State of Wonder

by Ann Patchett

  “It’s true,” Dr. Nkomo said nodding. “I had read Dr. Swenson’s papers but I was still very surprised. I have thought too much about the fertility and reproduction of mosquitoes and not enough about the fertility and reproduction of women. That’s what my wife would say. She says if we wait much longer for a baby she will have to come and live among the Lakashi in order to get pregnant.”

  Marina reached back and moved the base of her braid back and forth, trying to loosen it up before it gave her a headache. “I thought your research was in fertility with Dr. Swenson.”

  “Ah,” Dr. Nkomo said, taking his glasses back from the little girl and in doing so breaking her heart all over again. “We work together. We are colleagues, but we do not share the same field of study. Our fields overlap.”

  Their hosts followed the conversation intently, their faces turning from speaker to speaker as if they were watching a tennis match. “What is your field of study, Dr. Nkomo?”

  “Please,” he said, “call me Thomas. I suppose you would say I focus on the drug’s off-target toxicity, except in this case it isn’t toxic. The drug has exhibited benefits unrelated to fertility.”

  There were questions to ask, namely what the benefits were and who was paying for his research, but at that moment Easter appeared over the top of the ladder, every bit as wet as he had been coming up out of the river and over the side of the boat. Marina understood the look of panic on his face. He was sure she was dead as she had been sure he was dead. His eyes went quickly around the room, passing over her and stopping only briefly on Thomas Nkomo. He started to go down the ladder again but she stood up quickly and when he realized it was her in that dress with her hair braided he bounded up the last few rungs of the ladder, his T-shirt stretched out by the rain, the mud making a solid cake up to his knees. He began slapping his open hands against her arms, her hips, her back. He could not stop himself. She was his responsibility and he had lost her.

  The Lakashi nodded and clucked their tongues and pointed at him but Easter would not look in their direction and so they gave up. There was no teasing the deaf if they refused to look at you.

  “The rain is letting up,” Thomas said, craning his head to look beyond the edges of the roof. “Or maybe it’s stopped now and the trees are just dripping. It’s very difficult for me to tell the difference between the current rain and the continued falling of the rain we’ve already had.”

  “I don’t mind getting wet again.” Marina put her arm around Easter’s shoulders. She was thinking about his box, the pens and feathers, Anders’ open letter to the world on his behalf.

  “Then we should go.” Thomas began a series of deep nods around the room.

  “How do you say thank you?”

  “To the best of my knowledge the word doesn’t exist in Lakashi. I’ve asked other people that question and no one comes up with anything.”

  Marina looked at her hosts, who stared expectantly as if they were hoping she would figure it out. “What about in Portuguese?”

  “Obrigado.”

  “Obrigado,” Marina said to the pregnant woman but there was no change in expression. She put her hand on the woman’s belly again but the baby was quiet.

  Easter tugged at the cloth of Marina’s dress, then he held out his shirt, pointed at his shirt, and then pointed at her. Marina looked around the room. There were a few hammocks strung between poles, some piles of blankets and clothes on the floor, some baskets with roots and some baskets with twigs, but she did not see her shirt and pants. In truth, if he hadn’t mentioned her clothes she probably would have gone right down the ladder without them, she was so distracted by what she had seen. She shook her head. Easter then went to the pregnant woman and held out his shirt to her between two fingers and pointed to Marina. The woman seemed to have no idea what he was getting at. Marina did a pantomime of unbuttoning her shirt, taking her fingers down the front of her dress where the buttons would have been, but again the woman shrugged.

  Thomas then said a word, basa or basi, which was probably the word he believed meant clothes, but it was met with the same blank expression as the Portuguese word for thanks. He held out his own shirt and pointed to Marina. The younger woman took her place on the floor and resumed the twisting and knotting of palm fronds as if there had never been visitors at all and then, in what was the most damning gesture of false innocence, the teenage girl sat down to help her. The baby was settled on the floor and given a palm frond to play with and he put the tip of it in his mouth and sucked contentedly.

  “I believe you’ve been scammed,” Thomas said.

  “Out of my clothes?” Marina couldn’t quite imagine such a thing was possible even as she stood there in a smock. Easter crossed the room and started digging through a pile on the floor and one of the men came over and smacked him on the side of the head with the flat of his hand.

  “This isn’t good,” Marina said. “I don’t know where my luggage is.”

  “The bag you came with from Manaus?” Thomas said. “Wasn’t it on the boat with you?”

  She turned to him. Suddenly the dress felt very small. “Of course it was on the boat with me but, my God, coming into all that fire and screaming, all these men climbing on board from the water, and then the next thing I knew Dr. Swenson was going up the dock. I wasn’t going to stay there and find my luggage.”

  “Of course,” Thomas said. He did not offer her a single word of encouragement. He did not tell her as anyone would that this was a very small village and surely there was no place for her bag to go. The teenage girl was up now, slapping at Easter’s hands, and then the littlest girl, the toddler, came over and she hit him as well. “We should go now, Dr. Singh,” Thomas said.

  “Please,” she said, surprisingly heartbroken over such a small loss. “Call me Marina.”

