State of Wonder (16 page)

“Now that was worth coming in for,” Dr. Swenson said, when finally, after fifteen minutes of thunderous applause, the soprano reluctantly tore herself from the proscenium. As they picked up their programs and opened the door to the box, Dr. Swenson addressed Marina directly. “What did you think of the Gluck, Dr. Singh?”

Tell us about the patient, Dr. Singh.
Marina stopped herself. “I’m afraid I’m not a good judge this evening. I was distracted.”

Dr. Swenson nodded as if this was the correct answer. “I feel certain it’s better that way. The Gluck in one’s memory is always more satisfying than the Gluck itself.” She turned and led the way down the hall to the staircase and the four others followed behind. Milton took Marina’s arm for the stairs and she was grateful for the kindness. She spent very little time in high heels and she could feel a sway in
her ankles.

“No one was expecting her?” Marina said. She made her voice quiet but the crowds were pouring into the hallways now and filling up the space around them, everyone chattering to one another, to their cell phones. The air clicked with the hard, bright syllables of Portuguese spoken by Brazilians well pleased with their evening out.

“There is no expecting Dr. Swenson,” Milton said, tightening his grip on Marina’s arm as two young girls cut through the crowd at a gallop pace, their party dresses flipping up behind them to show white underskirts as they took the stairs three at a time. “But there is suspecting. She doesn’t like to miss the opening of the season. I didn’t take any bookings for tonight though there were plenty of people who wanted to come in a car. That is not because I expected her, but because I suspected.”

Marina had lost sight of Dr. Swenson but not the Bovenders, who were a dozen steps ahead. Mrs. Bovender especially was a virtual lighthouse. “I would have appreciated you passing your suspicions along.”

“I might have made you worry for nothing then. She doesn’t always come. She doesn’t always do anything.”

“I understand that, but had I known there was any possibility of her being here tonight I would have worn my own clothes.”

Milton stopped on the stairs, forcing the people behind him to stop. “There is something wrong with your dress? How could there be something wrong with this dress?”

Up ahead Marina saw the Bovenders ride the river of humanity out the front doors of the opera house, their bright heads bent down. She could assume they were talking to Dr. Swenson or at least that they were listening to her. She ignored Milton’s question and tugged him forward.

The night air was heavy and warm but there was a slight fish-smelling breeze coming from the river. Marina and Milton found the other three on the great tiled landing in front of the opera house, their faces turned in the direction of that breeze. Countless thousands of insects poured towards the electric lights that bathed the sides of the magnificent building and flooded over into the terraces and the streets below them. Even in the noise of the crowd Marina could hear the thrumming of wings, the various pitches of buzzing sounds they made. Their enthrallment of the light reminded her of the audience at the end of the final aria. They were driven mad by it. They could never have enough.

“The Bovenders tell me that nothing has changed since I’ve been gone,” Dr. Swenson said as Milton and Marina approached them. “Is that true? An entire city and nothing changes?”

“I can’t think of any changes in the last ten years,” Milton said.

“There must be something,” Dr. Swenson said. Her face was tilted up and the spotlight above her head seemed to shine on her alone. It was as if she had been cut out of light and pasted onto a dark background, powerfully removed from the crowds around her the way she was in memory. Even though this was exactly the person Marina had been looking for, she could not overcome the feeling that two very distant points in her life were now colliding in a way that should be relegated only to bad dreams. The last time she had actually seen Dr. Swenson was the day before the accident. Throughout the inquisition they had no contact and after the inquisition she left the program. She hadn’t thought of that before.

“Well, Marina’s here now,” Jackie offered.

“I would prefer something I didn’t already know.”

Milton thought for a moment. “Rodrigo is stocking flea collars in his store. He says you can put them under your pillow, it keeps things out of the bed.”

Dr. Swenson nodded her head approvingly, as if this were exactly the piece of information she had hoped to uncover. “I’ll get some in the morning.”

