The point of an evening at Teatro Amazonas was not so much to see an opera as it was to see an opera house. They had tickets for Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, but only because there had to be tickets for something. The building itself was the performance, the two long marble staircases curving up in front, the high blue walls piped with crisp white embellishments, the great tiled dome that must have been torn from a Russian palace by a monstrous storm and blown all the way to South America, or so a tourist had told Marina one morning when she stopped to take a picture of it with her phone. There was no real explanation for how such a building was conceived for such a place. Marina thought of it as the line of civilization that held the jungle back. Surely without the opera house the vines would have crept up over the city and swallowed it whole.
“The natives swear that nobody built it,” Barbara said, taking the tickets out from her tiny black lacquered evening bag. “They say it just happened.”
Jackie nodded. It was the version of which he most approved. “They say it was brought down in a space ship for some prince because this was the only place he could have sex.”
Barbara Bovender was wearing a short ivory-colored dress that showed the full length of her leg, a shameless expanse of tanned calf and thigh that was exaggerated by a very high pair of evening sandals. It was a dress she had first offered to Marina and Marina had declined. Every dress Barbara had brought over in her tapestry bag was missing some essential piece of fabric: the front or the back or the skirt, leaving Marina to decide which part of herself she could best afford to leave uncovered. The ivory dress had a modest neckline and long sleeves but was short enough to embarrass a third-grader. In the end she settled on a long straight dress of dark gray silk that left bare her arms and back because Barbara consented to lend her a wrap, even though she said it ruined the lines. Once Marina’s fever had broken and the vomiting had stopped, she was in fact grateful, not only for her shaman cure (though she wished she had taken a vaccine for hepatitis A before leaving on her trip) but for the loan of an inappropriate dress and the chance to go to the opera. She appreciated having a reason to scrub beneath her fingernails, to leave her room in the evening, to listen to music. What’s more, Mrs. Bovender came back to her hotel before the performance to pin up Marina’s hair and apply her eyeliner as if she were a bride. Marina had had many friends in her life who could recite the periodic table from memory but not since high school had she had a friend with a particular talent for hair. When Barbara was through with her considerable work she led Marina to the mirror so that she could be overwhelmed by the results, and Marina, who didn’t remember looking as beautiful on her wedding day, obliged. “You have to make a point of looking nice every now and then,” Barbara said, clamping a significant gold cuff around Marina’s wrist. “Believe me, if you don’t do it down here then everything is lost.”
When the three of them moved through the lobby, the crowds of opera goers turned to watch them pass. Jackie, slightly stoned, with his lightly tinted glasses and glossy hair, looked like a man who was likely to arrive with two women. He wore a white linen shirt with white embroidery down the front, a surfer’s version of formal wear. Marina was only sorry to think that this beauty she was doubtlessly incapable of replicating was being spent on the Bovenders. After all, Mr. Fox enjoyed the opera. It wasn’t so unreasonable to think he could have visited her here. She imagined the weight of her hand resting inside his arm.
The usher unlocked the door to their box with a heavy brass skeleton key that he wore around his neck on a velvet cord. He made a slight bow to each of them while distributing the programs. The three of them had eight red velvet chairs to choose from. Marina leaned over the brass railing on their balcony to watch the prosperous citizens of Manaus find their way to their seats. The inside of the house was a wedding cake, every intricately decorated layer balanced delicately on the shoulders of the one beneath it, rising up and up to a ceiling where frescoed angels parted the wandering clouds with their hands. When the chandeliers began to dim, Jackie put his hand on his wife’s thigh and she crossed her other leg over to pin him there. Marina turned her attention down to the orchestra. With a face of pure serenity, Barbara leaned towards Marina and whispered, “I love this part.” Marina didn’t know what part she meant, and didn’t ask, but when the house was dark and the overture rose up to their third-tier balcony she understood completely. Suddenly every insect in Manaus was forgotten. The chicken heads that cluttered the tables in the market place and the starving dogs that waited in the hopes that one might fall were forgotten. The children with fans that waved the flies away from the baskets of fish were forgotten even as she knew she was not supposed to forget the children. She longed to forget them. She managed to forget the smells, the traffic, the sticky pools of blood. The doors sealed them in with the music and sealed the world out and suddenly it was clear that building an opera house was a basic act of human survival. It kept them all from rotting in the unendurable heat. It saved their souls in ways those murdering Christian missionaries could never have envisioned. In these past few days of fever Marina had forgotten herself. The city was breaking her down along with the Lariam, her sense of failure, her nearly mad desire to be home in time to see the lilacs. But then the orchestra struck a note that brought her back to herself. Every pass of the cellists’ bows across the cellos’ strings scraped away a bit of her confusion, and the woodwinds returned her to strength. While she sat in the dark, Marina started to think that this opera house, and indeed this opera, were meant to save her. She knew the story of Orpheus, but it wasn’t until the singing began that she realized it was the story of her life. She was Orfeo, and there was no question that Anders was Euridice, dead from a snake bite. Marina had been sent to hell to bring him back. Had Karen been able to leave the boys, she would have been Orfeo. It was the role she had been born to play. But Karen was in Minnesota, and Marina’s mind was filled with Anders now, their seven years of friendship, the fifty hours a week they spent charting lipids, listening to the rise and fall of each other’s breath.
