State of Wonder

by Ann Patchett

  The Lakashi women were singing now. No, they weren’t singing. It was just that so many of them were talking at once and when their voices came together it sounded vaguely like a section of Torah as sung by a group of bar mitzvah boys whose voices had yet to change. “Do you know what they’re saying?” Marina asked.

  Nancy shook her head. “I catch a word every now and then, or I think I do. We had a linguist with us for a while. He had been a student of Noam Chomsky’s. He said the language wasn’t particularly difficult or even interesting, that all the languages in this region of the Amazon came from a single grammatical base with variations in vocabulary which meant at one point the tribes must have been connected and then split apart. It made me wish we had a language that was a little bit more obscure so we might have kept him. He made us some charts with phonetics so we can put together some basic phrases.”

  “Thomas is very good at it,” Dr. Budi said. She held up her arm and the other two women stopped and waited while a very large, low slung lizard dragged itself across their path, its loose green skin hanging over the rib cage like chain mail. “I don’t know that one,” Dr. Budi said, watching it carefully.

  Nancy leaned over to peer at the lizard as if it were someone she could almost place, then she shook her head. “Neither do I.”

  It was another twenty minutes past the lizard before they came to a clearing, or, if not a clearing, a place where fewer, thinner trees stood farther apart from one another, and all the trees were the same. There was no thick coat of undergrowth covering the ground, just a light wash of grass, there were no hairy ropes of vines strangling the trees, only the smooth, straight expanse of bark. Sunlight fell easily between the pale oval leaves and hit the ground in wide patches. “It’s beautiful,” Marina said, dropping her head back. Such sunlight, such pretty little leaves. “My God, why don’t they live here?”

  “Too far from the water,” Dr. Budi said, looking at her watch and making a note of the time.

  A dozen Lakashi women were already there. Marina knew most of them by sight even if she couldn’t properly reproduce the series of tones that made up their names. Over the next few minutes two dozen more arrived and took their places against the trunks that were a buttery yellow color and ranged from ten to twenty inches around. Without ritual or fanfare, with no apparent consideration, the women went for bigger trees, the ones already bitten, and left the saplings alone. Pressing in like a partner for a slow dance, they opened their mouths and began immediately to scrape their teeth down the bark. The jungle on this morning was particularly quiet and so it was possible to hear them, a small sound amplified by so many women making it at the same time.

  A few stragglers wandered in and stopped to greet the women at the trees around them who stopped their biting and chewing long enough to receive the greeting and return it. Two of the women who had a great deal to say to each other took opposite sides of the same tree and from a distance they appeared to be kissing. Women who had brought their children left them in a pile in the center of the trees and the older children herded the younger ones back when they tried to crawl away. One of the older women went into the group of children and led a girl of twelve or thirteen to a tree and the others stopped all at once, turning their heads from their trees to watch her. When the girl tilted her face to the side, looking uncertain of how she should approach it, the others hooted lightly and slapped their trees to make a kind of tree-plus-human applause. The thin branches trembled and shook the delicate leaves from side to side. The girl, whose hair was unbraided and disheveled by sleep, looked embarrassed to be the center of so much attention. She then began to nibble at the bark. After the others felt certain she was performing this primal act correctly they all went back to their work. From the nubile to the beldame they scraped and chewed without pleasure or distaste. They had turned the fairly exotic act of biting a tree into nothing more than factory work.

  “This is important,” Dr. Budi said to Marina. “The girl has just completed her first menstrual cycle. The Lakashi rituals are very brief, unsentimental. You are lucky to see such a thing on your first day.”

  Nancy Saturn turned some pages in her notebook. “I didn’t realize Mara was menstruating.”

  Dr. Budi held up her book. “I have it.”

  There were more than enough trees for everyone, maybe two hundred of them spread over two acres of land. The tallest climbed to a height of sixty or seventy feet, but there were plenty of new trees coming up as well. In the places where a tree had been recently eaten, the absence of bark left a mark that was soft and white; growing back, it was the palest of yellows and then darkened over time so that most of the trees at the height of a Lakashi’s head appeared to have been banded by decoupage.

