Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

And besides, if she wasn’t working, what was she going to do with her days? The jungle, with its screeching cries of death and slithering piles of leaves, was hardly a place to go walking alone in the afternoons. Two of the young men from the tribe had dreams of learning English and German and becoming tour guides at one of the eco-lodges hundreds of miles away. They had seen the great white hope of the cruise ships while riding bundles of trees to Manaus. They had met the naturalists when visiting the Jinta. Because they were always looking to practice, they were willing to take a restless doctor into that deeper place off the available paths where the afternoon light was filtered out by leaves. With a great deal of hand gesturing, a few common words in four different languages, and a couple of glossy field guides with the name Anders Eckman printed inside the front cover, they would endeavor to give jungle tours, pointing out the neon colored frogs the size of dimes that contained enough poison in their clammy skins to take down twenty men. The scientists all agreed that they had never been deep into the jungle for more than eight minutes without thinking they would give everything they owned to be led safely out.

Sometimes in the late afternoons when the generator stumbled from the burdens of overuse and the scant electricity in the lab clicked off altogether (save the backup, backup generators that kept the blood samples in the freezers flash-frozen to arctic levels), the heat drove the doctors, save Dr. Swenson, into the river to swim, though the river was even worse than the jungle because in that murky soup there was no telling what was coming at you. As they treaded the water slowly, hoping not to kick up an attractive splash, the conversation turned not to the spectacular moth with wings the size of handkerchiefs that for a moment hovered over their heads, but to the microscopic candiru fish that were capable of swimming up the urethra with catastrophic results. Marina, who had no alternative, swam in her dress and hoped that in the slow agitation of her strokes she was washing it. They kept an eye out for water snakes whose heads rode the surface of the river like tiny periscopes, and reminisced about the vampire bats that had tangled their claws in the mosquito nets over their beds. No one stayed long in the water, not even Dr. Budi, who apparently had been something of a swimming star in Indonesia when she was a girl.

For entertainment not reliant on nature, there were outdated scientific journals and old New Yorker s but invariably something had eaten through the most interesting paragraphs. Dr. Swenson had a complete set of hardbacked Dickens and she kept the books wrapped separately in heavy pieces of plastic tarp and tied with twine. She would loan them out and then do spot checks to make sure they were being read with clean hands. A cinnamon stick was lodged in the plastic wrap of each volume, as ants, Dr. Rapp had once told her, would always avoid the scent of cinnamon. Dr. Swenson believed that ants would be the standard bearers for the end of civilization.

Other than the brief and unsatisfying diversions of walking and swimming and reading, all that was left for Dr. Swenson and Dr. Singh, Dr. Nkomo and Dr. Budi and the two Drs. Saturn, was the lab, and the lab was not unlike a Las Vegas casino. They existed there without calendar or clock. They worked until they were hungry and then they stopped and ate — opening a can of apricots and another can of tuna. They worked until they were tired and then they went back to their cots in the small ring of huts that sat behind the lab like the bungalows at the Spear-O-Wigwam Summer Camp for Girls at Mille Lacs. They read some Dickens before they went to sleep. At the end of her first week, Marina was halfway through Little Dorrit . Of all her possessions lost and gone she was particularly sorry to be without her James novel.

As for the Lakashi, they were patient subjects, submitting themselves to constant weighing and measurement, allowing their menstrual cycles to be charted and their children to be pricked for blood samples. Dr. Swenson deserved the credit for that and she accepted it readily, telling stories about the tireless cajoling and gift giving that had once been required for even the most basic examinations. “I tamed them,” she said, taking not the least discomfort in the word. “It was our life’s work, Dr. Rapp’s and mine, earning their trust.”

But if she taught them to tolerate her research she had not made them good company. They rarely offered to share their dried fish and regurgitated manioc root, not that anyone wanted it, but it was the most basic lesson in any Introduction to Anthropology class: the sharing of food was the primary symbol of harmonious communal living. Then again, Dr. Swenson strictly forbade the sharing of the scientists’ food among members of the tribe as she believed that a jar of peanut butter was more corrupting to indigenous ways than a television set, so it was possible that the Lakashi’s unwillingness to offer up their bread was only a matter of passive retaliation. It was Easter alone who ate from both tables, or, more accurately, both pots. The Lakashi didn’t knock on the door of the lab to extend an invitation on the nights they decided for no discernible reason to dance until three in the morning, and they left no note when they cleared out, all of them together, which they did from time to time, leaving behind the most unnerving silence. When they came back twelve hours later they were red-eyed and quiet, walking on their toes in their collective indigenous hangover. Even the children smelled of a peculiar smoke and sat like stumps on the bank of the river, an entire line of them staring straight ahead without scratching their insect bites.

“We used to call it a vision quest in honor of the indigenous Americans,” Dr. Swenson had said when Marina ran to the lab in a sweat-soaked panic asking what had happened to everyone. She had been in camp three days when, in the manner of a horrible scene from a science fiction movie, they all disappeared. “That was the perfect name for what they were doing until it also became the name of a video game and the rallying cry for every pack of middle-aged New Agers who were looking to legitimize their interest in psychedelics. I don’t have a name for it anymore. I wake up and see they’re gone and I think, Oh, it’s time for that again.”

“Have you ever gone with them?” Marina asked.

Dr. Swenson was working through a complicated looking equation in a spiral notebook but she didn’t seem to mind carrying on the conversation while she wrote down strings of numbers. There were computers in the lab but between the undependable electricity and the overpowering humidity that from time to time seized the generators like a fever, everyone was more inclined to do their important calculations by hand, proving legions of math teachers correct. “No one goes with them now. In retrospect, I think it was only Dr. Rapp they were inviting and the rest of us held his coattails. Once he stopped coming on expeditions, the Lakashi simply went out in the middle of the night while we were sleeping. Never have I known a people who could one hour be as loud as a blitzkrieg and the next hour maintain perfect silence while walking through dried leaves. They can move their entire operation out of here without breaking a twig.”

Marina waited for an answer to the question she had asked but Dr. Swenson’s attention had fallen back to the math before her. It occurred to Marina that these sorts of conversations were exactly the reason the Bovenders worked so hard to keep Dr. Swenson separated from society. Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one’s partner on both the left and the right. “But you did go?”