State of Wonder

Three

The minute she stepped into the musty wind of the tropical air-conditioning, Marina smelled her own wooliness. She pulled off her light spring coat and then the zippered cardigan beneath it, stuffing them into her carry-on where they did not begin to fit, while every insect in the Amazon lifted its head from the leaf it was masticating and turned a slender antenna in her direction. She was a snack plate, a buffet line, a woman dressed for springtime in the North. Marina handed over her passport to the man at the desk whose shirt bore all the appropriate badges and tags of his office. He looked hard at her picture, her face. When asked, she said she was visiting Brazil on business. While her planned response to the question “How long will you stay?” was two weeks, she changed her mind just as she opened her mouth.

“Three weeks,” she said, and the man stamped an empty page in a booklet filled with empty pages.

Marina squeezed into place at the crowded baggage carousel and watched the river of bundled possessions flow past. Such enormous suitcases piled on top of one another like sandbags ready to stem a rising tide. Marina waited and watched for her own unassuming luggage, looking away only long enough to help a stranger drag a foot locker to the floor. She thought of Calcutta, the madness of the baggage claim that gave only the slightest preview to the madness of the streets outside. She and her mother and father were alone together among the thronging masses, her father shepherding them from the path of young men with roller carts. Sari-wrapped grandmothers guarded the family luggage by sitting on top of it, zippered soft-sides that strained to open against a series of exterior belts. Marina shook the image from her head, turning her full attention to the scene at hand. She tried to stay hopeful through the dwindling: the suitcases, the crowd, one by one they all left. A pair of child’s swim goggles remained on the belt and she watched them pass again and again. She made a mental list of the items a smarter person would have kept in a carry-on: the dictionary, the zippered bag with the phone, the Lariam, which was in a trash can in the Minneapolis — St. Paul airport.

The unhappy people who crowded the office of lost luggage pressed against the stacks of unclaimed suitcases and together they raised the temperature in the little room some fifteen degrees beyond the heat in the vast cavern of baggage claim. A small black metal fan sat on the desk and stirred hopelessly at the air in a two foot radius. One by one they approached the girl at the desk, making fast conversation in Portuguese. When Marina’s turn came she handed over her ticket and the address of her hotel without a word, and the girl, who had had more than a little experience with these situations, pushed forward a laminated sheet of pictures of various bags. Marina touched the suitcase that most resembled hers. The printer churned out a piece of paper that the girl then handed back to Marina, circling a phone number and a claim number.

Marina went past security and customs and stepped out into the lobby full of people who were looking behind her. Young girls stood on their toes and waved. Taxi drivers hustled for fares, cruise directors and Amazon adventure guides herded their charges into groups. An assortment of cheap shops and money changing stations vied for attention with bright colors and brighter lights, and right in the middle of everything stood a man in a dark suit holding a neatly lettered sign with two words:

Marina Singh.

So certain was Marina Singh that she was alone in this world that the sight of her own name written in a heavy black marker and properly spelled (how rarely anyone found the energy to include that final “h”) made her stop. The man holding the sign appeared to see everything, and though there were easily five hundred people to choose from, he very quickly turned to her. “Dr. Singh?” he said. He was quite far away. She did not hear her name as much as see it shaped by his lips and she nodded. He walked towards her and the sea of life parted easily around him. He held out his hand. “I am Milton.”

“Milton,” she said. She had to remind herself that an embrace was not in order.

“You are quite late. I was concerned.” And he looked concerned. His eyes peered into hers for any sign that things had not gone well.

“My luggage was lost. I had to go to the claims office. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know that anyone would be here to meet me.”

“You have no luggage?” Milton said.

“I have an overcoat.” She patted at the coat and saw that one sleeve was almost to the floor. She pushed it back in the bag.

On his face she saw a look of sorrow and responsibility. “You’ll come with me?” He took the small bag from her and put his hand very lightly on her upper arm, moving her a few steps backwards into

the crowd.

“I filled out all the forms,” she said.

He shook his head. “We must go back.”

“But we can’t go back through security.” To move backwards through a security door, a door clearly marked to indicate that all traffic flowed in one direction, was as likely as going back in time, but there was Milton, his hand now resting on the shoulder of the security guard. He leaned his body slightly forward and whispered something to the man with the gun and the man with the gun held up his hand to stop the people who were pouring ahead to let Milton and Marina through. They walked the wrong way through customs where a man in uniform had two hands deep inside a woman’s purse. He then held out one of those hands to Milton and Milton shook it as they passed.

“I’ll need your paper,” Milton said to Marina, and she handed it to him. Already they were moving past the carousels. They stepped into the claims office which was now crowded with different people who had lost their luggage on later flights. They pushed against one another, angry and sad, thinking they had been the only ones.

The girl working behind the desk saw them, or sensed them, as soon as they stepped inside the door and she raised her head. “Milton,” she said, smiling, and then she was off on a tear of Portuguese. Marina put together the girl’s opening and then lost the thread—“Isso é um sonho.” The girl waved them up to the front where she and Milton began a conversation in passionate animation. When a man who had waited more than an hour for a word of recognition began to protest, the girl made a clucking sound with her tongue and silenced him. Milton gave her the computer printout and she read the report she had typed up herself as if it were a document of compelling mystery, then let out a long sigh. From his wallet Milton took a business card and quickly folded a bill around it, talking, talking. The girl took it from him and he kissed the tips of her fingers. She laughed and said something to Marina that may or may not have been lurid in nature. Marina looked back at her, dumb as a sock.

