State of Wonder (30 page)

Marina shrugged. It was a peculiar kind of therapy, lying flat out with the child you had only now realized you wanted while being asked if you had wanted a child. “I’m forty-two. I seriously doubt my life will change so much in the next year or two that it would be possible.” She was no longer sure about what she wanted from Mr. Fox, and hers was not an age for indecision.

“There will be nothing but time, don’t you understand? That’s what the Lakashi are offering. If I can have a child at seventy-three, then why shouldn’t you have one at forty-three, forty-five? I’ll tell you the truth, Dr. Singh, what I have discovered about these trees is not what I expected. It will not be what your pharmaceutical company expects. It is something much greater, much more ambitious than anything we had hoped for. That was Dr. Rapp’s great lesson in the Amazon, in science: Never be so focused on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.”

Marina was sitting up now. She had disengaged her hand from Easter’s though the two were fairly stuck together from where the snake’s blood had dried and sealed them into one unit. She came outside her net. “You’re telling me you’re pregnant?”

Dr. Swenson blinked. For a moment she looked more surprised than Marina. “You thought I was fat?”

“You’re seventy-three years old!”

Dr. Swenson folded her hands on top of her stomach in a universal gesture of pregnancy. It was something Marina was sure she had never seen her do. Her shirt rode up and showed the roundness of her belly. “I know you have seen women here who are my age or older and they are pregnant. I’ve heard you comment on them.”

“But they’re Lakashi.” Marina wasn’t sure if what she was saying was racist or scientific. This distortion of biology is for them, not for us. She could still hear them singing by the river, beating on drums, no doubt tenderizing the snake before they held it on sticks above the fire, or whatever one did to cook a snake in these parts.

“They are Lakashi indeed, so that is the question. We know that if they eat the bark consistently from the onset of first menses their ova appear not to deteriorate. But Americans wouldn’t feed their daughters a monthly pill from the time they’re thirteen on the off chance the child will want to wait until she’s fifty to reproduce. What we have to find out is whether or not the bark can reinvigorate the reproductive capacity of the postmenopausal woman.”

“And you’re the test case? You couldn’t find someone else to do this?”

“There are no postmenopausal Lakashi. That’s the whole point.”

“Then you get a Jinta. You don’t take it yourself.”

“How quickly we put our medical ethics aside. I developed this drug. If I believe in it, and clearly I do, then I should be willing to test it on myself.”

“Who is the father?”

Dr. Swenson looked at her with the gravest disappointment, the disappointment she reserved for first year medical students. “Really, Dr. Singh, you are not serious.”

Given the circumstances of the day, Marina would have sworn that there was nothing left to upset her, and still she felt her hands shaking. “I understand that you are conducting an extremely limited initial trial on yourself but the end result of this experiment will be a child and, with all good wishes for your longevity, you may not be around as long as you might like to look after it. If there is no father in the traditional sense, then what happens to the outcome?”

“There are plenty of children around here. Do you really think one more is going to break the tribe? I am very well regarded. Any outcome of mine, as you so warmly describe this child, would be welcomed and well cared for.”

“You’re going to leave it here? Annick Swenson’s child will be raised by the Lakashi?”

“They are a decent, well-organized people.”

“You went to Radcliffe.”

“I didn’t love it.”

Easter slept through all of it. Marina looked down on him in the bed. His shirt and arms and face were smeared with blood. Somehow in all of this she hadn’t noticed it before. She would get a cloth and wash him. She could wash him while he slept. “Imagine Dr. Rapp fathered a child down here,” she said, remembering the example of Alan Saturn in his argument with his wife and working to calm her voice. “Should the son or the daughter of the greatest mind in botany just wander around in the jungle for the rest of his or her life, not having any access to their own potential?”

