by Ann Patchett
“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.
“Dr. Singh conhece o Dr. Swenson,” Milton said to his brother-in-law. Marina heard both of their names. In a gesture that struck her as being particularly Indian, Rodrigo pressed his palms together in front of his lips and made a slight bow of his head.
“She is an excellent customer,” Milton said. “She buys all the provisions for the camp here. It is something to see the way she comes into the store. She stands right in the middle, right where you are, and points to what she wants and Rodrigo brings it down for her. She does it all without a list. It’s impressive.”
“Muito decisivo,” Rodrigo said. “Muito rápido.”
“It used to be one of the other doctors might come in for supplies. Dr. Swenson would be working very hard on her medicine and so she would send someone else into town, then two days later there she would be at the dock. She’d say they hadn’t bought enough things, or the right things. In the end she told me sending someone else was only time wasted. Sometimes she sends in Easter with a note if there is something special she needs, but that isn’t often. He couldn’t do all the shopping himself.”
Rodrigo disagreed. Milton ignored him. “Rodrigo knows her very well now. There are certain items he orders just for her.”
“Other doctors?” Marina said. Outside she could hear voices and then the rattling of the door handle, and then the slapping of hands against glass. The crowd wanted in.
“It hasn’t been a month since she was here.” Milton looked at Rodrigo and asked in Portuguese, “Um mês?” Rodrigo nodded. “That could be inconvenient for you,” Milton said. “I’ve known her to be gone for three.”
Marina pictured three months in this city she had yet to see in daylight, wearing these clothes, memorizing the manual for the missing cell phone. She would buy a boat and head down the river herself if
it came to that. She asked if there was anyone who would know how to find her.
Milton tilted his head from side to side as if weighing out his thoughts. “If anyone did it would be the Bovenders, but I don’t really think that they know.”
“Dr. Swenson não lhes diria nada,” Rodrigo said. He could follow the conversation well enough in English but did not speak it. He brought out a hooded rain poncho folded into a clear plastic sack and a small umbrella. He handed them to Marina and nodded at her with a gravity that insisted she add them to her purchases.
“You have another idea?” Milton asked his brother-in-law in English.
“The Bovenders,” Marina said.
“They are the young couple who stay in her apartment. No doubt you’ll meet them. They are very hard to miss. They are travelers.” Milton closed his eyes. “What is the word?”
“Boêmio,” Rodrigo said disapprovingly.
Milton opened his eyes. “They are young bohemians.”
Rodrigo was making a list of everything Marina was taking, writing down the prices with a pencil. She held a single yellow flip-flop against the sole of her shoe, then she put it back to try another. She picked up a prepaid phone card. Anders would have found the Bovenders easily enough if they were living in Dr. Swenson’s apartment. He had the address where her mail was delivered, he would have gone there first. In the store there was an irregular clicking sound, a tapping that wasn’t coming from the people who were taking turns trying to force open the door. It sounded like someone was hitting the edge of a watch against a counter. She looked up to the ceiling to see some hard-shelled insects dashing themselves against the fluorescent tubing. From where she stood they didn’t appear to have wings.
“Estoque!” Milton called out to the people clustered on the other side of the glass. He continued to shout at them in Portuguese. Rodrigo shut off the light again. In the dark he put her purchases into tissue thin plastic bags.
“What do they want?” Marina asked.
Milton turned and looked at her. “They don’t want anything,” he said, pointing out the way in which their situation was different. “They’re just looking to pass the night.”
When Rodrigo finally did open the door to let Milton and Marina out it became clear that the crowd wasn’t as large as it had appeared when viewed through a pane of glass, maybe twenty people, and some of them were children. They looked dissipated standing there in the open street, as if there had never really been the energy needed to push their way inside. Still, they waited around to voice their disappointment, which they did in a half-hearted manner.
When Rodrigo opened the car door for Marina she suddenly realized she hadn’t paid for anything. The featherweight sacks containing everything she had taken were looped over her fingers and she held them up to the two men. “I haven’t paid,” she said to Milton. The members of the dwindling crowd who hadn’t wandered home leaned in towards her, hoping to make out the contents of her bags.
He shook his head. “It all goes on account, yes?”
“Whose account?”
“Vogel,” Rodrigo said. He reached into one of the bags and showed her the carbon of the bill, a neatly printed record of everything she was leaving with.
Marina started to say something and then let it go. If it seemed odd to her that a general store in Manaus had direct billing with an American pharmaceutical company, it did not seem odd to the two men. She thanked them both and said good night to Rodrigo, who, under Milton’s translation, wished her luggage a safe return. Because he opened the back door of the car for her that was where she sat for the very short ride to her hotel. When they reached their destination, Milton gathered up the few things she had and walked her inside.
