first seen outside the opera house, the one Jackie had held in his arms. The boat was now the responsibility of the tree and for these moments he could be on his own. He pointed to the water and looked again to Dr. Swenson. She nodded, and as quickly as she could move her head he pulled off his T-shirt, showing them the smooth brown skin of his chest, the matchstick of his torso. He scrambled on top of two boxes of canned apricots and flying up and over the ropes that stood in place for a proper railing he launched his body rocket-wise, up and over, up and out, out and into the brown water with a resounding splash, his knees pulled up to his chest, his chin tucked in, his arms lifted up to the light. And then he was gone.

Marina was at the edge of the boat in two steps while Dr. Swenson made herself busy looking for something in a brown paper bag. The water was velvety, undisturbed by the weight of so small a boy. It didn’t even trouble itself to give up a reflection the way most water would. There was nothing on the surface and nothing beneath it. “Where is he!” Marina cried.

“Oh, that’s part of the trick. He thinks he’s scaring me to death. That’s the big fun of it all.” Dr. Swenson rooted through a bag of loose items. “Do you eat peanut butter? Americans are all determined to be allergic to peanuts these days.”

“I can’t see him!” The water was as impenetrable as the earth itself. The boy had been swallowed whole, a minnow, a thought.

Dr. Swenson raised her head and, looking in Marina’s direction, she sighed. “There is a great temptation to tease you, Dr. Singh. Your earnestness makes you very vulnerable to that, I’m sure. The child has the lungs of a Japanese pearl diver. He’ll resurface two-thirds of the way across in a direct line with the boat.” She waited one count. “Now.”