“Do you think his children aren’t here? Do you honestly think such things never happened? You should ask Benoit to take you to the next vision quest or whatever you want to call it.” Dr. Swenson shook her head and then walked over to sit in the one small chair in the room. She sat on top of Marina’s second dress and her other two pair of underpants as the chair was where she kept her things. “I am very tired, Dr. Singh,” she said and pushed back her hair with her hands. “I have sciatica in my left leg and the child is sitting on my bladder. It begins to thrash whenever I lie down. I am glad to have conducted this piece of research on myself because it makes me realize something I might not have otherwise taken into account: women past a certain age are simply not meant to carry children, and I can only imagine that we are not meant to bear them or to raise them either. The Lakashi are used to it. This is their particular fate. They can hand off their infants to their granddaughters. They don’t have to raise them. That is the only reward for these late-life children: you know they won’t be your responsibility. I had never felt old before this, that is a fact. I have avoided mirrors my entire life. I have no better sense of what I look like at seventy-three than I did at twenty. I’ve had some arthritis in my shoulder but nothing to speak of. I keep on. I have kept coming down here, kept up with my work, Dr. Rapp’s work. I have not lived the life of an old woman because I was not an old woman. I was only myself. But this thing, this child, it has made me firmly seventy-three. It has made me older than that. By straying into the territory of the biologically young I have been punished. I would have to say rightfully so.”

Marina looked at her teacher, looked at her feet filling out a battered pair of Birkenstocks, looked at the way gravity pinned her to the chair. She asked the most ridiculous question of all, only because she had been so recently asked herself. “Did you ever want to have children?”

“What is it you said to me just now? There was a time? Maybe there was a time. To tell you the truth I can’t remember. From where I sit I would tell you that having a child is akin to plotting your own death, but I delivered thousands and thousands of babies in my day and it seemed at least in that moment many of the mothers were happy. I know it wasn’t like this for the young.” Dr. Swenson closed her eyes and though her head stayed balanced and upright she seemed to be asleep.

“Should I walk you back to your room?” Marina asked.

Dr. Swenson considered the offer. “What about Easter?”

Marina looked back at him, noted the regular rise and fall of his chest. “He’s not going to wake up. He’s had a long day.”

“That’s the one you want,” Dr. Swenson said, bringing their conversation back to its beginning although this time she seemed to be offering him up. “One who’s older, one who’s smart, one who loves you. If someone ever told me I could have had a child like Easter I would have done it, only I would have done it a long time ago.”

Marina nodded, and using both of her hands she pulled Dr. Swenson up from her chair. “We can agree on that.”

“You were smart to stay with us, Dr. Singh. I kept waiting for you to go, but I’m starting to see that you are genuinely interested in our work.”

“I am,” Marina said, realizing for the first time that she hadn’t been thinking about leaving at all. Then she took Dr. Swenson’s arm and together they walked down the stairs and side by side on the narrow path back through the jungle to the lab.

At the lab, Marina borrowed some soap and a pot, and when she was in the river took off her dress and held herself under the warm clouded water for some time. There was a complicated, ineffectual shower rigged up behind the lab that required hauling bags of water up from the river and running them through a filtering system but it would have been no match for all she was hoping to remove. Bringing her head above the surface, opening her eyes to the light falling at a low slant across the water, she was surprised to find that she no longer felt afraid of the river. She would have thought it would be the other way around. She scrubbed her dress and then used the rough fabric of the dress to scrub herself, then sank a final time and swam back into her clothes. She emerged dripping from the water still stinking, though perhaps not as much. Then she convinced the Lakashi women to let her put a pot of water down at the edge of their fire and while she waited for it to heat up a woman came and sat behind her, combing out Marina’s wet hair with her fingers and then braiding it. If there were men in the tribe who hoped to one day escape their circumstances by becoming naturalists, the women all seemed to share a common dream of hairdressing. There was no more denying their desire to groom than one could stop those little African birds from riding on the backs of crocodiles and pecking out insects, and while Marina had fought them at first, pulling their hands from her hair whenever they gathered it back, she had finally given over to it. She had learned to relax beneath their touch. While the woman braided and tugged, Marina watched the river, counting the fish that popped the surface. She counted eight in all.

