State of Wonder (35 page)

Marina, as usual, felt that she was five steps behind in the conversation. “It seems you should give Vogel a chance. You may find they’re as interested in the vaccine as you are.”

“Your trust would be charming if it weren’t so simplistic,” Dr. Swenson said without a trace of rancor in her voice. “Because if you’re wrong, and I am fairly certain you are wrong about an American pharmaceutical company wishing to foot the bill for Third World do-gooding, then we lose everything. That is not a risk you are allowed to take when the outcome of an incorrect assumption amounts to such a significant annual loss of lives.”

They were back in the village, having picked up a great many more Lakashi on the way. It looked to Marina like almost the entire tribe was assembled.

“Come to the lab,” Dr. Swenson said, patting the arm that she held with her other hand. “Dr. Nkomo will show you our mosquitoes.”

“Let me take a swim first,” Marina said. “Get the blood off.”

Dr. Swenson shook her head. “Use a basin. I’ll have some men bring some buckets of water over for you. No sense getting into the river all covered in blood. You never know who might mistake you for dinner.”

“I went into the river when I had half an anaconda on me,” Marina said, looking down at her dress which had stiffened as it dried.

Dr. Swenson nodded her head. “We’re being more careful with you now.”

When Marina went back to the sleeping porch the sheets on the bed had been straightened and there was a letter lying on top of the pillow. She reached carefully into the netting and took it out. She didn’t want to touch anything until she’d had a bath and still she slid a finger around the edges of the envelope, turning it back into a sheet of paper. All that was there was her name,
Karen Eckman, Karen Ellen Eckman, Mrs. Anders Eckman, Karen Smithson, Karen Eckman.
The letters were scrawled and uneven. A few times the pen had torn the paper. He had printed the words but his hand was shaking. Maybe he had folded this one up and kept it with him in the bed. Maybe this one he had never even thought to mail.

Ten

E
very morning Marina extricated herself from the sleeping limbs of the lightly drugged child and took the path to the field of Martins. She didn’t follow the native example and wait for five days to pass. She was thinking it was possible that five days from now she would be out of this place and so she wanted to stuff herself with the bark, to turn herself into medical evidence before she went home. Her goal was to make up for all the bark she hadn’t eaten in the past and anticipate the bark she would never eat in the future. This was her moment, the perfect now. She didn’t mind making the trip deep into the jungle by herself anymore, though there was never a morning when she didn’t run into other women eventually, both Lakashi and the doctors. Dr. Budi said there was scientific precedent for going to chew the trees so often at the beginning. They said they’d had a loading dose as well. Maybe it was just the excitement of the discovery, or maybe it was something the body had been starved for all along. Dr. Budi told Marina that even at this early stage she would be inoculated against malaria and that her window for monthly fertility would be extended from three days to thirteen. Beyond that, Marina had begun to wonder if there wasn’t something mildly addictive in the fenneled bark, something that kept the Lakashi women trudging back to the trees long after they were sick to death of babies, something that kept the doctors at their desks for years after they were ready to go home. Maybe Dr. Rapp had been correct in his original assessment that there was some mild connection between the mushrooms and trees, the smallest touch of narcotic in the bark that kept the women leashed to the forest.

As for herself, Marina dreamed of Martins. They were there, slim and stately, in front of her eyes before she opened them in the morning, and when she drifted off at night she was walking towards them. It was the thought that she could become addicted to anything in this place that first made her realize it was time to leave the Amazon, though everything was pointing towards departure. In one week she had sewn together the eyelid of a girl who had been bitten by the very monkey she had worn around her neck. It took both of her parents to hold the child down while Marina worked with too heavy a needle and too thick a thread to reassemble the delicate tissue. When she asked Dr. Swenson about getting some human rabies immunoglobulin, Dr. Swenson said she would first need to see a slide of the monkey’s brain. She had removed a six-inch wedge of wood from between the third and fourth toes of a man who was cutting down trees to make boats to ride to Manaus. Three men had dragged him down to the lab without so much as a tourniquet, leaving Marina to do her best to piece together muscles and bones whose names she could no longer remember. The terror of the jungle was now redefined by the work it could dream up for her. While the other doctors, no doubt relieved that they had not been asked to perform the task themselves, praised her to the point of ridiculousness, the Lakashi peered over her porch railing at night and raised up on their toes to sniff her neck whenever they were close. It was clear to Marina that no good was going to come of this. She was tired of her two dresses, tired of waking up in the middle of the night trying to figure out how she could take Easter with her when she left. She was unnerved both by Dr. Swenson’s repeated references to “our” delivery date and by the letters from her dead friend that she found waiting in her bed at night. She wanted out of all of it, but still, it was just now light in this beautiful, singular stand of trees and she cupped her hand around the slender trunk of one of them and leaned in.

