State of Wonder

by Ann Patchett

  “I understand that, but had I known there was any possibility of her being here tonight I would have worn my own clothes.”

  Milton stopped on the stairs, forcing the people behind him to stop. “There is something wrong with your dress? How could there be something wrong with this dress?”

  Up ahead Marina saw the Bovenders ride the river of humanity out the front doors of the opera house, their bright heads bent down. She could assume they were talking to Dr. Swenson or at least that they were listening to her. She ignored Milton’s question and tugged him forward.

  The night air was heavy and warm but there was a slight fish-smelling breeze coming from the river. Marina and Milton found the other three on the great tiled landing in front of the opera house, their faces turned in the direction of that breeze. Countless thousands of insects poured towards the electric lights that bathed the sides of the magnificent building and flooded over into the terraces and the streets below them. Even in the noise of the crowd Marina could hear the thrumming of wings, the various pitches of buzzing sounds they made. Their enthrallment of the light reminded her of the audience at the end of the final aria. They were driven mad by it. They could never have enough.

  “The Bovenders tell me that nothing has changed since I’ve been gone,” Dr. Swenson said as Milton and Marina approached them. “Is that true? An entire city and nothing changes?”

  “I can’t think of any changes in the last ten years,” Milton said.

  “There must be something,” Dr. Swenson said. Her face was tilted up and the spotlight above her head seemed to shine on her alone. It was as if she had been cut out of light and pasted onto a dark background, powerfully removed from the crowds around her the way she was in memory. Even though this was exactly the person Marina had been looking for, she could not overcome the feeling that two very distant points in her life were now colliding in a way that should be relegated only to bad dreams. The last time she had actually seen Dr. Swenson was the day before the accident. Throughout the inquisition they had no contact and after the inquisition she left the program. She hadn’t thought of that before.

  “Well, Marina’s here now,” Jackie offered.

  “I would prefer something I didn’t already know.”

  Milton thought for a moment. “Rodrigo is stocking flea collars in his store. He says you can put them under your pillow, it keeps things out of the bed.”

  Dr. Swenson nodded her head approvingly, as if this were exactly the piece of information she had hoped to uncover. “I’ll get some in the morning.”

  That was when a slightly built boy, a Brazilian Indian, wandered towards them, slipping easily between adults without touching their clothes. He was noticeable even in the crowd because he represented two groups that were largely absent from the evening: children and Indians. He wore a pair of nylon shorts and a green T-shirt that said “World Cup Soccer.” He looked like the boys who sat on blankets in the square selling bracelets and small animals carved out of nuts. He had the same dark silky hair and eyes that appeared overly large, when in fact it was his face that was too small. Logic would dictate that this child would be selling something as well, children were industrious in Manaus: hawking fans and postcards and butterflies in wooden boxes, but his hands were empty.

  “Easter!” Barbara Bovender cried, and dropped down to sit on the back of her heels, a perilous maneuver in so short a dress. She held out her arms to the boy who ran into them, burying his face in her neck.

  “It’s the hair,” Dr. Swenson said. “He never can get over it.”

  Jackie leaned over to pick the child up and his wife came up as well. The boy had filled both of his hands with her hair and was studying it intently, a luminous rope thrown down from the gods. He was too old to be picked up and clearly it delighted him. “I think you’re bigger,” Jackie said, jostling him up and down as if trying to guess his weight.

  “He isn’t bigger,” Dr. Swenson said. She tapped the boy on the chest and when he looked at her she spoke. “Dr. Singh.” She raised her right index finger and touched that hand to her left wrist, then drew a line up her throat with one finger and pulled that same finger into the air from her mouth. Then she pointed at Marina. He let go of Barbara’s hair and gave Marina his hand.

  “Look at that!” Jackie said, as if this were a particularly clever trick for a boy. “He can shake.” As a reward he tossed the child up in the air a few inches, up and down and up and down, until he laughed a strange, seal-like laugh and had to let go of her hand.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Marina said. The child’s enormous eyes fixed themselves to her and did not look away. “You could have brought him to the opera,” she said to Dr. Swenson. Had he come with her? “There were plenty of seats.”