When her hair was finished and the water was hot enough she carried it back to the porch. It was finally getting dark and the evening was lovely and young. While the bats spun out of dead trees to announce the dusk, Marina washed the snake off of Easter. He woke up just enough to squint at her vaguely while she worked her cloth down his arms and between his toes. She wiped his face and rubbed his hair and was very gentle as she wiped down his stomach and chest which were already blossoming into a spectrum of purple and green. When she was finished he turned himself over with great difficulty and let her do the other side. She spread a clean sheet beneath him the way she had seen nurses do, it was a skill she had forgotten she had: change a bed with someone in it. So he had been a cannibal once, if only in another lifetime. In light of all that had happened it was hardly worth mentioning.

Nine

I
t was on the fourth morning after the trip to the trading post that Marina saw Dr. Budi and the second Dr. Saturn walking through the jungle. It was very early, much earlier than she normally would be out, but something had crawled beneath the net above her bed and bitten her near the elbow and the bite, now swollen and hot, had prevented her from going back to sleep. She used what scant morning light was available to inspect the snake’s long-lasting tattoo that had deepened the color of Easter’s bruises to eggplant and spread from his armpits to his groin. When she had assured herself yet again that these bruises were merely horrible and not a sign of some underlying medical catastrophe, she dislodged herself from the sleeping child and went in search of the coffee that Dr. Budi, always working, was sure to have made. It was still fifteen minutes short of full daylight when she saw her colleagues on the other side of a giant termite mound, the ground between them trembling with industry. She waved and called good morning and they stopped abruptly, looking at her as if she were the last person they had ever expected to see in the Amazon. After a pause, Dr. Saturn leaned down to whisper something in Dr. Budi’s ear and Dr. Budi, after what appeared to be consideration, nodded her approval. The two doctors then made their way towards her, cutting a wide berth around the termites.

“How’s Easter?” Nancy Saturn said.

Marina gave Nancy the credit for saving Easter’s life, for having the presence of mind to say the word
knife
when Marina was still attempting to win a wrestling match with a snake. It was Nancy Saturn who had set their salvation in motion. “He was sleeping when I left. Dr. Swenson gives him half an Ambien at night now, otherwise the pain wakes him up.”

“Blessings from Allah on that,” Dr. Budi said, nodding.

“We’re going out to the trees,” Nancy said casually, laying her hand on the bag of notebooks that hung across her chest. “Why don’t you come along?”

Before Easter’s accident, if pulling a snake into a boat can be called an accident, Marina had asked several times to see the trees, but her requests had been met by a vague evasiveness—they had already been or this wasn’t the week to go. Since the anaconda, she had frankly forgotten about them. Her notions of what was important had shifted. The jungle was not short on trees and she had seen many of them. It was difficult to imagine that some would be so substantially different from the others. Still, now that the invitation had been extended she accepted with pleasure, feeling that her patience had been noticed and rewarded.

In fact, she had written just such a sentiment last night to Mr. Fox, sitting on the floor of the sleeping porch and using the chair as a desk because Easter had already gone to bed. (Since the snake, his hammock had hung empty until a marmoset took it up for afternoon naps. It was a filthy little creature.)
I find myself following your advice now that I have no direct way of reaching you. You would tell me to wait and observe. You would tell me there is more to this situation than I could immediately understand and you would be right, just as you were right to tell me to come here and right to tell me (I know this is what you would say) to stay. Look how agreeable I’ve become since I’ve been gone! I can hardly believe how close I came to getting on the next flight home. I would have suffered through Manaus only to miss the very thing I had come for.

Far to the west, Budi and Nancy and Marina heard a rustling of branches as two young women laughing and talking in what Marina still considered to be an impenetrable language passed at a distance, nodding their heads with disinterest when they spotted the doctors. One of the older women was walking from the direction of the river holding the hand of a young girl. Three more suddenly appeared from behind a large, dead stump. “You would think they all had alarm clocks,” Nancy said as more and more women stepped from the underbrush and headed in the same direction. They were on a path Marina didn’t think she had been on before although she couldn’t be sure. Paths opened up when she studied the undergrowth carefully and then disappeared as soon as she turned her head. She had a mortal fear of following one path into the jungle and then being unable to find it again when she was ready to go out. If Marina had it all to do over again she would have brought sacks of red yarn with her so she could tie one end of the ball to the foot of her bed every time she entered the labyrinth.