Barbara opened up her tiny purse and handed Marina a Kleenex. “Blot in a straight line beneath your eyes,” she whispered.
A woman sang the role of Orfeo in a baggy toga, her hair slicked back and caught beneath a crown of gilded leaves. She stood there center stage, a lyre in her arms to cover her breasts, and sang her sorrow to the chorus.
Jackie leaned across his wife. “Why is it a woman?” he whispered to Marina. Marina dabbed her nose and bent in to tell him that the alternative was to find a castrato for whom the part was originally written, but a hand reached between them and thumped Jackie on the shoulder with two hard taps.
“Quiet,” the woman’s voice said.
Marina and the two Bovenders straightened their spines as if the same small voltage had run up the carved chair legs and through the velvet seats. They began to turn, the three of them together, but the hand came back between Barbara and Marina and pointed to the stage. That was how they watched the rest of the opera, their eyes forward and their entire consciousness turned behind them to focus on Dr. Swenson.
Dr. Swenson! Back from the jungle and here at the opera with no announcement at all. And now they were made to wait, not to get out of their seats like reasonable people, step into the stairwell or go down to the lobby to begin the conversation that should have been started weeks ago. At first Marina had thought about how she would feel once she saw Dr. Swenson, but the longer she had stayed in Brazil the more she came to consider her chances of finding her to be hopeless. The scenarios she had run in her mind involved going home to tell Karen and Mr. Fox that she had failed. Euridice was behind Orfeo as they trudged the long road up from the underworld, Euridice constantly harping, complaining, her lovely soprano voice turned into a droning saw—Why won’t you look at me? Why don’t you love me? Dear God, even in her enormous beauty she was unbearable. Marina fixed her eyes forward and willed herself with everything in her not to turn around. She noticed that Jackie’s hand was no longer sandwiched between his wife’s thighs and that they were both staring at the stage with great concentration, no doubt wondering if they had properly aired the apartment, made the bed, returned all the lacy scraps of underwear to their proper drawers. Marina, who had folded the shawl in her lap once the lights went down because it was less than perfectly cool in this third-tier box, considered the visage of her naked shoulders and back that were presently obstructing Dr. Swenson’s view of the stage, the complicated twist of her hair held in place with two black sticks ornamented with tiny gold fans as if she were a Chinese princess. She imagined herself in a hospital room, sitting at a patient’s bedside in her dark gray silk, and suddenly Dr. Swenson came into the room behind her. I was paged, Marina said to her, trying to explain the lack of fabric in her dress. I’ve been at the opera.
Her own fear surprised her most, the dull thumping deep in her bowels that was associated with the instruction that she might now open her test booklet and begin. Or even later, being called on in Grand Rounds, Dr. Singh, if you would then explain to us why the numbness persists. Marina would have expected anger, confrontation. It wouldn’t matter that someone was singing, that everyone around them would hear her. I want you to tell me what happened to Anders! was what she had planned to say. What a thought. She had nothing to say to Dr. Swenson. She was waiting to hear what Dr. Swenson had to say to her. Dr. Singh, of course I remember, you blinded that child in Baltimore. The sweat under her arms came down her rib cage in an unimpeded line, and because of the way the dress was cut, fastened behind her neck and low across her back, it did not pool into a stain until it was nearly at her waist. Orfeo could not take it another minute, the badgering, the chilling doubt. Isn’t it proof enough that I’ve come to hell for you? he could have said. Couldn’t you trust my love and wait another twenty minutes while I navigate this narrow path? But no, it didn’t work that way. He had to see her. He had to reassure her of his love. He had to shut her up. He turned to his beloved and in doing so he killed her all over again, sending her down to that pit of endless sleep where the story had first begun.