  “Easter’s deaf,” Dr. Swenson said. “The opera would have been more tedious for him than it was for us.”

  “It wasn’t such a bad opera,” Barbara said to the boy.

  “He likes to wander when he has the chance,” Dr. Swenson said for him. “He likes to take a look around town.” Easter, perched in Jackie’s arms, his attention rightfully returned to Barbara’s hair, did not turn his head. Even with good hearing he would have seemed too small to be walking the streets of Manaus alone in the dark.

  “I would have gone with you if I’d known you were out here,” Jackie said to the boy. “We could have cut out together.”

  “He could have come. I think he would have liked seeing all the people,” Barbara said. “There’s a lot to look at in the opera house even if you can’t hear the music.”

  Dr. Swenson looked at her watch. “I think this is enough of a reunion for now. Dr. Singh and I should have a talk. I assume you don’t mind the late hour, Dr. Singh. Milton tells me you’ve been waiting.”

  Marina said that she would be glad to talk.

  “Good. So the rest of you go on. I’ll see you in the morning. Milton, tell Rodrigo I’ll be at the store by seven.”

  “May I drive you somewhere?” Milton asked.

  Dr. Swenson shook her head. “It’s a perfectly good night. I’m sure we can manage a walk. Can you manage, Dr. Singh?”

  Marina, in her column of gray silk and her high heels, was not entirely sure she could manage, but she said that a walk would be good after sitting so long.

  “We’ll take Easter back to the apartment,” Barbara said. The child had begun to braid the section of her hair that he was holding on to.

  Dr. Swenson shook her head. “He hasn’t eaten. He’ll come with us. Put him down, Jackie, he isn’t a monkey.”

  Jackie set Easter on the ground and the boy looked from one party to the other. In spite of not having heard he seemed to be in tacit agreement with the plans. “We’ll see you later then,” Jackie said, finding the part in the boy’s hair with his fingers and smoothing it down. Then, remembering what in fact was new, he held out his hand and Easter shook it goodbye. “Brilliant,” Jackie said.

  The streets around the opera house were made of flat stones fitted together into an uneven jigsaw and Marina found herself wishing that Milton had come with them, if not to drive then at least to keep his hand under her arm. Marina was a very tall doctor who worked in a lab in Minnesota and those three things: the height, the work, and the state, precluded the wearing of heels, giving her little experience to draw from now that she needed it. She shifted her weight forward onto her toes and hoped not to wedge the heel of Barbara’s shoes into a crevice. Even as Marina slowed, Dr. Swenson kept to her own unwavering pace, a trudge of metronomic regularity that Marina remembered. In her khaki pants and rubber-soled shoes, she was quickly a block ahead without seeming to notice that she was alone. Easter stayed behind them both, perhaps to alert Dr. Swenson in the event that Marina went down. The crowd from the opera had dispersed and all that remained were the city’s regulars who stood on the street corners in the dark trying to decide whether or n
ot to cross. They watched Marina as she pulled her borrowed shawl up over her shoulders.

  “Are you coming, Dr. Singh?” Dr. Swenson called out. She had gone around a corner or stepped into a building. Her voice was part of the night. It came from nowhere.

