State of Wonder

by Ann Patchett

  She fell onto the leather seat just as she might have fallen out on the pavement in front of the house had she been forced to wait there another minute. “Just take me back to my car,” Marina said. Her hands were shaking and she pinned them between her knees. She had spent most of her life in Minnesota and yet she had never been so cold. All she wanted in the world was to go home and sit in a hot bath.

  It had stopped snowing but the sky hanging over the prairie was swollen and gray. The interstate, once they found it, was nothing but a beaten strip of badly plowed blacktop between two flat expanses of white. Mr. Fox did not take Marina back to her car. He was driving instead to St. Paul, and once in St. Paul to a restaurant where in the past they had had remarkable luck not running into anyone they knew. When she saw where he was going she said nothing. She could understand in some dim way that after all they’d been through it was better for them to be together. It was well after five when they slid into a booth in the back of the room. When Marina ordered a glass of red wine, she realized she wanted it even more than the bath. The waitress brought her two and put them side by side on the table in front of her as if she might be expecting a friend. She brought Mr. Fox two glasses of scotch over piles of ice.

  “Happy Hour,” she said with no particular happiness. “You folks have a good time.”

  Marina waited until the woman had walked away and then without preamble she repeated to Mr. Fox the single sentence from Karen’s monologue that had stuck in her head so clearly after all the others began to melt together. “If Vogel has inflated its stock price then that’s Vogel’s problem.”

  He looked at her with what might have been called a wan smile except there wasn’t quite enough smile in it. “I can’t ever remember being this tired.”

  She nodded her head. She waited. For a long time he waited

  with her.

  “You know the stock price is up,” he said finally.

  “I know it’s up. I guess I don’t know why it’s up or that it has anything to do with Anders.”

  Mr. Fox drained his first glass easily and then rested his fingers lightly on the rim of the second. He would be sixty-one in a month but the events of the day had put him safely beyond that. In the dim light of the low-hanging swag lamp with a faux Tiffany shade he could have been seventy. He sat hunched, his shoulders pressing towards one another in the front, and his glasses dug a small red groove into the bridge of his nose. His mouth, which in the past had been generous and kind, now cut across his face in a single straight line. Marina had worked at Vogel for more than six years before they ever came to this restaurant. It was plenty of time to think about Mr. Fox as her employer, her superior. For the last seven months they had made an attempt to redefine their relationship.

  “The problem is this,” Mr. Fox said, his voice turned sullen. “For some time now there has been . . .” He waited, as if a combination of the cold, the exhaustion, and the scotch had stolen the very word he needed. “There has been a situation in Brazil. It was not a situation that Anders was meant to solve. I didn’t ask him to solve it, but I did think he would bring back enough information so that I would be able to handle it myself. I saw Anders as the person who would set things in motion. He would explain to Dr. Swenson that it was essential that she wrap up her research and move directly, with the help of other scientists, into the developmental phase of the drug. Then he would explain to me, based on what he’d seen, what sort of reasonable timetable we should be able to expect. The fact that Anders died in the middle of all this is a terrible thing, I don’t need to tell you that, but his death”—and here Mr. Fox paused to consider his words and take a quarter inch off the second glass—“his death does not change the problem.”

  “And the problem is that this drug which you’ve been saying for a year now is all but sitting on the doorstep of the FDA doesn’t exist? It’s not that Dr. Swenson isn’t bringing it back from Brazil. You’re saying there’s nothing to bring back.” Mr. Fox was too old for her. He was five years younger than her mother, a point her mother would have been the first person to bring up had Marina been inclined to tell her about the relationship.

  “I don’t know that. That was the purpose of the trip. We needed more information.”

  “So you sent Anders out on some sort of reconnaissance mission? Anders Eckman? How was he qualified for that?”

  “He was meant to be our ambassador. He wasn’t hiding anything, there was nothing to hide. His job was to explain to Dr. Swenson the importance of her finishing her portion of the project. Since she’s been down there she’s disconnected herself, from—” Mr. Fox stopped and shook his head. The list was too long. “Everything. I’m not entirely sure she possesses a concept of time.”

  “How long ago did you last hear from her?”

  “Not counting today’s letter?” He stopped to do the math in his head though Marina suspected he was only stalling. “It’s been twenty-six months.”

  “Nothing? In over two years you’ve heard nothing? How is that possible?” What she meant was how was it possible he had let this go so far but that was not how he heard the question.

  “She doesn’t seem to feel she’s accountable to the people who have been funding her work. I’ve given her a kind of latitude that any other drug company would have laughed at, and should laugh at. That’s why she agreed to come with us. Her money is deposited monthly into an account in Rio as per our original agreement. I’ve paid to have a research station built and I don’t even know where it is. We sent the whole thing down on a barge, freezers and tin siding, roofs and doors, more generators than you could imagine. We sent everything to set up a fully operating lab and she met the barge in Manaus and got on board and took it down the river herself. None of the workers were ever able to remember where they dropped things off.”