With everything in her, Marina willed the singers to stop singing, the musicians to put down their instruments in recognition of the unbearable anxiety emanating from the third tier. Such is the stuff of dreams. It wasn’t enough that in this opera the dead were alive and then dead again due to the botched efforts of the protagonist, there were still more reversals of fortune and a very long dance segment to endure, but the ending did at last arrive. Marina and the two Bovenders applauded violently, all the repressed energy of waiting finally able to release itself into their slapping hands. “Brava!” Jackie called when the mezzo came forward on the stage.
“It was hardly as good as all that,” Dr. Swenson said behind them.
As if that sentence were their permission, they stood and turned, the three of them, Dr. Swenson’s chorus. “Probably not,” Barbara said, as if this were a conversation. “But it’s just so lovely to go to the opera.”
“Great seats,” Jackie said.
Marina, who was considerably taller in Mrs. Bovender’s shoes, neglected to take Dr. Swenson’s height into account and so looked directly over Dr. Swenson’s head when she turned. She saw another person in the box, a man in a suit who stayed beneath the eaves. Milton mouthed to her a silent hello.
Barbara put her arm around Marina’s shoulder and pulled her close. The gesture could have been seen as possessive or loving and yet Marina suspected it was really an attempt by the younger woman to remain standing. She could feel Barbara Bovender’s heartbeat as she pushed in hip to hip, rib to rib. A low current of trembling rumbled between them and she could not be sure which of them was the source. “Annick, you know my friend Dr. Singh,” Barbara said.
“Dr. Singh,” Dr. Swenson said, and offered her hand, neither confirming nor denying what she knew. The last thirteen years had not touched Dr. Swenson, except that her skin, which had seen very little sun in those Baltimore winters, was now quite tan, and her hair was more white than gray. It still floated around her broad, open face in the same disorganized cloud Marina remembered. She was blue-eyed, bright, her small hand round and soft in Marina’s own. Her clothing was wrinkled, sensible, making no concessions for a night at the opera. It seemed possible that she had come directly from the dock. This woman who had fixed the course of Marina’s life looked for all the world like somebody’s Swedish grandmother on a chartered tour of the Amazon.
“I’m very glad—” Marina began.
“Sit, sit,” Dr. Swenson said, and sat herself to set the example. “She’s going to sing the Villa-Lobos.”
“The what?” Barbara said.
Dr. Swenson answered her with a tremendous glare and took the fourth chair in the first row next to Marina while the soprano, the tedious and beautiful Euridice, put a modest hand to her breast and bent her head forward to receive the maelstrom of applause. The Villa-Lobos, Brazil’s singular contribution to the classical repertoire, was considerably more beautiful than the Gluck, or the soprano was inclined to sing the vocalise with more tenderness than she had been able to bring to her previous role, and for the briefest moment Marina was able to forget what was behind her (Anders’ death) and all that there was still to come (the now inevitable trip into the jungle with her professor) and she listened. It took eight cellos and a human voice to quiet her mind.
“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.
The 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.
“Clearly you didn’t,” Dr. Swenson said. “Easter knew where we were going.”
“I didn’t know that Easter had been informed.”
Dr. Swenson was looking at the menu through a pair of half glasses. “I’m sure you realized soon enough. This place is a bit farther but that’s why the opera crowd avoids it. I can always get a table.”
Marina pulled out a chair beside Easter, across from Dr. Swenson, and felt a significant throbbing in her feet as the blood shifted back up her legs. She decided to be grateful for the chair and for the audience.
