State of Wonder

by Ann Patchett

  “Dr. Singh, I presume,” he said, walking around a fire to offer his hand to Marina. He wore khaki pants and a blue cotton shirt that looked as if they had been banged out repeatedly on rocks. “Thomas Nkomo. It is a pleasure.” His English was so musical and so clearly not his first language that Marina wondered if he had learned to speak it through singing.

  “A pleasure,” she said, taking his long, thin hand.

  “Dr. Swenson told us you would be returning with her. I had wanted to meet you last night, to say welcome, but with everyone turning out to greet you I could not even get close.”

  “I don’t think it was me they were coming to greet.” Dr. Swenson told him she would be returning with her?

  “The Lakashi like to make things happen. They’re always looking for reasons to celebrate.”

  Marina nodded to the crowd behind them who had sat down to watch their conversation as if it were a theater piece. “You speak their language beautifully.”

  Thomas Nkomo laughed. “I’m a parrot. What they give me I can return to them. It is the way I learn. They know some Portuguese, the traders come through or they go to Manaus, but I make an attempt to speak Lakashi. One must not be shy where language is concerned.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to start with this one.”

  “You must first open your mouth.”

  “Do you understand Lakashi?”

  He shrugged. “I know more than I think I do. I have been here two years now. That’s time enough to pick up something.”

  Two years? Just behind the thick scrim of leaves Marina could make out the shape of some huts, a vague outline of civilization. Was there a sort of suburb in the trees that she couldn’t see, a place where people could bear to live for years at a time? “So you’re working with Dr. Swenson?” Surely Vogel knew and failed to mention to her that they were paying other doctors to work on-site.

  “I am working with Dr. Swenson,” he said, but he sounded like he was parroting again, that he either didn’t believe what he was saying or he hadn’t understood the question, then he added, “Our fields of research overlap. And you, Dr. Singh? Dr. Swenson tells us you are employed by Vogel. What is your field?”

  “Cholesterol,” Marina said, thinking that in all probability no one in the rain forest had ever considered their cholesterol nor did they need to. There were so many lanceheads to step on. “I work as part of a group that does long-range tests with statins.”

  With that Thomas Nkomo put his long, elegant hands together and pressed the tips of his fingers to his lips, his head moving sadly, slowly from side to side. She saw his gold wedding band bright as a beacon against his skin. The Lakashi, who never stopped watching him, were leaning forward now, concerned to see the distressed look on his face. It was a very long time before he said anything at all. “You are here about our friend then.”

  Marina blinked. Of all the other doctors who had come here before her the chances were good that only one of them was interested in cholesterol. “Yes.”

  He sighed, his chin down. “I had not put this together but of course, of course. Poor Anders. We have missed him very much. How is his wife? How are Karen and the boys?”

  Car-ron was how he said her name. It had never been feasible for Karen to make this trip and yet Marina wanted her there to see the suffering on Thomas Nkomo’s face, to be the recipient of such gracious sympathy. “She wants me to find out what happened to him. There has been very little information.”

  Thomas Nkomo’s shoulders slumped forward. “I don’t know what to say. How can we explain this to her? We thought he would recover. People in the jungle get extremely sick, fevers are common things. I am from Dakar. In West Africa I can tell you that the very young will die suddenly and the very old will die slowly but the people in the middle, healthy men like Anders Eckman, they pass through these illnesses in time. We are doctors here.” He covered his heart with his hand. “I am a doctor. I was not expecting this.”

  As if in response to this show of emotion the Lakashi stood abruptly and gathered their children and their knives. They made quick work of putting twigs and clothing into baskets and in less than a minute every last one of them had retreated into the jungle. Thomas Nkomo glanced nervously at the sky. “We should go now, Dr. Singh. The storm will be heavy. The Lakashi have the most uncanny meteorological abilities. Come with me, then, yes? I will show you the lab. You will be impressed by what we have made in our primitive circumstances.”

  To the west she could see the storm heading up the river and feel the sudden shift in the texture of the air. Dr. Nkomo put his hand against her back. “Now, please,” he said, and they began to walk quickly in a direction Marina had not been in before. Birds came reeling past the water and dived straight into the canopy overhead while other things, things that Marina couldn’t make out exactly, darted up trees. Then there was a single, nuclear flash of lightning that was followed some milliseconds later by a clap of thunder that could have cracked the world in half, and then, because these things come in threes, there was rain. Marina, half blinded by the light and deafened by the boom, suddenly thought she would drown standing up.