The outside air was heavy enough to be bitten and chewed. Never had Marina’s lungs taken in so much oxygen, so much moisture. With every inhalation she felt she was introducing unseen particles of plant life into her body, tiny spores that bedded down in between her cilia and set about taking root. An insect flew against her ear, emitting a sound so piercing that her head snapped back as if struck. Another insect bit her cheek just as she raised her hand to drive the first one away. They were not in the jungle, they were in a parking lot. For an instant the heat lightning brightened up an ominous cloud bank miles to the south and just as quickly left them in darkness.

“Do you have what you need in the small bag?” Milton asked hopefully.

Marina shook her head. “Books,” she said, “a coat.” The manual for the phone that was lost. A neck pillow for sleeping on the plane. A copy of The Wings of the Dove, which she brought because she thought it was long enough to see her through the entire trip. A copy of the New England Journal of Medicine, which contained a chapter of Dr. Swenson’s report—“Reproductive Endocrinology in the Lakashi People.”

“Then we must get you some things tonight,” he said. His brother-in-law ran a store in town. Milton took out his cell phone, assuring her the brother-in-law would be amenable to meeting them with the keys despite the late hour, not a problem, and Marina, who very much wanted a toothbrush, accepted.

Milton was careful to maneuver around those potholes which could be maneuvered around. He drove cautiously through the ones that could not. People clumped together on corners of busy streets waiting for a light to cross, but when the lights changed they continued to stand there. Girls dressed for dancing pushed strollers past walls pasted over in handbills. An old woman with a broom swept debris through the middle of an intersection. Marina watched all of it thinking of Anders, wondering if he had seen these same people on the night he arrived. She couldn’t imagine things in Manaus changed very much from one night to the next. “Did you drive Dr. Eckman?” Marina asked.

“Eckman,” Milton said, as if it were an object whose English name was unfamiliar to him.

“Anders Eckman. He came here just after Christmas. We work for the same company.”

Milton shook his head. “Do many of your doctors come to Brazil?”

Exactly three, Marina thought, and then she said, “Not many.” Of course no one would have thought to get Anders a car and driver. Anders would have found his luggage and taken it to the taxi line, opened his Portuguese phrase book and rehearsed the sentence, “What is the fare to the hotel?” It occurred to Marina now how close she was to him here. She thought of him standing in that same airport, his feet planted on the same asphalt outside. They had been divided by only a scant handful of months, one of them slipping out the back door while the other was coming in the front. It was then that an entirely different idea came to Marina. “Did you ever drive a woman named Dr. Swenson?”

“Dr. Swenson, of course. She is a very good customer. Do you work with Dr. Swenson as well?”

Marina sat up straighter then and as soon as she did she felt her seat belt lock into place. If Vogel hadn’t bothered to hire a driver for Anders they certainly would have found one for Dr. Swenson, or Dr. Swenson would have found one for herself. It would be a car as clean as this one, a driver as strikingly competent. “Do you know where she lives?”

“In Manaus, yes. It isn’t far from your hotel. But Dr. Swenson is rarely in Manaus. Her work is in the jungle.” Milton stopped then, and Marina saw him glance at her in the rearview mirror. “You know her, yes?” He should not be talking about the people he drives. He should not be talking about Dr. Swenson.

“She was my teacher in medical school,” Marina said, offering up this bit of her past so easily it felt like a lie. “Many years ago. We work for the same company now. I’ve come here to find her. Our company has sent me to talk to her about the project she’s working on.”

“And so you know,” Milton said, his voice relieved.

“I have her address in town but no one is able to reach her where she’s working. Dr. Swenson won’t use cell phones.”

“She calls me from the pay phone at the dock when she comes to the city.”

“And it doesn’t matter if you’re driving someone else. .” She was speaking from her own, distant experience.

Milton nodded then, keeping his eyes straight ahead. “There’s never any warning when she’s coming, when she leaves. Sometimes months go by and she doesn’t come in from the jungle. I grew up in Manaus. I wouldn’t spend so much time out there.”

“Nothing bothers Dr. Swenson,” Marina said.

“No,” Milton said, but after more consideration he added, “except not being picked up at the dock.”

In a few more turns Milton brought her to another part of the city where people walked through the streets arguing or holding hands, oblivious to the fact it was night and there was nothing going on around them in any direction. Up ahead a man sat on a low cement step and Milton pulled the car over. Immediately the man stood up and opened Marina’s door. He was tall and thin, wearing a pink cotton shirt that would have covered two of him. He greeted them in clipped Portuguese. He clearly was not as pleased to be coming out late as Milton had suggested.

“Negócio é negócio,” Milton said, turning off the ignition. He introduced his brother-in-law, Rodrigo, to Marina, as Rodrigo took her hand to help her out of the car.

