State of Wonder

Four

Jackie sat up front with Milton on the way to Ponta Negra while Marina sat with Barbara in the back. They kept the windows down. In the wind tunnel that roared through the backseat, strands of Barbara’s hair would intermittently fly out and strike Marina in the face even though Barbara did her best to gather her hair in her hands and hold it down. Jackie was prone towards car sickness, and the road to the beach was neither smooth nor straight.

“It wouldn’t be better if you were cool?” Milton asked Jackie. Jackie said nothing.

“He needs the fresh air,” Barbara shouted from the back.

Marina might have noted that the air was not particularly fresh but she refrained. The Bovenders had invited her to the beach and she was determined to be grateful that they had extended themselves. When he was invited to come along on the outing and bring his car, Milton had said they needed to leave no later than six a.m. The beach, like the market, was strictly a morning affair. But the Bovenders would not hear of six. They claimed they were useless until nine at the very earliest, and while Milton and Marina were waiting for them in front of the apartment at that designated hour, the Bovenders did not make an appearance until nearly ten. It was, Marina thought, a bad start. “Wouldn’t you get motion sickness from surfing?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard over the din of circulating air. They were going fast; Jackie had said he wanted to go fast in order to get out of the car as soon as possible.

“Not a problem,” he said.

“He can surf a killer wave but on boats,” Barbara said. “My God, he can’t even look at a boat. He can’t walk down a dock.”

“Baby, please,” Jackie said, his voice weak.

“Sorry,” Barbara said, and turned her head towards the window.

“I don’t have any problems when I drive,” Jackie said.

As they rounded another hairpin curve a silky white goat trotted into the road and Milton slammed the brakes. Marina, who was not given to car sickness in the least, felt her stomach lurch up. The people in the car understood that the goat had escaped his fate by no more than four inches, but the goat understood nothing. It looked up, mildly puzzled, sniffed the blacktop, and then went on. Jackie opened the door and vomited lightly.

“I can’t let you drive,” Milton said.

“I know,” Jackie said, and he covered his eyes with his hand.

The night before at dinner the Bovenders had made a list of everything Marina should see while she was in Manaus. “There isn’t much to do around here,” Jackie had said, “so you really ought to make the effort.” They offered to take her to the beach and the Natural Science Museum but both required a car. Barbara took out her cell phone at the dinner table and called Milton. His number was programmed in.

The Bovenders had come to her. They had waited nearly a week after their unfortunate first meeting but then they called. They wanted to hear about Anders. They assumed, incorrectly, that Marina knew a good deal more about his death than she had told them.

“But what did Annick say?” Barbara leaned in close enough that Marina could smell her perfume, a mix of lavender and lime.

“She said that he died of a fever. That’s all I know. And I know that she buried him there.” The restaurant was dark with a cement floor and dried out palm fronds hanging over the bar. There were two pinball machines in the corner and they chirped and clanged even when there was no one there with the change it took to play them.

Barbara ran a tiny red cocktail straw in circles, nervously stirring up the contents of her glass. “I’m sure it would have been almost impossible for her to get the body back.”

“But people do,” Marina said. “I realize Dr. Swenson isn’t sentimental but I imagine she would have felt differently had it been her husband. Anders’ wife would have liked to see him buried at home.” She would have liked it had he never gone in the first place.

“Annick has a husband?” Barbara said.

“Not that I know of.”

“Did you speak to Annick about what should be done with Dr. Eckman?” Barbara was more inclined to do the talking. Jackie was busying himself with the hard salted strips of plantains that were served in the place of chips.

“From what I understand she doesn’t have a phone. She wrote a letter and by the time it got to Vogel he’d been dead two weeks.” Marina took a sip of some fruited rum punch Jackie had ordered for all of them. “She wrote the letter to Mr. Fox.”

Barbara and Jackie looked at one another. “Mr. Fox,” they said together ominously.

Marina put down her drink.

“Do you know him?” Barbara asked.

“He’s the president of Vogel,” Marina said, her voice even. “I work for him.”

“Is he awful?”

Marina looked at the girl and smiled. In truth she was irritated with Mr. Fox. He had gone ahead and sent her another phone and several different antibiotics and enough Lariam to see her through another six months in South America. If he had intended it as a message, it wasn’t a message that pleased her. “No,” she said neutrally, “not awful at all.”

Barbara waved her hand. “I shouldn’t have said that. But you have to understand—”

“We’re very protective of Annick,” Jackie said, nibbling the side off a plantain strip.

Barbara nodded vigorously, giving her long, jeweled earrings a good swing. Barbara had overdressed for dinner, wearing a sleeveless silk top in emerald green. She was such a pretty girl. It must be hard for her, Marina imagined, to have no place to go. “Of course you’d be upset about your friend. We’re upset about Dr. Eckman ourselves, but whatever happened it wasn’t Annick’s fault. It’s just that she’s very focused. She has to be.”

Now that Marina was in the Amazon it seemed that there was probably no end of things that could kill a person without any assignment of blame, unless perhaps the blame was assigned to Mr. Fox. “I never thought it was her fault.”

This news came to Barbara as a great relief. “I’m so glad!” she said. “Once you understand Annick you know there’s nobody like her. I was thinking that maybe you hadn’t been around her in a while, or you’d forgotten,” she said, seeming to know things she could not possibly know. “She’s such a force of nature. Her work is thrilling, but really, it’s almost beside the point. She’s what’s so amazing, the person herself, don’t you think? I try to imagine what it would have been like to have a mother like that, a grandmother, a woman who was completely fearless, someone who saw the world without limitations.”