  There had been many occasions in Manaus when Marina had outrun a storm, or outrun the worst of it, she had pounded up the street in her flip-flops, finding shelter beneath an awning before the sky broke apart, but to run in a jungle one must have been born in a jungle, otherwise the roots and vines are snares, leg breakers, with mud that slicks the landscape into oil. The Lakashi had long since vanished with the birds and those other skittering unknowns, all of them back to home and nest and hole, leaving the place empty for Marina and Dr. Nkomo who made slow progress on the uneven path. Every drop of rain hit the ground with such force it bounced back up again, giving the earth the appearance of something boiling. Marina moved her hands from tree to tree, steadying herself on branches, trying to regulate her breath in the flow of water.

  Dr. Nkomo tapped one of his long fingers against her fingers. “Excuse me, but it is not the best idea,” he said loudly. “You never know when there is something hiding in the bark you shouldn’t touch.”

  Marina pulled her fingers back quickly and nodded, then she turned her palms up and washed her hands in the rain.

  Dr. Nkomo went on, more or less shouting to pitch his voice above the roar of the storm. “I leaned against a tree once and a bullet ant bit through my shirt, bit into my shoulder. You may know it by the genus, Paraponera?” He removed his glasses, which the rain had rendered useless, and put them in his shirt pocket. “It was only one ant, as long as my thumbnail, and I was in bed for a week. No one likes to complain of such things but the pain was memorable. No bullet ants where you are from, is that correct?”

  Marina thought of the crickets and the meadowlarks, the rabbits and the deer, the Disney book of wildlife that slept in the wide green meadows of her home state. “No bullet ants,” she said. Her scalp was soaked, her underwear, the ground beneath her feet loosened as streams of water sluiced between the trees. They heard a high whistle piercing through the thunder and wondered if it was their imagination. Imagination played a major role in the jungle, especially during a storm. They stopped and waited until the whistle came again and then a silence. Marina turned her head and saw that what she had taken for a tree to her left was actually a pole. There were four poles, and five feet above her head there was a platform, and above that a palm roof. Four Lakashi leaned over the edge, watching. Dr. Nkomo looked up, waved, and the four waved back.

  “It is an invitation,” he said to Marina. “We should go up, yes?”

  Marina, who could barely hear for the water building up inside her ears, climbed the ladder first.

  The single wide, open room that was the house was miraculously dry given the absence of side walls but the roof was several feet wider than the floor in every direction and dipped down low on the sides. Marina and Dr. Nkomo both looked up instin
ctively to admire this barrier between the rain and their heads while one of the women sat on the floor intricately knotting three very long palm fronds together into shingles as if to demonstrate how such things were possible. She was so taken with her work that she seemed not to notice the arrival of the guests, and yet Marina was certain she had been leaning over the edge of the floor and staring at them thirty seconds before. The sound of water pummeling palm fronds was infinitely more gentle than the sound of water beating against her skull and she was grateful to this woman for the work she did. Two men, who may have been thirty or fifty, came over to slap their hands against Dr. Nkomo’s chest and back, though the slaps were more respectful and restrained than the ones that had been meted out to Easter the night before. Then, chatting endlessly with one another, they picked up pieces of Marina’s sopping hair, examined her ears briefly, and let the hair drop. A much heavier woman in her sixties or seventies was chopping up a pile of whitish roots using the floor as her cutting board and the same knife that had recently been in the employ of the boat builders. Because there were two men in the room there was a second similar knife on the ground behind her. There was a teenage daughter, replete with pimpled skin and bitten nails, who cast her gaze aimlessly around the room as if she were hoping to catch sight of a telephone, a sprinting toddler of two or three who wore a very small version of the crude shift dress that all Lakashi women seemed to wear, and a naked boy baby crawling at a good clip across the splintered planks. Marina quickly calculated the speed at which the baby was traveling and the remaining length of the floorboards and immediately leapt across the room, catching the boy by his small brown foot just as his left hand had reached into the empty air in front of him.

  “Aaaahhh!” the crowd said, and laughed. Marina, breathless, looked over the edge where the water from the roof churned into a pit of mud and vines like it was pouring off Niagara Falls. She dipped an arm beneath the child’s midsection and carried him back to the center of the room again. The baby was laughing too. What was the joke, exactly? That she really thought he was going to go over the same way she had thought that Easter would not break the surface of the water again? That this was how they ensured an intelligent race, by letting the careless babies fall like ripe fruit from the trees? She held the child beneath his arms to face her. He was no doubt thinner than the average American model but very healthy, kicking and gurgling with pleasure. The toddler stopped her running for a minute to pick up the unemployed knife and began to knock it against the floor behind the older woman. The baby then urinated on Marina, a long exuberant stream against the front of her already soaking shirt. The men laughed harder now and the women laughed more sedately, shaking their heads at all the silly foreigners in the world who don’t know enough to hold a baby in the right direction. The toddler’s knife got stuck in the floorboards and after a momentary wail she pulled it out and plunged it back again, missing the old woman’s back by six inches. “Could you pick up that knife?” Marina said to Dr. Nkomo.

