State of Wonder

by Ann Patchett

  Dr. Swenson looked at her watch, and then she took it off her swollen wrist and laid it on the desk. When she stood up from her chair she struggled, the great and looming failure of her pregnancy going before her. “We should get to work now, don’t you think? There’s nothing else here that I can do.”

  Eleven

  Many hours after the surgery, and well after dark, Easter and Thomas took the mattress off the cot on the sleeping porch and carried it to Dr. Swenson’s hut. They had to take out the table and push the two chairs against the wall but in the end there was enough room for Easter and Marina to sleep. Not that Marina was sleeping, she was watching Dr. Swenson, watching the parade of every nocturnal creature in the Amazon as it wandered through the room. It seemed that they were all attracted to the light, which made her think of that first night in Manaus and Rodrigo’s store. The next day she sent Benoit over for the cot frame and the mosquito netting. Easter brought his strongbox with him. For a moment Dr. Swenson opened her eyes and watched while they rearranged the furniture again. “I don’t remember asking the two of you to move in,” she said, but before Marina could launch her explanation Dr. Swenson had fallen back to sleep.

  Aside from her quick morning trips to the Martins, Marina stayed close to her patient, watching her pass in and out of fevers. In her lucidity Dr. Swenson was demanding, wanting to talk to Alan Saturn about mosquitoes, wanting briefings on the data that had been collected since her surgery, wanting Marina to take her blood pressure. Then just as quickly the fever came back and she cried in her sleep, great flooding tears. She would ask for ice and Marina would go and get the small block she kept in the freezer where they stored the blood samples, chipping it into shards with a knife. It was the same freezer where she kept the child with the curving tail. Sirenomelia. It was two days before Marina remembered the name for it. The only time she had ever heard of it was in a lecture on birth abnormalities Dr. Swenson had given at Johns Hopkins. It flashed by in a single slide, Sirenomelia, Mermaid Syndrome, the legs of the fetus are fused together into a single tail, no visible genitalia. It is nothing you’re likely to see. And there it went; with a click and a brief flash of blackness they were on to the next slide. The only person who ever stood to know what it would have been like to have Dr. Swenson for a mother had not lived to meet the experience. A life of such extraordinary beginnings had, in the end, amounted to little more than a science experiment. Marina had rested her hand on the tiny head for a moment when the whole thing was over, just before Budi covered it over to keep it from the insects and took it off to the lab.

  In her fevered dreams, Dr. Swenson often gave bits and pieces of lectures, and sometimes it was a lecture Marina remembered, “Ectopic Pregnancy and the Damage to Fallopian Tubes.” She fell into another broken sleep, the blood of Thomas Nkomo making a slow loop through her veins. Marina gave her fluids and tinkered with the antibiotics. For all that they lacked in the jungle their assortment of antibiotics was as comprehensive as any hospital pharmacy. She checked the incision, watched for excessive swelling. She sat in the small room with the door open and read the copious notes on malaria. As the days went by, Dr. Swenson’s fevers would stop and then start again. Marina upped the dosages, beat them back. It was days before they could sit her up, and then stand her up. Marina worried about clots. With Easter on one side and Marina on the other, Dr. Swenson walked halfway down the path to the lab. When she was safely back in bed, too tired even to sleep, Marina read to her from Great Expectations. That became their new routine, and if the chapter was particularly good, or the day particularly dull, Dr. Swenson would ask Marina to read her some more. Easter sat on the floor with his paper and pad and practiced bending straight lines into the alphabet. Marina wrote out Dr. Swenson and put it on Dr. Swenson’s chest. She wrote the word Marina and put it in her lap.

  “Did you think I’d forget?” Dr. Swenson said, looking at the piece of paper when she woke.

  “I’m trying to give him a few new words,” Marina said.

  Dr. Swenson put the piece of paper back on her chest and patted it there. “Good. Let him remember this. Dr. Eckman was always trying to teach him to write Minnesota. That was never going to do him any good.”