Rodrigo said something to Milton when he unlocked the door to the building. Milton then flipped on the lights. Inside it smelled of sawdust. He checked to make sure the door was locked behind them. Rodrigo turned off the lights and Milton turned them on again. Rodrigo covered his eyes with his hands as if trying to ensure darkness, all the while making quick use of a language Marina did not speak. She blinked, her eyes dilated and blind and then flooded with electric light. The store was nothing but a large square with wood plank floors and every conceivable item crammed inside: canned food and clothes and pills, sunglasses, postcards, bags of seed, laundry soap. The colors of the boxes and bottles climbing up and up to the high ceiling made her dizzy. The general tenor of the argument between the two men was clear to her even if she didn’t understand the words. They were taking turns flipping the switch from off to on to off and she was to make fast work in the light while she had it. She picked up a red toothbrush, deodorant, toothpaste, shampoo, insect repellent, sunblock, two cotton shirts, T-shirts, a straw hat. She held a pair of pants up to her waist and then dropped them on the counter. The suitcase might arrive in the morning or she might never see it again. She picked up a package of underwear and then a cluster of elastic hair bands. “So when was the last time you saw Dr. Swenson?” Marina asked.

“Dr. Singh conhece o Dr. Swenson,” Milton said to his brother-in-law. Marina heard both of their names. In a gesture that struck her as being particularly Indian, Rodrigo pressed his palms together in front of his lips and made a slight bow of his head.

“She is an excellent customer,” Milton said. “She buys all the provisions for the camp here. It is something to see the way she comes into the store. She stands right in the middle, right where you are, and points to what she wants and Rodrigo brings it down for her. She does it all without a list. It’s impressive.”

“Muito decisivo,” Rodrigo said. “Muito rápido.”

“It used to be one of the other doctors might come in for supplies. Dr. Swenson would be working very hard on her medicine and so she would send someone else into town, then two days later there she would be at the dock. She’d say they hadn’t bought enough things, or the right things. In the end she told me sending someone else was only time wasted. Sometimes she sends in Easter with a note if there is something special she needs, but that isn’t often. He couldn’t do all the shopping himself.”

Rodrigo disagreed. Milton ignored him. “Rodrigo knows her very well now. There are certain items he orders just for her.”

“Other doctors?” Marina said. Outside she could hear voices and then the rattling of the door handle, and then the slapping of hands against glass. The crowd wanted in.

“It hasn’t been a month since she was here.” Milton looked at Rodrigo and asked in Portuguese, “Um mês?” Rodrigo nodded. “That could be inconvenient for you,” Milton said. “I’ve known her to be gone for three.”

Marina pictured three months in this city she had yet to see in daylight, wearing these clothes, memorizing the manual for the missing cell phone. She would buy a boat and head down the river herself if it came to that. She asked if there was anyone who would know how to find her.

Milton tilted his head from side to side as if weighing out his thoughts. “If anyone did it would be the Bovenders, but I don’t really think that they know.”

“Dr. Swenson não lhes diria nada,” Rodrigo said. He could follow the conversation well enough in English but did not speak it. He brought out a hooded rain poncho folded into a clear plastic sack and a small umbrella. He handed them to Marina and nodded at her with a gravity that insisted she add them to her purchases.

“You have another idea?” Milton asked his brother-in-law in English.

“The Bovenders,” Marina said.

“They are the young couple who stay in her apartment. No doubt you’ll meet them. They are very hard to miss. They are travelers.” Milton closed his eyes. “What is the word?”

“Boêmio,” Rodrigo said disapprovingly.

Milton opened his eyes. “They are young bohemians.”

Rodrigo was making a list of everything Marina was taking, writing down the prices with a pencil. She held a single yellow flip-flop against the sole of her shoe, then she put it back to try another. She picked up a prepaid phone card. Anders would have found the Bovenders easily enough if they were living in Dr. Swenson’s apartment. He had the address where her mail was delivered, he would have gone there first. In the store there was an irregular clicking sound, a tapping that wasn’t coming from the people who were taking turns trying to force open the door. It sounded like someone was hitting the edge of a watch against a counter. She looked up to the ceiling to see some hard-shelled insects dashing themselves against the fluorescent tubing. From where she stood they didn’t appear to have wings.

“Estoque!” Milton called out to the people clustered on the other side of the glass. He continued to shout at them in Portuguese. Rodrigo shut off the light again. In the dark he put her purchases into tissue thin plastic bags.

“What do they want?” Marina asked.

Milton turned and looked at her. “They don’t want anything,” he said, pointing out the way in which their situation was different. “They’re just looking to pass the night.”

When Rodrigo finally did open the door to let Milton and Marina out it became clear that the crowd wasn’t as large as it had appeared when viewed through a pane of glass, maybe twenty people, and some of them were children. They looked dissipated standing there in the open street, as if there had never really been the energy needed to push their way inside. Still, they waited around to voice their disappointment, which they did in a half-hearted manner.

When Rodrigo opened the car door for Marina she suddenly realized she hadn’t paid for anything. The featherweight sacks containing everything she had taken were looped over her fingers and she held them up to the two men. “I haven’t paid,” she said to Milton. The members of the dwindling crowd who hadn’t wandered home leaned in towards her, hoping to make out the contents of her bags.

