State of Wonder (18 page)

Marina cautiously moved her toes side to side. Her feet had swollen while she had been sitting and the straps of her sandals were now cutting deep into the skin. She reached under the table and, with some effort and a sharp strike of pain, pulled the shoes off. Easter, having finished the cake, ducked to look.

“I’m afraid I won’t be able to walk back,” Marina said. What harm would there be in telling the truth now? She was finished.

Dr. Swenson called out to the waiter and Marina clearly understood her to say Milton’s name. The waiter nodded. “He’ll come and pick us up,” she said. She motioned for Easter to hand her one of the shoes and she looked at it as if it were a rare archeological find. “It’s difficult for me to understand why a woman would choose to do that to herself.” She returned the silver sandal to its mate.

“It is a mystery to me as well,” Marina said. She would not try to defend the shoes. They were indefensible. She would walk barefoot for the rest of her life before she’d put them on again.

“Barbara tells me you were a student of mine,” Dr. Swenson said. Perhaps it was the shoes that made her think of it, she was wondering how a student of hers had learned so little about the workings of the human anatomy.

“Yes,” Marina said. All of her fears were floating away from her now. What difference did it make? One by one she met them and then let them go.

“That would have been Johns Hopkins?”

Marina nodded. “I’m forty-two.”

Dr. Swenson signed her name to the bill and left it on the table. It would no doubt be mailed to Vogel. “Well, I must not have done a convincing job if you went into pharmacology. But then here I am developing a drug. I suppose we both wound up in the same field after all.” She reached down to the floor and handed Marina’s sandals to Easter to carry. He seemed very pleased to have the job. “None of us knows how life will work out, Dr. Singh.”

Dr. Singh was in the process of agreeing with that exact impossibility as Milton, who must have been idling the car outside, walked in the door to take her home.

T
hat night Marina spent a long time in the bath paying attention to her various wounds: the turned back flaps of skin that dotted her toes and heels, the pillowy blisters that had yet to drain, the different bites that were itching or bleeding or bruised, she scrubbed them all with soap and washcloth until the skin around the red lesions was red as well, then she dried off and slathered up with salve. All of this had to be done before calling Mr. Fox. It didn’t matter how late it was. She was planning on waking him up. She was hoping even that waking him up would give her something of an advantage in their conversation. She pictured the phone ringing on the night table beside the bed she had on occasion fallen asleep in but in which she had never slept an entire night, the very bed she hoped to go home to. Mr. Fox answered on the fourth ring, his voice alert and composed. He would have given himself two rings after waking to collect himself.

“Tell me you’re fine,” he said.

“Some blisters,” she said, gently pushing at one of them on her toe, “but absolutely fine. I found Dr. Swenson.” She said it straight out. She did not wait for him to ask her because he had asked her every time they spoke, as if finding Dr. Swenson was something that might have happened and then slipped her mind. She told him about the opera house, about Easter and the dinner. She told him what had been said about Anders and, in trying to recreate the conversation, she realized how little of a conversation it had actually been. She could report that the project was behind but moving forward. Even if she lacked the details she was sure about the essential fact: Dr. Swenson wanted to see this done more than anyone, and she would get it done, on that point she had been very convincing, though she had neglected to say when she projected the drug might be submitted to the FDA.

“No time line?” Mr. Fox said.

“Nothing absolute,” Marina said, but in truth she hadn’t asked. Why hadn’t she asked? All these years later, she still listened to Dr. Swenson as a student listens to a teacher, as a Greek listens to an oracle. She didn’t question her, she simply committed the answers to memory.

“Don’t worry about that,” Mr. Fox said. “It was a preliminary meeting. You’re smart not to push her yet. Do you think you’ll leave tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow or the next day. It depends on tickets. I’ll be on the first plane that has a seat.”

“You’ll take a plane?” Mr. Fox asked.

“To come home.”

The line was quiet, and into that silence Marina did not extend herself. Even as she realized the error of her assumption she wanted to stay with it for as long as possible. Her hopeful imagination had let her drift all the way home. She had no luggage. They had never found her luggage. Everything she had acquired in Manaus would be left behind, save the little white heron and the red beaded bracelet that was knotted to her wrist. Through the window of the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport she saw white blossoms. She drank the honeyed breeze as she stepped outside.

