State of Wonder (19 page)

Rodrigo saw them first. There wasn’t room enough for Dr. Swenson and all the women who had come in for flour and thread, things they could easily wait until later to buy. He began to rush his other customers by shouting at them and no one objected to his harassment. A few of them put down whatever was in their hands and left the store immediately, while others grabbed a few more things off the shelves nearby and rushed to the counter to pay. Maybe they knew Dr. Swenson. Maybe they were as anxious to leave as the clerk was to see them go. Rodrigo, always so careful to write up bills of sale, gave a quick visual assessment of the pile of goods and barked out a price that each woman paid without question. Dr. Swenson noticed none of this. Her chin was pointed up. She was mainly interested in the high-shelf items, the goods ignored by the daily foot traffic of Brazilians. She was muttering her thoughts to the ceiling and Milton was writing them down. She would not have noticed Marina had Marina been dipped in yellow paint, and Milton, who never looked up from his pencil and pad, had missed her as well. One by one the customers fled the store. Marina followed the last of them to the counter to have her purchases added to her account. Rodrigo, who seemed to understand exactly the decision that had been made, added in an extra hat, three more cotton handkerchiefs, several rolls of LifeSavers.

“You’re up very early, Dr. Singh,” Dr. Swenson said to the ceiling.

Milton, startled, looked up. “There you are!” he said. “Then finding you this morning is one thing I can cross off my list.”

“You said you’d be here early,” Marina said. “And there were a few things I needed myself.”

“There’s no end to what one needs in the Amazon,” Dr. Swenson said. “What isn’t eaten by insects is quick to rot. That’s why our friend Rodrigo does such a booming business. Nature provides a state of constant turnover. Still, I would think if you are leaving today you’d be better off making your purchases at home, unless you’re looking for souvenirs.”

There was nothing to do but say it. Marina told her she would be coming along. This did not seem to surprise Dr. Swenson. She took the news as if it were both unpleasant and expected. “You’ve been talking to Mr. Fox.”

Marina looked up towards the high shelves as well, wondering what she might be seeing there. “At the very least I should get Anders’ things.”

“Raisins,” Dr. Swenson said to Milton, who added it to the list. “Tapioca.” She turned to Marina. “Does it matter at all that you are not invited?”

It would be easier had she been invited but to the best of her knowledge Dr. Swenson had never welcomed students to her classes or interns to the program or patients to the hospital. She couldn’t see how this experience should be any different. “Not really.”

“Dr. Rapp always said that people would attach themselves to an expedition.” She moved very slowly, putting her hand first on a box of crackers, next on a bag of coffee. Milton continued to write and then Rodrigo was writing as well. An older woman with a baby tied across her chest in a bright red scarf opened the door and, seeing the people who were inside, turned and left without comment. “Certainly they did with him. I saw it myself. An endless succession of mongrels and malingerers, the laziest dropouts who fancied themselves explorers. He made his policy clear: he was not responsible for their food, their shelter, their safety, or their health. He didn’t waste his time discouraging them because frankly there was no discouragement they could not withstand. All of the energy they could have put into their intelligence they had used to develop their tenacity. But what I quickly learned was that their tenacity was for going, not for staying. Once they were out on the trail they fell like flies. Some took a day, two days, others were gone in a matter of hours, and Dr. Rapp never stopped for them. He remained beautifully consistent: he was there to work and he would continue to work. He would not ferry back the weak and the lame. They had chosen to get themselves in and they would simply have to figure the means to get themselves out. People were quick to accept these terms until they themselves were weak. Then they changed their tune entirely, then they said Dr. Rapp was heartless. They couldn’t slander him as a scientist but they said no end of scurrilous things about him as a man. He hadn’t rescued them! He hadn’t been their father and mother! I will tell you, none of that troubled his sleep. If he had made them his responsibility, either by dissuading them from their ambitions or by bailing them out of their folly, the greatest botanist of our time would have been reduced to a babysitter. It would have been an incalculable blow to science, all in the name of saving the stupid.”

The air, ever heavy, now was paralyzed. Milton had slipped his pencil and pad in his pocket without thinking, and Rodrigo had put his pencil down as well. While Dr. Swenson continued to calculate how much food she would need to take back with her, the other three stood breathless and unblinking. Marina felt as if she were trying to remember the answer when there hadn’t been a question posed. They were all waiting. “I don’t think you’ll find me to be nearly that much trouble,” she said finally.