After taking in all the information the menu had to offer, Dr. Swenson laid it down. Now that she knew what she would have for dinner she was ready to begin. “Allow me to be direct, Dr. Singh,” she said, folding her glasses back into their padded case. “It will save us both some time. You shouldn’t have come. There must be a way of convincing Mr. Fox that continual monitoring does not speed productivity. Maybe that can be a project for you when you return home. You can tell him I am fine, and that it would better suit his own purposes to leave me alone.”
A waiter approached the table and Dr. Swenson proceeded to order for herself and the child in broken Portuguese. When the waiter turned to Marina she asked for a glass of wine. Dr. Swenson added to the order and sent the waiter away.
“I’m glad you’re fine,” Marina said. “And you’re right, I’ve come to find out about the progress of the drug’s development, that’s part of the reason I’m here. But I was a close friend of Dr. Eckman’s. I am a friend of his wife’s. It’s important for her to understand the circumstances of his death.”
“He died of a fever.”
Marina nodded. “So you wrote, but she would like to know more than that. It would help her to be able to explain to their children what happened.”
Easter sat at the table without fidgeting, both of his feet on the floor or nearly on the floor. He tore neat pieces off his bread and ate them slowly. He did not seem to be the least bit bothered by waiting, which caused Marina to wonder if he had had a great deal of practice.
“Are you asking me if I know what caused the fever, if it had a name? I do not. The list of possibilities is too long. I suppose at this point checking his recent vaccination records would be a place to start. I can also give you a list of antibiotics he failed to respond to.”
“I’m not asking you what kind of fever it was,” Marina said. “I’m asking you what happened.”
Dr. Swenson sighed. “Is this my deposition, Dr. Singh?”
“I’m not accusing—”
Dr. Swenson waved her hand, brushing the words out of the air. “I will tell you: I liked Dr. Eckman. Every aspect of his visit was a great inconvenience to me but there was something ingenuous about him. He had a sincere interest in the Lakashi, in the work. You were a friend of his and so you know this about him, he had a singular ability for demonstrating interest, if it was in birds or in the estrogen levels in the collected blood samples; he asked a great many questions and took in every word of the answers he was given. He was polite and affable even when I was trying to convince him to leave, which, you should note to his wife, I did constantly.” She interrupted herself to finish her glass of water and before the empty glass had come to rest on the table it had been refilled by the hovering waiter. “Mr. Fox was an idiot to send him down here. I’ve hardly ever seen a man so ill suited for the jungle, and that’s saying a great deal. Most people are ill suited for the jungle. The heat, the insects, even the trees made him anxious. Now, one would think when a person comes to a place where he doesn’t want to be and he is not wanted, he would have the sense to go. Dr. Eckman lacked that sense. He told me that the company needed me to speed up the progress of my work, that they needed to see my records, bring in other researchers, move as much of the project back to Vogel as soon as was possible. I believe our entire exchange could have taken place in an hour, fifteen minutes if both parties were succinct, but there was something about Dr. Eckman. It was as if he needed to see everything for himself. He had come a long way and by God he wasn’t going to take my word for the fact that there was a drug in development. He felt the need to retrace the entire course of my work. He was going to rediscover the Lakashi tribe himself. He was going to find the roots of their fertility himself. He refused to let his misery inform his actions.”
A small man in a dirty white apron came out of the kitchen with two plates of yellow rice covered over with chicken. The meat was the same color as the rice and was glossy and loose on the bone. He gave one to Dr. Swenson and one to the child, whose face became incandescent with joy when he saw what was for dinner.
“We haven’t had much luck keeping chickens,” Dr. Swenson said. “We have both been looking forward to dinner.” She tapped Easter’s hand and at that permission he picked up his fork and began to pull the meat apart by holding the chicken in place with two fingers. She tapped his hand again and handed him a knife. “We have Dr. Eckman to thank for Easter’s table manners. All this is new. It frankly wasn’t anything I’d stressed before, the Lakashi table manners are not our own, but I’ve kept up with it. Dr. Eckman took such an interest in the child. I can only think he was missing his own—” She stopped and looked at Marina, leaving the question unspoken.
“Boys,” Marina said. “He had three boys.”
Dr. Swenson nodded. “Well, you could see it. I don’t suppose I’d thought of this before but surely a great part of my sympathy for Dr. Eckman came from his kindness to Easter.”
