State of Wonder

Six

There was traffic on the Negro, barges and tugs, water taxis with rotting thatched roofs where river swallows nested, dugout canoes containing entire families — sisters with babies and brothers and cousins and grandfathers and aunts holding open umbrellas, so many people crammed into one log that the lip of the boat sat nearly level with the surface of the brown water as one man in the back rowed carefully on. The smaller boats stayed near the shore, while a cruise ship, white as a sailor’s dress uniform, churned up the center aisle. Easter remained fiercely alert, his damp hair pushed back by the breeze, his eyes sweeping slowly side to side. He pulled the throttle to cut his wake in deference to the boats that were smaller, and he waved to those larger boats that cut their wake for him. Every appearance was that of an orderly world. Then the boy would turn and look behind him, and when he did he would nod to Marina and Dr. Swenson and they would nod back.

“Does he drive all the way?” Marina asked, not having any idea how far they were going.

Dr. Swenson nodded. “He likes it.” She was sitting on a box of canned hash while Marina stood. “What boy wouldn’t want to drive the boat? It gives him standing in the tribe. I drive or Easter drives, no one else. A few of the men have outboard motors that they’ve traded for over the years, but they’ve never captained a boat like this. It forces them to show respect when they see how much I trust him. He’s good with the engine, too. He’s figured it out.”

Marina was no judge of children but she would say that Easter looked too young to captain a boat or fix an engine or walk alone in a city at night, though not a mile back she had seen a child alone in a child-sized log who could not have been more than five, a spear lying over the bow, his paddle even as it went in and out of the water. “How old is Easter?”

Dr. Swenson looked up and gave a squint in Marina’s direction. “Shall I ask him?”

If Dr. Swenson had not been changed by time or experience or geography or climate, was it possible that Marina had not been substantively changed either? Was she in fact the person she had been in medical school, in grade school? “You’ll have to forgive me,” Marina said, and then set about restating the question. “I don’t know any more about the Lakashi than what you’ve written and you’ve written nothing about their ability to record time. Does anyone know how old anyone is? Do his parents know?”

“You make no end of suppositions, Dr. Singh. Is that a habit of yours? I have to say that was one thing I admired about Dr. Eckman: no preconceived conclusions whatsoever. A truly open mind is a scientist’s greatest asset. He must have been very thoughtful in his research. Had the circumstances been different I could have imagined asking him to stay on.”

Marina was not in the least bit unsettled by the praise for Anders. She knew the role of compliments in Dr. Swenson’s pedagogy: they were used not to raise one person up but to tap another down into place. She was only sorry that she didn’t have Anders to repeat it to, no doubt he would be shocked to hear such kindness after his death.

“You, however, suppose that Easter is Lakashi. He is not. I of course cannot be certain where he came from as he simply appeared in camp one morning and could neither hear nor speak. Were I to follow your example, I would suppose that he was Hummocca based on the shape of his head and the arrangement of his sinuses. The Hummocca have sinus cavities that are less pronounced than the Lakashi. Their faces are more curved, not quite so flat, but the difference is subtle. The Hummocca are somewhat smaller as well, and this goes to your original question about his age. I say all of this based on a single brief and unpleasant encounter with the tribe many years ago. Still, I find that fear can sometimes heighten our powers of observation to a point of great clarity. I remember the heads of the Hummocca so vividly it was almost as if I had dissected one.”

A double-decker tourist boat glided by without slowing and for a moment they were caught in its churning wake. As they pitched forward and back, rolling like a barrel in the little waves, Marina grabbed on to a pole and Easter raised his fist at the bigger boat. A tourist on the upper level pointed a camera in their direction. Dr. Swenson dropped her head for a moment, as if willing the other boat to sink through powers of concentration.

After the worst of the rolling had abated, Dr. Swenson lifted her head, her blue eyes bright and ringed in sweat. “Always buy a pontoon,” she said, panting lightly as if making an effort not to vomit. “You cannot imagine how hard that wake would have hit us had we not been in a pontoon. But I was making a point: Easter is a very small child, I would go so far as to say he is stunted. This could have been caused by a consistent lack of nutrition. It seems quite possible that no one was willing to give much of the tribe’s resources to a deaf child, or it could be that whatever illness rendered him deaf also rendered him small but now I am straying into what can only be called guessing, which is never helpful. Given his skills, his ability to learn, I would think him to be a twelve-year-old of normal, perhaps above-normal, intelligence. I’ll have a more precise judgment when he reaches puberty. The onset of puberty in the Lakashi male falls consistently between thirteen-point-two and thirteen-point-eight, a much narrower window than you find in American males. Whether or not this holds true of the Hummocca I am afraid I will never know. Do you have children, Dr. Singh?”

Marina was at least three questions behind. She wanted very much to know about the unpleasant encounter but, feeling she had been called on to give the easiest answer, merely shook her head. “None.”

“That’s good. Dr. Eckman had no business coming down here leaving three children behind. Are you married?”

“I am not.”

“Good again.” Dr. Swenson nodded her approval before turning her face towards the breeze. The sky spooled blue above the river in both endless directions. “This is a business for old maids, and I don’t say that derogatorily, being one myself. I feel better about you being on the boat knowing your circumstances.”