“Don’t quit this now,” Mr. Fox said. “Not after all the time it’s taken to find her.”

He would still be saying this after six months, after a year,
Don’t quit this now
. Maybe he wanted her to stay until she could promise she was bringing back the chemical compound for fertility in her pocket. “I delivered the message,” Marina said. In retrospect she was not entirely sure that she had said anything but she was certain that any message she delivered to Dr. Swenson would never be listened to anyway. Dr. Swenson didn’t listen to Marina, or Anders, or Mr. Fox. Listening was not Dr. Swenson’s habit. Marina was not going to change the course of the river. “Anders delivered the message. She told me that. She understands exactly what it is you want and I believe she will get it to you as soon as is humanly possible.”

“It isn’t the sort of thing you can take someone’s word on. The drug could be finished or she could never have started it. This is a project of enormous importance and expense. You need to find out where we are in development,” Mr. Fox said, and then he added the word “exactly.”

She looked at her feet, bright and raw in the overhead light, slick with Neosporin. “You’ll have to find somebody else.”

“Marina,” he said. “Marina, Marina.” He said it with tenderness in his voice, with love.

She could smell her own capitulation coming on from a mile away. It was her nature, her duty. She told him good night and hung up the phone. She couldn’t blame him much. Inside the envelope of his own warm, dry sheets, he really couldn’t understand what he was asking her to do. When she was still at home, she hadn’t been able to imagine this place either.

It was a Lariam day. She had been putting it off since this morning, but what difference did it make? She always wound up taking it in the end. The pills she had so cavalierly tossed in the airport trash had managed to find her again. Tomo never complained about having to come up from the front desk to settle her screaming by banging on her door. And if she dealt with intermittent nausea, paranoia, my God, she could hardly pin that on the Lariam. Even if she went home tomorrow she would have to take it for another four weeks. It was the drug’s way of reminding the patient that the trip isn’t over. The trip would be in the bloodstream, in the tissues. All the potential disasters of the place would continue to linger inside. Marina set the pill on her tongue and swallowed it with half a bottle of water which was sitting on her dresser, then she turned out the light. She was becoming accustomed to the dip in the middle of the mattress, to the foam-rubber pillow that smelled like cardboard boxes, to the sound of the water piping into the ice machine down the hall and then, hours later, the dumping release of its little frozen charges into the bin. She wondered how long these things would stay with her once she was home again. She wondered how long Anders would stay with her, and what it would be like to settle back into their lab alone and who would eventually come to replace him. She wondered how long it would be that she would think of him every day, and what it would feel like to realize that days had passed and she had forgotten to think of him at all. She thought about the stack of letters that Karen had written sitting in the drawer of the table beside the bed. She thought of Anders buried in the jungle floor three thousand miles from Eden Prairie. As tired as she was, it kept her awake. When the mind could no longer bear the news—Anders is dead—it busied itself with the details: Where is his camera? Where are his binoculars?