Marina could remember that exact feeling. It was a thought so briefly held and deeply buried that she could barely dredge it up again: What if Dr. Swenson were my mother? She made a mental note to call her mother before she went to bed tonight, even if it was very late. “But what does that have to do with Mr. Fox?”

“He bothers her,” Jackie said, as if he had suddenly woken up and found himself in a restaurant, in a conversation. His blue eyes peered out brightly through the fringe of his overly long bangs. “He writes her letters asking her what she’s doing. He used to call her.”

“That’s when she got rid of the phone,” Barbara said. “It happened years before we got here.”

Marina took the slice of pineapple off the edge of her glass, dipped it into her drink and ate it. “Is that really so intrusive? She does work for him after all. He is paying for everything, her research, her apartment, this dinner. Isn’t he entitled to know how things are going?”

Barbara corrected her. “He doesn’t pay for it. The company pays for it.”

“Yes, but the company is his job. He runs it. He hired her. He’s responsible.”

“Is the person who commissions van Gogh responsible for the painting?”

Marina wondered if she would have come up with a similar quip of logic when she was twenty-three or however old Mrs. Bovender actually was. She was quite sure she would have felt the same way. It was exactly Dr. Swenson’s brio she had been drawn to, the utter assuredness with which she moved through the world, getting things done and being indefatigably right. Marina had not met her like again, and she was glad of that, and she was sorry. “I suppose that van Gogh would be responsible for making good on his sale, and that if he didn’t show up with the painting after a vastly extended period of time it would be within the rights—”

Barbara put her cool hand on Marina’s wrist. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Mr. Fox is your boss, Dr. Eckman was your friend. I shouldn’t be running on about this.”

“I understand your point,” Marina said, making a conscious effort to get along.

“We’ll try to find a way to get word to Annick, and if we can’t we’ll just entertain you ourselves until she comes back.”

Marina took a long pull off her drink, even though there was a distinct voice in her head telling her not to. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Of course we do,” Barbara said, and sat back peacefully in her chair as if everything had been decided. “It’s what Annick would want.”

By ten o’clock the world was a furnace cracked open in a closed room, but just outside of Manaus people crowded the river’s bank on a Wednesday to lie across towels spread out in the sand. Children played in the shallows while adults swam wide circles around them. Their voices, the screaming and laughing while they splashed one another, sounded less like words and more like the call and answer of birds. Milton in his infinite wisdom had brought a large striped umbrella in the trunk of his car and stabbed it repeatedly into the sand until it was able to stand upright and provide a circle of shade. It was in that limited field that he and Marina sat on towels, their arms around their knees. Marina had gone to buy a swimsuit from Rodrigo that morning and the only possible option, which is to say the only one-piece, was cheap and bright and had a small skirt that made her look like an aging figure skater. She wore it under her clothes now, unable to imagine what had ever made her think she would go into the water. The Bovenders, who had no interest in the umbrella or its protection, were, without their clothes, unnerving. Jackie wore a pair of cutoff shorts that rode dangerously below the sharp protrusions of his hipbones, while Barbara’s bikini was carelessly tied together with a series of loose strings. It seemed that the desired effect of their swimwear was to make their fellow beach-goers feel a strong breeze could strip them bare. At one point Jackie yawned, tilted forward into the sand, and raised himself into a handstand. The muscles in his arms and back separated into distinct groups that any first year medical student would have been grateful to study: pectoralis major, pectoralis minor, deltoid, trapezius, intercostal. The people on neighboring towels pointed, calling for their children to watch. They whistled and clapped.

“Not sick anymore,” Milton said.

Jackie brought his feet to the ground and sat again. The vine that encircled his ankle was hung with tiny clusters of grapes. “I’m fine.”

“That’s why I married him,” Barbara said, half of her face shielded behind enormous black glasses. “I saw him do that at the beach in Sydney. He was wearing his boardies. I said to my girlfriend, ‘That one’s mine.’ ”

“Marriages have been built on less,” Marina said, although in truth she didn’t think this was the case.

“Do you swim?” Milton asked her. He was wearing his trousers and his white short-sleeved shirt. He showed no signs of removing them.

“I know how,” she said, “if that’s what you’re asking.”

Barbara stretched along her towel, her oiled body reflecting light from every surface except for the few discreet areas covered by fabric. There was a small, circular diamond hanging in the gold chain of her anklet and it glinted along with her skin. “It’s so hot,” she cried quietly.

“Hot is what we do best,” Milton said. He had a little straw hat sitting on the top of his head and somehow it made him look cooler than the rest of them.

“Let’s go for a swim,” Jackie said, and leaned over to smack his wife’s stomach lightly with the flat of his open hand. Her whole body jumped an inch off her towel.

“The water is only going to be hotter,” she said.

“Up, up, up,” he said, and stood himself, leaning down to pull her to her feet. She paused a moment to shake the sand out of her pale hair. It was for the other beach-goers as great a spectacle as her husband standing on his hands. They were halfway to the water, their arms draped against each other’s naked waists, when they turned back to their compatriots. “You’re coming, aren’t you?” Jackie asked.