He shook his head. “It all goes on account, yes?”

“Whose account?”

“Vogel,” Rodrigo said. He reached into one of the bags and showed her the carbon of the bill, a neatly printed record of everything she was leaving with.

Marina started to say something and then let it go. If it seemed odd to her that a general store in Manaus had direct billing with an American pharmaceutical company, it did not seem odd to the two men. She thanked them both and said good night to Rodrigo, who, under Milton’s translation, wished her luggage a safe return. Because he opened the back door of the car for her that was where she sat for the very short ride to her hotel. When they reached their destination, Milton gathered up the few things she had and walked her inside.

She had a room at The Hotel Indira. She could not imagine that whoever booked it had known enough to mean it as a joke. From the grand exterior she entered a lobby of palm plants and tired brown sofas that slumped together as if they had come as far as they could and then given up. Milton checked her in and then came back to give her the key. After a pleasant wish for a good night he left her there, having circled his cell phone number on his business card. She realized that without Milton she might have slept in a chair in the airport and then checked in for the morning flight back to Miami. Even when she was in her room and had hung her coat on a metal bar that was attached rather nakedly to the wall, she thought about that flight. She sat down on the edge of the bed and fished a pair of reading glasses out from the bottom of her purse in order to see the endless series of microscopic numbers from the phone card she had bought in Rodrigo’s store. Somehow it was only one hour earlier in Eden Prairie. After so much travel she was a scant hour from home. Mr. Fox answered on the second ring.

“I’m here,” she said.

“Good,” he said. “Good.” He cleared his throat and she heard some rustling around. She wondered if she had woken him up. “I thought I’d hear from you earlier. Did you get some dinner?”

Marina thought about it. She must have eaten something on the plane but she couldn’t remember. “My suitcase was lost. I’m sure they’ll bring it tomorrow but I wanted you to know I don’t have the phone.”

“You put the phone in your suitcase?” he said.

“I put it in the suitcase.”

Mr. Fox was quiet for the briefest moment. “They always find them these days. Usually they bring it to the hotel in the middle of the night. Call the desk as soon as you wake up in the morning. I’ll bet it’s there.”

“The driver took me to get some things. At least I have a toothbrush now. Thank you for that, by the way.”

“For the toothbrush?”

“For Milton, the driver.” She put her hand over the receiver and yawned.

“I’m glad he’s helpful. I’m sorry I’m not more helpful myself.”

She nodded, for all the good it did their conversation. Maybe she should have waited until tomorrow to call. The draperies were open and she looked out onto the city, that infinite sea of tiny lights. In the dark, in the distance, she could have been anywhere. She closed her eyes.

“Marina?” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I think I fell asleep.”

“Go to bed. We can talk tomorrow.”

“Unless the phone doesn’t come,” she said, and then she remembered. “Or you can call me at the hotel.”

“I’ll do that,” he said. “Get some sleep.”

“I’ll write you a letter,” she said. She did not remember hanging up the phone.

Manaus wasn’t difficult to figure out. It catered to tourists and travelers and shippers, who, in this accommodating city, were free from all import duties. Everyone was either getting off of boats or getting on them, and so the streets had been laid out in such a way that one always had the feeling of walking away from the water or towards it. By the third day Marina could navigate easily. Once she got a fix on the river’s position everything else fell into place. She went to the market hall at six in the morning when the world was out to accomplish as much as was humanly possible before the truly devastating heat began. The smell of so many dead fish and chickens and sides of beef tilting precariously towards rot in the still air made her hold a crumpled T-shirt over the lower half of her face but she took the time to stop and look at the herbs and barks at the medicine table, the snake heads floating in what she sincerely hoped was alcohol. A black vulture the size of a turkey walked down the aisles like all the other shoppers, looking for whatever fish heads and entrails were to be had underneath the tables. The bloody scraps were hard to find. Marina bought two apple-flavored bananas and a pastry from a woman who kept hers under a crumpled sheet of waxed paper. After that she went down to the river to watch the boats. She spent a great deal of time looking at the water, which was the color of milky tea and completely opaque even when she walked down a dock, squatted on her heels, and stared directly into it. She did this often. She couldn’t see a quarter of an inch below the surface. She was waiting for Dr. Swenson.

Waiting for Dr. Swenson to appear would have been a clear waste of time had there been some other means of putting time to better use. Waiting for her suitcase was simply not a full time job, even though Tomo, the young man at the front desk of her hotel, was kind enough to call the airport twice a day and inquire as to its status. There were also the Bovenders to wait for. Marina had the address of Dr. Swenson’s apartment and so every day she had written to them, putting both the names Bovender and Swenson on the envelope and neatly printing her request for contact along with her hotel information. From what Marina could tell from the building’s architecture and neighborhood, and from the well-appointed lobby where she left off her letters at the desk every morning, it was one of the city’s better residences. She wondered what it was costing Vogel to keep a pied-à-terre in Brazil that was mainly inhabited by bohemians who didn’t seem to be home much themselves. Of course, it was possible that the bohemians had gone on. They had been described as travelers after all, and this was clearly a city where people who had somewhere else to go would not be inclined to stay. She nodded again to the concierge who as always took her envelope with an enormous grin and great, energetic nodding.