  “You never know,” Marina said.

  “I do know. I think about Dr. Eckman now. There is something very specific about having a fever in the tropics, very unlike having a fever at home. Here you feel the air burning into you, or you are burning into it. After a time one loses all parameters, even the parameter of skin. I think he couldn’t possibly have understood what was happening to him.”

  “Probably not,” Marina said. It had been almost a week since Easter had left one of Anders’ letters in the bed. He must have run out of them. Easter was sitting shirtless by the door and the sun fell over exactly half of him, one leg and one arm, the left side of his face. The bruises had in time faded down to a dull green.

  “How well do you think I am now?”

  “You’re through the worst of it but I wouldn’t say you’re well. That will take a long time. You know more about it than I do.”

  Dr. Swenson nodded. “That’s what I’ve been thinking myself. Dr. Budi, Dr. Nkomo, even the botanist could look after me now.”

  In fact they came to visit every day. Just that morning Dr. Budi brought a bouquet of pink blossoms from the Martin trees in a drinking glass, who knows how she had managed to get them. They were there on the bedside table, the heavy blossoms crossing the face of Dr. Rapp. The Lakashi came too, the women keeping a silent vigil outside the window while they unbraided and rebraided one another’s hair. Any one of them would have taken care of her if given the chance. Marina told her as much.

  “None of them would do the job like you. I trained you myself, after all. You do your follow-up the way it’s meant to be done. I would like to keep you on, Dr. Singh. You certainly could manage Vogel, keep them happy while everyone else did their work. The other doctors like you. The Lakashi have bonded to you in much the way they bonded to Dr. Rapp. Someone is going to need to look after them once I’m gone. I don’t think any of the others could do that.”

  “The Lakashi can look after themselves.”

  Dr. Swenson shook her head. “Not if the world comes in to take the Martins, to take the Rapps. I will get over this surgery or I won’t. Other people can take care of me but who can take care of them? The truth is, I could just keep thinking up reasons you had to stay. I understand you well enough for that.”

  “You’ve done a good job so far,” Marina said, wringing out a cloth to wash Dr. Swenson’s face and neck.

  “Sit still for a minute,” Dr. Swenson said, pushing her hand away. “Sit down. I’m trying to tell you something important. This is a conflict I am facing. I am telling you I want you to stay and at the same time giving you a reason to go.”

  “You aren’t giving me any reason to go.”

  “That’s because you won’t be quiet. You won’t stop moving all the time.”

  Marina sat down and held the wet cloth in her hands. It was cool. She’d let the extra ice melt in the bowl.

  Dr. Swenson, small in her bed, looked up at the ceiling. There was a fly circling over her head and Marina disciplined herself not to shoo it away. “Barbara Bovender came to see me the morning that she left. She was worried that I was going to fire her, and because she was worried she told me the story of her visit to the Hummocca. It was a story that Milton had already told me, but she wanted to tell it again to show me how she had suffered for the cause. She sat in that chair where you are now and she cried. She told me she was so close to death that she had seen her father running through the jungle towards her, waving his hands, her father who had died when she was a child.”

  It was Barbara Bovender they were talking about? Not the child with the curling tail? Not Vogel? Not something that had happened thirteen years ago at Johns Hopkins? “She told me the same story,” Marina said.


  “She told you the same story? Then I would imagine you have come to a similar series of assumptions.” Dr. Swenson looked at Easter sitting in the doorway. She kept her eyes on him for a long time. “I didn’t realize she had told you.”

  “What assumptions?” Marina asked. It was a quiz of some sort and she had no idea what the answer was.

  Dr. Swenson looked at her the way she always looked at her, as if everything was obvious. “Mrs. Bovender is a very tall, pale blonde. Wouldn’t her father be the same? I can’t help but think that what she saw was a white man in the jungle, a man who was not her father but from a distance, in her fear, might have looked something like him. He was running through the trees towards her, she was in a boat. She couldn’t have seen him for more than a few seconds. I asked her if he had said anything, if he had spoken to her in English. She told me that her father had called for her to wait.”