Dr. Swenson, who had been distracted by a small bin of socks, did not look up. “As much trouble as what?”

“The mongrels,” Marina said. “The malingerers.”

“Don’t be so self-referential. I was telling you a story. I wasn’t telling a story about you.”

At that Milton inhaled as abruptly as Nixon at his desk. “There you go,” he said, willing himself to accept the explanation. “How many cans of apricots?”

Dr. Swenson waited a moment, as if making a tally in her head. “A case more than usual,” she said, looking at Marina. It was impossible to know how many apricots a person would eat once they had been removed from civilization.

It was agreed then that Milton would pick Marina up in front of the Hotel Indira at eleven, and despite the heat of that hour she was standing ready at the front of the hotel, tucked beneath the awning with her half-empty bag. She had said goodbye to Tomo, who was more than happy to store her coat and sweaters until she returned. She had not said goodbye to Mr. Fox. This city, so busy when she woke up that morning, was practically empty now. The dogs pressed themselves into doorways beneath thin strips of shade. The cars drove by slowly, as if every driver was trying to decide if he was the one who was supposed to take Marina to the docks. They looked at her carefully and tapped their horns.

When Milton did arrive, Easter was in the passenger seat. When he saw Marina through the open window, he reached both of his arms out to her as if he were hers alone in all the world. There was something brilliant about being recognized, the happiness on his face entirely disproportionate to his knowing her. Marina went to him and took both of his small hands in her hands and he gave her an enthusiastic shake. Milton put a thumb on the boy’s shoulder and pointed to the backseat. Easter immediately flipped backwards, a trick he had been saving.

“Forgive me,” Milton said in a tired voice when she got in the car. He was sitting on a folded towel, his shirt and pants and hair soaked through. Even the small straw hat on the back of his head was wilted and damp. There could have been a rainstorm blocks from here that Marina never saw. He could have fallen in the river.

“Forgive you for what?”

Milton shook his head. “It took us longer to load the boat.” He took out a smaller towel and wiped down his face.

Easter was craning his entire upper body out the window to see as far as he could in every direction: boy as turtle, car as shell. The wind dried out last night’s soccer shirt and ruffled the dark, wet curls against his neck. Looking at him, Marina realized he was a marker. The boat was loaded, Dr. Swenson was on the boat. If Milton hadn’t taken Easter there would have been no reason for her to wait the minutes it took for him to drive to the hotel. “It’s not as if I had anywhere else to go,” she said.

“He likes the car,” Milton said, tilting his head back.

“I’m sure he does.”

The dock was farther up river than Marina had been before. The wooden planks on the walkway were warped by the endless succession of sun and hard rain. A collection of rusted tugs and houseboats that looked like they had been pieced together over the course of many generations bobbed between the low-riding water taxis. From the top of the bank she could see the freighters and cruise ships in the distance lining up against the great cement piers. Below her was a small figure pacing beneath the shade of a black umbrella.

“We are late, Milton,” Dr. Swenson called. The engine of the boat was running and a pale lavender smoke spread out across the water.

“This would be the time to change your mind,” Milton said quietly. “If you are inclined to change your mind.”

Easter flew ahead of them now, running in flip-flops, forsaking the perilous steps for the more perilous slope of mud and rock and weed. The boat was a pontoon, the kind of boat her father had rented for a weekend every summer when Marina was young and her parents were married. Her father was not much for boating but the pontoon he said was like a pony rented out for children: stolid and low, not given to sudden movements.

“I’ll be fine,” Marina said. She was in motion now. She was as good as on the river.

“I don’t remember telling you to take Easter along,” Dr. Swenson said when they reached the old pontoon with a flat metal roof. The boy was standing behind her now, his hands on the wheel in an imitation of steering. There were boxes stacked neatly around the circumference and the boat sat low and even in the water.

“I don’t believe you did,” Milton said. He gave Marina his hand to board and in the moment she held his hand she thought about him the way she thought about the Bovenders. It would all be better if he would simply board the boat behind her.

Dr. Swenson tapped Easter on the shoulder and pointed to the lines, at which point the boy jumped off the boat and untied them. He curled his toes around the edge of the dock and pushed the boat away. He let it go so far that for one horrible instant Marina thought he wasn’t coming either, but then he leapt, his child’s bones filled with springs, and landed with both feet planted on the deck.

