Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

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.