  It was easier to breathe in this place, and so easy to see! In every direction the vista was open. No more wondering what might be tearing through the jungle with its wet jaws hinged open. “I never thought there would be so many trees,” Marina said. “I didn’t picture it like this.”

  “It’s actually just one tree,” Nancy said. She was counting the women and marking them present by name in her notebook. “They’re Populas, like Aspens, a very rare phenomenon. It’s a single root system. The tree is cloning itself.”

  “Very delicate,” Dr. Budi said, nodding to herself.

  “The root system changes the acidity level in the soil so that nothing much will grow here except for the trees and a little bit of grass. In a sense you could say the tree poisons the area it inhabits to make sure that nothing else will survive in its space and take the nutrients out of the soil or grow taller and block out the sunlight.”

  “Except the Rapps,” Dr. Budi said. “The Rapps thrive right where they are.” She pointed the tip of her pen towards the clusters of mushrooms that grew near the base of the trees, each cap a perfect golf ball on a tall, slender stem. The Rapps were a most unearthly shade of pale blue. They came so close to glowing in the light of day that she wanted to come back with a flashlight and see them in the dark. Marina couldn’t imagine how she had missed them.

  “Psilocybe livoris rappinis,” Nancy said. “They are considered to be the greatest single discovery in mycology. There has never been any evidence that this ecosystem is duplicated anywhere else in the rain forest, anywhere in the world. These trees you’re looking at here, these mushrooms, this is it. As far as we know, these are the only Rapps in the world. Your passport to spiritual enlightenment.”

  “You’ve tried them?”

  Nancy Saturn closed her eyes and nodded slightly, holding up one finger.

  “Very sick,” Dr. Budi said. “Interesting, everything you see, but too sick.”

  “So if the mushrooms are Rapps, are the trees called Swensons?” Marina asked. There was an inordinate number of lavender moths the size of quarters bobbing through the sunlight. Marina didn’t remember seeing them before but then it would be difficult to notice such a small moth in the workaday tangle of vines that suffocated the rest of the jungle.

  “The trees are called Martins,” Dr. Budi said. “Tabebuia martinii.”

  “It’s actually the Rapps we’re protecting,” Nancy said. “All the secrecy about the work and the location, it’s so no one can find the Rapps. Scientifically, it’s the Martins that have presented such remarkable potential. The Martins really may prove to be one of the great botanical discoveries of our age. But people have been trying to get their hands on the Rapps ever since Dr. Rapp started writing about them. If the greater world knew where they were—”

  Dr. Budi covered her eyes with her hand and shook her head.

  “Exactly. This place would be overrun, drug dealers, the Brazilian government, other tribes, German tourists, there’s no telling who would get here first and what sort of a war would ensue. The only thing I know for sure is that the Lakashi would be destroyed. Their entire existence is built around Rapps and while they have easily a hundred t
imes more mushrooms than they need for their rituals they have no interest in drying and storing them. The Rapps present three hundred and sixty-five days a year and so the Lakashi just assume they’re always going to be right here under the trees. I’ve been trying to grow Martins and, subsequently, Rapps, for three years now, and I’m not talking about growing them back in Michigan, I’m talking about growing them in the lab from root dissections, the same soil, the same water, and I can’t do it.”

  “You will,” Dr. Budi said.

  Nancy Saturn shook her head. “It’s too soon to say.”