Marina shook her head. “Go, go,” Milton said. “We’ll come and watch.” He got up stiffly and helped Marina to her feet. “They want us to see how pretty they are in the river.”

“They were pretty enough just lying there,” Marina said.

“We are the parents,” Milton said. “We have to watch.”

Marina went along with a sullen sense of duty, but out from under the umbrella the world was a different place. It had not been cool beneath the candy colored stripes, but away from them the sun meted out a pummeling that was stunning. She stopped for a moment to spot the Bovenders as they walked into the brown water holding hands. On a few occasions since arriving in Brazil she had been as hot but she had always been able to step into the shade, to go into a café for a can of soda, return to her hotel room and stand in a cold shower. She had come to know in advance when the heat was about to overwhelm her as clearly as if there had been a thermometer built into her wrist and so she had been able to save herself accordingly, but looking out at the water and the sand she was uncertain of where she could go. She was melting into the people around her, into Milton. There was a little ice chest beneath the umbrella that Milton had brought with them — cool bottles of water and beers for Jackie. She could rub a piece of ice against her neck. Far ahead of them the Bovenders sank into the water and blurred into all of the other children around them as they swam away. With everything in her she cursed them for being unwilling, unable, to wake before nine. After all, she had been tired herself. She had taken a Lariam fresh from the new bottle Mr. Fox had sent the night before and at three in the morning she had woken herself, and no doubt everyone else in the Hotel Indira, with her interminable screaming. Someone is stabbing a woman to death, was the thought she had swimming up through sleep before she realized where the sound was coming from. After that she was finished for the night, no more sleep, just waiting.

“You do a good job of this,” Milton said, keeping his eyes towards the river. “I admire your patience.”

“Believe me, I have no patience.”

“Then you create the illusion of patience. In the end the effect is the same.”

“All I want to do is find Dr. Swenson and go home,” she said slowly. The words coming out of her mouth felt hot.

“And to get to Dr. Swenson and to get home you must first get past the Bovenders. The Bovenders are the guards of the gate. It is their job to keep you away from her, that’s what they’re paid for. I have no idea if they know where she is, but I am certain that no one else knows. They like you. Perhaps they’ll figure something out.” An arm went up in the water and waved and Milton raised his hand and waved back.

Where in the world was the rain? Those blinding cataracts that she had endured day after day? She needed one now. It didn’t necessarily cool things down but at least for a while it blocked out the sun. “They couldn’t like me.”

“They think you’re very natural. Mrs. Bovender told me that. They see you as a person who is honestly grieving her friend and trying to get information about his death.”

“Well, that’s true,” she said, although that description only covered her obligations to Karen.

“They’re starting to think that Dr. Swenson would like you,” Milton said.

Marina felt the top of her head turning soft as the sun worked into her brain, unloosening its coils. “Dr. Swenson knew me once already. I’m quite certain she had no feelings for me one way or the other.” She mopped at her face with a large red handkerchief Rodrigo had pressed on her that morning. When she declined it once he had made her a gift of it, though probably it went on Vogel’s account all the same. Under her clothes she felt the swimsuit with every inhalation. It wrapped around her body like an endless bandage, growing larger and looser as it soaked her up. She kept pushing the cloth against her face. Her vision was clouded by the sweat in her eyes. She could only make out the most basic elements of the landscape: sand, water, sky.

“What the Bovenders require is diplomacy,” Milton said. “They just need some more of your time. They want to study you and make sure you are what you seem.”

Marina squinted out towards the waving line of the horizon. “I don’t see them anymore.” What she meant to say was that she thought she might faint. At that point she might have said Milton’s name. She didn’t fall, but she was thinking of falling, and with that thought he took her arm and walked her over the remaining expanse of sandy beach to the river. He walked her into the water up to their knees and then up to their waists. It was like a bath, silky and warm. The current was so slight it barely disturbed her clothes. She wanted to lie down in it. Milton dipped his own handkerchief into the water and spread it wet over the top of her head. “It’s better, isn’t it,” he said, though it wasn’t a question.

She nodded. Jackie had been right to make Barbara go in. It was lifesaving. When Marina looked down she saw nothing, just a line where her torso vanished into the water. All around them children kicked their rafts and jumped off one another’s shoulders. “How do you know what’s under there?” she asked him.

“You don’t,” Milton said. “You don’t want to.”

When Marina got back to the hotel room and checked her cell phone she had two messages from Mr. Fox, one from her mother, and one from Karen Eckman, whose number showed up in Anders’ name. She might as well have been home. She was feeling slightly sympathetic towards Dr. Swenson’s refusal to have a phone at all. She took a cold shower, drank a bottle of water, and went to bed, where she had a dream about losing her father in a train station. When Barbara Bovender called on the hotel line at nine that night she woke her up. “We wanted to check on you,” she said. “I’m afraid we nearly killed you this afternoon with our idea of fun.”

“No, no,” Marina said, disoriented by sleep and heat and dreams. “I’m fine. I just haven’t gotten used to all of it yet. I suppose it takes some time.”

“It does!” Barbara said, sounding gleeful for no reason. “I’m so much better at it now than I used to be. The secret is not to let the heat keep you in. Jackie swears the air conditioning weakens your immune system after a while. The more you get out the more you get used to it. You should come over to the apartment and have a drink.”

“Now?” Marina said, as if she might have something else to do.

“A little walk at night would do you good.”