“It is the Lakashi biological clock,” Dr. Budi said, and Nancy and Marina laughed. Dr. Budi smiled shyly, having made so few successful jokes in her life.

It wasn’t often that Marina dwelled on the contents of either of her lost suitcases but there were moments, and this was such a moment, when she would have liked a real pair of shoes instead of the rubber flip-flops. She would have liked a long sleeved shirt that would have saved her arms at least from the smaller thorns, and a pair of pants to protect her from those random blades of grass which when brushed past at exactly the right angle could slice the shin like a razor. The small amount of blood that beaded and then seeped from her leg was an advertisement for all she had to offer. It felt as if they were going a very long way, but distances, like directions, were hard to measure. It could have been that this particular path (were they on a path?) had more fallen trees lying across it that required clambering over, more mysterious sinkholes of standing water heralded only by a sudden sponginess underfoot. It could be that they were only two or three straight city blocks away from their destination but that distance was meaningless given the obstacles they had still to overcome. Marina brushed her hand across the back of her neck and dislodged something with a hard shell. She had learned in time to brush instead of slap as slapping only served to pump the entire contents of the insect, which was doubtlessly already burrowed into the skin with some entomological protuberance, straight into the bloodstream.

The Lakashi women were singing now. No, they weren’t singing. It was just that so many of them were talking at once and when their voices came together it sounded vaguely like a section of Torah as sung by a group of bar mitzvah boys whose voices had yet to change. “Do you know what they’re saying?” Marina asked.

Nancy shook her head. “I catch a word every now and then, or I think I do. We had a linguist with us for a while. He had been a student of Noam Chomsky’s. He said the language wasn’t particularly difficult or even interesting, that all the languages in this region of the Amazon came from a single grammatical base with variations in vocabulary which meant at one point the tribes must have been connected and then split apart. It made me wish we had a language that was a little bit more obscure so we might have kept him. He made us some charts with phonetics so we can put together some basic phrases.”

“Thomas is very good at it,” Dr. Budi said. She held up her arm and the other two women stopped and waited while a very large, low slung lizard dragged itself across their path, its loose green skin hanging over the rib cage like chain mail. “I don’t know that one,” Dr. Budi said, watching it carefully.

Nancy leaned over to peer at the lizard as if it were someone she could almost place, then she shook her head. “Neither do I.”

It was another twenty minutes past the lizard before they came to a clearing, or, if not a clearing, a place where fewer, thinner trees stood farther apart from one another, and all the trees were the same. There was no thick coat of undergrowth covering the ground, just a light wash of grass, there were no hairy ropes of vines strangling the trees, only the smooth, straight expanse of bark. Sunlight fell easily between the pale oval leaves and hit the ground in wide patches. “It’s beautiful,” Marina said, dropping her head back. Such sunlight, such pretty little leaves. “My God, why don’t they live here?”

“Too far from the water,” Dr. Budi said, looking at her watch and making a note of the time.

A dozen Lakashi women were already there. Marina knew most of them by sight even if she couldn’t properly reproduce the series of tones that made up their names. Over the next few minutes two dozen more arrived and took their places against the trunks that were a buttery yellow color and ranged from ten to twenty inches around. Without ritual or fanfare, with no apparent consideration, the women went for bigger trees, the ones already bitten, and left the saplings alone. Pressing in like a partner for a slow dance, they opened their mouths and began immediately to scrape their teeth down the bark. The jungle on this morning was particularly quiet and so it was possible to hear them, a small sound amplified by so many women making it at the same time.