That was when a slightly built boy, a Brazilian Indian, wandered towards them, slipping easily between adults without touching their clothes. He was noticeable even in the crowd because he represented two groups that were largely absent from the evening: children and Indians. He wore a pair of nylon shorts and a green T-shirt that said “World Cup Soccer.” He looked like the boys who sat on blankets in the square selling bracelets and small animals carved out of nuts. He had the same dark silky hair and eyes that appeared overly large, when in fact it was his face that was too small. Logic would dictate that this child would be selling something as well, children were industrious in Manaus: hawking fans and postcards and butterflies in wooden boxes, but his hands were empty.

“Easter!” Barbara Bovender cried, and dropped down to sit on the back of her heels, a perilous maneuver in so short a dress. She held out her arms to the boy who ran into them, burying his face in her neck.

“It’s the hair,” Dr. Swenson said. “He never can get over it.”

Jackie leaned over to pick the child up and his wife came up as well. The boy had filled both of his hands with her hair and was studying it intently, a luminous rope thrown down from the gods. He was too old to be picked up and clearly it delighted him. “I think you’re bigger,” Jackie said, jostling him up and down as if trying to guess his weight.

“He isn’t bigger,” Dr. Swenson said. She tapped the boy on the chest and when he looked at her she spoke. “Dr. Singh.” She raised her right index finger and touched that hand to her left wrist, then drew a line up her throat with one finger and pulled that same finger into the air from her mouth. Then she pointed at Marina. He let go of Barbara’s hair and gave Marina his hand.

“Look at that!” Jackie said, as if this were a particularly clever trick for a boy. “He can shake.” As a reward he tossed the child up in the air a few inches, up and down and up and down, until he laughed a strange, seal-like laugh and had to let go of her hand.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Marina said. The child’s enormous eyes fixed themselves to her and did not look away. “You could have brought him to the opera,” she said to Dr. Swenson. Had he come with her? “There were plenty of seats.”

“Easter’s deaf,” Dr. Swenson said. “The opera would have been more tedious for him than it was for us.”

“It wasn’t such a bad opera,” Barbara said to the boy.

“He likes to wander when he has the chance,” Dr. Swenson said for him. “He likes to take a look around town.” Easter, perched in Jackie’s arms, his attention rightfully returned to Barbara’s hair, did not turn his head. Even with good hearing he would have seemed too small to be walking the streets of Manaus alone in the dark.

“I would have gone with you if I’d known you were out here,” Jackie said to the boy. “We could have cut out together.”

“He could have come. I think he would have liked seeing all the people,” Barbara said. “There’s a lot to look at in the opera house even if you can’t hear the music.”

Dr. Swenson looked at her watch. “I think this is enough of a reunion for now. Dr. Singh and I should have a talk. I assume you don’t mind the late hour, Dr. Singh. Milton tells me you’ve been waiting.”

Marina said that she would be glad to talk.

“Good. So the rest of you go on. I’ll see you in the morning. Milton, tell Rodrigo I’ll be at the store by seven.”

“May I drive you somewhere?” Milton asked.

Dr. Swenson shook her head. “It’s a perfectly good night. I’m sure we can manage a walk. Can you manage, Dr. Singh?”

Marina, in her column of gray silk and her high heels, was not entirely sure she could manage, but she said that a walk would be good after sitting so long.

“We’ll take Easter back to the apartment,” Barbara said. The child had begun to braid the section of her hair that he was holding on to.

Dr. Swenson shook her head. “He hasn’t eaten. He’ll come with us. Put him down, Jackie, he isn’t a monkey.”

Jackie set Easter on the ground and the boy looked from one party to the other. In spite of not having heard he seemed to be in tacit agreement with the plans. “We’ll see you later then,” Jackie said, finding the part in the boy’s hair with his fingers and smoothing it down. Then, remembering what in fact was new, he held out his hand and Easter shook it goodbye. “Brilliant,” Jackie said.