  For the first time since she had left Manaus, that last morning when she had woken up standing in front of the air conditioner having dreamed about her father, Marina Singh was cold. She was so cold she thought her bones would break. She put the wet cloth back in the bowl. She felt as if there were ice around her heart. “He isn’t dead.”

  “I would swear to you with everything I understand about this place that he was dead, but no, I did not see it for myself. Sometimes when Dr. Eckman was very sick he would wander off. He never went very far. We found him in the storage room once. Once he fell over the railing of the sleeping porch and hurt his shoulder. I left Easter there to watch him. Dr. Eckman would start to get up and Easter would put him back to bed. Easter was a very good steward of Dr. Eckman. The boy had grown attached to him, the way he’s grown attached to you. Then one night he came into my hut well after midnight and he was frantic, frantic. He pulled me out of bed. I barely got my feet in my shoes and he was pulling me back to the storage hut. It was pouring rain that night, a blinding rain, and Easter was crying like it was the end of all the earth. I assumed that Dr. Eckman was dead. I remember feeling surprised, as sick as he was I had thought he would pull through. We came onto the porch and Easter had a flashlight. He showed me the bed, he showed me the room. Dr. Eckman was gone. While Easter was asleep in his hammock Dr. Eckman had wandered off in the night. I went to wake Benoit and he rounded up a group of Lakashi, but no one could find him. Not that night or all the next day. We never found him. You’ve been out there. It isn’t so hard to imagine that a man who was very sick would last about twenty minutes in the jungle at night. He would step on a spider. He would crawl into the hollow of some rotting tree and never wake up. Something had eaten him, something had dragged him away. I didn’t know what it was but he was gone, Dr. Singh, he was as gone as any man who had died, and so that’s what I said. I told the other doctors the Lakashi take away their dead in the middle of the night. I wrote a letter saying we had buried him. And I believed I had handled the situation with as much humanity as was possible until Barbara Bovender turned up the wrong tributary and saw her father.”

  Marina had thought she understood this place. She had spotted the lancehead after all, she had cut apart the anaconda. She had performed surgeries she was neither licensed nor qualified to perform on a dirty floor and had eaten from the trees and swum in the river in a bloody dress only to find out that none of those things were on the test. There was in fact a circle of hell beneath this one that required an entirely different set of skills that she did not possess. She would have to go there anyway. She had been foolish enough to think that she had given up everything when in fact she could see now that she hadn’t even started. Anders Eckman could still be alive. Anders her friend, Anders father of three, was down the river with the cannibals waiting for another boat to go by. “Is there any safe way for me to do this?” she said finally.

  Dr. Swenson covered her eyes with the heels of her hands. “No. In fact, I imagine they’ll kill you.”

  Anders took off his lab coat and put on his jacket that was hanging on the back of the door. He retied his tie, took his briefcase off the desk. “If I have to go to one more meeting it is going to kill me,” he said to Marina.

  Marina looked out the open door. Somehow it was still morning. It wasn’t two hours ago that she had been eating the Martins. “I should go now,” she said.

  “After we’ve thought it through,” Dr. Swenson said. “First there has to be a plan.”

  Marina shook her head, thinking of Karen Eckman and what she had said about Anders not being comfortable with the trees. She would have walked off the path at that moment. She would have gone straight into the jungle to find him. “I don’t think tomorrow’s going to be any better.” And with that she left, Easter trailing behind her. She could hear Dr. Swenson calling her name as she went past the lab but she didn’t go back. They could have talked it over for the rest of their lives. Marina only wanted to be on the boat, out on the water, heading towards Anders and her own fate. She was floating now, caught in a current that pulled her ahead and to her surprise she did not mind it. She was content to float, to be pulled under or tossed up. She would give herself over to the force of the river if the river took her to Anders. She would have gone straight to the dock but she needed to take something with her. She was trying to think of what she could offer the Hummocca in exchange for her friend. She looked around the storage room, opening boxes, and found ten oranges left in the bottom of the crate. She took them along with the peanut butter. She put the white nightgown Barbara Bovender had given her around her neck like a scarf, thinking if there was in fact a universal language of surrender it would at least give her the means to do so. She wished for buttons and beads, knives and paint. She wished for something other than syringes, litmus papers, glass tubes with rubber stoppers, bottles of acetone. She sat down on a box of fruit cocktail and closed her eyes. She saw Anders sitting on his desk looking through birding guides to the Amazon. She tried to think of something that was as valuable as Anders’ life. And then Marina remembered the Rapps.