Maybe the Bovenders were the guards at the gate but it was also true that they were lonely. There was nothing keeping Marina at the Hotel Indira. Tomo had moved her to a bigger room two days before, a reward that acknowledged the length of her stay, but it was still as musty and dismal as the one before it. There was a better view but the same metal bar attached to the wall for clothes. Marina looked at her wool coat, even from a distance she could see the lacework of holes the moths had eaten near the collar. She said she’d come over.

Walking through the city streets past all the closed up shops, Marina could understand how exciting it would be to see one of them open now. If there had been a light on in Rodrigo’s store tonight she would doubtlessly have gone and stood with the crowd on the street, craning her neck to try and see what was going on inside. She had not come up with a time line for how long she would wait in Manaus if the waiting continued to be nothing but an exercise in frustration, but she could feel herself coming to the end. Marina was used to being good at her work but she was no good at this. The same concierge who had been sitting at the desk in the lobby of Dr. Swenson’s apartment building at eight in the morning was sitting there still at nine-thirty at night. It appeared he was very glad to see her. After all, she hadn’t been by in several days. “Bovenders,” she said to him, and then touched her index finger to her chest. “Marina Singh.”

When Barbara Bovender opened the door and invited her in, Marina had the sense that she was crossing a portal from the wasteland of Manaus to another world entirely. Granted, she had spent more than a week in a badly furnished hotel room wearing the same three outfits she rinsed out in the bathtub at night. She was very far from beauty, and yet she had to think that this place would have struck her as beautiful no matter where she came across it. She praised it lavishly, sincerely.

“You’re so sweet,” Barbara said, walking her down a hallway past a series of small framed works on paper that could not have been Klee and yet looked like Klee. The hallway brought them into a large open living room with a high ceiling. Two sets of tall French doors were open onto a balcony and a breeze that Marina hadn’t felt anywhere in the city stirred the edges of the sheer silk curtains that had been drawn aside. The breeze smelled like jasmine and marijuana. From the height of the sixth floor the river appeared to be rimmed in small, blinking lights. If Marina didn’t focus her gaze she could have been in any number of splendid cities. “It’s a wonderful place,” Barbara said, looking at her home with impartial judgment. “I’m sure the bones have always been good but it really was a wreck when we got here.”

“Barbara’s done amazing things,” Jackie said, taking a small hit off a joint and holding it up to her. Marina shook her head and so he brought her a glass of white wine instead, kissing her on the cheek when he gave it to her as if they were old friends. She was surprised how much the kiss startled her, more even than the joint. Jackie raised his hands, motioning to the walls around him. “The woman who lived here before us, Annick’s last assistant, had her sisters strung up in hammocks all over the place.”

Barbara took the joint from her husband, allowing herself a modest inhalation before stubbing it out in a small silver ashtray. She gave herself a moment and then exhaled. “Annick just wanted something nice. That was the only thing she said to me about it. Of course you would, wouldn’t you? Coming in from all that time in the jungle, that’s not so much to ask. Good sheets, good bath towels—”

“A decent glass of wine,” Jackie said and raised his glass as an indicator that they should all drink up.

There was something perfectly spare about it all, a bouquet of some sort of white flowers she had never seen before on the dining room table, a long, low leather bench in front of an equally long white sofa, walls that were painted a shade of blue so pale it might not have been blue at all, it might have been the evening light. And then there were the Bovenders themselves, whose many physical attributes were highlighted by the elegance of their surroundings. Barbara’s stacking bracelets seemed to have been carved from the same wood as the floor boards so that one might notice how the color of the floor complimented the warm color of her skin. Still, it was difficult to imagine Dr. Swenson perched on that sofa. Marina doubted Dr. Swenson’s feet would touch the floor. “Where do you go when she comes in?”

Barbara shrugged. “Sometimes we just move to the guest room. It depends on whether or not she needs us for anything. If we have some time we go to Suriname or French Guiana so Jackie can surf.”

“I need to get to Lima,” he said, glad to have the topic turn in his direction if only for a sentence. “The waves are exploding there, but getting flights from Manaus to Lima is an unbelievable bitch. It would take me about as much time to walk there.”

Marina wandered over to the balcony. She couldn’t take her eyes off the river; that thick brown soup was a mirror in the darkness. “I wouldn’t have expected there would be something like this in Manaus,” she said. She wouldn’t have expected the Meursault either, and she took another sip. She couldn’t help but wonder what all of this was costing. It couldn’t really matter to Vogel. The expense of one apartment in the Amazon for a researcher who didn’t use it was nothing when put against the potential profits of fertility.

“There was a lot of money here once, you have to remember that,” Barbara said. “It used to be more expensive to live in Manaus than in Paris.”

“They came, they built, they left,” Jackie said, dropping himself down on the sofa and stretching his bare feet out on the bench in front of him. “When there wasn’t any money to be made in boiling the rubber out of the jungle anymore that was it, instant history. The people around here were very glad to see those people go.”

“I think there’s a lot about this city that’s still very elegant. This building is as good as anything you’d find in a real city,” Barbara said. “And Nixon takes care of everything at the front desk like a professional. I tell him all the time he could get a job in Sydney.”

“Nixon?” Marina said.

“Seriously,” Jackie said, his eyes lightly pinked.

“Well, he isn’t much for delivering the mail,” Marina said, and then she thought again. “Unless you did get the notes I sent you.”

