State of Wonder (9 page)

They did not terminate her residency. Marina remembered this with no small amount of wonder. When all of it was over and the lawsuit was settled, she was allowed to go back. The patient had liked her, that was the hell of it. They had spent the whole night together. She wanted the settlement money but she didn’t want Marina’s head on a pike. She said that other than that one mistake she’d done a good job. That one mistake. So Marina was left to mete out a punishment for herself. She could not touch a patient or face her classmates. She could not go back to Dr. Swenson, who had said in the deposition that the chief resident had been instructed not to proceed alone. Over the three hour period the fetal heart rate kept getting lower but every time it reversed. It kept coming up. Maybe in another hour or two she would have dilated. Maybe in another ten minutes the baby would have died. No one knew the answer to that. Marina was a sinking ship and from the safety of dry land Dr. Swenson turned her back and walked away. Marina suspected in the end Dr. Swenson had no idea who she was.

Anders was never going to stay home. Not when there was a chance to leave in the winter and see the Amazon, to photograph the crested caracaras. And anyway, he had already left, he was already dead, she was flying to Brazil in hopes of finding out what had become of his body. She had been up all night with the patient, she had been up all night blinding the child, and now her eyes dropped, opened, dropped. This was the cost of going to find Dr. Swenson: remembering. She went to the lab at Vogel even though she had promised the man beside her on the plane that she would not. She went down the dark hall to their dark lab and there she picked up the picture of the Eckman boys that sat on Anders’ desk, all three of them caught in a fit of hilarity that would hereafter be thought of as belonging to another lifetime. The picture, whose small subjects were so incandescent they seemed to throw off a little light of their own in the dark room, was in her hands when the door opened again. Anders had forgotten what this time? Wallet? Keys? It didn’t matter. She only wanted him back.

“Come now, Mari,” her father said. “It’s time to go.”

It was so perfect that Marina nearly laughed aloud. Of course he was there now, of course. There was a part of the dream that did not follow her into waking—this part—where her father comes into the room and says her name. The part when they are together for a while, the two of them, before things go wrong. The way things ended always obliterated the genuine happiness that had come before and that shouldn’t be the case. The truth was so much more complicated than that. It was made up of grief and great rewards and she needed to remember all of it. “I was looking at this picture,” she said, and held it out to him. “Aren’t these handsome boys?”

Her father nodded. He looked good in his yellow kurta and pressed trousers. He looked fit and rested, a braided belt circling his trim waist. Marina hadn’t thought of it before but they were very nearly the same age now. She understood it was the business of time to move forward but she would have been glad to stay exactly in this moment.

“So you’re ready?”

“I’m ready,” she said.

“Good, alright then, hold on to me.” And he opened the door and they stepped out together into the empty hallway of Vogel. For a moment there was a wondrous quiet and Marina tried to appreciate it while understanding that it couldn’t last. One by one the doors opened and her colleagues came out to meet her father and shake his hand and behind them came Indians, more and more of them, until it felt like all of Calcutta was pouring in beside them, raising their voices over the din of other people’s conversations.

“I know where the staircase is,” Marina said into his ear. “We can get there.”

Her father couldn’t hear her, it was simply too loud. They pressed ahead, holding on to each other for as long as was possible.

Three

T
he minute she stepped into the musty wind of the tropical air-conditioning, Marina smelled her own wooliness. She pulled off her light spring coat and then the zippered cardigan beneath it, stuffing them into her carry-on where they did not begin to fit, while every insect in the Amazon lifted its head from the leaf it was masticating and turned a slender antenna in her direction. She was a snack plate, a buffet line, a woman dressed for springtime in the North. Marina handed over her passport to the man at the desk whose shirt bore all the appropriate badges and tags of his office. He looked hard at her picture, her face. When asked, she said she was visiting Brazil on business. While her planned response to the question “How long will you stay?” was
two weeks
, she changed her mind just as she opened her mouth.

“Three weeks,” she said, and the man stamped an empty page in a booklet filled with empty pages.

Marina squeezed into place at the crowded baggage carousel and watched the river of bundled possessions flow past. Such enormous suitcases piled on top of one another like sandbags ready to stem a rising tide. Marina waited and watched for her own unassuming luggage, looking away only long enough to help a stranger drag a foot locker to the floor. She thought of Calcutta, the madness of the baggage claim that gave only the slightest preview to the madness of the streets outside. She and her mother and father were alone together among the thronging masses, her father shepherding them from the path of young men with roller carts. Sari-wrapped grandmothers guarded the family luggage by sitting on top of it, zippered soft-sides that strained to open against a series of exterior belts. Marina shook the image from her head, turning her full attention to the scene at hand. She tried to stay hopeful through the dwindling: the suitcases, the crowd, one by one they all left. A pair of child’s swim goggles remained on the belt and she watched them pass again and again. She made a mental list of the items a smarter person would have kept in a carry-on: the dictionary, the zippered bag with the phone, the Lariam, which was in a trash can in the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport.