W
hen Marina woke up she was standing in front of the window in her hotel room with no memory of having gotten out of bed. It was freezing. She and her father had been at the campus of the University of Minnesota where he had done his doctoral work in microbiology. The snow was coming down hard. All she could really remember were the Indians coming out of all the buildings, and how the women in their red and purple saris completely changed the landscape, the men in pink shirts broke the whiteness apart. They shivered in the arctic wind until the colors began to vibrate, making a sea of trembling, snow-covered poppies. She had gone to sleep with the air conditioner left on high and now the inside of the hotel window was so wet that she wondered from the stupor of interrupted sleep if it was finally raining inside. Beads of water streaked down the glass, reducing the view of the world outside to a deep purple darkness punctuated by balls of glittering light. The cold air blew gale force at the cheap cotton nightgown she had bought from Rodrigo. She squatted down in front of the unit beneath the window, her hair blown back by the wind, and blindly pushed the little buttons until the system gave one final frozen exhalation and died. She was shaking, and unsure how much of that was the temperature and how much was a dream. All she could be certain of was that she had been trying to go home and that she couldn’t because of the snow. She wasn’t going home. Maybe Mr. Fox had whispered in her ear all night, but while she slept the world shifted away from the airport and towards the docks. The clear resolve she had had in the restaurant seemed to have broken like a fever sometime during the night and as she was waking up she could feel Minnesota recede with the rest of her dream. She would not get back into bed now. She was finished with that bed. Like a somnambulist half awake she gathered up everything that belonged to Barbara Bovender, the gray silk dress that was muddied around the hem, the savage shoes, the wrap, the hair pins, and put them all together in a plastic bag. Then she opened every drawer and removed the meager contents. She folded what she owned and put it into small piles on the dresser. As she went to every corner of the room, she told herself that what mattered now was movement, that the point was not so much to get home as it was to leave Manaus. She was certain of nothing except the fact that she wouldn’t spend another night in the Hotel Indira. She put the packet of Karen’s letters on top of her three folded shirts. She didn’t have a bag for what she owned but that, she imagined, would be the least of it.

By six o’clock she had dressed and left. The early morning city had the tick of action, children were on their blankets, the painted bowls and crude flutes and beaded bracelets they had to sell were all in even lines, the women were moving towards the market hall, not briskly but faster than they would move at any other point for the rest of the day. Dogs trailed along far to the sides of the streets, heads low and watchful, the shadow and light making valleys between every rib.

It seemed in all of Manaus only Nixon was still asleep. In the lobby of the Swenson-Bovender apartment building, his face was pressed sideways against the desk, his hands stretched out in front of him and open wide. Marina gave herself a moment to watch such a deep and dreamless sleep, feeling a fondness for him she couldn’t account for unless it was just the fact that there were so few people in this city she knew by name. She imagined he was a good man even though her only evidence was his fidelity to this post.

She sat down in the lobby to write the Bovenders a note, but after going to the trouble of locating paper and pen found she had no idea what to say. She couldn’t thank them. They were the grand jury after all, keeping her there in the holding cell of the Hotel Indira for two weeks while they decided if her case was fit for Dr. Swenson to hear. Or maybe she should thank them for managing to make their decision in two weeks. They had kept Anders for over a month, an entire wasted month of life while his boys rode their bicycles alone through the slush of spring. Marina was distracted by the sound of Nixon’s labored respiration. Then, on his desk, he stopped breathing. Twenty seconds, thirty seconds, she was just about to get up when at forty-five seconds he gasped, his back heaving, and then began to breathe again. Still asleep, he sighed and turned his face in the other direction. Apnea. There was nothing she could do about that.

She settled back into the winged chair in the lobby’s small conversational grouping of furniture where she sat by herself. If Marina couldn’t thank the Bovenders, she found she couldn’t blame them either. At twenty-three she would have gladly done their job. She might have stayed in the position until she was forty-three if certain events had played out differently. Without the Bovenders there to remind her, she might have forgotten what it was like to be enthralled, to fall hard in love for principles and a singularly remarkable mind. They were little more than pretty children, feather-light, proven capable of no end of lies, and yet there was something in their shiny nature that made them indestructible. She would have given anything to take them to the jungle with her. So in the end she put down the truth as she knew it at that exact minute.
I will miss you.
She wrote their name on the bag and added twenty dollars U.S. for the cost of cleaning the dress, knotted it all together and left it on the desk beside one of Nixon’s sleeping hands. Dr. Swenson tended to be early. If rounds began at seven she was on to the first case at six-thirty. It didn’t take long to figure out the clock. Marina didn’t want to meet her in the lobby for fear it might look like an ambush. She walked quickly to Rodrigo’s store. It was busy then, all the stores were busy. She fixed herself a cup of coffee from the pot on his counter and found a nylon duffel bag while he waited on customers. She picked up more sunscreen, more bug spray. It was important not to think too deeply about what she would need or she might wind up taking all of it. Everything went on the Vogel account, down to the coffee. She picked up another box of Band-Aids, a second pair of flip-flops. She was looking at a length of netting that was meant to hang over a bed when Dr. Swenson came in with Milton.