  Dr. Saturn and Dr. Budi announced that they were talking too much and the window of time for work would not stay open indefinitely. They excused themselves and began going tree to tree asking the women questions that involved the use of four or five words of Lakashi. Nancy took a cuff out of her bag and was checking Mara’s blood pressure. Marina took the opportunity to look at the trees: a small plastic placard, numbered and dated, had been staked in front of each one. She ran her hands over the scarred bark, sniffed at the wood. Had she seen them by a lake in Minnesota she wouldn’t have given them a second look, or maybe one glance back, just because she had no memory of seeing such yellow bark. The Rapps she would have noticed, looking down at the small clump near her feet. They were like a cluster of exotic sea creatures that had washed up a thousand miles inland. How in the world had Dr. Rapp found this place? How had he known to look past the fire waving tribe on the shore and go a mile into the jungle? Marina cut a path between the trees. What a pleasure it was to walk! What a pleasure to take a large step and be able to see where her foot was landing. She raised her arms above her head and stretched. One by one the women stepped back from the trees and began scratching out whatever splinter of bark had lodged between their teeth with their fingernails. Budi picked a handful of women out of the crowd and wiped down their fingers with alcohol swabs and then pricked them to draw the small pipettes of blood. After making notes she carefully pressed the tubes into a small metal case. On the other side of the stand, Dr. Saturn went through a more challenging interaction as she handed three of the women long cotton swabs and waited while they reached beneath their dresses, made a quick flick with the wrist, and handed the swab back to her. Dr. Saturn then tapped the swab on a slide and on a piece of litmus paper.

  “What in the world are you doing?” Marina asked.

  “Checking the levels of estrogen in cervical mucus.” Dr. Saturn’s carrying case was a more complicated affair and she sat down on the ground to make her notations on the test tube where she deposited her swabs. “The slides are for ferning.”

  “No one does ferning anymore,” Marina said. It was the slightly arcane process of watching estrogen grow into intricate fern patterns on slides. No ferns, no fertility.

  Dr. Saturn shrugged. “It’s very effective for the Lakashi. Their estrogen levels are quite sensitive to the intake of bark.”

  “How in the world did you convince them to—” She wasn’t sure of the appropriate word. Self-swab?

  “That,” Dr. Saturn said, “is Dr. Swenson’s genius. The training was in place a long time before I arrived. I cannot imagine how terrified of her they must have been to have gone along with it. These days it doesn’t even seem to register as an invasion of privacy.” The third Lakashi woman handed over her Q-tip without fanfare and Nancy bowed her head as she accepted it.

  When the Lakashi had finished what had been asked of them, they walked off in groups of two and three and four, not looking back at the trees or acknowledging the scientists. They picked up the children who were too small to walk reliably and let the others trail behind as best they could. They were done.

  “Do they come every day?” Marina watched as the entire lot of them receded into the thickening woods as if a school bell had been rung. They left without so much as a glance back to the doctors or the trees. Their work was done.

  “They chew the bark every five days, though the entire female sector of the tribe doesn’t come on the same day. Their visits are regular. How they figure the five days is beyond us as they have no apparent system for marking time. I can only assume that it has at this point become a biological craving. They don’t come when they’re pregnant. In fact the bark repulses them from what seems to be the moment of conception. Dr. Swenson confirms this. Because of this pregnancies seem especially long out here. We know about them for a full thirty-nine weeks. They also don’t come when they’re menstruating, though conveniently they’re pretty much on the same cycle so we get a few days off every month.”

  “All of them?”

  Nancy nodded. “It takes the new girls a while to get it straightened out and no one is perfectly regular after giving birth, but other than that.”

  Dr. Budi walked over to a tree near her and looked to find a place where the bark was darkest yellow and dry, then she leaned towards it and bit, her teeth making that same scraping sound. “You’ll try it?” she said, looking back at Marina.

  “I should take her vitals,” Nancy said, pulling out the blood-pressure cuff again. “Budi, take her temperature.”

  “Why would I?” Marina said.

  “We need people to test. People who aren’t Lakashi. We do it.”

  “But I’m not going to get pregnant.”

  Nancy Velcroed a cuff around Marina’s arm and began to pump it tighter and tighter. Dr. Budi held up a flat plastic thermometer and Marina, sure of nothing, opened her mouth.

  “You would not be alone in that,” Dr. Budi said.

  “Believe me, there are plenty of things to test you for. You don’t have to get pregnant.”