  Dr. Swenson would no doubt have argued for respecting the natural order in which babies sailed off the edge of a flat earth and toddlers played with the knives they would one day need to understand in order to feed themselves. These children had escaped without major injury before Marina arrived and chances were no doubt good that they would continue to exist after the company departed, but still, Dr. Nkomo was willing to pry the knife from the unwilling hands of the little girl, and when he had handed it to one of the men she put her face down on the floor and wept. The woman weaving shingles stood up and said something to Dr. Nkomo, pointing at Marina, pointing at him. The teenage girl came and took the baby away.

  “Have I done something already?” Marina asked.

  “It is something about your clothes,” he said. “Clothes is the only word I recognized, and maybe I am not sure of that.”

  The older woman now got up stiffly from the floor and began to unbutton Marina’s shirt. Marina caught the woman’s fingers and shook her head but the woman simply waited until Marina let her hands go and then she started again. Her touch was both patient and persistent. It made no difference to Marina that there was urine on her filthy, soaking clothes but there was no way to explain that. When Marina stepped away the woman followed her. She was considerably shorter than Marina, they all were, and so Marina was left to look at the part in her gray hair, the long braid that went down her back. Her dress pulled against her belly and her belly pressed against Marina’s groin. The woman’s belly was high and hard and suddenly Marina saw the woman’s arms were thin, her face and legs were thin. Only her stomach protruded. Marina considered this as she stepped away from her again and again until it seemed possible that they might both go over the edge. Marina stopped, considering the ways to extricate herself while the woman resumed the work with the buttons, her stomach pressed against her, and then she felt the baby kick.

  “My God,” Marina said.

  “I think she wants to wash your shirt,” Dr. Nkomo said, seeming deeply embarrassed. “Once they are on to an idea it is very difficult to dissuade them.”

  “She’s pregnant. I felt the baby kick,” Marina said. “It kicked me.”

  The baby kicked again as if grateful for the recognition and the woman lifted her face and shook her head at Marina as if to say, Kids, what can you do? Her forehead was deeply creased and her neck was wattled. There was a dark, flat mole of an irregular shape on the side of her nose near the eye that could have been a melanoma. Buttons undone, she helped Marina out of her shirt and Marina let her take it. What was it that Anders had said? Lost Horizon for ovaries? How many children had this woman undressed and how many of the people in this tree house were her children? The toddler weeping for her knife? The woman weaving the roof? The men waiting to get back to carving their boat? The other woman came with a rag that was small and not particularly clean and rubbed down Marina’s arms and back, rubbed her stomach and neck. She touched Marina’s bra and said something to the older woman who leaned her nose between Marina’s breasts to inspect the lace edge of the white cups more closely. Dr. Nkomo busied himself with the toddler, his back decisively pointed in her direction, but the other two men folded their arms across their chests, watching the show with interest, and Marina was not bothered by any of this. She had been kicked by a fetus whose mother was at the very least sixty and could easily have been more than seventy. The teenage girl stood in front of Marina and held up her arms until Marina understood that this was an instruction and not a game. She held up her arms as well. It was the girl’s clear intention to drop a shift dress over Marina’s head but the height discrepancy between them did not allow for it and so Marina pulled it on herself. No sooner was it covering her head and somewhat twisted than one of them pulled down her pants and began to rub her legs with the cloth as well. She stepped up obediently, one foot and then the other, and the pants were taken away. Marina stood there like the others now in her loose trapeze dress full enough to take her through an entire pregnancy because among the female Lakashi all clothes were maternity clothes. Without zippers or buttons, Marina saw the way in which they looked like candidates for a rustic insane asylum. The outfit was considerably shorter on her and the women poked at her knees and laughed as if there was something vaguely scandalous about knees. The women sat down on the floor and Marina sat with them and put her hands back on the woman’s stomach, waiting for the baby to move again while the one who made shingles pulled back Marina’s hair with a carved comb and braided it more tightly than her own mother had ever managed to braid it when she was a child. The teenage girl bit off a single piece of the palm frond with her teeth and tied off the end of her braid while the baby swam beneath Marina’s hands. She would say six months along. Marina realized then she had not touched a single pregnant woman since it stopped being her business to touch them. How could that be possible? After all the countless bellies she had run her hands over in her training, how had she let them all go?

&
nbsp; “You knew, didn’t you, about the Lakashi, about why Dr. Swenson is here? Anders told you?” Dr. Nkomo asked, the little girl in his lap, playing with his glasses. She was gentle as she folded the arms in and out.

  “I’d been told, but I can’t say I necessarily believed it. It’s something altogether different to see things for myself.”