The unhappy people who crowded the office of lost luggage pressed against the stacks of unclaimed suitcases and together they raised the temperature in the little room some fifteen degrees beyond the heat in the vast cavern of baggage claim. A small black metal fan sat on the desk and stirred hopelessly at the air in a two foot radius. One by one they approached the girl at the desk, making fast conversation in Portuguese. When Marina’s turn came she handed over her ticket and the address of her hotel without a word, and the girl, who had had more than a little experience with these situations, pushed forward a laminated sheet of pictures of various bags. Marina touched the suitcase that most resembled hers. The printer churned out a piece of paper that the girl then handed back to Marina, circling a phone number and a claim number.

Marina went past security and customs and stepped out into the lobby full of people who were looking behind her. Young girls stood on their toes and waved. Taxi drivers hustled for fares, cruise directors and Amazon adventure guides herded their charges into groups. An assortment of cheap shops and money changing stations vied for attention with bright colors and brighter lights, and right in the middle of everything stood a man in a dark suit holding a neatly lettered sign with two words:

Marina Singh.

So certain was Marina Singh that she was alone in this world that the sight of her own name written in a heavy black marker and properly spelled (how rarely anyone found the energy to include that final “h”) made her stop. The man holding the sign appeared to see everything, and though there were easily five hundred people to choose from, he very quickly turned to her. “Dr. Singh?” he said. He was quite far away. She did not hear her name as much as see it shaped by his lips and she nodded. He walked towards her and the sea of life parted easily around him. He held out his hand. “I am Milton.”

“Milton,” she said. She had to remind herself that an embrace was not in order.

“You are quite late. I was concerned.” And he looked concerned. His eyes peered into hers for any sign that things had not gone well.

“My luggage was lost. I had to go to the claims office. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know that anyone would be here to meet me.”

“You have no luggage?” Milton said.

“I have an overcoat.” She patted at the coat and saw that one sleeve was almost to the floor. She pushed it back in the bag.

On his face she saw a look of sorrow and responsibility. “You’ll come with me?” He took the small bag from her and put his hand very lightly on her upper arm, moving her a few steps backwards into
the crowd.

“I filled out all the forms,” she said.

He shook his head. “We must go back.”

“But we can’t go back through security.” To move backwards through a security door, a door clearly marked to indicate that all traffic flowed in one direction, was as likely as going back in time, but there was Milton, his hand now resting on the shoulder of the security guard. He leaned his body slightly forward and whispered something to the man with the gun and the man with the gun held up his hand to stop the people who were pouring ahead to let Milton and Marina through. They walked the wrong way through customs where a man in uniform had two hands deep inside a woman’s purse. He then held out one of those hands to Milton and Milton shook it as they passed.

“I’ll need your paper,” Milton said to Marina, and she handed it to him. Already they were moving past the carousels. They stepped into the claims office which was now crowded with different people who had lost their luggage on later flights. They pushed against one another, angry and sad, thinking they had been the only ones.

The girl working behind the desk saw them, or sensed them, as soon as they stepped inside the door and she raised her head. “Milton,” she said, smiling, and then she was off on a tear of Portuguese. Marina put together the girl’s opening and then lost the thread—“Isso é um sonho.” The girl waved them up to the front where she and Milton began a conversation in passionate animation. When a man who had waited more than an hour for a word of recognition began to protest, the girl made a clucking sound with her tongue and silenced him. Milton gave her the computer printout and she read the report she had typed up herself as if it were a document of compelling mystery, then let out a long sigh. From his wallet Milton took a business card and quickly folded a bill around it, talking, talking. The girl took it from him and he kissed the tips of her fingers. She laughed and said something to Marina that may or may not have been lurid in nature. Marina looked back at her, dumb as a sock.

The outside air was heavy enough to be bitten and chewed. Never had Marina’s lungs taken in so much oxygen, so much moisture. With every inhalation she felt she was introducing unseen particles of plant life into her body, tiny spores that bedded down in between her cilia and set about taking root. An insect flew against her ear, emitting a sound so piercing that her head snapped back as if struck. Another insect bit her cheek just as she raised her hand to drive the first one away. They were not in the jungle, they were in a parking lot. For an instant the heat lightning brightened up an ominous cloud bank miles to the south and just as quickly left them in darkness.

“Do you have what you need in the small bag?” Milton asked hopefully.

Marina shook her head. “Books,” she said, “a coat.” The manual for the phone that was lost. A neck pillow for sleeping on the plane. A copy of
The
Wings of the Dove
, which she brought because she thought it was long enough to see her through the entire trip. A copy of the
New England Journal of Medicine
, which contained a chapter of Dr. Swenson’s report—“Reproductive Endocrinology in the Lakashi People.”