  “Thomas will tell you,” Dr. Budi said, and then as if on cue, Dr. Nkomo broke through the thicket outside the stand of Martins and was walking towards them.

  “I see I am sufficiently late,” he said, bowing his head to the three women.

  “Men and women don’t come to the stand at the same time,” Nancy told Marina. “The women chew the trees and the men gather the Rapps.”

  “Division of labor,” Dr. Budi said. Nancy removed the blood-pressure cuff and pressed two fingers to the side of Marina’s wrist to find her pulse.

  “First time, yes?” Thomas said.

  Marina nodded, keeping her mouth fixed to the thermometer.

  “Ah, very good. Just remember to keep your tongue pushed down. Otherwise you can get splinters.”

  “Although we’re geniuses at taking them out,” Nancy said. “Pulse sixty-four. Well done, Dr. Singh.”

  Thomas brought his mouth to the tree beside him and, far above the band of scarring, began to scrape down the bark. Marina took the thermometer out of her mouth. “Wait a minute,” she said.

  “The Martins have many purposes,” Nancy said. “For years Dr. Rapp thought that part of the hallucinogenic qualities in the mushrooms must come from the root system of the tree, that it must in some way be leached from the trees themselves, so he assumed that by chewing bark the women were, in essence, giving themselves a little bump. It was Annick who made the connection between the trees and extended fertility. Apparently he never noticed that they kept getting pregnant.”

  “She still is always giving Dr. Rapp the credit,” Dr. Budi said, not as a correction, simply as a statement.

  “If you look at their notes from that time it’s quite clear.” Thomas took a handkerchief out of his pocket and touched it to the corners of his mouth.

  “It wasn’t until 1990 that she made the connection between the Martins and malaria,” Nancy said. “And that was definitely her discovery. Dr. Rapp was barely in the field by the nineties.”

  “She still gives him credit,” Dr. Budi said. “Says he had mentioned it before.”

  Thomas Nkomo shook his head by way of acknowledging the sadness of a woman who was so quick to assign her achievements to a man. “This is the greatest discovery to be made in relation to t
he Lakashi tribe. Not the Rapps or the fertility but the malaria.”

  “I don’t understand,” Marina said, and she didn’t, not any of it.

  “Lakashi women do not contract malaria,” Dr. Budi said. “They have been inoculated.”

  “There is no inoculation for malaria,” Marina said, and the other three smiled at her, and Thomas bit the tree again.

  Nancy Saturn pointed out the small purple moth resting on the white inner bark of the tree. It was the spot that Dr. Budi had recently chewed and there was still the slightest glimmer of saliva on the surrounding outer bark. “The Martin is a soft bark tree. Once the bark is broken the Lakashi have no trouble scraping through the inner bark and down into the cambium where the living cells are. This creates an opening, as you can see, a sort of wound in the tree, and into that wound comes this moth, the purple martinet.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Marina said, leaning in for a better look. “Is there anything he didn’t name for himself?”

  “The Lakashi tribe was not a Martin Rapp discovery. If it had been, this place would surely have been Rapptown.” Nancy put a finger just beneath the moth which, like the Lakashi, seemed impervious to the invasions of its privacy. “Agruis purpurea martinet. It takes liquid from the pulp of the Martin, not the sap, which is deeper inside the tree. The insect subsists on the moisture in the wood itself. It ingests and excretes almost simultaneously, processing the proteins from the pulp. Once a year it lays its eggs.”

  “In the bark?” Marina asked. When the moth opened its wings it showed two bright yellow dots like eyes, one on either side, then it folded back up again. A butterfly rests with its wings open and a moth rests with its wings closed, she had read that somewhere years ago.

  Nancy nodded. “Like the Martins and the Rapps, the purple martinets seem to exist right here. You’ll see one in camp from time to time. They’ll go as far as the river, but we have no record of it feeding outside this area. The key to fertility is found in the combination of the Martin tree and the purple martinet, although we haven’t isolated the moths’ excretions from the proteins in its larval casing. What we know is that it works.”