Speaking of suppositions, how much light could being unmarried and childless shed on her circumstances? Did it mean that no one would miss her terribly if she were to die, that there wouldn’t be the same set of complications brought about by Dr. Eckman’s death? Marina said nothing but sat down on the deck near Dr. Swenson’s feet. The sun edged beneath the boat’s awning and she wanted more of the shade.

Dr. Swenson leaned to the side and patted her case of canned hash with an open hand. “I prefer to sit on a box. A box doesn’t protect one from the roaches but I like to think it sends a message: We are on another level. There is a case of grapefruit juice there. I would recommend that.”

Obediently, Marina got up and pushed the box of juice forward, sat. They passed a handful of open houses built onto stilts. Several children, all of them too young to be standing alone in the water, were standing waist deep in the river, waving.

“As for Easter’s parents—” Dr. Swenson stopped then and looked at the captain’s small back. She tilted her head. “Parents seems a very sentimental word to use in his case. The man who inseminated the woman, the woman who pushed the child out of her body, other members of the tribe who may or may not have tried to raise that child when the original duo failed in their responsibilities: his parents have not been in evidence. The Hummocca left it up to the Lakashi, which, considering the nature of the tribe, strikes me as a startling act of humanity. I would have thought them more inclined to abandon a child in the jungle to starve to death or be eaten. All of which is to say he has been with me some eight years now, eight this past Easter. I suppose I am his parents.”

“It sounds as if the Hummocca may have left Easter for you then and not the Lakashi, assuming they knew you were here.” Marina realized she had made another assumption as soon as it was out of her mouth but this one Dr. Swenson let pass.

“Oh, they knew I was here,” she said, nodding her head. “Everyone knows everything eventually. Upon first consideration a person believes herself to be very isolated in the jungle but it isn’t the case. Word travels between the tribes, although I’ve never figured out how it happens as many of them refuse to communicate with one another. It would make a brilliant dissertation topic if you ever become interested in furthering your education.” (Marina would have mentioned her Ph.D. as well as her M.D. but there was not a glimmer of a break.) “I say it’s the monkeys,” Dr. Swenson said. “But then I tend to blame the monkeys for everything. ‘A white woman is living with the Lakashi.’ News like that goes up and down the river in a matter of hours. Then one afternoon a boy is cutting at a tree with a machete and when his arm goes back he sinks the blade into his sister’s head. Amazing that this sort of thing doesn’t happen every fifteen minutes out here. So I found a needle and some gut in my bag and I sewed the girl up. It was mostly blood, she was a very dramatic bleeder, but one hardly has to go to medical school to sew up a head. It didn’t take many events like this, a snake bite, a breech birth, and suddenly the whole of Brazil knows there is a doctor available off the Negro. Now, you must understand this, Dr. Singh, so few people do: I am not Médecins Sans Frontières. I have not come to the Amazon to be a family practioner. I am simply a person who made certain mistakes at the onset. They didn’t know me as a doctor when I arrived. The Lakashi knew me as a member of Dr. Rapp’s party. They thought I was like Dr. Rapp, that I was there for the flora and not for them. For the first few years I came alone they were forever bringing me mushrooms and various fungi to look at. They lugged so many fallen trunks of enormous, rotted trees back to camp it would have sent any mycological society into a frenzy. The fact that I took their temperature and drew blood samples and measured their children was completely lost on them, they continued to see me as the person they first met — as an extension of Dr. Rapp. And it had been my intention to be like him, to float on their misguided perceptions, but then I sewed up that girl’s head. It was my fatal mistake. The next thing I knew sick people were being paddled up the river to receive my care, and a deaf child had been left off for me to deal with.”

The deaf child had gotten her to town. He had ferried her guest to the restaurant after the opera and loaded the boxes on the boat and steered the boat through the river. The deaf child was not without his uses. “What would the alternative have been?” Marina asked. “Going back to that first girl.”

“The bleeder. The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived. That is how one respects indigenous people. If you pay any attention at all you’ll realize that you could never convert them to your way of life anyway. They are an intractable race. Any progress you advance to them will be undone before your back is turned. You might as well come down here to unbend the river. The point, then, is to observe the life they themselves have put in place and learn from it.”

Marina felt remarkably unmoved by this. “So go back in time, do it again: there is a child standing in front of you with a machete in her head. What do you do?” The farther they went down the river, the fewer boats they saw. From time to time there was still a group of people, mostly very small children, in clusters on the shore but they were thinning out. It felt good to ask a question twice. It was something she could never have managed in the past.