“Travel safely,” Milton said, and raised his hand up to them. He was the only person on the dock and he stood there as if they were the
Lusitania
. He was waving them back instead of waving them on.

Easter was firm at the wheel now. The child steered the boat out into a low swirl of current, a seriousness in his eyes as he scanned the wide horizon. Dr. Swenson, safe beneath the boat’s cover, closed her umbrella. Marina dropped her bag at her feet and held on to the railing. Milton receded but stayed in place, his arm raised as he grew smaller and smaller. Dear Milton. She waved to him. She hadn’t made it clear how grateful she was. After all those empty hours to spend in any conversation in the world, they had left in a matter of minutes with no discussion of where they were going or how long it would take them to get there or when they might think of coming back. But somehow none of that mattered anymore. Marina hadn’t understood the enormity of the river until she was on it. The sky was spread over in white clouds that banked and thinned depending on the direction she turned in. Some of the clouds had covered over the sun so for the moment it was cooler, and the breeze of their forward momentum kept the insects down. The birds shot out from the banks and cut over the water. Marina thought of Anders at the bow, his binoculars raised. How glad he must have been to finally leave this city. Marina never would have believed it until she was on a boat herself but the water was an enormous relief. “Beautiful,” she said to the one member of the party who could hear her.

“We always feel better heading home,” Dr. Swenson said.

Six

T
here was traffic on the Negro, barges and tugs, water taxis with rotting thatched roofs where river swallows nested, dugout canoes containing entire families—sisters with babies and brothers and cousins and grandfathers and aunts holding open umbrellas, so many people crammed into one log that the lip of the boat sat nearly level with the surface of the brown water as one man in the back rowed carefully on. The smaller boats stayed near the shore, while a cruise ship, white as a sailor’s dress uniform, churned up the center aisle. Easter remained fiercely alert, his damp hair pushed back by the breeze, his eyes sweeping slowly side to side. He pulled the throttle to cut his wake in deference to the boats that were smaller, and he waved to those larger boats that cut their wake for him. Every appearance was that of an orderly world. Then the boy would turn and look behind him, and when he did he would nod to Marina and Dr. Swenson and they would nod back.

“Does he drive all the way?” Marina asked, not having any idea how far they were going.

Dr. Swenson nodded. “He likes it.” She was sitting on a box of canned hash while Marina stood. “What boy wouldn’t want to drive the boat? It gives him standing in the tribe. I drive or Easter drives, no one else. A few of the men have outboard motors that they’ve traded for over the years, but they’ve never captained a boat like this. It forces them to show respect when they see how much I trust him. He’s good with the engine, too. He’s figured it out.”

Marina was no judge of children but she would say that Easter looked too young to captain a boat or fix an engine or walk alone in a city at night, though not a mile back she had seen a child alone in a child-sized log who could not have been more than five, a spear lying over the bow, his paddle even as it went in and out of the water. “How old is Easter?”

Dr. Swenson looked up and gave a squint in Marina’s direction. “Shall I ask him?”

If Dr. Swenson had not been changed by time or experience or geography or climate, was it possible that Marina had not been substantively changed either? Was she in fact the person she had been in medical school, in grade school? “You’ll have to forgive me,” Marina said, and then set about restating the question. “I don’t know any more about the Lakashi than what you’ve written and you’ve written nothing about their ability to record time. Does anyone know how old anyone is? Do his parents know?”

“You make no end of suppositions, Dr. Singh. Is that a habit of yours? I have to say that was one thing I admired about Dr. Eckman: no preconceived conclusions whatsoever. A truly open mind is a scientist’s greatest asset. He must have been very thoughtful in his research. Had the circumstances been different I could have imagined asking him to stay on.”

Marina was not in the least bit unsettled by the praise for Anders. She knew the role of compliments in Dr. Swenson’s pedagogy: they were used not to raise one person up but to tap another down into place. She was only sorry that she didn’t have Anders to repeat it to, no doubt he would be shocked to hear such kindness after his death.