“Bovenders,” she said pointedly.

“Bonvenders!” he replied.

She decided that her project for the afternoon would be to cobble together a note in Portuguese to hand him tomorrow. It would be better if she could explain to the concierge, as well as to the mythical Bovenders, what she was after.

All of Marina’s activities — waiting at the river, waiting outside the apartment building, wandering through the city in hopes that she might be struck by some piece of inspiration that could lead her in the direction of Dr. Swenson — were punctuated by rain, blinding, torrential downpours that seemed to rise out of clear skies and turn the streets into wild rivers that ran ankle deep. People moved calmly from the open spaces and pressed their backs against buildings, sharing whatever room there was beneath various overhangs while they waited for the storms to pass. Several times a day she had the opportunity to be grateful to Rodrigo for pushing the rubberized poncho on her.

Of course there were times when neither the poncho nor the awnings were enough and the rain drove Marina to run in her flip-flops back to the hotel, every drop pricking her skin like a hornet. The chemicals in her sunscreen mixed with the DEET in her insect repellent and when she tried to wipe the water from her face it burned her eyes until she was half blind. Back at the hotel she showered and napped and did her best with the James novel, and when she’d had enough of that she read about the reproductive endocrinology in the Lakashi people.

As Anders had tried to explain to her when she had been so disinclined to listen, the Lakashi were an isolated tribe in the Amazon whose women appeared to continue to give birth to healthy infants well into their seventies. Securing accurate ages on the women was of course an inaccurate science. Still, it did not undermine the point: old women were having babies. The Lakashi were reproducing for up to thirty years beyond the women in the neighboring tribes. Families containing five generations were commonplace, and aside from what could perhaps be called a heightened exhaustion, they all appeared to enjoy a state of health commensurate to that of their indigenous peers. Birth defects, mental retardation, problems with bones, teeth, vision, height, weight, everything came out as average in both mothers and children as compared to members in neighboring tribes over a thirty-five-year period of study.

Marina rolled over onto her back and held the journal above her. A thirty-five-year period of study? That would mean that while Dr. Swenson was, to the best of her knowledge, teaching a full load at Hopkins she was also studying the Lakashi in Brazil? Of course, who knew what she did on the weekends, spring breaks, Thanksgiving vacations. It was possible she had been flying to Manaus all those years and hiring a boat to take her down the splitting tributaries of the Rio Negro. Had it been anyone else she would have been certain the whole report was an ambitious fraud, but Dr. Swenson had always exhibited a relentless energy that defied all human understanding. If someone had told Marina that while she was stumbling through her rounds half asleep in Baltimore, Dr. Swenson was taking the red-eye to Brazil to collect data, she would have been impressed but not amazed. In fact, the very paper she was reading included research from a dissertation for which she had been awarded a doctorate in ethnobotany from Harvard. It seemed there was a great deal about Dr. Swenson she didn’t know.

When the rains came hard and caught her out too far to run back to the hotel, Marina would go to the Internet café and pay five dollars to look up information about Dr. Swenson or her tribe, but as she sat there trying not to let her hair drip on the keyboard she found there was remarkably little information to be had. Google Annick Swenson and there were course descriptions, appearances at medical conferences, papers — mostly related to gynecological surgery — some tedious postings from medical students who complained that Dr. Swenson’s classes, and probably all of their classes, were unfairly difficult. Most of the mentions of Lakashi linked back to the New England Journal of Medicine article, although the name also came up in relation to the famous Harvard ethnobotanist Martin Rapp, who had first interacted with the tribe while taking plant samples in 1960. His interest in them as a people appeared nominal, as his writing about their habits was limited to which species of fungi they did and did not consume. There was a single picture of him, an extremely thin sunburnt man with light hair and a straight English nose who stood a head above the natives on either side of him. They were all holding up mushrooms. Marina read everything she could find about Dr. Rapp and the Lakashi in hopes that there might be some clues as to their location, but the most specific directive she found was “central Amazon basin.” Leave it to Dr. Swenson to somehow manage to keep the Internet out of her business.

“Tell me they’ve found the suitcase,” Mr. Fox said as soon as he answered the phone. Mr. Fox had somehow become more focused on whether or not she had made successful contact with her luggage than with either Dr. Swenson or the mythical Bovenders.

“Apparently the airport code for Manaus is MAO. Madrid is MAD. The theory is that an O starts to look like a D after a certain number of suitcases and so they start sending bags to Spain.”

“I’m going to mail you another phone,” he said. “I’ll get it programmed and shipped down there tomorrow. You’re going to need more Lariam soon anyway. Make a list of what you want.”

“Nothing,” she said, looking at the rings of insect bites that braceleted her wrists and ankles, hard red bumps that she longed to dig out with her fingernails. “I don’t need anything. The second you send another phone my suitcase will show up and then I’ll have two.”

“So then you’ll have two. You can give one to Dr. Swenson. There may be someone she wants to call.”

In fact, Marina enjoyed not having a telephone. She had started out as an intern with a pager and then added to that a cell phone that later turned into a BlackBerry. In Manaus, there was an almost indescribable sense of freedom that came from wandering around in a strange city knowing that she was unreachable. “Speaking of Dr. Swenson, I’ve been reading about the Lakashi.”