“That’s a dramatic flourish, Dr. Singh. Did I tell you the child had a machete in her head? I said she was cut. There was no doubt that she had a skull fracture. I picked out bone fragments with my tweezers but there was nothing else to be done about that. If she was draining cerebral spinal fluid she didn’t do it in front of me. I sewed her up, I gave her some antibiotic ointment, hooray for me, now I can meet your expectations of decency, unless of course your expectations include my taking her back to Manaus for an X-ray. But the actions you admire are not thoughtful, they were automatic, the actions I had brought with me from my Western medical background. The question you should be asking is what would have happened to the girl if I hadn’t been there? There was someone in the tribe who had managed these situations before me and I suppose that he, in this case it was a he, would have used the available means to help her. Would it have been a sterile needle? I think not. Would she have died? Very doubtful. And while you are moralizing, ask yourself this question as well: What happens to the girl whose brother cuts her after I’ve gone? Does the tribe still have faith in the man who sewed up heads before me? Has he kept up with his own skills or was he too busy watching mine? I don’t intend to be here forever.”

“The man who puts the girl’s scalp back together, the one you are respecting, do you think his methods are as successful as yours?”

“Now you are being purposefully ridiculous. I have very little respect for what passes as science around here. There’s nothing a Westerner loves more than the idea of being cured by tinctures made of boiled roots. They think this place is some sort of magical medicine chest, but for the most part the treatments here consist of poorly recorded gossip handed down throughout the ages from people who knew very little to people who know even less. There is much to be taken from the jungle, obviously — I am here to develop a drug — but in most cases the plants are as useless as the potted begonia that grows on your kitchen windowsill. The ones that do have potential can only be medicinal when they are properly employed. For these people there is no concept of a dosage, no set length for treatments. When something works it seems to me to be nothing short of a miracle.”

Marina remembered that cup of sludge Barbara Bovender had brought her from the shaman’s stand and wondered if she was no more than a Westerner given to the charms of boiled tinctures. It was a cure she would never admit to now.

Dr. Swenson brightened for a moment. “I’ll tell you what the locals do have a real genius for, and that’s poison. There are so many plants and insects and various reptiles capable of killing a person out here that it seems any idiot could scrape together a compound that would drop an elephant. As for the rest of it, people survive regardless of the care they get. The human animal is too resilient for it to be otherwise. It is not for me to meddle.”

“I appreciate your point. It’s only that I believe in the moment — the child, the blood — it would be hard not to act.”

“Then perhaps it will actually open up some of my time to have you here. I’ll send the daily medical emergencies to you.”

Marina laughed at this. “Then I know they’d be better off with the local medical care. I haven’t threaded a needle in nearly fifteen years.” Suddenly Marina realized she couldn’t remember sewing up that last woman she’d operated on. She remembered lifting out the infant, and at that instant realizing what she had done. She remembered one of the nurses taking him away, but what came after that? Where was the needle? She didn’t leave the patient there, uterus and abdomen open to the world, but she could not find a picture in her memory of closing.

“It comes right back,” Dr. Swenson said. “You were my student. Believe me, I pounded it all in there.”

Marina was still looking for the conclusion to the surgery in her mind when she had another thought. “What about Dr. Rapp?”

“What about him?”

“Wouldn’t he have sewn up the girl’s head?”

Dr. Swenson snorted. “He most certainly would not have, and not because he wasn’t a medical doctor. He had a perfect understanding of human physiology and the steadiest hands I have ever seen in my life. He could have grafted a vein by a campfire had he thought it was necessary. But Dr. Rapp had no self-aggrandizing notions about his role in the tribe. He never set himself out to be the great white hero. He never took a single specimen more than what was absolutely needed. He disrupted nothing.”

“So he would have let her bleed to death.”

“He would have respected the order that was in place.”

Marina nodded, thinking perhaps she was luckier than she realized to have found herself with an expedition still capable of making errors of compassion. “Is Dr. Rapp still alive?”

She might as well have asked if President Kennedy had survived his assassination attempt. “Do you read, Dr. Singh? Do you live in this world?”

It was a beautiful question to be asked by a woman on a boat who was taking her down a river into the beating heart of nowhere. “I do,” Marina said.

She sighed and shook her head. “Dr. Rapp died nine years ago. It will be ten years this August.”

And Marina, sensing that sympathy was in order, said that she was sorry to hear it, and Dr. Swenson thanked her.

“Were you studying mycology at the time? Is that how you came to work with Dr. Rapp?” It seemed possible, after all; anything was possible. She may have been coming down here as an operative for the CIA.

“I was a student of Dr. Rapp’s, and the location of his classroom was unpredictable. I followed him through Africa and Indonesia, but the Amazon was the source of his most important work. He studied botany, and I was free to study the workings of a true scientific mind. As an undergraduate at Radcliffe I wasn’t allowed to take his class at Harvard, Harvard couldn’t have stood for anything as radical as that, but Dr. Rapp let me travel on the expeditions. He was the first teacher I encountered who saw no limitations for women. As it turned out he was the only one.”

They were quiet for a long time after that, both staring off at different aspects of the jungle as it rolled past them, the same bit of scenery recycled indefinitely. Two hours later, Easter left the protection of the right-hand bank and crossed the width of the Negro to the left. There he turned up a tributary that was in every way similar to the countless other tributaries they had passed, and while it was unmarked, it was the exit ramp from the interstate, the one that would eventually take them to the street where Dr. Swenson lived. No other boats followed them though the entrance was wide at the mouth. In a matter of minutes the nameless river narrowed and the green dropped behind them like a curtain and the Negro was lost. Marina had thought that the important line that was crossed was between the dock and the boat, the land and the water. She had thought the water was the line where civilization fell away. But as they glided between two thick walls of breathing vegetation she realized she was in another world entirely, and that she would see civilization drop away again and again before they reached their final destination. All Marina could see was green. The sky, the water, the bark of the trees: everything that wasn’t green became green. All in green my love went riding.