The original waiter returned and put a piece of tres leches in front of Marina, who shook her head at the sight of it. She was thinking of those three boys on the sofa, the ones whose hearing was so acute that adult conversations were forced into the kitchen pantry and conducted in whispers.
“I ordered it for you,” Dr. Swenson said, and sent the waiter away. “It’s good cake. It goes with the wine.”
Marina saw the boy eyeing her dessert, caught between the joy of his own meal and the longing for hers. “How long was Anders with you before he got sick?”
“It would be hard to say since I don’t actually know when he was infected. In retrospect, I think he may have picked up something here in Manaus and brought it out with him. I didn’t know Dr. Eckman before this. It’s possible that I never saw him when he was completely himself.”
“You did,” Marina said. “You met him at Vogel before you left. He was on the review committee for your financing.” She pictured Anders leaning against her desk. He had been so certain Dr. Swenson had liked him.
Dr. Swenson nodded, her attention given over fully to her chicken for the moment. “Yes, of course, he told me that. But I didn’t remember him. I wouldn’t have any reason to remember him.”
“Of course,” Marina said, and for the first time it came to her with certainty: She does not know me.
The older doctor took a bite of rice. “It’s difficult to trust yourself in the jungle,” she said. “Some people gain their bearings over time but for others that adjustment never comes. It’s simply too foreign. We can’t find a common application for what we already know. I’m not just thinking of moral issues or rules of law, though both of those apply, but the simple concrete facts of existence aren’t what we’re used to. Take the insects, for example. Hundreds of thousand of new species are discovered around the world every year, and who knows how many other species vanish. The means by which we separate out the deadly from the merely irritating are extremely limited considering that the insect that just bit you might not have even been classified yet, and at what point does constant irritation itself become deadly? You’re bitten by so many things, there’s no way of keeping track. You simply have to accept the fact that whatever it was probably isn’t going to kill you.” She motioned to Marina with her fork. “Did you know your arm is bleeding, Dr. Singh?”
Marina had let the shawl slip behind her in the chair and she could see now that there was a thin line of dried blood about six inches long that came from a puncture of her right biceps. Dr. Swenson took the unused napkin from the fourth place at the table and dipped it into her water glass. “Here,” she said. “Clean yourself up.”
Marina took the napkin and wiped her arm, taking a minute to apply some pressure to the wound as washing it had started up the bleeding again.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Dr. Swenson said, working industriously to get the last of the chicken off the bone, “but it goes to my point. It’s easy to become hypochondriacal out here but the more dangerous state is hypochondria’s opposite: the insistent voice that says you must be overreacting to things, and so in turn you begin to ignore real symptoms. Doctors, I’m sure you know, are notorious for this sort of behavior, and I think it may have been the case with Dr. Eckman. His substantial fears actually led him too far in the other direction. Every time I asked him if he was sick he would exhaust himself denying it. When it became ridiculous for him to deny it, I told him I was sending him back. No, no, no, he said to me, like some sort of child who doesn’t want to miss his part in the school pageant, he would be better in a day or two. I couldn’t make his decisions for him, Dr. Singh, though believe me, I tried. He had waited for me a long time in Manaus and he wasn’t about to turn back around without completing whatever mission he imagined it was his responsibility to complete. The next thing I knew we were setting up an infirmary. He required nearly constant attention.” Dr. Swenson looked over at Easter, who had picked a chicken bone up from his plate and was gnawing on it. She raised a hand to tap him and then lowered it instead. She let it go. “Do you see the problem here?” she said to Marina, her voice maintaining every inflection of composure. “The man who had been sent to prod me along in my work was keeping me from it. He had crossed over a line from feeling that he would recover quickly to feeling he was too ill to travel. He told me he wanted to wait until he was in a better condition. He didn’t want to be out on the river. He was afraid of the river. What he wanted was to be home, but getting home from the Amazon requires a great deal of effort and after a certain point he no longer had that in him. I liked Dr. Eckman well enough, but I don’t believe that makes any difference to the story. He was an impediment to me when he was well and he was an impediment when he was sick. I will not have him be an impediment now that he is dead. I will not attempt to retrace every moment of his illness when I cannot alter its outcome. I am sorry that his wife will have to bear that, but there was nothing I could do about it then and there is nothing I can do about it now. He made his own choices. He received the best care we could have given him considering our resources, but Dr. Eckman died. Does that shed any more light on the subject? I wasn’t with him at the end. If there were some final words, a message, I missed it.”