T
he streets around the opera house were made of flat stones fitted together into an uneven jigsaw and Marina found herself wishing that Milton had come with them, if not to drive then at least to keep his hand under her arm. Marina was a very tall doctor who worked in a lab in Minnesota and those three things: the height, the work, and the state, precluded the wearing of heels, giving her little experience to draw from now that she needed it. She shifted her weight forward onto her toes and hoped not to wedge the heel of Barbara’s shoes into a crevice. Even as Marina slowed, Dr. Swenson kept to her own unwavering pace, a trudge of metronomic regularity that Marina remembered. In her khaki pants and rubber-soled shoes, she was quickly a block ahead without seeming to notice that she was alone. Easter stayed behind them both, perhaps to alert Dr. Swenson in the event that Marina went down. The crowd from the opera had dispersed and all that remained were the city’s regulars who stood on the street corners in the dark trying to decide whether or not to cross. They watched Marina as she pulled her borrowed shawl up over her shoulders.

“Are you coming, Dr. Singh?” Dr. Swenson called out. She had gone around a corner or stepped into a building. Her voice was part of the night. It came from nowhere.

Are you coming, Dr. Singh?
She would dip so quickly into a patient’s room that suddenly the residents would lose their bearings. Had she gone to the right or the left? Marina squinted down the street, the darkness broken apart by streetlights and headlights and bits of broken glass that showered the curb and reflected the light up. “I’m coming,” she said. Her eyes shifted constantly from one side of the street to the other in a slow nystagmus. In order to steady herself, she made an organized list in her mind of all the things that were making her nervous: it was night, and she wasn’t exactly sure where she was, though she could have easily turned around and found her way back to the opera house and from there, her hotel; she was unsteady in her shoes, which, along with the ridiculous dress, made her the human equivalent of a bird with a broken wing to any predator who might be out trawling the streets late at night; if there was a predator, she now had a deaf child to protect and she wasn’t exactly sure how she would manage that; as she felt the blisters coming up beneath the sandals’ straps she could not help but think of the countless explorers throughout history who had been taken down by the lowly blister, then she reassured herself that there was very little chance that this was how she would meet her end given the three different types of antibiotics Mr. Fox had sent along with her Lariam and the phone; and since this was a list of anxieties, she could not neglect the most pressing fear of all: assuming she made it to her destination tonight, she was then to sit down with Dr. Swenson and have a discussion about what exactly? Vogel’s rights and interests in Brazil? The location of Anders’ body?

Then, without so much as a footfall to announce him, Easter came up from behind her and put himself in the lead. At first she thought he must be bored by how slow she was and figured he meant to leave her, but instead he aligned himself to her pace. He would have been in easy reach had she just put out her hand. He had made himself her seeing-eye boy. As she watched his back, his shoulders barely wide enough to hang a shirt on, half the anxieties on her list fell away. With one hand she held Mrs. Bovender’s wrap firmly to her chest while her other hand was full of the silk of her skirt which she held up in order not to trip on it or let it drag in the pools of muddied rain left over from the late afternoon deluge. The night air pressed against her, moving roughly in and out of her lungs. It was very recently that she had been ill. Despite the pins and the spray and the black lacquered sticks with the gold Chinese fans, she could feel random sections of her hair breaking free and sliding damply down the back of her neck. When they reached the corner, Easter turned right, and without question or thought, she followed him.

Two blocks later, at about the point she was certain she would not be able to take another step, Easter dipped into a restaurant Marina had never seen before, on a street she couldn’t remember. He could not have seen Dr. Swenson go in but there she was, sitting at a table in the corner, a bottle of soda water in front of her that was already half consumed. If possible, the room was slightly darker than the night she had come in from and a small, single candle on every table stood in place of the stars. Half a dozen tables were occupied, a dozen more were empty. It was late. The boy, having completed his job, cut the shortest path between the other customers and sat in a wooden chair beside Dr. Swenson. Had she brought him in with her from the jungle or did Easter, along with Milton and the Bovenders, have his place on Vogel’s payroll? Dr. Swenson tilted the bread basket towards him and he took a piece and laid it nicely on his plate. Marina tried not to limp as she made her way towards them. For a moment she stood at the table saying nothing, her resplendence melted in the heat, and waited for the other woman to acknowledge her arrival. She could have waited for the rest of her life. “I lost you,” Marina said finally.