Dr. Swenson announced that lunch was now in order. “The boy deserves a break. He stands up there so rigid that I think he would shatter if a nut hit him just right. There is no way of communicating that one should relax, do you realize that? You can shake out your arms and swivel your neck and it all looks like nonsense.” Dr. Swenson put her hands on her thighs and pushed up but she did not stand. She was thicker around the middle than she had been in Baltimore and the weight and the long time sitting seemed to keep her tied to her case of hash. Dr. Swenson, so far as Marina could calculate, would be in the neighborhood of seventy. It was possible at this point that even Dr. Swenson was tired. Marina stood up and extended her hand. Dr. Swenson rubbed her knees for a minute, looking pointedly away, then she took the hand. “Thank you for the assistance,” she said. She stood up and then let Marina go. “These are different days. For all I know about the body this is still not what I expected.” She went over and tapped Easter on the shoulder, then made a turning motion with her wrist and pointed to the shore. He nodded, keeping his eyes ahead. “He won’t go in right away,” Dr. Swenson said, coming back to where Marina was standing. “There’s a spot he likes where he can tie up to a tree. The anchor makes him nervous. It’s not reliable. Once he dropped it off and we had a devil of a time getting it back in the boat. There’s a lot for an anchor to get caught on in this river.”

Marina looked over the side of the boat. She couldn’t even imagine it. “How long have you been coming out here?”

“Dr. Rapp first found the Lakashi”—Dr. Swenson craned back her head, looked towards the tops of the trees—“it was fifty years ago, I suppose. I was on that trip, standing right on the stage of history. I remember coming down this very river for the first time. It was a glorious day. I had no idea that I would be coming back for the rest of my life.”

“It doesn’t seem that anything much has changed,” Marina said, looking to the riverbank and the straight wall of plant life, not a single person on the shore now, not a hut, a boat, in any direction.

“Don’t be fooled by the scenery,” Dr. Swenson said. “Things were very different then. You didn’t turn a corner and find a square mile of forest burned into a field. You didn’t see the constant smoke the way you do now. And the Lakashi, even they’re different. They lose their skills as fast as the basin loses forest. They used to make their own ropes, they wove cloth. Now even they manage to buy things. They cut down two or three trees and tie them together, float them to Manaus and sell them, that’s enough money for kerosene and salt, a river taxi ride back home, maybe some rum if they can strike a good deal, but for the most part they are terrible at dealing. They pick up clothing in town, the very junk that Americans drop off at the Salvation Army box. One time when I was visiting, this was years ago, the tribal elder, a man they called Josie, met me at the dock wearing a Johns Hopkins T-shirt. I had left my class at Hopkins that morning and flown to Brazil and taken a boat down a half a dozen splitting rivers only to be greeted by a Johns Hopkins T-shirt.” She shook her head at the memory of it. “Dear God, he was proud of that shirt. He wore it every day. In fact he was buried in it.”

“So you would teach all week and see patients and then fly down here on the weekends?”

“Not every weekend, nothing like that, though if there had been enough time or enough money I might have. There was so much work to do down here. I would leave late Thursday night after my last class. I only had office hours on Friday, and I didn’t keep office hours. I never believed in them. Questions are for the benefit of every student, not just the one raising his hand. If you don’t have the starch to stand up in class and admit what you don’t understand, then I don’t have the time to explain it to you. If you don’t have a policy against nonsense you can wind up with a dozen timid little rabbits lined up in the hall outside your office, all waiting to whisper the same imbecilic question in your ear.”

Marina clearly remembered being one of those same Friday rabbits herself, waiting for hours in the chair beside the office door until another student coming down the hall had the decency to explain that she was waiting for nothing. “The department chair didn’t mind that you didn’t keep hours?”

Dr. Swenson lowered her chin. “Did you attend parochial school as a child, Dr. Singh?”

“Public,” Marina said. “And so you came back on Sunday and taught Monday’s class?”

“It was a red-eye coming back. I’d land Monday morning and have the taxi take me straight to campus.” She stretched her arms overhead, the straying springs of her white hair reaching out in every direction. “I never looked my best on Mondays.”

“I never noticed,” Marina said.

“That’s one thing I have to give to your Mr. Fox: he made it possible for me to stay down here and do my work. I can’t say I am undisturbed, as he makes every effort to disturb me himself, but I am free of the madness that comes from trying to conduct meaningful research when your subjects are in another country. I’ve been down here full time for ten years now. The first three years I pieced together grants but the constant search for funding was more time consuming than flying back and forth to teach. There wasn’t a major pharmaceutical company in the world that wouldn’t have been willing to foot the bill for this but in the end Vogel won. I give credit where credit’s due.”