A few stragglers wandered in and stopped to greet the women at the trees around them who stopped their biting and chewing long enough to receive the greeting and return it. Two of the women who had a great deal to say to each other took opposite sides of the same tree and from a distance they appeared to be kissing. Women who had brought their children left them in a pile in the center of the trees and the older children herded the younger ones back when they tried to crawl away. One of the older women went into the group of children and led a girl of twelve or thirteen to a tree and the others stopped all at once, turning their heads from their trees to watch her. When the girl tilted her face to the side, looking uncertain of how she should approach it, the others hooted lightly and slapped their trees to make a kind of tree-plus-human applause. The thin branches trembled and shook the delicate leaves from side to side. The girl, whose hair was unbraided and disheveled by sleep, looked embarrassed to be the center of so much attention. She then began to nibble at the bark. After the others felt certain she was performing this primal act correctly they all went back to their work. From the nubile to the beldame they scraped and chewed without pleasure or distaste. They had turned the fairly exotic act of biting a tree into nothing more than factory work.

“This is important,” Dr. Budi said to Marina. “The girl has just completed her first menstrual cycle. The Lakashi rituals are very brief, unsentimental. You are lucky to see such a thing on your first day.”

Nancy Saturn turned some pages in her notebook. “I didn’t realize Mara was menstruating.”

Dr. Budi held up her book. “I have it.”

There were more than enough trees for everyone, maybe two hundred of them spread over two acres of land. The tallest climbed to a height of sixty or seventy feet, but there were plenty of new trees coming up as well. In the places where a tree had been recently eaten, the absence of bark left a mark that was soft and white; growing back, it was the palest of yellows and then darkened over time so that most of the trees at the height of a Lakashi’s head appeared to have been banded by decoupage.

It was easier to breathe in this place, and so easy to see! In every direction the vista was open. No more wondering what might be tearing through the jungle with its wet jaws hinged open. “I never thought there would be so many trees,” Marina said. “I didn’t picture it like this.”

“It’s actually just one tree,” Nancy said. She was counting the women and marking them present by name in her notebook. “They’re
Populas,
like Aspens, a very rare phenomenon. It’s a single root system. The tree is cloning itself.”

“Very delicate,” Dr. Budi said, nodding to herself.

“The root system changes the acidity level in the soil so that nothing much will grow here except for the trees and a little bit of grass. In a sense you could say the tree poisons the area it inhabits to make sure that nothing else will survive in its space and take the nutrients out of the soil or grow taller and block out the sunlight.”

“Except the Rapps,” Dr. Budi said. “The Rapps thrive right where they are.” She pointed the tip of her pen towards the clusters of mushrooms that grew near the base of the trees, each cap a perfect golf ball on a tall, slender stem. The Rapps were a most unearthly shade of pale blue. They came so close to glowing in the light of day that she wanted to come back with a flashlight and see them in the dark. Marina couldn’t imagine how she had missed them.

“
Psilocybe livoris rappinis
,” Nancy said. “They are considered to be the greatest single discovery in mycology. There has never been any evidence that this ecosystem is duplicated anywhere else in the rain forest, anywhere in the world. These trees you’re looking at here, these mushrooms, this is it. As far as we know, these are the only Rapps in the world. Your passport to spiritual enlightenment.”

“You’ve tried them?”

Nancy Saturn closed her eyes and nodded slightly, holding up one finger.

“Very sick,” Dr. Budi said. “Interesting, everything you see, but too sick.”

“So if the mushrooms are Rapps, are the trees called Swensons?” Marina asked. There was an inordinate number of lavender moths the size of quarters bobbing through the sunlight. Marina didn’t remember seeing them before but then it would be difficult to notice such a small moth in the workaday tangle of vines that suffocated the rest of the jungle.

“The trees are called Martins,” Dr. Budi said. “
Tabebuia martinii.”

“It’s actually the Rapps we’re protecting,” Nancy said. “All the secrecy about the work and the location, it’s so no one can find the Rapps. Scientifically, it’s the Martins that have presented such remarkable potential. The Martins really may prove to be one of the great botanical discoveries of our age. But people have been trying to get their hands on the Rapps ever since Dr. Rapp started writing about them. If the greater world knew where they were—”