Marina had never seen the rooms where the other doctors lived. There was a small circle of huts behind the lab but the lab was where they worked and ate and stayed to talk in the evenings. She had known for some time that one of the huts contained the mice that were forced into repeated pregnancies, their heavy bellies bumping against their exercise wheels, and now she knew that another hut was full of mosquitoes. Their larvae grew in tepid water inside of plastic trays that stacked into a tall rack of metal shelving. When they were ready to hatch they were transferred into large plastic buckets with a piece of pantyhose stretched across the top that was held in place by a rubber band. From there the mosquitoes were infected with malaria. It might have been because everyone felt so confident in the success of their vaccinations that they could afford to be so sloppy in their protocol, but when Alan Saturn first showed them to Marina she did not feel comfortable with the hundreds of flying insects per bucket banging their minuscule weight against a web of nylon.

“Feeding time at the zoo,” Alan said, and soaked a large wad of cotton in a cup of sugar syrup. “Go on and give them a taste of what they really want. Breathe on them. Just lean over and exhale.”

And so she did, and they flung themselves upward in one ineffectual black fist. Marina stepped back.

“Mammalian breath, that’s what draws them. It’s only the females that bite, you know. The males neither contract nor spread the protozoa.” He dropped the cotton onto the hosiery and the mosquitoes went in like sharks for bloody chum. He watched them for a minute. “They always hold up their end of the bargain.”

There were two plastic flyswatters tacked to the wall, their wire handles rusted. “How do you test yourself?” she asked, not entirely certain she wanted to know.

“We take five mosquitoes out of the infected bucket,” he said, tapping the lip of the bucket she’d just breathed into. “When I first came here you should have seen what we went through. We’d put on hazmat suits, seriously, face masks, gloves. As if every tenth mosquito outside isn’t carrying anyway. Now I just stick a net in there. I know what I’m doing. I put those five in a cup with a piece of nylon over the top, then I hold the cup on my arm, on my leg, it doesn’t matter. When I have five bites I kill the mosquitoes and run them under the microscope on a slide to make sure they were all infected. That’s pretty much it.”

“That’s it?”

“Well, then you wait. The malaria will present in ten days. But it doesn’t present. It hasn’t for any of us.”

“So how can you be certain your mosquitoes are good?”

“The microscope tells us that, and then from time to time we infect one of the men in the tribe from the same batch. Ten days later, clockwork, he has malaria. We bring in some of the women and the same group of mosquitoes can bite them all day long and it’s nothing.” Alan was leaning over another bucket. He blew in before giving them the cotton.

“And this man who contracts malaria, how does he agree to this?”

He stood up and shrugged. “I suppose if this man had a lawyer it could be said that he hadn’t agreed, or that he hadn’t been made fully aware of what he was agreeing to. I’ve got some Cokes in here, I don’t tell Annick that. They love them.”

“You give them a Coke for getting malaria?”

“Don’t make this out to be the Tuskegee Institute. Chances are excellent that these men have had malaria before, or that they would have had malaria eventually. The difference is that when they get it in this room we’re also going to cure it. Curing malaria isn’t the problem, you’ll remember; the problem is figuring out a way to vaccinate against it. If they get sick for a couple of days in the name of developing a drug that could protect the entire tribe, the entire world, then I say so be it.”

“Yes,” Marina said, feeling a little uncomfortable with the argument. “But they don’t say so be it.”

Alan Saturn picked up his buckets and began to arrange them on the counter. “It’s good to get out of the American medical system from time to time, Marina. It frees a person up, makes them think about what’s possible.” He took an empty plastic cup off the table and held it out in her direction. “Do you feel like trying it? At least you can count yourself as fully informed to all the risks, and you will have saved one unfortunate native from standing in your place. The best part is, all you’ll wind up with in the end is five itchy bumps.”

Marina considered her Lariam, long gone. She considered her father. She looked inside the cup and shook her head. “I think I’ll wait.”

“Research doesn’t happen in a Petri dish, you know, and mice only go so far. It’s the human trials that make the difference. Sometimes you have to be the one to roll up your sleeve.”