Easter slowed the boat and then put it in reverse, which, with their forward momentum, achieved a sort of churning stillness. He steered it into what appeared to be a slight indentation in the solid wall of trees and then took the rope that was already in his hand and flung it over a branch that hung out over the water at a better angle than all the other branches.

“Well, that worked out nicely,” Marina said when the rope was safely caught. She would rather talk about branches and rope than her Mr. Fox.

“It always works out well. That’s Easter’s tree. That’s the one he waits for. He knows exactly where to go.”

Marina made a slow circle. Thousands of trees, hundreds of thousands of trees as far as she could see on both sides of the river without a single clearing. Branches ad infinitum, leaves in perpetuity. “He remembers one branch? I don’t see how it would be possible to remember one branch.” From time to time a flock of birds would explode shrieking from the tangled greenery but the jungle looked so impenetrable that Marina couldn’t imagine how birds were able to fly into it. How could one bird ever make its way back to the nest? How could Easter remember the best place to tie the boat?

“It has been my observation that Easter remembers everything,” Dr. Swenson said. “When I said I believed that his intelligence may be above average I didn’t mean it sentimentally.”

Every act the boy performed was done with a graceful efficiency of movement: he shut down the engine, tied a knot, turned around to nod at Dr. Swenson.

“Very good!” she said, holding two thumbs up.

Easter smiled. The minute they were properly moored he became a child again, the one that Marina had first seen outside the opera house, the one Jackie had held in his arms. The boat was now the responsibility of the tree and for these moments he could be on his own. He pointed to the water and looked again to Dr. Swenson. She nodded, and as quickly as she could move her head he pulled off his T-shirt, showing them the smooth brown skin of his chest, the matchstick of his torso. He scrambled on top of two boxes of canned apricots and flying up and over the ropes that stood in place for a proper railing he launched his body rocket-wise, up and over, up and out, out and into the brown water with a resounding splash, his knees pulled up to his chest, his chin tucked in, his arms lifted up to the light. And then he was gone.

Marina was at the edge of the boat in two steps while Dr. Swenson made herself busy looking for something in a brown paper bag. The water was velvety, undisturbed by the weight of so small a boy. It didn’t even trouble itself to give up a reflection the way most water would. There was nothing on the surface and nothing beneath it. “Where is he!” Marina cried.

“Oh, that’s part of the trick. He thinks he’s scaring me to death. That’s the big fun of it all.” Dr. Swenson rooted through a bag of loose items. “Do you eat peanut butter? Americans are all determined to be allergic to peanuts these days.”

“I can’t see him!” The water was as impenetrable as the earth itself. The boy had been swallowed whole, a minnow, a thought.

Dr. Swenson raised her head and, looking in Marina’s direction, she sighed. “There is a great temptation to tease you, Dr. Singh. Your earnestness makes you very vulnerable to that, I’m sure. The child has the lungs of a Japanese pearl diver. He’ll resurface two-thirds of the way across in a direct line with the boat.” She waited one count. “Now.”

And up came the head of the boy who flipped his wet hair aside and raised his hand and waved. The light on the planes of his face made him golden. Even at this distance she could see his enormous inhalation before he dove again, this time kicking his legs up straight so that the light caught the pink soles of his feet before they disappeared. Marina sank down on the case of apricots, the place from which those feet had so recently catapulted, and she cried.

“Peanut butter and marmalade,” Dr. Swenson said, dealing out six slices of bread along the top of a box as if it were a poker game. She twisted closed the plastic bag with a piece of wire and picked up a battered knife with a long narrow blade. She stuck the blade into a jar of marmalade. “Rodrigo got the Wilkins and Son. Now there is a man who knows how to keep his customer’s business. One underestimates the pleasures of marmalade until one has been separated from it. Be sure to enjoy the bread. When this loaf goes that’s it, no more. It just doesn’t keep. I bring back yeast and they bake some but it has almost nothing in common with the store-bought bread. This, I must say, is delicious.”

She had thought he was dead, and as stupid as that was she could not control her imagination. Of course the boy could dive, could swim. He would come back in the boat and take them where they needed to go. How had she become so dependent on a deaf child in less than twenty-four hours? What in the world was she crying for?

“Pull yourself together, Dr. Singh,” Dr. Swenson said, keeping her attention fixed on the even distribution of peanut butter over bread. “He’ll be back on the boat in a minute and it will upset him greatly to see you carrying on. He’s a deaf child. He does everything to make you forget that, so it is your responsibility as the adult to remember. You can’t explain to him why you’re crying. I have not invented a sign with which to convey foolishness, so you cannot tell him you are just being foolish. You’ll frighten him, so stop it.” Easter was on the surface now doing an extravagant backstroke and the sound of his splashing was soothing to both of the women in the boat. Using the same knife, Dr. Swenson cut the sandwiches into triangles and left them there on the box. “Come and get your lunch now,” she said to Marina. It was an imperative rather than an invitation.

Marina pressed her eyes against the sleeve of her shirt. “It just scared me. That’s all,” she said. Neither her voice nor her explanation sounded convincing.

