Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

“You do a good job of this,” Milton said, keeping his eyes towards the river. “I admire your patience.”

“Believe me, I have no patience.”

“Then you create the illusion of patience. In the end the effect is the same.”

“All I want to do is find Dr. Swenson and go home,” she said slowly. The words coming out of her mouth felt hot.

“And to get to Dr. Swenson and to get home you must first get past the Bovenders. The Bovenders are the guards of the gate. It is their job to keep you away from her, that’s what they’re paid for. I have no idea if they know where she is, but I am certain that no one else knows. They like you. Perhaps they’ll figure something out.” An arm went up in the water and waved and Milton raised his hand and waved back.

Where in the world was the rain? Those blinding cataracts that she had endured day after day? She needed one now. It didn’t necessarily cool things down but at least for a while it blocked out the sun. “They couldn’t like me.”

“They think you’re very natural. Mrs. Bovender told me that. They see you as a person who is honestly grieving her friend and trying to get information about his death.”

“Well, that’s true,” she said, although that description only covered her obligations to Karen.

“They’re starting to think that Dr. Swenson would like you,” Milton said.

Marina felt the top of her head turning soft as the sun worked into her brain, unloosening its coils. “Dr. Swenson knew me once already. I’m quite certain she had no feelings for me one way or the other.” She mopped at her face with a large red handkerchief Rodrigo had pressed on her that morning. When she declined it once he had made her a gift of it, though probably it went on Vogel’s account all the same. Under her clothes she felt the swimsuit with every inhalation. It wrapped around her body like an endless bandage, growing larger and looser as it soaked her up. She kept pushing the cloth against her face. Her vision was clouded by the sweat in her eyes. She could only make out the most basic elements of the landscape: sand, water, sky.

“What the Bovenders require is diplomacy,” Milton said. “They just need some more of your time. They want to study you and make sure you are what you seem.”

Marina squinted out towards the waving line of the horizon. “I don’t see them anymore.” What she meant to say was that she thought she might faint. At that point she might have said Milton’s name. She didn’t fall, but she was thinking of falling, and with that thought he took her arm and walked her over the remaining expanse of sandy beach to the river. He walked her into the water up to their knees and then up to their waists. It was like a bath, silky and warm. The current was so slight it barely disturbed her clothes. She wanted to lie down in it. Milton dipped his own handkerchief into the water and spread it wet over the top of her head. “It’s better, isn’t it,” he said, though it wasn’t a question.

She nodded. Jackie had been right to make Barbara go in. It was lifesaving. When Marina looked down she saw nothing, just a line where her torso vanished into the water. All around them children kicked their rafts and jumped off one another’s shoulders. “How do you know what’s under there?” she asked him.

“You don’t,” Milton said. “You don’t want to.”

When Marina got back to the hotel room and checked her cell phone she had two messages from Mr. Fox, one from her mother, and one from Karen Eckman, whose number showed up in Anders’ name. She might as well have been home. She was feeling slightly sympathetic towards Dr. Swenson’s refusal to have a phone at all. She took a cold shower, drank a bottle of water, and went to bed, where she had a dream about losing her father in a train station. When Barbara Bovender called on the hotel line at nine that night she woke her up. “We wanted to check on you,” she said. “I’m afraid we nearly killed you this afternoon with our idea of fun.”

“No, no,” Marina said, disoriented by sleep and heat and dreams. “I’m fine. I just haven’t gotten used to all of it yet. I suppose it takes some time.”

“It does!” Barbara said, sounding gleeful for no reason. “I’m so much better at it now than I used to be. The secret is not to let the heat keep you in. Jackie swears the air conditioning weakens your immune system after a while. The more you get out the more you get used to it. You should come over to the apartment and have a drink.”

“Now?” Marina said, as if she might have something else to do.

“A little walk at night would do you good.”

Maybe the Bovenders were the guards at the gate but it was also true that they were lonely. There was nothing keeping Marina at the Hotel Indira. Tomo had moved her to a bigger room two days before, a reward that acknowledged the length of her stay, but it was still as musty and dismal as the one before it. There was a better view but the same metal bar attached to the wall for clothes. Marina looked at her wool coat, even from a distance she could see the lacework of holes the moths had eaten near the collar. She said she’d come over.

Walking through the city streets past all the closed up shops, Marina could understand how exciting it would be to see one of them open now. If there had been a light on in Rodrigo’s store tonight she would doubtlessly have gone and stood with the crowd on the street, craning her neck to try and see what was going on inside. She had not come up with a time line for how long she would wait in Manaus if the waiting continued to be nothing but an exercise in frustration, but she could feel herself coming to the end. Marina was used to being good at her work but she was no good at this. The same concierge who had been sitting at the desk in the lobby of Dr. Swenson’s apartment building at eight in the morning was sitting there still at nine-thirty at night. It appeared he was very glad to see her. After all, she hadn’t been by in several days. “Bovenders,” she said to him, and then touched her index finger to her chest. “Marina Singh.”

When Barbara Bovender opened the door and invited her in, Marina had the sense that she was crossing a portal from the wasteland of Manaus to another world entirely. Granted, she had spent more than a week in a badly furnished hotel room wearing the same three outfits she rinsed out in the bathtub at night. She was very far from beauty, and yet she had to think that this place would have struck her as beautiful no matter where she came across it. She praised it lavishly, sincerely.

“You’re so sweet,” Barbara said, walking her down a hallway past a series of small framed works on paper that could not have been Klee and yet looked like Klee. The hallway brought them into a large open living room with a high ceiling. Two sets of tall French doors were open onto a balcony and a breeze that Marina hadn’t felt anywhere in the city stirred the edges of the sheer silk curtains that had been drawn aside. The breeze smelled like jasmine and marijuana. From the height of the sixth floor the river appeared to be rimmed in small, blinking lights. If Marina didn’t focus her gaze she could have been in any number of splendid cities. “It’s a wonderful place,” Barbara said, looking at her home with impartial judgment. “I’m sure the bones have always been good but it really was a wreck when we got here.”

“Barbara’s done amazing things,” Jackie said, taking a small hit off a joint and holding it up to her. Marina shook her head and so he brought her a glass of white wine instead, kissing her on the cheek when he gave it to her as if they were old friends. She was surprised how much the kiss startled her, more even than the joint. Jackie raised his hands, motioning to the walls around him. “The woman who lived here before us, Annick’s last assistant, had her sisters strung up in hammocks all over the place.”