  Are you coming, Dr. Singh? She would dip so quickly into a patient’s room that suddenly the residents would lose their bearings. Had she gone to the right or the left? Marina squinted down the street, the darkness broken apart by streetlights and headlights and bits of broken glass that showered the curb and reflected the light up. “I’m coming,” she said. Her eyes shifted constantly from one side of the street to the other in a slow nystagmus. In order to steady herself, she made an organized list in her mind of all the things that were making her nervous: it was night, and she wasn’t exactly sure where she was, though she could have easily turned around and found her way back to the opera house and from there, her hotel; she was unsteady in her shoes, which, along with the ridiculous dress, made her the human equivalent of a bird with a broken wing to any predator who might be out trawling the streets late at night; if there was a predator, she now had a deaf child to protect and she wasn’t exactly sure how she would manage that; as she felt the blisters coming up beneath the sandals’ straps she could not help but think of the countless explorers throughout history who had been taken down by the lowly blister, then she reassured herself that there was very little chance that this was how she would meet her end given the three different types of antibiotics Mr. Fox had sent along with her Lariam and the phone; and since this was a list of anxieties, she could not neglect the most pressing fear of all: assuming she made it to her destination tonight, she was then to sit down with Dr. Swenson and have a discussion about what exactly? Vogel’s rights and interests in Brazil? The location of Anders’ body?

  Then, without so much as a footfall to announce him, Easter came up from behind her and put himself in the lead. At first she thought he must be bored by how slow she was and figured he meant to leave her, but instead he aligned himself to her pace. He would have been in easy reach had she just put out her hand. He had made himself her seeing-eye boy. As she watched his back, his shoulders barely wide enough to hang a shirt on, half the anxieties on her list fell away. With one hand she held Mrs. Bovender’s wrap firmly to her chest while her other hand was full of the silk of her skirt which she held up in order not to trip on it or let it drag in the pools of muddied rain left over from the late afternoon deluge. The night air pressed against her, moving roughly in and out of her lungs. It was very recently that she had been ill. Despite the pins and the spray and the black lacquered sticks with the gold Chinese fans, she could feel random sections of her hair breaking free and sliding damply down the back of her neck. When they reached the corner, Easter turned right, and without question or thought, she followed him.

  Two blocks later, at about the point she was certain she would not be able to take another step, Easter dipped into a restaurant Marina had never seen before, on a street she couldn’t remember. He could not have seen Dr. Swenson go in but there she was, sitting at a table in the corner, a bottle of soda water in front of her that was already half consumed. If possible, the room was slightly darker than the night she had come in from and a small, single candle on every table stood in place of the stars. Half a dozen tables were occupied, a dozen more were empty. It was late. The boy, having completed his job, cut the shortest path between the other customers and sat in a wooden chair beside Dr. Swenson. Had she brought him in with her from the jungle or did Easter, along with Milton and the Bovenders, have his place on Vogel’s payroll? Dr. Swenson tilted the bread basket towards him and he took a piece and laid it nicely on his plate. Marina tried not to limp as she made her way towards them. For a moment she stood at the table saying nothing, her resplendence melted in the heat, and waited for the other woman to acknowledge her arrival. She could have waited for the rest of her life. “I lost you,” Marina said finally.

  “Clearly you didn’t,” Dr. Swenson said. “Easter knew where we were going.”

  “I didn’t know that Easter had been informed.”

  Dr. Swenson was looking at the menu through a pair of half glasses. “I’m sure you realized soon enough. This place is a bit farther but that’s why the opera crowd avoids it. I can always get a table.”

  Marina pulled out a chair beside Easter, across from Dr. Swenson, and felt a significant throbbing in her feet as the blood shifted back up her legs. She decided to be grateful for the chair and for the audience.

  After taking in all the information the menu had to offer, Dr. Swenson laid it down. Now that she knew what she would have for dinner she was ready to begin. “Allow me to be direct, Dr. Singh,” she said, folding her glasses back into their padded case. “It will save us both some time. You shouldn’t have come. There must be a way of convincing Mr. Fox that continual monitoring does not speed productivity. Maybe that can be a project for you when you return home. You can tell him I am fine, and that it would better suit his own purposes to leave me alone.”

  A waiter approached the table and Dr. Swenson proceeded to order for herself and the child in broken Portuguese. When the waiter turned to Marina she asked for a glass of wine. Dr. Swenson added to the order and sent the waiter away.

  “I’m glad you’re fine,” Marina said. “And you’re right, I’ve come to find out about the progress of the drug’s development, that’s part of the reason I’m here. But I was a close friend of Dr. Eckman’s. I am a friend of his wife’s. It’s important for her to understand the circumstances of his death.”