  Eight

  Marina had been in the jungle for a week before Dr. Alan Saturn, whom she thought of as the first Dr. Saturn, said he would borrow Easter and the boat and make a trip to the trading post two hours away to mail some letters. (The trading post was not a trading post at all but a larger village down river where the more advanced Jinta Indians had their camp. They were, for a small price, willing to hold letters and money until a trader passed through from Manaus, which they did with some frequency. For a larger price, the traders would then take the letters back with them to mail—no small request as the mail was going to Java and Dakar and Michigan and they themselves were not men born with a natural inclination to stand in long post office lines.) Once the trip was established, everyone save Dr. Swenson broke from work to sit down for some time after lunch to commit themselves to paper. Dr. Budi gave Marina three blue tissue Aerograms from her considerable stack and Alan Saturn said he would stand her for the stamps. Marina, whose luggage had yet to be recovered, had spent the past seven days in her Lakashi dress, though she had been given an identical spare out of either guilt or compassion by an anonymous tribe member. Nancy Saturn, the second Dr. Saturn, had given her two extra pairs of underwear and Thomas Nkomo had a toothbrush still in the plastic wrap. He put it in her hand very discreetly. It seemed to Marina that these were among the kindest gifts of her existence.

  “This is why I don’t loan out the boat,” Dr. Swenson said, looking around the lab as the doctors scattered with paper and pens, those charming dinosaurs of communication. “Once you say it’s leaving no one seems to think there’s any work to do.”

  But work was all there was to do. Marina had been set up in the corner of the lab and been given the job of running tests on the compound for stability, to see whether it was degrading with heat and exposure. Like Anders, she was a small molecule person. Their work had been in pills and while it wasn’t an exact match for the task at hand it was comfortably within her realm of experience. There was enough data piled up to keep her busy for years and she wondered if that wasn’t Dr. Swenson’s objective—to keep her busy. It w
as possible that they were feeding her problems they had already solved as a means of placating her or testing her competence. They had mice after all, they were clearly already onto testing the concentration of the compound in blood levels. Still, she knew that if she stayed in her corner looking over what they had given her she would be much more able to make a realistic assessment of how far they were from a first efficacious dose. She could sidle over to Dr. Budi from time to time—Budi was in charge of clinical research organization—and ask her questions about the Lakashi blood work. She could see now how ridiculous it had been to simply ask Dr. Swenson over dinner what her progress was. Working here she had the chance to make her own assessment, and that was what Mr. Fox had wanted all along.

  And besides, if she wasn’t working, what was she going to do with her days? The jungle, with its screeching cries of death and slithering piles of leaves, was hardly a place to go walking alone in the afternoons. Two of the young men from the tribe had dreams of learning English and German and becoming tour guides at one of the eco-lodges hundreds of miles away. They had seen the great white hope of the cruise ships while riding bundles of trees to Manaus. They had met the naturalists when visiting the Jinta. Because they were always looking to practice, they were willing to take a restless doctor into that deeper place off the available paths where the afternoon light was filtered out by leaves. With a great deal of hand gesturing, a few common words in four different languages, and a couple of glossy field guides with the name Anders Eckman printed inside the front cover, they would endeavor to give jungle tours, pointing out the neon colored frogs the size of dimes that contained enough poison in their clammy skins to take down twenty men. The scientists all agreed that they had never been deep into the jungle for more than eight minutes without thinking they would give everything they owned to be led safely out.

  Sometimes in the late afternoons when the generator stumbled from the burdens of overuse and the scant electricity in the lab clicked off altogether (save the backup, backup generators that kept the blood samples in the freezers flash-frozen to arctic levels), the heat drove the doctors, save Dr. Swenson, into the river to swim, though the river was even worse than the jungle because in that murky soup there was no telling what was coming at you. As they treaded the water slowly, hoping not to kick up an attractive splash, the conversation turned not to the spectacular moth with wings the size of handkerchiefs that for a moment hovered over their heads, but to the microscopic candiru fish that were capable of swimming up the urethra with catastrophic results. Marina, who had no alternative, swam in her dress and hoped that in the slow agitation of her strokes she was washing it. They kept an eye out for water snakes whose heads rode the surface of the river like tiny periscopes, and reminisced about the vampire bats that had tangled their claws in the mosquito nets over their beds. No one stayed long in the water, not even Dr. Budi, who apparently had been something of a swimming star in Indonesia when she was a girl.

  For entertainment not reliant on nature, there were outdated scientific journals and old New Yorkers but invariably something had eaten through the most interesting paragraphs. Dr. Swenson had a complete set of hardbacked Dickens and she kept the books wrapped separately in heavy pieces of plastic tarp and tied with twine. She would loan them out and then do spot checks to make sure they were being read with clean hands. A cinnamon stick was lodged in the plastic wrap of each volume, as ants, Dr. Rapp had once told her, would always avoid the scent of cinnamon. Dr. Swenson believed that ants would be the standard bearers for the end of civilization.