She had a room at The Hotel Indira. She could not imagine that whoever booked it had known enough to mean it as a joke. From the grand exterior she entered a lobby of palm plants and tired brown sofas that slumped together as if they had come as far as they could and then given up. Milton checked her in and then came back to give her the key. After a pleasant wish for a good night he left her there, having circled his cell phone number on his business card. She realized that without Milton she might have slept in a chair in the airport and then checked in for the morning flight back to Miami. Even when she was in her room and had hung her coat on a metal bar that was attached rather nakedly to the wall, she thought about that flight. She sat down on the edge of the bed and fished a pair of reading glasses out from the bottom of her purse in order to see the endless series of microscopic numbers from the phone card she had bought in Rodrigo’s store. Somehow it was only one hour earlier in Eden Prairie. After so much travel she was a scant hour from home. Mr. Fox answered on the second ring.
“I’m here,” she said.
“Good,” he said. “Good.” He cleared his throat and she heard some rustling around. She wondered if she had woken him up. “I thought I’d hear from you earlier. Did you get some dinner?”
Marina thought about it. She must have eaten something on the plane but she couldn’t remember. “My suitcase was lost. I’m sure they’ll bring it tomorrow but I wanted you to know I don’t have the phone.”
“You put the phone in your suitcase?” he said.
“I put it in the suitcase.”
Mr. Fox was quiet for the briefest moment. “They always find them these days. Usually they bring it to the hotel in the middle of the night. Call the desk as soon as you wake up in the morning. I’ll bet it’s there.”
“The driver took me to get some things. At least I have a toothbrush now. Thank you for that, by the way.”
“For the toothbrush?”
“For Milton, the driver.” She put her hand over the receiver and yawned.
“I’m glad he’s helpful. I’m sorry I’m not more helpful myself.”
She nodded, for all the good it did their conversation. Maybe she should have waited until tomorrow to call. The draperies were open and she looked out onto the city, that infinite sea of tiny lights. In the dark, in the distance, she could have been anywhere. She closed her eyes.
“Marina?” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I think I fell asleep.”
“Go to bed. We can talk tomorrow.”
“Unless the phone doesn’t come,” she said, and then she remembered. “Or you can call me at the hotel.”
“I’ll do that,” he said. “Get some sleep.”
“I’ll write you a letter,” she said. She did not remember hanging up the phone.
Manaus wasn’t difficult to figure out. It catered to tourists and travelers and shippers, who, in this accommodating city, were free from all import duties. Everyone was either getting off of boats or getting on them, and so the streets had been laid out in such a way that one always had the feeling of walking away from the water or towards it. By the third day Marina could navigate easily. Once she got a fix on the river’s position everything else fell into place. She went to the market hall at six in the morning when the world was out to accomplish as much as was humanly possible before the truly devastating heat began. The smell of so many dead fish and chickens and sides of beef tilting precariously towards rot in the still air made her hold a crumpled T-shirt over the lower half of her face but she took the time to stop and look at the herbs and barks at the medicine table, the snake heads floating in what she sincerely hoped was alcohol. A black vulture the size of a turkey walked down the aisles like all the other shoppers, looking for whatever fish heads and entrails were to be had underneath the tables. The bloody scraps were hard to find. Marina bought two apple-flavored bananas and a pastry from a woman who kept hers under a crumpled sheet of waxed paper. After that she went down to the river to watch the boats. She spent a great deal of time looking at the water, which was the color of milky tea and completely opaque even when she walked down a dock, squatted on her heels, and stared directly into it.
She did this often. She couldn’t see a quarter of an inch below the surface. She was waiting for Dr. Swenson.
Waiting for Dr. Swenson to appear would have been a clear waste of time had there been some other means of putting time to better use. Waiting for her suitcase was simply not a full time job, even though Tomo, the young man at the front desk of her hotel, was kind enough to call the airport twice a day and inquire as to its status. There were also the Bovenders to wait for. Marina had the address of Dr. Swenson’s apartment and so every day she had written to them, putting both the names Bovender and Swenson on the envelope and neatly printing her request for contact along with her hotel information. From what Marina could tell from the building’s architecture and neighborhood, and from the well-appointed lobby where she left off her letters at the desk every morning, it was one of the city’s better residences. She wondered what it was costing Vogel to keep a pied-à-terre in Brazil that was mainly inhabited by bohemians who didn’t seem to be home much themselves. Of course, it was possible that the bohemians had gone on. They had been described as travelers after all, and this was clearly a city where people who had somewhere else to go would not be inclined to stay. She nodded again to the concierge who as always took her envelope with an enormous grin and great, energetic nodding.
“Bovenders,” she said pointedly.
“Bonvenders!” he replied.
She decided that her project for the afternoon would be to cobble together a note in Portuguese to hand him tomorrow. It would be better if she could explain to the concierge, as well as to the mythical Bovenders, what she was after.
All of Marina’s activities—waiting at the river, waiting outside the apartment building, wandering through the city in hopes that she might be struck by some piece of inspiration that could lead her in the direction of Dr. Swenson—were punctuated by rain, blinding, torrential downpours that seemed to rise out of clear skies and turn the streets into wild rivers that ran ankle deep. People moved calmly from the open spaces and pressed their backs against buildings, sharing whatever room there was beneath various overhangs while they waited for the storms to pass. Several times a day she had the opportunity to be grateful to Rodrigo for pushing the rubberized poncho on her.