  “He died of a fever.”

  Marina nodded. “So you wrote, but she would like to know more than that. It would help her to be able to explain to their children what happened.”

  Easter sat at the table without fidgeting, both of his feet on the floor or nearly on the floor. He tore neat pieces off his bread and ate them slowly. He did not seem to be the least bit bothered by waiting, which caused Marina to wonder if he had had a great deal of practice.

  “Are you asking me if I know what caused the fever, if it had a name? I do not. The list of possibilities is too long. I suppose at this point checking his recent vaccination records would be a place to start. I can also give you a list of antibiotics he failed to respond to.”

  “I’m not asking you what kind of fever it was,” Marina said. “I’m asking you what happened.”

  Dr. Swenson sighed. “Is this my deposition, Dr. Singh?”

  “I’m not accusing—”

  Dr. Swenson waved her hand, brushing the words out of the air. “I will tell you: I liked Dr. Eckman. Every aspect of his visit was a great inconvenience to me but there was something ingenuous about him. He had a sincere interest in the Lakashi, in the work. You were a friend of his and so you know this about him, he had a singular ability for demonstrating interest, if it was in birds or in the estrogen levels in the collected blood samples; he asked a great many questions and took in every word of the answers he was given. He was polite and affable even when I was trying to convince him to leave, which, you should note to his wife, I did constantly.” She interrupted herself to finish her glass of water and before the empty glass had come to rest on the table it had been refilled by the hovering waiter. “Mr. Fox was an idiot to send him down here. I’ve hardly ever seen a man so ill suited for the jungle, and that’s saying a great deal. Most people are ill suited for the jungle. The heat, the insects, even the trees made him anxious. Now, one would think when a person comes to a place where he doesn’t want to be and he is not wanted, he would have the sense to go. Dr. Eckman lacked that sense. He told me that the company needed me to speed up the progress of my work, that they needed to see my records, bring in other researchers, move as much of the project back to Vogel as soon as was possible. I believe our entire exchange could have taken place in an hour, fifteen minutes if both parties were succinct, but there was somethin
g about Dr. Eckman. It was as if he needed to see everything for himself. He had come a long way and by God he wasn’t going to take my word for the fact that there was a drug in development. He felt the need to retrace the entire course of my work. He was going to rediscover the Lakashi tribe himself. He was going to find the roots of their fertility himself. He refused to let his misery inform his actions.”

  A small man in a dirty white apron came out of the kitchen with two plates of yellow rice covered over with chicken. The meat was the same color as the rice and was glossy and loose on the bone. He gave one to Dr. Swenson and one to the child, whose face became incandescent with joy when he saw what was for dinner.

  “We haven’t had much luck keeping chickens,” Dr. Swenson said. “We have both been looking forward to dinner.” She tapped Easter’s hand and at that permission he picked up his fork and began to pull the meat apart by holding the chicken in place with two fingers. She tapped his hand again and handed him a knife. “We have Dr. Eckman to thank for Easter’s table manners. All this is new. It frankly wasn’t anything I’d stressed before, the Lakashi table manners are not our own, but I’ve kept up with it. Dr. Eckman took such an interest in the child. I can only think he was missing his own—” She stopped and looked at Marina, leaving the question unspoken.

  “Boys,” Marina said. “He had three boys.”

  Dr. Swenson nodded. “Well, you could see it. I don’t suppose I’d thought of this before but surely a great part of my sympathy for Dr. Eckman came from his kindness to Easter.”

  The original waiter returned and put a piece of tres leches in front of Marina, who shook her head at the sight of it. She was thinking of those three boys on the sofa, the ones whose hearing was so acute that adult conversations were forced into the kitchen pantry and conducted in whispers.

  “I ordered it for you,” Dr. Swenson said, and sent the waiter away. “It’s good cake. It goes with the wine.”