Barbara stood a little straighter. In her heels she was taller than Marina. “We didn’t. I told you that.”

Marina shrugged. “So much for Nixon.”

“All the mail goes into a box for Annick.” She walked away and came back from another room holding a neat looking steel crate with handles on either side, the kind of thing an idle girl would order from a design catalogue to be delivered to Brazil when putting mail into a cardboard box seemed too messy. “Look,” she said. “I don’t even check it. Annick says straight in the box and so there it goes. I keep it in her office.” She put the crate down on the bench near her husband. There was a pale V marked across the tops of his brown feet where his flip-flops had interfered with his tan. “I used to answer the letters, to tell people they couldn’t come to see her, but in the end Annick decided that any interaction was a form of encouragement so she told me to stop.”

“These people take no as encouragement,” Jackie said.

Marina came and sat beside the box, putting her glass of wine down on the floor. She did not ask. She slipped her fingers into the back and moved the letters forward. She didn’t have to go very far before she found her own handwriting on the hotel’s white envelopes. “Bovender,” she said, dropping the first one on the bench and then going back to find the other two. “Bovender, Bovender.”

Jackie leaned forward and plucked the paper from the envelope. “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Bovender,” he began.

“Please!” Barbara said, and covered her ears with her hands to make her point. “It makes me feel like a total idiot. From now on I’ll look at the mail, I promise.”

Marina looked up at her. “Don’t you pay the bills?”

Jackie shook his head. “They all go straight to Minnesota. I bet that was something to set up.”

Of course, so no one would be bothered. Marina went back to the box. The magazines stood up neatly at the side, Harper’s, The New Yorker, Scientific American, the New England Journal. There seemed to be a host of letters from Vogel, letters from other countries, envelopes from hospitals, universities, drug research companies that were not her own. Her fingers kept flipping, flipping.

Barbara peered over the edge and watched her employer’s correspondence sift through the hands of someone she in fact did not know at all. “I’m not so sure we should be doing this,” she said in a tentative voice. It seemed it was just now occurring to her that bringing out the entire box of mail might not have been her best decision. “Unless you wrote us more letters. She doesn’t like for us—”

But there it was. Marina didn’t have to go so deep into the crate. It wasn’t such a very long time ago that he had been here. “Anders Eckman.” She dropped the blue airmail envelope on top of the stationery from her hotel. Jackie pulled up his feet quickly, as if she had set down something hot.

Barbara leaned forward, looked without touching. “My God. Who do you think it’s from?”

Anders Eckman, in care of Dr. Annick Swenson, a particularly inaccurate phrasing. “His wife,” Marina said. Once she had identified Karen’s handwriting she could find the letters quickly. Everything she pulled from the box now would have been written after he had gone into the jungle. Writing in care of Dr. Swenson in Manaus was the only chance Karen had of reaching him once he had left the city, there were no other addresses. Before he was in the jungle she would have called him or e-mailed or, if she was feeling sentimental, sent him a letter at the hotel. Karen would have told him about the boys and the snow, told him to come home now because he was sounding worse, and anyway, they obviously had not thought this through well enough at the outset. Marina knew the contents of every letter that passed through her hands and one by one she dropped them onto the bench where Jackie’s feet had been. She could see Karen sitting at the island in her kitchen, perched on top of a high stool, writing page after page in the morning after she had taken the boys to school and then again at night when she had put them to bed, her head bent forward, her blond hair pushed behind her ears. Marina could read them as if she were standing over Karen’s shoulder. Come home. The letters came singly and in pairs. They came in groups of three. Karen would have written every day, maybe twice a day, because there was nothing else she could do to help him. But she didn’t help him. Marina did not doubt that Anders knew Karen was writing him and knew that her letters had hit a wall in Manaus. He would have known his wife’s loyalty as a correspondent. But by not receiving those letters he never knew that she was hearing from him. Anders would have died wondering if any of his letters had made it out of the jungle. Who wouldn’t imagine that the boy in the dugout log would have simply taken the coins he was given and let the envelopes float in the water as soon as he had rounded the bend in the river, and that those letters were divided between the fish and the freshwater dolphins? In the meantime, Karen Eckman turned her love into industry, writing her husband with a diligence that was now spread across a low leather bench in Dr. Swenson’s apartment.

At some point Barbara had gone to sit next to her husband. They held their wine glasses and watched the growing stack of mail with a flush of guilt on their cheeks. “What will you do with them all?” Barbara asked once Marina had combed the box for the final time.

Marina leaned over to pick up the few strays that had fallen onto the floor. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll take them. I don’t know what I’ll do with them.”

“This one’s different,” Jackie said, and picked up a smaller envelope from the pile.

Marina took the envelope, giving it the most cursory inspection. “It’s from me.”

“You were writing to him too?” Barbara asked.

Marina nodded. There would have been notes from the boys in there as well. Karen would have addressed the envelopes for them.

“Were you in love with him?”