  Easter stayed with her though he had never followed her out to the Martins before. The sun was high and hot though it was not yet nine in the morning. She carried a very large basket that she had found in the storage room, something the Lakashi had woven out of heavy grass. She had never come so late. In the two hours since she had last taken this trail the jungle had installed an entirely different set of birds screeching out an entirely different hue and cry. The mid-morning shift of insects replaced their early-morning brethren and clicked and vibrated a new and distinct set of messages. Marina kept her mind on the snakes that wrapped around trees and tangled themselves into vines and she placed her feet down carefully. She could not afford to make a mistake now. She stopped for a minute at the edge of the Martins, leaning forward to wipe the sweat off her face with the hem of her dress. The way the bright sunlight came into the field now turned the bark a softer yellow and she stood there, making a point to notice everything. She picked a Rapp and held it up to Easter, then she put it in the basket. She picked another and another and he followed her, going to other trees, taking just a few from every individual community of mushrooms, thinning them out while the basket rounded into a pile of pale blue jewels. No matter how many they picked the plants did not appear to be diminished. Maybe that was part of their secret. She had never realized how many of them there were. Protecting the Rapps meant protecting the Lakashi, and the Martins, and the fertility drug, and the malaria vaccine. No one could ever know where the Rapps had come from. But who had thought to protect Anders? If this is what was available to her then this is what she would use. When she picked up the basket it was scarcely heavier than it had been empty, and she covered the whole thing up with the nightgown and made her way back.

  The mushrooms she knew were her best chance but she had Easter carry the peanut butter and the oranges just in case. She loaded all of it onto the boat. Thomas met her on the dock, Benoit was beside him. “I cannot believe what Dr. S
wenson has told me,” Thomas said, the panic rising in his voice, “What must Anders have thought, that in all this time we never came to look for him?”

  Marina shook her head. “We didn’t know.”

  Thomas took her hand. “I am going with you to find him.” The Lakashi were there now, waiting to leap aboard.

  It was all a set-up. Dr. Swenson would have called out for Thomas as soon as she was gone, telling him everything, telling him he had to go with Marina, and Thomas, guilt stricken in his ignorance, played right along. But it was not his destiny to see this thing through. “Anders was my friend,” Marina said, and squeezed his thin fingers. “He’s the reason I came here. I think I should be the one to go.”

  “I understand that,” Thomas said. “But he was my friend as well and so it is equally my right. And you have no language with which to ask for him back.”

  “You don’t speak Hummocca,” Marina said.

  “What Benoit and I have between us will be closer to Hummocca than your English. I will not wait on this dock and wonder what’s become of you. I will not wait to see if Anders is alive.” His face shone with such bright earnestness it was nearly unbearable. “I have already made a promise to Dr. Swenson. We are going along.” Benoit nodded his head without understanding exactly what was being promised. Marina thought it was a nod of considerably less conviction.

  “If you wait much longer to decide, Alan Saturn will hear about this,” Thomas said. “He will insist on going. He has always been interested in the Hummocca. And Nancy would never let him go without her, you know this, so factor her in as well. I do not imagine Dr. Budi would agree to stay behind to watch Dr. Swenson but I could be wrong. If she insists on coming as well then we will need to put Dr. Swenson on the boat. We could make her a pallet on the deck out of some blankets.”