  “If Anders found it, it wouldn’t be impossible to find.” Dr. Swenson would never see herself as accountable to Vogel, any more than she would think of herself as working for them. She might develop a drug for the purposes of her own curiosity or the interest of science, but it would never occur to her that her work was the property of the people who signed the checks. Anyone who had spent a thoughtful hour in her presence could have figured that much out. “So pull the plug. Cut the money off and wait until she comes out.”

  Mr. Fox, who had been holding the remaining and mostly full glass of scotch an inch off the table, now set it down. The look on his face meant to say that she understood none of it. “The project needs to be completed, not abandoned.”

  “Then it won’t be abandoned.” Marina closed her eyes. She wanted to sink into the red wine, to swim in it. “The truth is I don’t want to talk about Dr. Swenson or Vogel or drug development anymore. I know I’m the one who brought it up but I was wrong. Let’s just give the day to Anders.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Mr. Fox said in a tone that was free of concession. “This isn’t the time to talk about it, and tomorrow won’t be either, nor will the day after that. But since the day is rightfully Anders’ I’ll tell you this: in finding Dr. Swenson we not only have the chance to solve Vogel’s problems, but we could resolve some of the questions about Anders’ death as well.”

  “What questions?”

  “Believe me,” he said, “there will be questions.”

  She wondered then if he felt it too, that the blame would come to him eventually. “You’re not going to Brazil,” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  It was this terrible light that made him look old, the scotch and the heavy weight of the day. She wanted them to leave now, and when they got back to Eden Prairie she would take him home with her. She blamed him for nothing. She leaned across the table of this dark, back booth and took his hand. “The president of the company doesn’t go off to Brazil.”

  “There is nothing inherently dangerous about the Amazon. It’s a matter of precautions and good sense.�
��

  “I’m sure you’re right but that doesn’t mean that you should go.”

  “I promise you, I’m not going. Annick Swenson wouldn’t listen to me. I realize now she’s never listened to me, not in the meetings, the agreement letters, the contracts. I’ve been writing to her ever since she left—no e-mail, no texting, she does none of that. I sit down and put it all on paper. I’ve been very clear about her obligations and our commitment to the project. There’s been no indication that she reads my letters.”

  “So what you need to find is someone she’ll listen to.”

  “Exactly. I didn’t think that through when I sent Anders. He was affable and bright, and he seemed to want to go, which counted for a lot. I only thought it needed to be someone from Vogel, someone who wasn’t me.”

  Oh, Anders! To have been sent off on a mission you were never right for. To be regarded after your death as an error of judgment. “So now you’ll find the right person.”

  “You,” he said.

  Marina felt a small jolt in the hand he was holding, as if something sharp had briefly stabbed through him and into her. She took back her hand and rubbed it quickly.

  “She knows you,” he said. “She’ll listen. I should have asked you in the first place. You were the board’s choice, and I made the case against you. I told them I had asked you and you had refused. It was selfishness on my part. This time we’ve spent together—” He looked up at her now but for both of them it felt almost unbearable and so he dropped his eyes. “It’s been important to me. I didn’t want you going off. That’s my guilt, Marina, sending Anders instead of you, because you would have gotten it done.”

  “But he died,” she said. She didn’t want to turn back the clock and choose between Anders and herself, to think about which one of them was more expendable in life’s greater scheme. She was sure she knew the answer to that one. “You would have rather it had been me?”

  “You wouldn’t have died.” He was utterly clear on this point. “Whatever Anders did, it was careless. He wasn’t eaten by a crocodile. He had a fever, he was sick. If you were sick you would have the sense to get on a plane and come home.”

  Marina didn’t approve of the introduction of culpability on Anders’s part. It was bad enough that he was dead without it being his fault. “Let’s leave poor Anders out of this for a minute if we can.” She tried to grab hold of logic. “The flaw in your argument is that you think I know Dr. Swenson. I haven’t seen her in—” Marina stopped, had it been that long? “Thirteen years. I know her thoughts on reproductive endocrinology and to a lesser extent gynecological surgery, and not even her current thoughts on either of those things, her thirteen-year-old thoughts. I don’t know her. And as for her knowing me, she doesn’t. She didn’t know me then and there is no reason to think she would suddenly know me now. She wouldn’t remember my name, my face, my test scores.” Would Dr. Swenson know her? She saw Dr. Swenson raise her eyes to the lecture hall, sweep past the faces of all the students, all the residents, year after year after year. There could be hundreds of them in a single class and over the years that quickly added up to thousands, and yet for a brief time Dr. Swenson knew Marina Singh alone.

  “You underestimate yourself.”

  Marina shook her head. “You overestimate Dr. Swenson. And me. We would be strangers to one another.” This was halfway true. It was the truth in one direction.

  “You were her student, her bright student who went on to do well in her field. It’s a connection. It’s more of a connection to her than anyone else has.”

  “Except for her employer.”