Marina sat at the table and thought of her friend dying of a nameless fever in some room or some hut at the end of the world. Karen Eckman made her promise she would ask if Anders was dead. Instead she asked Dr. Swenson if he had died alone. It was a sentimental question but she wanted some other picture in her mind than the one she had.
“When he died? No,” she said. Her eyes cut over to the boy for an instant and then back to Marina. “Easter was with him.”
Easter, who was possibly the age of the oldest Eckman boy, or the middle one, had seen him out. His plate was scraped clean and wiped down with bread, a neat pike of chicken bones stacked in the center. She gave him her cake and in return he gave her such a smile that she wanted the waiter to come back so she could order another piece and give him that one as well.
“It isn’t a story to bring home,” Dr. Swenson said.
“No,” Marina said.
“The story isn’t meant for her anyway.” Dr. Swenson tapped the corners of her mouth with her napkin. “It’s a story for you. Without getting into the details over dinner, you will trust me when I tell you that Dr. Eckman suffered. I mean it to be a cautionary tale.”
Marina nodded, trying to find some untapped vein of stoicism within herself as she wanted very much to cover her face with her hands at the thought of Anders’ end. “I understand that.”
“I don’t imagine that anyone has been too worried about this back at the pharmaceutical plant, but Dr. Eckman’s death was difficult for me as well. I was cautious to begin with and now I am doubly so. I’m not looking to take on a new responsibility. If you want to know how my work is going I will tell you: I am behind schedule. This is a delicate piece of science. I give it every waking moment of my life but at this point it still requires more time. I understand that it is not an unlimited number of years I have in which to finish this, both from Vogel’s perspective and from my own.” Dr. Swenson signaled the waiter to bring the check and drank the last of her water. “Someday I would like to leave the Amazon myself, Dr. Singh. I am used to this place but I am not in love with it. I have every possible incentive to complete this project as quickly as possible. Mr. Fox seems to think that I’m enjoying myself so much that I would need a series of Vogel emissaries to remind me that the goal is to finish. You may report back that I have not lost sight of the goal.”
Marina nodded. She understood that she was being given her ticket home.
Dr. Swenson put both of her hands on the table and gave it a gentle tap to signify that their interview was now concluded. “Easter and I will walk you back to your hotel. We’ll go right past it on the way to the apartment. There we will say good night and goodbye. This won’t be a long visit for me. You understand I need to get back.”
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.
That 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?
When 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.
Rodrigo saw them first. There wasn’t room enough for Dr. Swenson and all the women who had come in for flour and thread, things they could easily wait until later to buy. He began to rush his other customers by shouting at them and no one objected to his harassment. A few of them put down whatever was in their hands and left the store immediately, while others grabbed a few more things off the shelves nearby and rushed to the counter to pay. Maybe they knew Dr. Swenson. Maybe they were as anxious to leave as the clerk was to see them go. Rodrigo, always so careful to write up bills of sale, gave a quick visual assessment of the pile of goods and barked out a price that each woman paid without question. Dr. Swenson noticed none of this. Her chin was pointed up. She was mainly interested in the high-shelf items, the goods ignored by the daily foot traffic of Brazilians. She was muttering her thoughts to the ceiling and Milton was writing them down. She would not have noticed Marina had Marina been dipped in yellow paint, and Milton, who never looked up from his pencil and pad, had missed her as well. One by one the customers fled the store. Marina followed the last of them to the counter to have her purchases added to her account. Rodrigo, who seemed to understand exactly the decision that had been made, added in an extra hat, three more cotton handkerchiefs, several rolls of LifeSavers.
“You’re up very early, Dr. Singh,” Dr. Swenson said to the ceiling.
Milton, startled, looked up. “There you are!” he said. “Then finding you this morning is one thing I can cross off my list.”
“You said you’d be here early,” Marina said. “And there were a few things I needed myself.”