“Then we must get you some things tonight,” he said. His brother-in-law ran a store in town. Milton took out his cell phone, assuring her the brother-in-law would be amenable to meeting them with the keys despite the late hour, not a problem, and Marina, who very much wanted a toothbrush, accepted.

Milton was careful to maneuver around those potholes which could be maneuvered around. He drove cautiously through the ones that could not. People clumped together on corners of busy streets waiting for a light to cross, but when the lights changed they continued to stand there. Girls dressed for dancing pushed strollers past walls pasted over in handbills. An old woman with a broom swept debris through the middle of an intersection. Marina watched all of it thinking of Anders, wondering if he had seen these same people on the night he arrived. She couldn’t imagine things in Manaus changed very much from one night to the next. “Did you drive Dr. Eckman?” Marina asked.

“Eckman,” Milton said, as if it were an object whose English name was unfamiliar to him.

“Anders Eckman. He came here just after Christmas. We work for the same company.”

Milton shook his head. “Do many of your doctors come to Brazil?”

Exactly three, Marina thought, and then she said, “Not many.” Of course no one would have thought to get Anders a car and driver. Anders would have found his luggage and taken it to the taxi line, opened his Portuguese phrase book and rehearsed the sentence, “What is the fare to the hotel?” It occurred to Marina now how close she was to him here. She thought of him standing in that same airport, his feet planted on the same asphalt outside. They had been divided by only a scant handful of months, one of them slipping out the back door while the other was coming in the front. It was then that an entirely different idea came to Marina. “Did you ever drive a woman named Dr. Swenson?”

“Dr. Swenson, of course. She is a very good customer. Do you work with Dr. Swenson as well?”

Marina sat up straighter then and as soon as she did she felt her seat belt lock into place. If Vogel hadn’t bothered to hire a driver for Anders they certainly would have found one for Dr. Swenson, or Dr. Swenson would have found one for herself. It would be a car as clean as this one, a driver as strikingly competent. “Do you know where she lives?”

“In Manaus, yes. It isn’t far from your hotel. But Dr. Swenson is rarely in Manaus. Her work is in the jungle.” Milton stopped then, and Marina saw him glance at her in the rearview mirror. “You know her, yes?” He should not be talking about the people he drives. He should not be talking about Dr. Swenson.

“She was my teacher in medical school,” Marina said, offering up this bit of her past so easily it felt like a lie. “Many years ago. We work for the same company now. I’ve come here to find her. Our company has sent me to talk to her about the project she’s working on.”

“And so you know,” Milton said, his voice relieved.

“I have her address in town but no one is able to reach her where she’s working. Dr. Swenson won’t use cell phones.”

“She calls me from the pay phone at the dock when she comes to the city.”

“And it doesn’t matter if you’re driving someone else . . .” She was speaking from her own, distant experience.

Milton nodded then, keeping his eyes straight ahead. “There’s never any warning when she’s coming, when she leaves. Sometimes months go by and she doesn’t come in from the jungle. I grew up in Manaus. I wouldn’t spend so much time out there.”

“Nothing bothers Dr. Swenson,” Marina said.

“No,” Milton said, but after more consideration he added, “except not being picked up at the dock.”

In a few more turns Milton brought her to another part of the city where people walked through the streets arguing or holding hands, oblivious to the fact it was night and there was nothing going on around them in any direction. Up ahead a man sat on a low cement step and Milton pulled the car over. Immediately the man stood up and opened Marina’s door. He was tall and thin, wearing a pink cotton shirt that would have covered two of him. He greeted them in clipped Portuguese. He clearly was not as pleased to be coming out late as Milton had suggested.

“Negócio é negócio,” Milton said, turning off the ignition. He introduced his brother-in-law, Rodrigo, to Marina, as Rodrigo took her hand to help her out of the car.

Rodrigo said something to Milton when he unlocked the door to the building. Milton then flipped on the lights. Inside it smelled of sawdust. He checked to make sure the door was locked behind them. Rodrigo turned off the lights and Milton turned them on again. Rodrigo covered his eyes with his hands as if trying to ensure darkness, all the while making quick use of a language Marina did not speak. She blinked, her eyes dilated and blind and then flooded with electric light. The store was nothing but a large square with wood plank floors and every conceivable item crammed inside: canned food and clothes and pills, sunglasses, postcards, bags of seed, laundry soap. The colors of the boxes and bottles climbing up and up to the high ceiling made her dizzy. The general tenor of the argument between the two men was clear to her even if she didn’t understand the words. They were taking turns flipping the switch from off to on to off and she was to make fast work in the light while she had it. She picked up a red toothbrush, deodorant, toothpaste, shampoo, insect repellent, sunblock, two cotton shirts, T-shirts, a straw hat. She held a pair of pants up to her waist and then dropped them on the counter. The suitcase might arrive in the morning or she might never see it again. She picked up a package of underwear and then a cluster of elastic hair bands. “So when was the last time you saw Dr. Swenson?” Marina asked.