  He raised his eyebrows but it wasn’t enough to mock surprise. “So now you think I should go?”

  “Are we the only two people available for this mission? I don’t think either one of us should go.” She could see Anders so clearly now. He had laid it all out for her and yet she had missed his point entirely. “She found a village of people in the Amazon, a tribe,” Anders had said, “where the women go on bearing children until the end of their lives.”

  “Now there’s a chilling thought.” Marina was inputting numbers and listening to Anders the way she often did, with half of one ear.

  “Of course their lives are on average shorter than ours by about a decade but that’s true everywhere in the Amazon—poor diet, little or no medical care.”

  “All those children.”

  Anders pushed off from his desk in his rolling chair. With his long legs and the short length of floor in the lab he maneuvered around the room easily with his heels. “Their eggs aren’t aging, do you get that? The rest of the body goes along its path to destruction while the reproductive system stays daisy fresh. This is the end of IVF. No more expense, no more shots that don’t end up working, no more donor eggs and surrogates. This is ovum in perpetuity, menstruation everlasting.”

  Marina looked up. “Would you stop this?”

  He put a thick bound report on her desk, Reproductive Endocrinology in the Lakashi People, by Dr. Annick Swenson. “Pretend for a moment that you are a clinical pharmacologist working for a major drug development firm. Imagine someone offering you the equivalent of Lost Horizon for American ovaries.” He took Marina’s hand as if in proposal. “Put off your reproductive decisions for as long as you want. We’re not talking forty-five, we’re talking fifty, sixty, maybe beyond that. You can always have children.”

  Marina felt the words pointed directly at her. She was forty-two. She was in love with a man she did not leave the building with, and while she had not broached the subject with Mr. Fox, it wasn’t impossible to think that they could have a child. Improbable, maybe, but not out of the question. She picked up the hefty report. “Annick Swenson.”

  “She’s the researcher. She’s some famous ethnobotanist in Brazil.”

  Marina opened to the table of contents. “She’s not an ethnobotanist,” she said, glancing down the list of chapters: “Onset of Puberty in Lakashi Women,” “Birth Rates in Comparable Tribes”. . .

  Anders looked at the page she was looking at as if this information was printed there. “How do you know that?”

  Marina closed the report and slid it back over the desk. From the very start she remembered wanting no part in this. “She was a teacher of mine in medical school.”

  That had been the conversation in its entirety. The phone rang, someone came in, it was over. Marina had not been asked to sit in on the review board meetings or to meet Dr. Swenson on the occasion of Dr. Swenson’s single visit to Vogel. There was no reason she would have been. Obligations on review board committees were rotating and in this particular instance her number had not come up. There was no reason Mr. Fox would have ever known about the connection between herself and the chronicler of the Lakashi people except that clearly at some point Anders must have told him.

  “What is she like, anyway?” Anders asked her two or three days before he left.

  Marina took a moment. She saw her teacher down in the pit of the lecture hall, observed her at a safe and comfortable distance. “She was an old-style medical school professor.”

  “The stuff of legends? A suicide in every class?”

  Anders was looking at his bird books then, too distracted by tanagers to notice her face. Marina was caught not wanting to make a joke of something that didn’t have an ounce of humor in it, and at the same time not wanting to offer up any little crack that could be pried open into a meaningful conversation. All she said then was, “Yes.”

  In the end neither Marina nor Mr. Fox could face dinner. They finished their drinks, two apiece, and drove back to the parking lot at Vogel, where Marina got in her car to go home. There was no further argument, no plans for the Amazon or the evening ahead. They had both been certain that the answer would be to go to bed together, hold each other through the long night as a means of warding off death, but there in the parking lot they split apart natural
ly, both of them too tired and too fundamentally alone in their thoughts to stay with the other.

  “I’ll call to say good night,” Mr. Fox said.

  Marina nodded and she kissed him, and when she was home and in bed after the bath she had so desperately wanted, he did call and said good night, but only good night, with no discussion of the day. When the phone rang again, five minutes or five hours after she had turned out the light, she did not think it would be Mr. Fox. Her first startled thought was that it was Anders. It had something to do with a dream she was having. Anders was calling to say his car had broken down in the snow and he needed her to come and pick him up.

  “Marina, I’m sorry, I’m waking you.”

  It was a woman’s voice, and then she realized it was Karen’s voice. Marina reached beneath her to try and straighten out the nightgown that had worked its way into twisted rope around her waist. “It’s all right.”

  “Dr. Johnson brought some sleeping pills over but they didn’t do anything.”

  “Sometimes they don’t,” Marina said. She picked up the little clock on her bedside table whose tiny hands glowed green in the dark, 3:25.

  “They worked for everyone else. Everyone in the house is sound asleep.”

  “Do you want me to come over?” She could go back now and sit on the kitchen floor with Karen and Pickles. She could lie on Anders’ side of the bed and hold Karen’s hand in the dark until she fell asleep. This time she would be ready, she would know what to do.