“There’s no end to what one needs in the Amazon,” Dr. Swenson said. “What isn’t eaten by insects is quick to rot. That’s why our friend Rodrigo does such a booming business. Nature provides a state of constant turnover. Still, I would think if you are leaving today you’d be better off making your purchases at home, unless you’re looking for souvenirs.”
There was nothing to do but say it. Marina told her she would be coming along. This did not seem to surprise Dr. Swenson. She took the news as if it were both unpleasant and expected. “You’ve been talking to Mr. Fox.”
Marina looked up towards the high shelves as well, wondering what she might be seeing there. “At the very least I should get Anders’ things.”
“Raisins,” Dr. Swenson said to Milton, who added it to the list. “Tapioca.” She turned to Marina. “Does it matter at all that you are not invited?”
It would be easier had she been invited but to the best of her knowledge Dr. Swenson had never welcomed students to her classes or interns to the program or patients to the hospital. She couldn’t see how this experience should be any different. “Not really.”
“Dr. Rapp always said that people would attach themselves to an expedition.” She moved very slowly, putting her hand first on a box of crackers, next on a bag of coffee. Milton continued to write and then Rodrigo was writing as well. An older woman with a baby tied across her chest in a bright red scarf opened the door and, seeing the people who were inside, turned and left without comment. “Certainly they did with him. I saw it myself. An endless succession of mongrels and malingerers, the laziest dropouts who fancied themselves explorers. He made his policy clear: he was not responsible for their food, their shelter, their safety, or their health. He didn’t waste his time discouraging them because frankly there was no discouragement they could not withstand. All of the energy they could have put into their intelligence they had used to develop their tenacity. But what I quickly learned was that their tenacity was for going, not for staying. Once they were out on the trail they fell like flies. Some took a day, two days, others were gone in a matter of hours, and Dr. Rapp never stopped for them. He remained beautifully consistent: he was there to work and he would continue to work. He would not ferry back the weak and the lame. They had chosen to get themselves in and they would simply have to figure the means to get themselves out. People were quick to accept these terms until they themselves were weak. Then they changed their tune entirely, then they said Dr. Rapp was heartless. They couldn’t slander him as a scientist but they said no end of scurrilous things about him as a man. He hadn’t rescued them! He hadn’t been their father and mother! I will tell you, none of that troubled his sleep. If he had made them his responsibility, either by dissuading them from their ambitions or by bailing them out of their folly, the greatest botanist of our time would have been reduced to a babysitter. It would have been an incalculable blow to science, all in the name of saving the stupid.”
The air, ever heavy, now was paralyzed. Milton had slipped his pencil and pad in his pocket without thinking, and Rodrigo had put his pencil down as well. While Dr. Swenson continued to calculate how much food she would need to take back with her, the other three stood breathless and unblinking. Marina felt as if she were trying to remember the answer when there hadn’t been a question posed. They were all waiting. “I don’t think you’ll find me to be nearly that much trouble,” she said finally.
Dr. Swenson, who had been distracted by a small bin of socks, did not look up. “As much trouble as what?”
“The mongrels,” Marina said. “The malingerers.”
“Don’t be so self-referential. I was telling you a story. I wasn’t telling a story about you.”
At that Milton inhaled as abruptly as Nixon at his desk. “There you go,” he said, willing himself to accept the explanation. “How many cans of apricots?”
Dr. Swenson waited a moment, as if making a tally in her head. “A case more than usual,” she said, looking at Marina. It was impossible to know how many apricots a person would eat once they had been removed from civilization.
It was agreed then that Milton would pick Marina up in front of the Hotel Indira at eleven, and despite the heat of that hour she was standing ready at the front of the hotel, tucked beneath the awning with her half-empty bag. She had said goodbye to Tomo, who was more than happy to store her coat and sweaters until she returned. She had not said goodbye to Mr. Fox. This city, so busy when she woke up that morning, was practically empty now. The dogs pressed themselves into doorways beneath thin strips of shade. The cars drove by slowly, as if every driver was trying to decide if he was the one who was supposed to take Marina to the docks. They looked at her carefully and tapped their horns.
When Milton did arrive, Easter was in the passenger seat. When he saw Marina through the open window, he reached both of his arms out to her as if he were hers alone in all the world. There was something brilliant about being recognized, the happiness on his face entirely disproportionate to his knowing her. Marina went to him and took both of his small hands in her hands and he gave her an enthusiastic shake. Milton put a thumb on the boy’s shoulder and pointed to the backseat. Easter immediately flipped backwards, a trick he had been saving.
