Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

“Now you are being purposefully ridiculous. I have very little respect for what passes as science around here. There’s nothing a Westerner loves more than the idea of being cured by tinctures made of boiled roots. They think this place is some sort of magical medicine chest, but for the most part the treatments here consist of poorly recorded gossip handed down throughout the ages from people who knew very little to people who know even less. There is much to be taken from the jungle, obviously — I am here to develop a drug — but in most cases the plants are as useless as the potted begonia that grows on your kitchen windowsill. The ones that do have potential can only be medicinal when they are properly employed. For these people there is no concept of a dosage, no set length for treatments. When something works it seems to me to be nothing short of a miracle.”

Marina remembered that cup of sludge Barbara Bovender had brought her from the shaman’s stand and wondered if she was no more than a Westerner given to the charms of boiled tinctures. It was a cure she would never admit to now.

Dr. Swenson brightened for a moment. “I’ll tell you what the locals do have a real genius for, and that’s poison. There are so many plants and insects and various reptiles capable of killing a person out here that it seems any idiot could scrape together a compound that would drop an elephant. As for the rest of it, people survive regardless of the care they get. The human animal is too resilient for it to be otherwise. It is not for me to meddle.”

“I appreciate your point. It’s only that I believe in the moment — the child, the blood — it would be hard not to act.”

“Then perhaps it will actually open up some of my time to have you here. I’ll send the daily medical emergencies to you.”

Marina laughed at this. “Then I know they’d be better off with the local medical care. I haven’t threaded a needle in nearly fifteen years.” Suddenly Marina realized she couldn’t remember sewing up that last woman she’d operated on. She remembered lifting out the infant, and at that instant realizing what she had done. She remembered one of the nurses taking him away, but what came after that? Where was the needle? She didn’t leave the patient there, uterus and abdomen open to the world, but she could not find a picture in her memory of closing.

“It comes right back,” Dr. Swenson said. “You were my student. Believe me, I pounded it all in there.”

Marina was still looking for the conclusion to the surgery in her mind when she had another thought. “What about Dr. Rapp?”

“What about him?”

“Wouldn’t he have sewn up the girl’s head?”

Dr. Swenson snorted. “He most certainly would not have, and not because he wasn’t a medical doctor. He had a perfect understanding of human physiology and the steadiest hands I have ever seen in my life. He could have grafted a vein by a campfire had he thought it was necessary. But Dr. Rapp had no self-aggrandizing notions about his role in the tribe. He never set himself out to be the great white hero. He never took a single specimen more than what was absolutely needed. He disrupted nothing.”

“So he would have let her bleed to death.”

“He would have respected the order that was in place.”

Marina nodded, thinking perhaps she was luckier than she realized to have found herself with an expedition still capable of making errors of compassion. “Is Dr. Rapp still alive?”

She might as well have asked if President Kennedy had survived his assassination attempt. “Do you read, Dr. Singh? Do you live in this world?”

It was a beautiful question to be asked by a woman on a boat who was taking her down a river into the beating heart of nowhere. “I do,” Marina said.

She sighed and shook her head. “Dr. Rapp died nine years ago. It will be ten years this August.”

And Marina, sensing that sympathy was in order, said that she was sorry to hear it, and Dr. Swenson thanked her.

“Were you studying mycology at the time? Is that how you came to work with Dr. Rapp?” It seemed possible, after all; anything was possible. She may have been coming down here as an operative for the CIA.

“I was a student of Dr. Rapp’s, and the location of his classroom was unpredictable. I followed him through Africa and Indonesia, but the Amazon was the source of his most important work. He studied botany, and I was free to study the workings of a true scientific mind. As an undergraduate at Radcliffe I wasn’t allowed to take his class at Harvard, Harvard couldn’t have stood for anything as radical as that, but Dr. Rapp let me travel on the expeditions. He was the first teacher I encountered who saw no limitations for women. As it turned out he was the only one.”

They were quiet for a long time after that, both staring off at different aspects of the jungle as it rolled past them, the same bit of scenery recycled indefinitely. Two hours later, Easter left the protection of the right-hand bank and crossed the width of the Negro to the left. There he turned up a tributary that was in every way similar to the countless other tributaries they had passed, and while it was unmarked, it was the exit ramp from the interstate, the one that would eventually take them to the street where Dr. Swenson lived. No other boats followed them though the entrance was wide at the mouth. In a matter of minutes the nameless river narrowed and the green dropped behind them like a curtain and the Negro was lost. Marina had thought that the important line that was crossed was between the dock and the boat, the land and the water. She had thought the water was the line where civilization fell away. But as they glided between two thick walls of breathing vegetation she realized she was in another world entirely, and that she would see civilization drop away again and again before they reached their final destination. All Marina could see was green. The sky, the water, the bark of the trees: everything that wasn’t green became green. All in green my love went riding.

Dr. Swenson announced that lunch was now in order. “The boy deserves a break. He stands up there so rigid that I think he would shatter if a nut hit him just right. There is no way of communicating that one should relax, do you realize that? You can shake out your arms and swivel your neck and it all looks like nonsense.” Dr. Swenson put her hands on her thighs and pushed up but she did not stand. She was thicker around the middle than she had been in Baltimore and the weight and the long time sitting seemed to keep her tied to her case of hash. Dr. Swenson, so far as Marina could calculate, would be in the neighborhood of seventy. It was possible at this point that even Dr. Swenson was tired. Marina stood up and extended her hand. Dr. Swenson rubbed her knees for a minute, looking pointedly away, then she took the hand. “Thank you for the assistance,” she said. She stood up and then let Marina go. “These are different days. For all I know about the body this is still not what I expected.” She went over and tapped Easter on the shoulder, then made a turning motion with her wrist and pointed to the shore. He nodded, keeping his eyes ahead. “He won’t go in right away,” Dr. Swenson said, coming back to where Marina was standing. “There’s a spot he likes where he can tie up to a tree. The anchor makes him nervous. It’s not reliable. Once he dropped it off and we had a devil of a time getting it back in the boat. There’s a lot for an anchor to get caught on in this river.”

Marina looked over the side of the boat. She couldn’t even imagine it. “How long have you been coming out here?”

“Dr. Rapp first found the Lakashi”—Dr. Swenson craned back her head, looked towards the tops of the trees—“it was fifty years ago, I suppose. I was on that trip, standing right on the stage of history. I remember coming down this very river for the first time. It was a glorious day. I had no idea that I would be coming back for the rest of my life.”