“We aren’t even there yet,” Dr. Swenson said, and took a triangle of sandwich for herself. “You’re going to have to toughen up or as God is my witness I will put you on the shore right here. There are more frightening things in the jungle than a boy going swimming in a still stretch of river.”

After Easter was back on the boat, as sleek and damp as a seal, and the sandwiches had been eaten (he handled the peanut butter jar with such gentle affection afterwards that Dr. Swenson consented to make him another), it was announced that there would be a nap. “Sesta,” Dr. Swenson said, and clapped her hands. The Portuguese made it sound essential. “It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.” She tapped Easter and pointed to a low trunk in front of the steering wheel, then she closed her eyes and rested her head against her folded hands in a child’s pantomime of sleep. Having his directions, the boy pulled two hammocks from the box and then set to clipping them onto poles beneath the shade of the boat’s tarp.

“Before I came to the jungle I didn’t believe in napping,” Dr. Swenson said, choosing the hammock nearest the steering wheel for herself. “I thought of it as a sign of weakness. But this country could make a napper out of anyone. It is important to pay attention to what the body is telling us.” She settled herself into the long piece of fabric and when she leaned back and lifted up her feet the hammock swallowed her whole. Marina looked at her teacher, a low-hanging lump cocooned in striped cotton swaying from side to side, the energy of her lying down to rest creating motion. “Go to sleep now, Dr. Singh,” the muffled voice said. “It will do your nerves a world of good.”

It was as if Dr. Swenson had vanished from the boat, as surely as Easter had vanished from it when he went over the side. Marina watched the hammock until its motion had settled. It was a magic trick: wrap her in a blanket and she’s gone. The quiet that was left without her was layered, subtle: at first Marina heard it only as silence, the absence of human voices, but once her ear had settled into it the other sounds began to rise, the deeply forested chirping, the caw that came from the tops of trees, the chattering of lower primates, the incessant sawing of insect life. It was not unlike the overture of the opera in which the well-trained listener could draw forth the piccolos, the soft French horn, a single meaningful viola. She leaned out from the shade’s protection and looked into the sun. Her watch said two o’clock. Easter sat on the deck in front of one of the many boxes that made up their furniture, a ballpoint pen in his right hand. Marina touched the empty hammock and then pointed to him. She folded her hands together and rested her head on them.

Easter shook his head, pointed to her, the hammock. He closed his eyes and dropped his chin. When she only stood there watching him he pointed again, this time using the pen for emphasis. She was supposed to go in the hammock.

It wasn’t a bad idea. She was tired. Still, she had the feeling that vigilance was in order. Didn’t someone need to stay awake and watch the jungle? Didn’t someone need to make sure the child did not fall overboard?

Easter got up and spread out the fabric with both hands, holding it open for her like an envelope and nodding instructively, as if perhaps the operation of a hammock was confusing to her. So he would watch the jungle. He would make sure she did not fall into the water. Obediently, she sat down, she lay down, and when she was settled in, Easter put his hand on her forehead and held it there as if she were a sick child. He smiled at her, and smiling back she closed her eyes. She was on a river in a boat in Brazil. She was in the Amazon taking a nap with Dr. Swenson.

She had had a good imagination as a child, though it had been systematically chipped apart by years of studying inorganic chemistry and charting lipids. These days Marina put her faith in data, the world she trusted was one that she could measure. But even with a truly magnificent imagination she could not have put herself in the jungle. She felt something slip across her rib cage — an insect? a bead of sweat? She kept still, looking out through the top of the hammock at the bright split of daylight in front of her. The midday heat tacked her into place. She thought about medical school, the fluorescent halls of that first hospital, the stacks of textbooks that made her back ache as she lugged them home from the library. Had she known that Dr. Swenson caught the last flight to Manaus after Thursday’s lecture on endometrial tissue, would she have wished that she could come along? Could she have seen herself in the Amazon at the side of her teacher on an expedition that forged ahead in science’s name? Dr. Swenson certainly had no trouble envisioning herself in the Amazon with Dr. Rapp when she was a student. Wasn’t it possible that she could have managed the same? Marina attempted to shift the knot of her hair to one side so that she was not lying on it so directly and in doing so set herself back into a gentle rocking. The answer was no. Marina had been a very good student, but she only raised her hand when she was certain of the answer. She excelled not through bright bursts of inspiration but by the hard labor of a field horse pulling a plow. On the few occasions Dr. Swenson noticed her she had approved, but she had never been able to remember Marina’s name.

When the rocking stopped Marina tilted her hips back and forth to start it up again. There were layers upon layers of scents inside the hammock — the smell of her own sweat which brought up trace amounts of soap and shampoo; the smell of the hammock itself which was both mildewed and sunbaked with a slight hint of rope; the smell of the boat, gasoline and oil; and the smell of the world outside the boat, the river water and the great factory of leaves pumping oxygen into the atmosphere, the tireless photosynthesis of plants turning sunlight into energy, not that photosynthesis had an odor. Marina inhaled deeply and the scent of the air relaxed her. Brought together, all those disparate elements turned into something wholly pleasant. She wouldn’t have thought that would be the case.