Marina looked up, her hands full of thin blue envelopes. Barbara Bovender was more interested now. She leaned in closer, a glossy chunk of hair swinging forward. “No,” Marina said. She started to say something sharp and just as quick had another idea entirely: yes. The very thought of it brought the blood to her cheeks. Yes. She hadn’t loved him when he was alive, and not when that letter was written, but now? She thought of Anders when she went to sleep at night and when she woke up in the morning. Every street she walked down she imagined him standing there. She imagined being with him when he died, his head in her lap, just so she wouldn’t have to think of him alone, and for a minute at least she had fallen in love with her dead friend. “We worked together,” she said. “We did the same research. We ate lunch together.” Marina picked up the letter she had written. It was no doubt full of statistics on plaque reduction she had thought he might enjoy. She was glad he’d never received it. “You get used to people. You get attached to them. It was seven years. But no.” As far as Marina was concerned the evening was over. She rested the stack of letters in her lap. She was tired and sad, and she couldn’t imagine that she and her hosts had anything left to say to one another.

But the Bovenders wanted her to stay. Barbara said she could make a light supper and Jackie suggested that they watch a movie. “We got a copy of Fitzcarraldo,” he said. “How crazy is that?”

“You could even sleep over if you wanted,” Barbara said, her pale eyes brightening at the thought. “It would be so much fun. We’ll just agree now that we’ll stay up too late and have too much to drink.”

The twenty years between Marina and the Bovenders formed an impenetrable gulf. For whatever she thought of her hotel room, she knew a slumber party might well kill her. “I appreciate it, I really do, but all that sun this afternoon wore me out.”

“Well, at least let Jackie walk you back to your hotel,” Barbara said, and Jackie, in an unexpected flourish of chivalry, was on his feet at once and looking for his sandals.

“I’m fine,” Marina said. She put the bundle of letters in her bag. She wanted to go quickly now, before there was another offer to decline.

Barbara began to wilt as soon as it was clear her company was leaving. Her inability to come up with something more enticing to offer had defeated her. “We manage to make a worse impression every time we see you,” she said. Marina assured her it wasn’t true. Barbara leaned a shoulder against the wall. It couldn’t be said that she was blocking the exit, she didn’t have the girth for that, but clearly she was stalling. “It would be better for me if you didn’t tell Annick about the letters,” she said finally, twisting her bracelets. “I don’t think she’d like it if she thought I was letting people go through the mail, even though you were completely right to get the letters from Dr. Eckman’s wife.”

Marina thought of all the times another resident had asked her not to tell Dr. Swenson something, the lab results that had not confirmed a diagnosis, the details of a badly handled exam. She remembered Dr. Swenson’s canny knack for knowing all of it anyway. “I’m hardly in a position to tell her anything.”

Barbara took Marina’s hand in her two cool hands. “But you will be, when you see her again.”

“These letters belong to Anders and to Karen. They aren’t anyone else’s business.”

Barbara gave her the slightest smile of genuine gratitude. “Thank you,” she said. She squeezed Marina’s hand.

Once Marina was back at the hotel she put the letters on the night table and looked at the neat stack they made. She didn’t like having them there. They were certainly too personal to leave in Dr. Swenson’s box but they were too personal to be with her as well. She moved them to the night table’s shallow drawer beside a Portuguese Bible before calling Karen. She had a need to hear her voice, thinking it would tamp down the guilt for that sudden bout of love she’d felt for Karen’s husband.

“It’s so late,” Marina said. She hadn’t thought about the time until she dialed.

“I never sleep,” Karen said. “And the worst part is nobody calls after eight. They’re afraid of waking up the boys.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“I’m glad. Nothing wakes them up anyway. I called you this morning. Mr. Fox gave me your cell phone number.”

“You’ve heard from him?”

“He checks on us.” Karen yawned. “He’s a better person than I thought he was. Or he’s lonely. I can’t tell. He says you haven’t found her yet.”

“I found the Bovenders.”

“The Bovenders!” Karen said. “My God, how are they?”

“Anders talked about them?”

“And very little else for a while. They drove him out of his mind. He did not love the Bovenders.”

“I could see that.”

“He felt like they were stringing him along, like they were always about to produce Dr. Swenson but they never quite got around to it. He was never really sure whether or not they knew where she was, but he spent a lot of time being nice to them.”

“Well then, I guess I’m right on schedule. How much time was he in Manaus before he found Dr. Swenson?”

Karen thought about it. “A month? I’m not positive. I know it was at least a month.”

Marina closed her eyes. “I don’t think I can spend a month with the Bovenders.”

“What did they say about Anders?”

“They didn’t know he was dead,” Marina said.

There was a long silence on the line after that. Back in Eden Prairie, Marina heard Karen put down the phone and then there was nothing to do but wait. Marina laid back across the bed and stared at the pale water stain on the ceiling that she had contemplated every night since she changed rooms. She wished she could put her hand on Karen’s head, stroke her hair. Such is your bravery. Such is my good fortune. When Karen did come back her breathing had changed.

“I’m sorry,” Marina said.

“It comes on so fast,” Karen said, trying to catch her breath. “They didn’t know he was dead because she didn’t tell them. Why wouldn’t she tell them?”

“She didn’t tell them for the exact reason you just said — they have no means of communication. She only comes to town once every few months. She doesn’t even check her mail.” Marina didn’t know what she was going to do with the letters but she wasn’t going to tell Karen that she had them. That much she could at least be certain of. From thousands of miles away Marina listened to her crying. The boys were asleep in their beds. Pickles was asleep. “Should I call Mr. Fox?” she said. It didn’t seem like a good idea but it was the only one she had.

Karen put down the phone again and blew her nose. She was trying to get a hold of herself, Marina could hear it. She made the sounds of a person who was trying to wrestle an enormous sorrow to the ground. “No,” she said. “Don’t call him. This happens to me now. It’s part of it.”