“It’s always good to read up on people before you meet them,” Mr. Fox replied.

“It’s an interesting article but she doesn’t exactly give anything away.”

“Dr. Swenson doesn’t mean to give things away.”

“So what’s the secret ingredient? Does she even know? Certainly the Lakashi don’t know. I don’t care how primitive these women are, if they understood what they were doing that was causing them to remain fertile unto death they’d stop doing it.”

Mr. Fox fell silent on his end and Marina waited.

“You know and you don’t want to tell me?” Marina said, laughing. Surely his secretary, the very serious Mrs. Dunaway, had walked into his office at that moment and forced him to wait on his reply.

“It isn’t a matter of want,” Mr. Fox said finally.

Marina had relaxed into the conversation and spread herself out across the bed but a bolt of incredulity forced her to sit upright again. “What?”

“There is an agreement of confidentiality—”

“I’m in Brazil,” she said. “I found a lizard in the bathtub this morning the size of a kitten. I don’t know where Dr. Swenson is or how to find her and now you’re saying you aren’t going to tell me how the Lakashi women maintain fertility? Is there something I still need to do to merit your trust?”

“Marina, Marina, it has nothing to do with you. It’s contractual. I’m not allowed to talk about it.”

“It has nothing to do with me? Then why am I here? If this

has nothing to do with me then I would very much like to come

home now.”

In truth, she did not care. She did not care that the Lakashi were having 3.7 times the number of children as compared to other indigenous Brazilians over the course of their lifetimes. She didn’t care where they lived or if they were happy or if they wanted the children they had. What she did care about, cared about very much in fact, was that her employer, who had virtually proposed marriage and then sent her off to the equator after one of Vogel’s employees had died there, now refused to share with her the basic information of the research in question. “When I find Dr. Swenson and all those pregnant Lakashi people, am I supposed to avert my eyes so I won’t figure out how they’re managing this? Do they make it a practice of killing anyone who finds out their secret?” And then she saw Anders standing ankle deep in the muddy river, holding a single blue envelope in his hand. “My God,” she said. “My God, I didn’t mean that.”

“They chew some sort of bark while it’s still on the tree,” Mr.

Fox said.

Marina did not care at all about the bark or the trees. “I didn’t mean that.”

“I know,” he said, but all the light had gone out of his voice, and in another couple of sentences they had wrapped it all up and gotten off the phone. Marina put her shoes on and went back out into the street. The rain had stopped and the sun was beating the pavement and buildings and people and dogs into a flat sameness. She didn’t want to walk to the river or the market hall and so she walked for a while around the square in the choking humidity thinking of how Anders must have walked around the square as well. Maybe he hadn’t felt hopeless when he came here. Maybe he was glad to go on day-long birding excursions into the jungle and drink pisco sours alone at the bar at night. Marina bent over to look at the carved trinkets that a group of natives were selling off a blanket. She picked up a bracelet that could have been smooth painted beads or red seeds with holes drilled through the centers. She let the woman on the blanket tie it to her wrist with a complex and permanent set of knots and then bite off the ends, her lips somehow never touching skin. One of the children, a narrow-chested boy of nine or ten, looked through the menagerie of tiny carved animals that were spread out in front of him and picked out a white heron that was two inches high, a tiny fish caught in the needle of its beak, and he handed it to her. Marina had meant to refuse it, but once she held it up she thought it was in fact very fine, better than anything else she had seen, and so she agreed to buy the heron and the bracelet for a handful of bills she thought worked out to be about three dollars U.S. She put the little bird in her pocket and walked down a series of side streets, careful to keep all her turns in mind. She wasn’t in the mood to get lost. The farther she walked the more she noticed that no one was looking at her. The small boys with stacks of T-shirts and dazzling butterflies pinned to boards inside cheap wooden frames didn’t follow her. The ice cream vendors didn’t call to her, nor did the man with the mustache and a small monkey on each shoulder who was barking at tourists in Portuguese. With her black hair caught back in a barrette beneath the hat she’d bought and her cheap clothing and her flip-flops, she was able to pass in Manaus the way she was never able to pass in Minnesota. Here they looked at her and seeing someone who looked something like a woman they knew, looked away. When she was spoken to it was only a simple greeting, that much she understood, and she nodded her head in recognition and kept walking. Anders would have been mobbed everywhere. He was so blue-eyed and overly tall, his skin was very nearly luminous, as unfamiliar to these people as snow itself. Any passerby could see deeper into Anders than he could the Rio Negro. Marina thought of all the times he’d come to work on Monday after a weekend spent paddling the boys around some lake in the summer, and how his skin would be scorched, his lips and nose already starting to peel. “Haven’t you heard of sunblock?” Marina said. “Hats?”

“They keep all that information from men.” He didn’t wear a tie to work on those days and his shirt collar stayed open. The sore, red visage of his neck was something Marina made a point not to look at. Who thought it would be a good idea to send Anders to the equator? Her own skin was darker now. The sun had extended its reach past the hats and creams. It was inevitable.