“Forgive me,” Milton said in a tired voice when she got in the car. He was sitting on a folded towel, his shirt and pants and hair soaked through. Even the small straw hat on the back of his head was wilted and damp. There could have been a rainstorm blocks from here that Marina never saw. He could have fallen in the river.
“Forgive you for what?”
Milton shook his head. “It took us longer to load the boat.” He took out a smaller towel and wiped down his face.
Easter was craning his entire upper body out the window to see as far as he could in every direction: boy as turtle, car as shell. The wind dried out last night’s soccer shirt and ruffled the dark, wet curls against his neck. Looking at him, Marina realized he was a marker. The boat was loaded, Dr. Swenson was on the boat. If Milton hadn’t taken Easter there would have been no reason for her to wait the minutes it took for him to drive to the hotel. “It’s not as if I had anywhere else to go,” she said.
“He likes the car,” Milton said, tilting his head back.
“I’m sure he does.”
The dock was farther up river than Marina had been before. The wooden planks on the walkway were warped by the endless succession of sun and hard rain. A collection of rusted tugs and houseboats that looked like they had been pieced together over the course of many generations bobbed between the low-riding water taxis. From the top of the bank she could see the freighters and cruise ships in the distance lining up against the great cement piers. Below her was a small figure pacing beneath the shade of a black umbrella.
“We are late, Milton,” Dr. Swenson called. The engine of the boat was running and a pale lavender smoke spread out across the water.
“This would be the time to change your mind,” Milton said quietly. “If you are inclined to change your mind.”
Easter flew ahead of them now, running in flip-flops, forsaking the perilous steps for the more perilous slope of mud and rock and weed. The boat was a pontoon, the kind of boat her father had rented for a weekend every summer when Marina was young and her parents were married. Her father was not much for boating but the pontoon he said was like a pony rented out for children: stolid and low, not given to sudden movements.
“I’ll be fine,” Marina said. She was in motion now. She was as good as on the river.
“I don’t remember telling you to take Easter along,” Dr. Swenson said when they reached the old pontoon with a flat metal roof. The boy was standing behind her now, his hands on the wheel in an imitation of steering. There were boxes stacked neatly around the circumference and the boat sat low and even in the water.
“I don’t believe you did,” Milton said. He gave Marina his hand to board and in the moment she held his hand she thought about him the way she thought about the Bovenders. It would all be better if he would simply board the boat behind her.
Dr. Swenson tapped Easter on the shoulder and pointed to the lines, at which point the boy jumped off the boat and untied them. He curled his toes around the edge of the dock and pushed the boat away. He let it go so far that for one horrible instant Marina thought he wasn’t coming either, but then he leapt, his child’s bones filled with springs, and landed with both feet planted on the deck.
“Travel safely,” Milton said, and raised his hand up to them. He was the only person on the dock and he stood there as if they were the Lusitania. He was waving them back instead of waving them on.
Easter was firm at the wheel now. The child steered the boat out into a low swirl of current, a seriousness in his eyes as he scanned the wide horizon. Dr. Swenson, safe beneath the boat’s cover, closed her umbrella. Marina dropped her bag at her feet and held on to the railing. Milton receded but stayed in place, his arm raised as he grew smaller and smaller. Dear Milton. She waved to him. She hadn’t made it clear how grateful she was. After all those empty hours to spend in any conversation in the world, they had left in a matter of minutes with no discussion of where they were going or how long it would take them to get there or when they might think of coming back. But somehow none of that mattered anymore. Marina hadn’t understood the enormity of the river until she was on it. The sky was spread over in white clouds that banked and thinned depending on the direction she turned in. Some of the clouds had covered over the sun so for the moment it was cooler, and the breeze of their forward momentum kept the insects down. The birds shot out from the banks and cut over the water. Marina thought of Anders at the bow, his binoculars raised. How glad he must have been to finally leave this city. Marina never would have believed it until she was on a boat herself but the water was an enormous relief. “Beautiful,” she said to the one member of the party who could hear her.
“We always feel better heading home,” Dr. Swenson said.