“You, however, suppose that Easter is Lakashi. He is not. I of course cannot be certain where he came from as he simply appeared in camp one morning and could neither hear nor speak. Were I to follow your example, I would suppose that he was Hummocca based on the shape of his head and the arrangement of his sinuses. The Hummocca have sinus cavities that are less pronounced than the Lakashi. Their faces are more curved, not quite so flat, but the difference is subtle. The Hummocca are somewhat smaller as well, and this goes to your original question about his age. I say all of this based on a single brief and unpleasant encounter with the tribe many years ago. Still, I find that fear can sometimes heighten our powers of observation to a point of great clarity. I remember the heads of the Hummocca so vividly it was almost as if I had dissected one.”

A double-decker tourist boat glided by without slowing and for a moment they were caught in its churning wake. As they pitched forward and back, rolling like a barrel in the little waves, Marina grabbed on to a pole and Easter raised his fist at the bigger boat. A tourist on the upper level pointed a camera in their direction. Dr. Swenson dropped her head for a moment, as if willing the other boat to sink through powers of concentration.

After the worst of the rolling had abated, Dr. Swenson lifted her head, her blue eyes bright and ringed in sweat. “Always buy a pontoon,” she said, panting lightly as if making an effort not to vomit. “You cannot imagine how hard that wake would have hit us had we not been in a pontoon. But I was making a point: Easter is a very small child, I would go so far as to say he is stunted. This could have been caused by a consistent lack of nutrition. It seems quite possible that no one was willing to give much of the tribe’s resources to a deaf child, or it could be that whatever illness rendered him deaf also rendered him small but now I am straying into what can only be called guessing, which is never helpful. Given his skills, his ability to learn, I would think him to be a twelve-year-old of normal, perhaps above-normal, intelligence. I’ll have a more precise judgment when he reaches puberty. The onset of puberty in the Lakashi male falls consistently between thirteen-point-two and thirteen-point-eight, a much narrower window than you find in American males. Whether or not this holds true of the Hummocca I am afraid I will never know. Do you have children, Dr. Singh?”

Marina was at least three questions behind. She wanted very much to know about the unpleasant encounter but, feeling she had been called on to give the easiest answer, merely shook her head. “None.”

“That’s good. Dr. Eckman had no business coming down here leaving three children behind. Are you married?”

“I am not.”

“Good again.” Dr. Swenson nodded her approval before turning her face towards the breeze. The sky spooled blue above the river in both endless directions. “This is a business for old maids, and I don’t say that derogatorily, being one myself. I feel better about you being on the boat knowing your circumstances.”

Speaking of suppositions, how much light could being unmarried and childless shed on her circumstances? Did it mean that no one would miss her terribly if she were to die, that there wouldn’t be the same set of complications brought about by Dr. Eckman’s death? Marina said nothing but sat down on the deck near Dr. Swenson’s feet. The sun edged beneath the boat’s awning and she wanted more of the shade.

Dr. Swenson leaned to the side and patted her case of canned hash with an open hand. “I prefer to sit on a box. A box doesn’t protect one from the roaches but I like to think it sends a message: We are on another level. There is a case of grapefruit juice there. I would recommend that.”

Obediently, Marina got up and pushed the box of juice forward, sat. They passed a handful of open houses built onto stilts. Several children, all of them too young to be standing alone in the water, were standing waist deep in the river, waving.

“As for Easter’s parents—” Dr. Swenson stopped then and looked at the captain’s small back. She tilted her head. “
Parents
seems a very sentimental word to use in his case. The man who inseminated the woman, the woman who pushed the child out of her body, other members of the tribe who may or may not have tried to raise that child when the original duo failed in their responsibilities: his parents have not been in evidence. The Hummocca left it up to the Lakashi, which, considering the nature of the tribe, strikes me as a startling act of humanity. I would have thought them more inclined to abandon a child in the jungle to starve to death or be eaten. All of which is to say he has been with me some eight years now, eight this past Easter. I suppose I am his parents.”

“It sounds as if the Hummocca may have left Easter for you then and not the Lakashi, assuming they knew you were here.” Marina realized she had made another assumption as soon as it was out of her mouth but this one Dr. Swenson let pass.