When Marina turned again, a turn that was as aimless as all the others she had made, she found herself back at Rodrigo’s store. There were no crowds out front this time, no one peering in the window. In the daylight it didn’t appear to be such a compelling attraction. The street outside was empty of people, empty of cars. In fact when she went inside, thinking she would say hello, buy a bottle of water, there was only one young couple in the store, a man and woman in their twenties pointing up to something that was over their heads. The woman was long-limbed and tan in a red sundress and she stretched to try and reach for whatever it was she wanted. Her long yellow hair, which was held away from her face by a large pair of sunglasses pushed back on her head, was the brightest aspect of the room, as it seemed that Rodrigo was no more inclined towards electricity during the day than he had been at night. The young man, who may have been a little taller than the woman, stood back in his T-shirt and baggy shorts and watched her stretch. His hair was pale brown and shaggy and his face, which was nearly too pretty, was half covered up in what was either a beard or several days spent not shaving. They hadn’t noticed her come in, and so Marina watched them, in part because they made an unusual sight for Manaus, and in part because she was sure that they were the Bovenders.

She had pictured the Bovenders as being closer to her own age, without any of the drama inherent to so much bony attractiveness, but the minute she walked in the store she revised the imaginings of her idle mind. There was a tattoo banding the young man’s ankle, a decorative vine, and around the woman’s ankle a small gold chain. Marina had exactly one word of description to work from, bohemians, and these were the only two bohemians she had seen in three days.

Rodrigo came into the store from a room behind the counter. He told the couple something in Portuguese and the young woman disagreed and once again reached above her head helplessly while the young man folded his arms across his chest. Was it the soap pads she wanted? When Rodrigo turned for the ladder he saw Marina standing just inside the open door and in the course of a single second he placed her, remembered who it was she wanted to find, and was pleased at the luck of being the one to make the introductions. “Ola! Dr. Singh!” he said, and when the young couple turned to see who it was Rodrigo knew, he opened his hands towards his other guests. “Bovenders.”

The young Bovenders, in possession of a highly evolved social instinct, were beaming as they walked towards her. If they had been working to avoid her they were masters at hiding it. In fact, it seemed as if meeting her in this store on this afternoon was the very thing they were most looking forward to in all the world and they would not hold it against her that she had come a little late. “Barbara Bovender,” the young woman said, extending her hand. She smiled to show the slight disorder among her large white teeth.

“Jackie,” the young man said, and Marina shook his hand as well. The accent she thought was Australian but she wasn’t positive. They seemed too tan to be English.

Rodrigo said something to Barbara and she squinted at him slightly when he spoke, as if she were translating each word separately and then reassembling them into a sentence in her head.

“Nos?”

“Dr. Swenson,” he said.

“Yes, of course,” Barbara said, looking almost relieved. “You’re looking for Dr. Swenson.”

“People don’t look for us,” Jackie said.

“That’s because nobody knows where we are,” Barbara said, and then she laughed. “That makes it sound like we’re hiding.”

Marina tried to put this couple together in her mind with Dr. Swenson. She tried to picture the three of them standing together in the same room. She could not. “I’ve left letters for you.”

“For us?” Jackie asked. “At the apartment?”

“At Dr. Swenson’s apartment building. I left them at the desk.”

At this point Rodrigo got the ladder and climbed up towards the ceiling to get a box of dryer sheets. The hierarchy in which different items were desired, needed, and sold, could clearly be charted based on what was closest to the ceiling and what was closest to the floor. Dryer sheets appeared to be hovering on the edge of obscurity for everyone in Manaus save Barbara Bovender.

“All the mail goes straight into a box,” Jackie said. “Annick picks it up when she comes into town.”

“Or she doesn’t,” Barbara said. “She isn’t very good about the mail. I’ve told her I’d open it for her, sort it all out, but she says not to bother. I think at the heart of it she just doesn’t care.”

Jackie turned then to face his wife. Was she his wife? The Bovenders could have been siblings or cousins. The general resemblance they bore to one another was striking. “She has a lot on her mind.”

Barbara nodded, half closing her eyes, as if she were considering all the many weights Dr. Swenson had to bear. “It’s true.”

“We have a postbox,” Jackie said. “That way when we get to the next town they’ll forward it on.”

“Are you leaving?” Marina asked.

“Oh, we will, sooner or later,” Barbara said. She looked over at Rodrigo who now had the box of dryer sheets in his hand. “We’re always leaving. We’ve stayed here longer than anywhere.”

Somehow Marina was hoping she didn’t mean Manaus. She couldn’t imagine how she would last out the week. “In Brazil?”

“No, here,” Jackie said, and held up his open hand as if he meant to say that they had spent an endless stretch of time in Rodrigo’s store.

Barbara then got a serious look on her face and tilted the slender rack of her shoulders towards Marina. “Do you know Annick?”

Marina hesitated so briefly that neither of the young people saw it. “I do,” she said.

“Well, then you know. Her work is so important—”

Jackie interrupted her. “And she’s been really good to us, my God.”

“It’s not like I think we’re helping her,” Barbara said. “We’re not scientists. But if she thinks we’re helping her, if there’s anything we can do to contribute, then it’s not a problem for us to stay for a while. It’s not a problem for me anyway. I can do my work anywhere. It’s really harder for Jackie.”