Marina closed her eyes. She could feel the boat wagging gently in the current of the river as it pulled on its line. She could feel the light and layered motion of the water coming up through the boat and up the poles that held the hammock and from there into the hammock and into her bones, and that was the movement that sent her to sleep.

Her father was there, but he was in a terrible rush. She was going back to the university with him. He was late for the class he was teaching and the streets of Calcutta were packed in a human knot, more and more people pushing to find their place on the pavement, so many students rushing to get to class themselves. She held his hand as a way to keep from losing him in the crowd and she thought of how they must look, the two of them holding hands. When a woman walking quickly in the opposite direction with a sack of rice on her head wedged herself between them as if there was no other way she could possibly go, Marina latched onto the back of her father’s belt before he had the chance to slip away. She was trying to outsmart the dream. She knew it well enough by now. Her father was so fast! She was looking at the little bit of gray in the back of his hair, which was still very thick and mostly black, when suddenly a man with a cart full of bicycle tires rushed at them. How could he get so much speed in this crush? The dream was intent on its own historical set of rules — it is written that the two of them must be divided — and so he rammed his cart between them as if he meant to go through her arm. The blow hit her with such velocity that she went flying up into the air. It was like a dream, and for the instant she was above the crowd she saw everything, all the people and the animals, the terrible shacks that lined the road to the grand houses, the beggars and their bowls, the gates of the university, her father’s slim shoulders as he dashed ahead unencumbered by her weight. She saw everything, the impossibility of everything, before she crashed down on the pavement, the entire weight of her body coming onto her elbow.

“Is it a snake?” Dr. Swenson shouted at her. “Have you been bitten, Dr. Singh?”

Marina was on the deck of the boat. It was a very slight distance to fall. Suspended in her hammock she had been no more than three feet off the ground, but be that as it may the ground had come up hard and knocked the wind out of her. When she opened her eyes she saw feet in tennis shoes and beside them, small brown feet. She took another minute to breathe.

“Dr. Singh, answer me! Is there a snake?”

“No,” Marina said, her left cheek pressed hard to the filthy wood.

“Then why were you screaming?” The boat was moving now and Dr. Swenson gave Easter a poke in the shoulder and pointed him back to the wheel. They had resumed their journey at some point and for a minute there had been no one driving.

Oh, she could think of so many reasons to be screaming, not the least of which was the fire in every bone on the left side of her body. Marina eased over onto her back. She moved her left fingers gently and then explored the range of movement in her left wrist. She moved her feet from side to side to complete the inventory. Nothing broken. The fabric she had been sleeping in was now hanging just above her face. “I was having a dream.”

Dr. Swenson reached up and unclipped Marina’s hammock from the pole and then walked around her to the other side to take the hammock down. It had the effect of someone throwing open the draperies. The sunlight flooded her vision. Without intending to, Marina was looking up the bottom of Dr. Swenson’s shirt and saw the soft white ledge of her belly where it met the line of her drawstring pants. “I thought you had been bitten by a snake.”

“Yes, I understand that.” Marina was shivering slightly in the heat. She closed her right hand, tried to feel her father’s belt.

“There are lanceheads in these parts and they aren’t geniuses for hanging on to their branches. It is as stupid a snake as it is deadly. Everyone here knows someone who met their end stepping on a lancehead. They are perfectly camouflaged and they do nothing to get out of the way or make their presence known except for sinking their teeth into your ankle. Easter once kept me from putting my foot in the middle of one all coiled up in our camp. It must have been two meters long and it didn’t look any different from a pile of leaves and dirt. Even when he showed it to me I didn’t see it at first.” She stopped and gave herself a quick shake.

“Was I about to step on one?”

“They do occasionally fall into boats,” Dr. Swenson said tersely. “They like to get under things or into things. A hammock is a reasonable place for a snake to hide. It was startling, your screaming. I had to turn you out to see if there was a snake in there with you.”

“You turned the hammock over?” Marina had assumed she had thrown herself out in the course of her dream.

“Of course I did. Did you expect me to find the snake without waking you?”

Marina shook her head. Had there been a two-meter snake in her hammock, flinging it onto the ground while flinging Marina on top of it would likely not have saved her from being bitten, but where snakes were concerned people often made hurried decisions. She closed her eyes and covered them with both hands. Dr. Swenson would have thought she was thinking of the snake but she was thinking of her father. No one said anything for a while and then she felt something very cold tapping against her shoulder.

“Sit up,” Dr. Swenson said. “Drink a bottle of water. Sit up now. There’s ice on the boat. Do you want any ice?”

Marina shook her head.

“Ice is a luxury confined to this moment. If you want any ice, this is your chance. Sit up now, Dr. Singh. I can’t stand to see a person lying on this deck. It’s vile. You had a dream. Now sit up and drink your water.”

Marina sat up and then, remembering the cockroaches, she pulled herself back onto the box of grapefruit juice. Her head hurt. Then she noticed that the box she was sitting on was covered in letters, letters she was sure hadn’t been there earlier. It was a printed uppercase alphabet of an irregular size, or most of the alphabet. The letter K was gone, and when she moved her thigh she saw the Q was missing as well. Some letters, like the A, were perfectly rendered, while others, R and Z, were backwards. At the end of the string of letters were two words, EASTER and ANDERS, followed by a rudimentary drawing of a snail. Marina touched her fingers to Anders’ name. “What’s this about?”