  Other than the brief and unsatisfying diversions of walking and swimming and reading, all that was left for Dr. Swenson and Dr. Singh, Dr. Nkomo and Dr. Budi and the two Drs. Saturn, was the lab, and the lab was not unlike a Las Vegas casino. They existed there without calendar or clock. They worked until they were hungry and then they stopped and ate—opening a can of apricots and another can of tuna. They worked until they were tired and then they went back to their cots in the small ring of huts that sat behind the lab like the bungalows at the Spear-O-Wigwam Summer Camp for Girls at Mille Lacs. They read some Dickens before they went to sleep. At the end of her first week, Marina was halfway through Little Dorrit. Of all her possessions lost and gone she was particularly sorry to be without her James novel.

  As for the Lakashi, they were patient subjects, submitting themselves to constant weighing and measurement, allowing their menstrual cycles to be charted and their children to be pricked for blood samples. Dr. Swenson deserved the credit for that and she accepted it readily, telling stories about the tireless cajoling and gift giving that had once been required for even the most basic examinations. “I tamed them,” she said, taking not the least discomfort in the word. “It was our life’s work, Dr. Rapp’s and mine, earning their trust.”

  But if she taught them to tolerate her research she had not made them good company. They rarely offered to share their dried fish and regurgitated manioc root, not that anyone wanted it, but it was the most basic lesson in any Introduction to Anthropology class: the sharing of food was the primary symbol of harmonious communal living. Then again, Dr. Swenson strictly forbade the sharing of the scientists’ food among members of the tribe as she believed that a jar of peanut butter was more corrupting to indigenous ways than a television set, so it was possible that the Lakashi’s unwillingness to offer up their bread was only a matter of passive retaliation. It was Easter alone who ate from both tables, or, more accurately, both pots. The Lakashi didn’t knock on the door of the lab to extend an invitation on the nights they decided for no discernible reason to dance until three in the morning, and they left no note when they cleared out, all of them together, which they did from time to time, leaving behind the most unnerving silence. When they came back twelve hours later they were red-eyed and quiet, walking on their toes in their collective indigenous hangover. Even the children smelled of a peculiar smoke and sat like stumps on the bank of the river, an entire line of them staring straight ahead without scratching their insect bites.

  “We used to call it a vision quest in honor of the indigenous Americans,” Dr. Swenson had said when Marina ran to the lab in a sweat-soaked panic asking what had happened to everyone. She had been in camp three days when, in the manner of a horrible scene from a science fiction movie, they all disappeared. “That was the perfect name for what they were doing until it also became the name of a video game and the rallying cry for every pack of middle-aged New Agers who were looking to legitimize their interest in psychedelics. I don’t have a name for it anymore. I wake up and see they’re gone and I think, Oh, it’s time for that again.”

  “Have you ever gone with them?” Marina asked.

  Dr. Swenson was working through a complicated looking equation in a spiral notebook but she didn’t seem to mind carrying on the conversation while she wrote down strings of numbers. There were computers in the lab but between the undependable electricity and the overpowering humidity that from time to time seized the generators like a fever, everyone was more inclined to do their important calculations by hand, proving legions of math teachers correct. “No one goes with them now. In retrospect, I think it was only Dr. Rapp they were inviting and the rest of us held his coattails. Once he stopped coming on expeditions, the Lakashi simply went out in the middle of the night while we were sleeping. Never have I known a people who could one hour be as loud as a blitzkrieg and the next hour maintain perfect silence while walking through dried leaves. They can move their entire operation out of here without breaking a twig.”

  Marina waited for an answer to the question she had asked but Dr. Swenson’s attention had fallen back to the math before her. It occurred to Marina that these sorts of conversations were exactly the reason the Bovenders worked so hard to keep Dr. Swenson separated from society. Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one’s partner on both the left and the right. “But you did go?�
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  Dr. Swenson glanced up for a moment as if surprised to see Marina was still there. “Of course, when I was younger. It seemed fascinating at the time, as if we had discovered something central to the identity of the people. It was very important to Dr. Rapp, it was important to the entire field of mycology. I picture all those students now, boys from Park Avenue and Hyde Park and Back Bay who had spent their previous summers in the Hamptons scooping ice cream, all marching off into the jungle ready to ingest anything that was given to them. The way they opened their mouths and closed their eyes you would have thought the Lakashi were distributing communion. Actually, the ceremony would have made a striking program for interdisciplinary studies—biology, anthropology, world religion. I certainly found it compelling as a medical student to see how long a person could sustain such a low heart rate. In the whole lot of them there wasn’t a pulse over twenty-four. I once brought a cuff with me and monitored the Lakashi and the students every twenty minutes for five hours after they had reached a state of unconsciousness. Their diastolic pressure ticked in slightly above dead. I was only testing for my own interest but if I could have put together a committed control group it could have been an important study over time.”

  “Did you—” Marina wasn’t exactly sure how to phrase the question.

  “I did, of course, but mycology was never my field. I was more interested in recording the subjects. Let the botanist take notes on his own trip, I say. I was of great assistance to Dr. Rapp in this way. He never had a graduate student who was willing to abstain for purposes of observation. I didn’t mind that, of course, I was glad to help the science. The real problem was the Lakashi themselves. Once the women realized I wasn’t going on the trip anymore they started piling all the babies around me, all the children. I put a quick stop to that.”

  “The children were participating?”