“What do you do?” Marina said, using the pronoun in the plural.

“I’m a writer,” Barbara said.

Jackie raised his hand and ran his open fingers through his hair. “I surf,” he said.

Harder, yes. Marina thought about the bath-warm water of the Rio Negro inching along towards the Rio Solimões so that they could flow together into the Amazon. She was planning to ask him something about this, how surfing constituted work or how he planned to solve the current problems of his employment, when the only other person she knew in Manuas came through the open door. When Milton saw the three of them together he was extremely pleased. He had left his suit in the closet at home and was dressed for the weather. All his light cotton clothes were neatly pressed. “Perfect!” he said. “You found each other without me.”

Marina extended her hand to the driver. Because she knew him to be a problem solver she was especially glad to see him again. “I was just out taking a walk.”

“A bad time of day for walking but this is very good,” Milton said. “I am relieved. I have been telling them to go to your hotel.”

Jackie had wandered off to pick up the store’s lone can of tennis balls. It seemed that there was nothing Rodrigo hadn’t thought of. Barbara in turn shot her eyes to Milton who seemed startled by the severity of her glance. “I’m sorry,” he said, before he knew what he might be apologizing for.

Barbara sighed and tried to brush a medium-sized insect off the front of her sundress. It was hard-shelled and black and the tiny spikes on its legs held stubbornly to the fabric but she seemed not to notice any of this. She put her thumb beneath her index finger and gave the bug a single, dislodging flick. “You’ll forgive me,” she said to Marina, who imagined she would. “Part of what we try to do is keep Annick hidden — from the press that comes down, from other doctors and drug companies trying to steal her work. You never know who someone really is no matter what they tell you.”

“I am terribly sorry,” Milton said.

“The press comes here?” Marina said.

Barbara looked at her. “Well, they will once they hear about her research. They did before we got here. What really matters is that people shouldn’t distract her. Even people with very good intentions.” She was trying to be firm but she lacked experience.

“Dr. Singh works for Vogel,” Milton said in an attempt to make up for his indiscretion. “She and Dr. Swenson are employed by the same company. They sent her here to—” He looked at Marina but he had to stop there. She hadn’t told him why they’d sent her.

“Vogel”—she looked at Marina—“I’m sorry but that is my point exactly. Vogel is the worst. All they want to know is what her progress is. How can she be expected to do her work if she’s constantly being monitored? This is science. This may change the course of everything. She can’t just stop and meet people. Do you know that you’re the second doctor that Vogel’s sent to see her since Christmas?”

“I do,” Marina said. If she were in any way inclined to have compassion for the girl she would have stopped her then, but at the moment she did not. Jackie had come back now and he kept the can of tennis balls in his hand. Maybe he wanted them. Maybe he knew a court nearby where they could play.

“You know Dr. Eckman?”

“We worked together.”

Barbara shrugged her pretty shoulders which were gold along the tops and gold down her arms. “Well, if he’s a friend of yours, I’m sorry. He’s a perfectly nice guy but he was a huge distraction. He hung around here forever, always asking questions, always wanting to go along. He was a distraction to my work. I can’t even imagine what he must have been like for Annick.”

“He took me birding,” Jackie said.

“I tried to explain to him that Annick didn’t have the time, but he wasn’t going to go until he saw her. She finally came and picked him up. For all I know he’s still out there.”

“He isn’t,” Marina said. “Or he is. He’s dead.” It wasn’t the girl’s fault of course, not any of it, but Marina found her sadness transposed itself easily into anger.

Jackie put down the tennis balls then and took Barbara’s hand in a gesture of sympathy or solidarity. She watched the color drain from the girl, from her face, her neck, all the blood was rushing to her heart. Even the gold receded from her shoulders.

“Dr. Swenson buried him at the research station where she works. She told us that in a letter. She sent us very little information about his death, but, as you say, she’s busy. Dr. Eckman’s wife wanted me to come down to see if I could find out what happened. She wants to know what she should tell their children.”

Three women came into the store then, one of them holding a baby, and in another minute a couple came in behind them. It seemed that they all knew one another, the way they were talking. The woman with the baby passed her baby over to another one of the women so that she could look at cooking oil.

“I need to sit down,” Barbara said. She did not say this dramatically. The two Bovenders left the store together to sit on the cement steps out front. Almost immediately Jackie came back in to get her a bottle of water.

“Ah, your poor friend,” Milton said to Marina. “I am very sorry.”

Marina nodded, unable to focus her eyes on Milton or the Bovenders or anything in the store.

When the Bovenders did get up from the steps, after Barbara had finished her bottle of water, they did not come back into the store. Rodrigo wrote out the same well-ordered receipt to charge to the Vogel account and then gathered up the things they’d wanted and put them into bags: dryer sheets, tennis balls, a new sun hat, mangoes and bananas. Marina in her rush to be unpleasant had likely broken the one thread she could have followed into the jungle. Maybe they found Anders annoying, but in his affable way he had managed to wear them down. Still, she liked to think if she had been the one who died and he was coming in as the replacement, his patience would have been limited as well.