“That is one of the many legacies left by your friend Dr. Eckman. I’m sure there are more I have yet to come across. In the brief amount of time he was with us he managed to teach Easter the fundamentals of table manners as well as the alphabet, or most of the alphabet. I see the K is missing.”

“And he can write their names.”

“I thought it was interesting that those were the two words he chose to teach the boy. Easter, well, that makes sense, but Anders? Still, he was very sick at the end. Maybe he felt it was a way to be remembered.”

Marina could see him sitting on a log, a pad of paper out across his knees, Easter pressed in close beside him. Of course he could teach a boy how to make his letters. He’d done it three times before. It wouldn’t make any difference to him that Easter couldn’t hear. This is who you are, Anders tells him, pointing to Easter’s name. Then he points to his own, This is who I am.

“Dr. Eckman wrote everything out for him, a sort of study chart. Easter practices constantly. I let him keep Dr. Eckman’s pens when he died. For a while he was making letters all over his arms and legs but I put a stop to that. I don’t know how much of the ink is absorbed through the skin but it can’t be good for a child. It’s a bad habit when there’s plenty of perfectly usable paper. I don’t know what he thinks the letters are exactly, but he remembers them, most of them. He gets them in the right order.”

“Maybe he thinks of them as something that belonged to Anders.”

Dr. Swenson nodded. She watched the boy watch the river. “Easter cries out in his sleep. It’s the only time I’ve heard his voice, but he has one. Months go by and I don’t hear him, but since Dr. Eckman died he’s had nightmares every night. It’s a terrible sound he makes.” Dr. Swenson turned then and let her eyes stay on Marina’s. “It’s a shame you can’t talk to him about it. It’s something that the two of you have in common. I will assume that the issue for you is mefloquine and that Mr. Fox did not send me a doctor with a debilitating mental illness.”

“I’m taking Lariam.” She wished she could bring back the box of grapefruit juice for Karen. It was, all things considered, a remarkable achievement.

“I’ve seen my share of screamers down here but when it happens I never think of Lariam. In the moment I always think it’s a snake.”

“Better to be safe.”

Dr. Swenson nodded. “Lariam is for tourists, Dr. Singh. I sincerely hope you are a tourist, out of here in the next canoe. But short of that I suggest you throw those pills in the river. Do you think I take Lariam? A person can’t live here having screaming nightmares and paranoia and suicidal fantasies. The jungle is hard enough without that.”

“I haven’t been suicidal.”

“Well, good for you. It can still come. I knew a young man who walked into the river one night and didn’t walk out. The natives saw him, thought he was going for a swim.”

“I don’t take it because I enjoy it, believe me.”

“Ever more the reason not to take it. It affects certain people quite seriously. I would say given this display that you’re one of them.”

Marina drew a slow breath in, held it, let it out. She could feel herself coming back even as the fire was raised in her arm. “All the same though, I’d rather not get malaria.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say it’s rampant. I haven’t gotten it, or I got it once but it wasn’t here. And there is after all a cure.”

“Was Anders taking Lariam?”

Dr. Swenson put her hands in her hair and gave her scalp an aggressive scratch. “He didn’t scream in his sleep so we never had the opportunity to discuss it. Are you asking me if Dr. Eckman died of malaria?”

It hadn’t been what she was asking, though it was a perfectly reasonable question. “It seems possible.”

“Malaria is something of a specialty of mine,” Dr. Swenson said. “So I can tell you no. Not unless it was P. falciparum that turned cerebral. That would be a true rarity, of course, there isn’t a great deal of P. falciparum in these parts.”

P. falciparum, P. vivax, P. malariae, and there was one more. When was the last time Marina needed to know the strains of malaria?

“P. ovale,” Dr. Swenson said.

“You think he might have had P. ovale?”

“No, that’s the one you can’t remember. Mention a strain of malaria to any doctor and they try to remember the other three, but no one remembers P. ovale. You see very little of it outside West Africa. Do you have the same dream every time?”

Marina had been too recently asleep to understand everything, too recently on this boat, too recently discussing snakes, too recently in Calcutta, too recently with Anders. P. ovale? “More or less.”

“I find mefloquine interesting in that way, how it taps into a single pocket of the subconscious. You could just as easily use it as a treatment as you could a preventative medicine. There’s no sense suffering in advance. It wouldn’t do you much good with cerebral malaria but as I said, that would be an extremely rare presentation in Brazil. What are your dreams about, Dr. Singh?”

What are your dreams about? her mother asked her when she was a child screaming in her bed. What did you dream? Mr. Fox asked, his hands holding the tops of her arms. “My father,” Marina said. “I’m with my father and then we’re separated somehow. I can’t find him.”

Dr. Swenson stood up with some difficulty. The interview had reached its conclusion. “Well, that doesn’t sound too bad.”

Marina would concede the point. When presented as a single sentence without embellishment it didn’t sound bad at all.