“Oh, they knew I was here,” she said, nodding her head. “Everyone knows everything eventually. Upon first consideration a person believes herself to be very isolated in the jungle but it isn’t the case. Word travels between the tribes, although I’ve never figured out how it happens as many of them refuse to communicate with one another. It would make a brilliant dissertation topic if you ever become interested in furthering your education.” (Marina would have mentioned her Ph.D. as well as her M.D. but there was not a glimmer of a break.) “I say it’s the monkeys,” Dr. Swenson said. “But then I tend to blame the monkeys for everything. ‘A white woman is living with the Lakashi.’ News like that goes up and down the river in a matter of hours. Then one afternoon a boy is cutting at a tree with a machete and when his arm goes back he sinks the blade into his sister’s head. Amazing that this sort of thing doesn’t happen every fifteen minutes out here. So I found a needle and some gut in my bag and I sewed the girl up. It was mostly blood, she was a very dramatic bleeder, but one hardly has to go to medical school to sew up a head. It didn’t take many events like this, a snake bite, a breech birth, and suddenly the whole of Brazil knows there is a doctor available off the Negro. Now, you must understand this, Dr. Singh, so few people do: I am not Médecins Sans Frontières. I have not come to the Amazon to be a family practioner. I am simply a person who made certain mistakes at the onset. They didn’t know me as a doctor when I arrived. The Lakashi knew me as a member of Dr. Rapp’s party. They thought I was like Dr. Rapp, that I was there for the flora and not for them. For the first few years I came alone they were forever bringing me mushrooms and various fungi to look at. They lugged so many fallen trunks of enormous, rotted trees back to camp it would have sent any mycological society into a frenzy. The fact that I took their temperature and drew blood samples and measured their children was completely lost on them, they continued to see me as the person they first met—as an extension of Dr. Rapp. And it had been my intention to be like him, to float on their misguided perceptions, but then I sewed up that girl’s head. It was my fatal mistake. The next thing I knew sick people were being paddled up the river to receive my care, and a deaf child had been left off for me to deal with.”

The deaf child had gotten her to town. He had ferried her guest to the restaurant after the opera and loaded the boxes on the boat and steered the boat through the river. The deaf child was not without his uses. “What would the alternative have been?” Marina asked. “Going back to that first girl.”

“The bleeder. The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived. That is how one respects indigenous people. If you pay any attention at all you’ll realize that you could never convert them to your way of life anyway. They are an intractable race. Any progress you advance to them will be undone before your back is turned. You might as well come down here to unbend the river. The point, then, is to observe the life they themselves have put in place and learn from it.”

Marina felt remarkably unmoved by this. “So go back in time, do it again: there is a child standing in front of you with a machete in her head. What do you do?” The farther they went down the river, the fewer boats they saw. From time to time there was still a group of people, mostly very small children, in clusters on the shore but they were thinning out. It felt good to ask a question twice. It was something she could never have managed in the past.

“That’s a dramatic flourish, Dr. Singh. Did I tell you the child had a machete in her head? I said she was cut. There was no doubt that she had a skull fracture. I picked out bone fragments with my tweezers but there was nothing else to be done about that. If she was draining cerebral spinal fluid she didn’t do it in front of me. I sewed her up, I gave her some antibiotic ointment, hooray for me, now I can meet your expectations of decency, unless of course your expectations include my taking her back to Manaus for an X-ray. But the actions you admire are not thoughtful, they were automatic, the actions I had brought with me from my Western medical background. The question you should be asking is what would have happened to the girl if I hadn’t been there? There was someone in the tribe who had managed these situations before me and I suppose that he, in this case it was a he, would have used the available means to help her. Would it have been a sterile needle? I think not. Would she have died? Very doubtful. And while you are moralizing, ask yourself this question as well: What happens to the girl whose brother cuts her after I’ve gone? Does the tribe still have faith in the man who sewed up heads before me? Has he kept up with his own skills or was he too busy watching mine? I don’t intend to be here forever.”

“The man who puts the girl’s scalp back together, the one you are respecting, do you think his methods are as successful as yours?”

“Now you are being purposefully ridiculous. I have very little respect for what passes as science around here. There’s nothing a Westerner loves more than the idea of being cured by tinctures made of boiled roots. They think this place is some sort of magical medicine chest, but for the most part the treatments here consist of poorly recorded gossip handed down throughout the ages from people who knew very little to people who know even less. There is much to be taken from the jungle, obviously—I am here to develop a drug—but in most cases the plants are as useless as the potted begonia that grows on your kitchen windowsill. The ones that do have potential can only be medicinal when they are properly employed. For these people there is no concept of a dosage, no set length for treatments. When something works it seems to me to be nothing short of a miracle.”