“I want to tell you something different,” Marina said.

“I know you do.”

“It’s terrible here, Karen. I hate it.”

“I know,” she said.

That night, which was her first night of fever, she dreamed that she and her father were paddling a small boat down a river in the jungle and that the boat turned over. Her father drowned and she was left alone in the water. The boat had gotten away. Marina had forgotten that her father didn’t know how to swim.

“Now I have something you’re going to like,” Barbara said on the phone.

Marina hadn’t heard from the Bovenders since her visit to their apartment several days before and since that time she had not left the hotel and had very seldom left her bed. She wasn’t entirely sure if the preventative medicine that worked against insect borne diseases was making her sick or if she had in fact contracted an insect borne disease in spite of the medication. It also seemed entirely possible that all of her symptoms, which included body aches and a peculiar rash around her trunk, were psychosomatic — she was willing herself into illness in order to bring this all to an end. But then she wondered if Anders hadn’t reached the same conclusion. I have a fever that comes on at seven in the morning and stays for two hours. By four in the afternoon it’s back and I am nothing but a ranting pile of ash. Most days now I have a headache and I worry that some tiny Amazonian animal is eating a hole through my cerebral cortex. Marina had only read that letter once and still she knew it by heart. “What will I like?” she asked Barbara Bovender, because in truth she could not think of one single thing in Manaus that sounded appealing.

“We’re going to the opera! Annick keeps a box and the season opens tomorrow. We have her tickets!”

“She keeps a box at the opera?” Marina didn’t have the energy for indignation but really, was there no end to this?

“Apparently there was a season several years ago when the rains got so bad she had to come into the city for a long time. She said the opera saved her.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s going to save me. I’m sick. I need to stay where I am.”

“Did you eat something?” Barbara asked. It was the logical question. The market stalls were filled with things that would kill anyone who didn’t have several generations of the proper bacteria in their gut.

“It’s just a fever,” Marina said.

“High or low?”

“I don’t have a thermometer.” She was bored. She wanted to get off the phone.

“Alright,” Barbara said. “I’ll be over in about an hour. And I’m bringing some dresses for you to look at.”

“I don’t want company and I don’t want dresses. I appreciate the gesture but trust me, I’m a doctor. I know what I’m doing.”

“You have no idea,” Barbara said lightly.

Tomo, the concierge, in an act of dogged perseverance and faith that far outreached anything Marina herself was capable of, had continued to call the airport every day regarding her luggage. It had been located momentarily in Spain and then lost again. He was also the hotel employee who was sent up to her room whenever someone called about the screaming, and now he was looking after her because she was sick. He brought her bottles of syrupy cane juice and carbonated soft drinks and hard, dry crackers that stood in for meals. The truth was that Marina, stranded and in decline, elicited the sympathy of the entire hotel staff, but they all recognized that Tomo was in charge of her.

So when there was knocking on her door, how much later she couldn’t say (sleep was like an anesthetic she broke out of and then slipped into again), Marina assumed it was Tomo. She put on the extra bed sheet that was her robe and answered the door.

Barbara gave her a hard stare up and down before speaking. “Oh, you are rough,” she said with her long, flat vowels. “Why didn’t you call me?”

Marina, disappointed that now she wouldn’t be able to go right back to sleep, retreated into her room, which was dark and stale. The Australian followed her.

“I’ve brought you things.” Barbara held up a small, dirty paper sack and a tapestry overnight bag as if they were enticing offers. The housekeepers hadn’t been in for a couple of days because Marina could not stop sleeping. Bits of crackers were scattered over the floor like sand. Mrs. Bovender turned on the light switch by the door and then opened the blinds. “You shouldn’t be living like this,” was all she had to say.

“My standards have changed.” Marina burrowed down into the bed. One would think it would be difficult to fall asleep in front of someone you barely knew but in fact it was the simplest thing in the world.

Barbara took a paper cup out of the bag and pried off the lid. “Here,” she said, and held it out to her. “Sit up. You’re supposed to drink it while it’s hot.”

Marina leaned forward and sniffed the contents of the cup. It was the river, boiled down to its foulest essence. It was even the color of the river. The steam that rolled off the surface was like the heavy morning mist. “Where did you get that?”

“From the shaman stand in the market, and don’t say anything dismissive about the shaman until you’ve given him a try. I’ve been bitten by half the insects in this country. I’ve had some awful fevers, some sores I wouldn’t even talk about. Jackie had food poisoning once. He ate some sort of grilled turtle from a vendor, which was idiotic in the first place. I was positive he was going to die. The shaman’s saved us every time. I could practically open an account with him.”

The shaman would no doubt have direct billing with Vogel. “But I haven’t been to see the shaman,” Marina said, applying logic where no logic could be applied. “What is he basing his diagnosis on? You haven’t seen me either.”

“I explained the situation. Actually, Milton explained the situation for me after I explained it to Milton. The shaman and I don’t exactly speak the same Portuguese, and I think it’s important to get it all right. Milton hopes you’re feeling better, by the way.” She pressed the cup against Marina’s breastbone and held it there until she took it in her hands.

“This is idiocy,” Marina said, looking down at the cloudy liquid. The cup was warm. The smell came up to her in layers: water, fish, mud, death.

“Drink it!” Barbara said sharply. “I’m tired of trying to help you. Drink it all down, one swallow, come on. This is what we do down here in hell.”

