Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

There were people on the banks of the river.

They were going to meet the tribe. That had always been the point of the expedition, so why hadn’t Marina thought of it before now? What had made the jungle so uncomfortable all this time was its absence of people. All the jungle had offered thus far were plants and insects, clinging vines and unseen animals, and that was bad enough, but now Marina realized that people were truly the worst-case scenario. It was like being alone on a dark city street and suddenly turning a corner to find a group of young men staring menacingly from a doorway. “Lakashi?” Marina asked, hoping they were at the very least facing a known factor.

“Yes,” Dr. Swenson said.

Marina waited for a moment, hoping for more than a one word affirmation. She was on an unnamed river in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night feeling very much the same way she always felt with Dr. Swenson, like Oliver Twist holding up his empty bowl. Would it have been too much to ask for the simple acknowledgment that these were no doubt unfamiliar circumstances? Dr. Swenson could have even extended herself enough to tell the story of the first time she had encountered the Lakashi, Lucky for me it was daylight then , or, I certainly was grateful that Dr. Rapp knew what to do, but that of course would require Dr. Swenson to be someone else entirely. The boat crept its way towards the waving, spinning flames until they were close enough that Marina could just make out the shape of heads behind each of the fires, every man and woman waving a burning stick, children holding slim burning branches, jumping and calling. She could see the trails of sparks as they splintered off and flew in every direction, extinguishing themselves before they touched the ground. In their magnitude those sparks were reminiscent of stars. The sound was also more nuanced the closer they came to it: too forceful for any flock of birds, too rhythmic for any animal. Marina remembered a funeral her father had taken her to as a child, thousands of lights in paper cups floating down the Ganges, the people crowded onto the banks, walking into the water, cutting through the night air filled with incense and smoke. She could smell the rot of the water beneath the blanket of flowers. At the time the spectacle had frightened her so badly she buried her face in her father’s shirt and kept it there for the rest of the night, but now she was grateful for the little she had seen. It didn’t explain what was spread out before her but it reminded her of all the things she didn’t understand. “What do you think has happened?” Marina asked. Some of the people on the shore were dropping their fire now. They were walking into the water and swimming towards the boat. It was quite clear to Marina how people could get on the boat but she wasn’t able to see how she could get off.

“What do you mean?” Dr. Swenson said. What do you mean, Dr. Singh, when you say stage-two cervical cancer ?

Marina, beyond words, extended her open arms to the shore ahead.

Dr. Swenson looked down at the men who swam towards them. They kept their long throats stretched up like turtles so that they could avoid getting water in their open mouths as they called and cried. Then she looked back at her guest as if she could not believe she was yet again being bothered by the timid rabbits and their foolish questions. “We’ve come back,” she said.

Marina turned away from the ebullient welcome, the burning and hopping and splashing, the never-ending sound of la-la-la-la-la , and turned back to Dr. Swenson, who was nodding her head towards the masses with a sort of weary acceptance. “You were only gone for a night.”

“They never believe it. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell them. Their sense of time lacks—” But she didn’t finish her sentence. The boat had sharply listed to the right as the men began to hang on to the pontoon on one side and then push themselves up. The case of grapefruit juice slid abruptly, hitting Marina in the ankles and very nearly throwing her into the ones who were just now pulling themselves out of the water. She caught a pole and righted herself. This was the reason Marina’s father always insisted on renting a pontoon boat in those early summers: not only was it easier to navigate and impossible to sink, it would have been very easy to reboard if one of them had fallen over. But no one ever did fall over. The theory was not put to the test. Dripping, the men hoisted themselves on to the deck and stood. They were considerably smaller than Marina, though taller than Dr. Swenson, wearing nylon running shorts and sopping T-shirts that advertised American products — Nike and Mr. Bubble. One of them wore a Peterbilt hat. They slapped their open hands against Easter, his arms and shoulders and back, as if he were a fire that they were putting out. Easter, clearly pleased, slapped them away. There were seven men on the boat, and then there were nine, all of them crying out with piercing intent. The black water was churning with swimmers and from time to time Easter would swing down the light and shine it into the water which served to consolidate the men like tarpon. They looked up and waved. No one could fault Easter for driving over them, they were swarming, but when the slow moving pontoon pressed against a shoulder or head the man simply sank beneath it and then popped up again later, assuming it was the same man popping up there. How many boats throughout history had been met by such enthusiastic locals? On the deck a man was looking up at Marina now and he touched her cheek with a wet hand without making eye contact. Two men behind her petted her hair. A fourth man ran his fingers down her forearm in a way that was almost too gentle to be endured. It was as if she were being greeted in a school for the blind. When a fifth reached up and cupped her breast, Dr. Swenson clapped her hands together sharply.

“Enough of that,” she said, and the men with their hands on Marina jumped back onto the toes of ones standing behind them who were waiting their turn, which caused all of them to still their tongues in their mouths and look at Dr. Swenson with expectation. In that moment Marina knew two things for certain: the Lakashi did not speak English, did not know the word enough , and that despite this minor hindrance they would do whatever Dr. Swenson told them. The snap in Dr. Swenson’s voice had driven Marina’s pulse higher than the men with their wet fingers. They, after all, seemed more curious than menacing. In this hierarchy, Dr. Swenson was the uncontested kingpin and Marina felt herself to be closer to the natives than to their ruler. “Go on,” Dr. Swenson said, and pointed to the side of the boat, where one by one they walked obediently off the edge, often landing on some unfortunate in the water. “They are an extremely tactile people,” Dr. Swenson said when the last one had disappeared with a splash. “They don’t mean anything by it. If they can’t touch it, it doesn’t exist.”

“They don’t touch you,” Marina said, running her sleeve over

her face.

Dr. Swenson nodded. “At this point they know I exist. I’ve been able to do away with the rest of it.”

There was a narrow dock sticking out of the bank, a single, beckoning finger, and Easter brought up the boat snug alongside it, at which point the men handed their burning sticks to the women and boarded the boat in an orderly fashion, picking up boxes and baggage and carrying them off into the night. Most of them gave Marina a tap on the shoulder or stopped to touch the side of her head, but there was work to be done and no one lingered. Now it was the women who were singing out, and as Marina left the boat with Easter and Dr. Swenson they raised their torches overhead to cast a wider band of light. They wore homemade shift dresses in dull colors and kept their hair in long braids down their backs. There were children tied across their chests in slings, children holding on to their ankles, children balanced on hips, their dark round eyes reflecting the fire all around them. Dr. Swenson trudged up the dirt path into the jungle, nodding from time to time at the women who trilled their vowels in rapture. The children on the ground reached out and touched Marina’s pants, women ran their fingers around her ears and tapped at her collarbone. Occasionally a child, a very small one, would extend a hand to Dr. Swenson and the mother would snatch it back.