But Marina didn’t stay. She wanted more bark before she became part of the experiment.

Dear Jim,

I see how this could take years, how no amount of time would ever be enough to figure out everything that’s going on here, but I’m going to begin the business of trying to get home. The first thing I’ll have to figure out is the boat. Given Dr. Swenson’s investment in keeping me I doubt she’ll be quick to offer hers. But boats do go by and I know the direction of Manaus. Some days I think I’ll see one and swim out to it, and if Easter swims with me then who would stop us?

Marina wrote more letters now. She wrote them every day. Dr. Budi left her pack of stationery open on her desk and Nancy Saturn was generous with her stamps. She would take Easter with her to the river and they would skip rocks from the shore or go for a swim. Boats did go by—a child in a canoe, a rare river taxi on its way to the Jinta—but then two or three days would pass with nothing. She made Easter keep watch when she was working, leaving him alone with the letters. It would never have occurred to her that it was possible for the system to work, except that it had worked, Anders had mailed letters, who knew how many letters, and some of them found their way to Karen. Yet as often as she wrote to Mr. Fox she hadn’t really told him anything. She hadn’t told him about the malaria or Dr. Swenson’s pregnancy or Anders’ burial. Those things she needed to say to him herself.

Easter and Marina liked the river best at six o’clock when the sun was spreading out long across the water and the birds had just begun to make their way home for the night. They sat on the damp banks, as far away as they could from the heat of the Lakashi’s fire. It was too early to eat and still she wanted to leave the lab for a while, stretch her legs and roll her neck. Sometimes she would sit for twenty minutes, thirty minutes, and other nights she would stay until it was dark. She had never seen a boat go by once it was dark but it was such a pleasure to sit and watch the hot red ball of the sun sink fully down into the jungle that she made the excuse that one might come. Easter pointed out every fish that broke the river’s surface and she pointed out the bats swimming through the purple evening sky. She had gotten very used to spending her time with someone who said nothing at all. She found that watching the coming on of night without feeling any need to comment on it brought about a sense of tranquility that she had rarely known.

It was in that tranquility a boat was spotted in the distance.

She heard it before she saw it, the sound of a well-maintained engine pushing effortlessly ahead. That was in itself worthy of notice as the boats she was familiar with here came in two varieties: the completely silent canoe/raft/floating bundle of logs, and anything with a grinding motor. She got to her feet with four letters in her hand, one for her mother and one for Karen and two for Mr. Fox. The boat was coming on fast, a small round dot of light fixed to the front that was pointing up river, and Easter, ever the thinker, jumped up and grabbed two long branches from the edge of the fire, one for Marina and one for himself, and they stepped into the water until it was up to their knees and they waved the branches overhead. A boat that fast was surely headed to Manaus eventually, even though it was going in the wrong direction for now. She wanted that boat. She swung the fire over her head and let out a high, bright sound, a sound she never would have guessed she had in her. She hoped it would encompass every language in which the words
Stop the boat
could be spoken. Whether the people on the boat heard her it would be impossible to say, sitting as they were just on the cusp between near and far, but the Lakashi heard her, and they ran through the jungle faster than any boat could travel and picked the fire apart and lit sticks from one another’s sticks and then let out a giant howl, their own particular shibboleth, and all of this so Marina could send off her mail. Bless the Lakashi, and for this one night bless them for watching her too closely, because suddenly their shoreline was ablaze and the noise they made was deafening and the boat, which was almost on them now was certainly slowing out on the dark river though it wasn’t slowing enough to give the impression of stopping, and Marina, buoyed up on the energy of the people, called out with the lungs of a soprano, “Stop the boat!”

All sound stopped, the Lakashi startled into a brief silence by the intensity in Marina’s voice, even the frogs and insects for an instant held their breath. She wasn’t used to it herself, the power of her own voice, and so in the new silence she called again, “Stop the boat!” And the boat, which was past them now, stopped. It turned and slowly came towards the dock, its spotlight sweeping the crowd on the shore slowly, left to right.

“Correspondência!” Marina called. She had been reading a Portuguese dictionary at night along with the Dickens. “Obrigado, obrigado.” She came out of the water and ran down the planks of the dock, the letters in one hand, the burning branch in the other, and the light from the boat leapt across her and then returned. It hit her squarely in the face and froze her in mid-step. In her own defense she closed her eyes.

“Marina?” a voice asked.

“Yes?” she said. Why did this not seem strange, someone calling her name? It was because of the light she could not make sense of what was happening.