Marina, so surprised by the force of the order and by the look of mad frustration on Barbara Bovender’s face, did what she was told and took down the whole foul cup in one long swallow. It was not entirely liquid, it was thicker near the bottom, viscous, and there were tiny bits of something hard and twiglike that caught in her throat. The canoe they were in was a log and it rolled over to the side and she was thrown down with her father into the water. The water filled up her eyes and nose and mouth. She sank before she could swim and all she could taste was the river. She had forgotten until now how the river tasted.

“Put your head back and pant,” Barbara said. “Don’t throw it up.” She got down on her knees in front of Marina, putting her hands on Marina’s knees. Mr. Fox had said the difference between Marina and Anders was that Anders hadn’t had the sense to come home when he had first fallen sick, but oh, it wasn’t a matter of whether she was willing. It was all a matter of able. A chill passed through her, a great shuddering wave that washed over her wet skin and made her spine convulse.

“Okay,” Barbara said quietly, patting at her knee as if it were the head of a very small dog, “here’s the other thing. You’re going to be really sick now, but just for a little while, an hour or so, maybe two. It all depends on what needs to break down inside you. Then you’re going to be absolutely fine. You’re going to be better than fine. I’d be happy to stay with you. I’m free all afternoon.”

Marina looked at her guest but all she could really make out was the light of her hair which appeared to be receding down a tunnel. She said she did not want her to stay.

Barbara sat back on her heels looking disappointed. She took Marina’s cold fingers in her hand and bounced them. “Okay, I’ll come back then at five and we can talk about what dress you’re going to wear tomorrow. I brought a few that I think will be pretty on you. It’s good that you have a friend who’s as tall as you are.” She waited. “Are you going to be sick now? Try to wait as long as you can. The longer you can hold it down the better it works. Panting really helps.”

Lines of sweat began to run down Marina’s forehead, down from the crown of her head, down the back of her neck. A clear, thin mucus came from her nose at a rate that exceeded both the perspiration and the tears that were pouring from her eyes. She did not lift her hand to her face. She let the slick wall pour unabated. It was early still but she realized very clearly there was nothing she could do to stop this from happening. The trembling shook her hard enough to knock her teeth and she tried to keep her mouth open. Even if there were an antidote she would never get to it in time. This was the end of the end. She knew what it felt like now. If she lived to see it come again she would call it by name. In one of her last clear thoughts, Marina wondered if she had been murdered, or if by taking the cup herself, she had committed suicide.

Far outside the city the tree frogs were calling her, and the deep, rhythmic pulse of their voices set the blood flow to her heart.

Marina woke up on the cool tile of the bathroom floor, her head resting on a pile of towels. She opened her eyes and watched a bright red spider of medium size slip beneath the sink cabinet. The details of the time that had elapsed, she didn’t know how much time it was, were not clear, and for that she was grateful. She breathed in and breathed out, moved her fingers and toes, stretched open her mouth and closed it again. The shaman-induced illness had left her and in the violence of its departure had scraped out whatever illness she had had in the first place. She was alive, possibly well. Her hip was sore from the angle she had been lying at but that hardly seemed important. Carefully, slowly, she pulled herself upright and then moved the short distance over the ledge of the bathtub where she sat in the bottom just to be safe and let the hot shower beat against her head until the water slipped to lukewarm. After that she brushed her teeth and drank a bottle of water. She was sore and raw but she experienced that distinct mental clarity that marked a fever’s end. She rolled her head from side to side. She walked naked into the bedroom, a towel around her head, to find the room was clean and Barbara Bovender was sitting in a chair by the window reading the New England Journal of Medicine.

“Look who’s up!” Barbara said.

“You were leaving,” Marina said, but very little sound came out. She coughed, trying to reset her vocal cords which had been stripped from vomiting. “You were leaving.” She found the bathrobe sheet folded on the foot of the bed and pulled it around her.

“I was going to, but you got sick so fast. It really went right to work on you. I thought I should stay just to make sure you didn’t fall and hit your head on the toilet, anything like that. But you’re better, right? I can tell just by looking at you.”

“I am,” Marina said. She couldn’t bring herself to thank the person who had so recently poisoned her, nor could she deny that the poison had improved her circumstances.

“I’ve never read this article,” Barbara said, holding up the journal. “It’s fascinating, even the science parts which I really don’t follow. I kept thinking about how lucky it was that things worked out so that I was sitting in your hotel room for a couple of hours. I have to tell you, I really didn’t understand Annick’s work at all before this. To think of being able to wait and have your children whenever you want them, forty, fifty — sixty even, that would be amazing.” Barbara stopped and looked at her hostess. “You know, I’ve never asked you, do you have children?”

“I do not,” Marina said. The air conditioning had been turned up to high and she was starting to shiver in the cold. “I’d like to get dressed now.” For the first time in days she was hungry.

“Oh sure, of course.” Barbara got up from her chair. “Do you mind if I borrow this? I know Jackie would want to read it.”

“Fine,” Marina said.

“Try the dresses on and let me know which one you like.” Barbara stopped at the door. “I really am so glad it all worked out and that you’re better. I’ll tell the shaman, he’ll be so pleased. We’ll pick you up tomorrow at seven, alright?”

But she didn’t mean it as a question. Before Marina had a chance to answer, Barbara Bovender and the New England Journal of Medicine were gone.