Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

The first time Marina found one of those blue paper rectangles in her bed, perfectly sealed and addressed to Karen Eckman in Eden Prairie, she froze as solidly as a blood sample in the very bottom of the freezer. She leaned over the railing and shined the flashlight into the night jungle looking for a flash of Anders running away, her heart in full arrhythmia, but it didn’t take her long to figure out who had delivered it. For Easter, these envelopes were his most precious possessions and therefore his best gifts, and because he knew he had come to them through a direct act of disobedience, they carried the added enticement of guilt. The letters were so secret he would not keep them in his lock box with the feathers. Wherever they came from he doled them out slowly, one every other day, every third day, beneath the sheet, beneath the pillow, folded in her extra dress.

Let me tell you the virtue of fever: it brings YOU here. I would have preferred it take me home and once or twice that’s happened but for the most part YOU arrive at 4:00 and take me out of this bed and we walk through the jungle, and Karen, you know EVERYTHING about the jungle. You know the names of all the spiders. You are afraid of nothing. I am afraid of nothing when you are here. Let me live in this fever. It is so much worse now, the hours I am well

Then nothing. Maybe these were the letters Anders didn’t finish, the ones he started and forgot, and Easter picked them up off the floor while Anders slept and tucked them away. Of the three she had received so far two were only paragraphs and the third was a scant two sentences:

What was the name of the couple who lived next door to us in the apartment building on Petit Court? I see them here constantly and I cannot think of their names.

Dr. Swenson had gone to her room at the back of the lab after being sick, and by the time she returned everyone had finished his or her letter except for Dr. Budi who seemed to approach the question of what to say as a spatial problem. She would stare for a long time at her paper and then turn her eyes up to the ceiling as if trying to calculate exactly how many words she needed to express her feelings and how many inches there were left on the paper for those words. Dr. Swenson returned after lunch looking like nothing had happened and when Marina started to ask her how she was feeling, Dr. Swenson waved her away. “Fine,” she said, without waiting for the question.

Alan Saturn stood in front of Dr. Budi and tapped the table with his fingers. “Give it up,” he said.

“You could have told me last night that you meant to go today.” She was a fine-boned woman of indeterminate age who wore her black hair in a single braid in the manner of the Lakashi. She folded her letter into thirds and ran her tongue along the glue strip.

“Nothing happens here,” Alan said. “No one needs that much time to write a letter.”

Dr. Budi reached into the pocket of the cotton smock she wore and pulled out several small bills which she handed over to Dr. Saturn along with the envelope. Then, without further conversation, she returned her attention to her work. In her devotion to her task, Dr. Budi was an archetype of a particular sort in the medical community, as much as the ill-tempered surgeon or the addicted anesthesiologist. Any time a group of doctors came together, there was always the one whose car would be in the parking lot when the others arrived at dawn and whose car would still be there when the others pulled away after midnight, the one who was standing at the nurses’ station at four a.m. reviewing a chart when it wasn’t her weekend on call, the one the other doctors privately ridiculed for having no life and yet with whom they felt a gnawing and irrational sense of competition. What was remarkable was how ably Dr. Budi filled this role even when there was no hospital, no parking lot, and no patients. When all they did was work, Dr. Budi worked more. She claimed that she had already read all the Dickens.

“Have you ever been to Java?” Alan Saturn asked Marina. “Anywhere in Indonesia?” She had followed him down to the dock with the Lakashi, not even asking herself why she was doing it. A departure, an arrival, she was beginning to see their appeal as a diversion. She was certain one of the men was wearing a pair of her pants rolled up at the cuffs. Pieces of her clothing walked by her from time to time and there was nothing to do but watch them pass. She shook her head.

“It’s my theory that Budi is more suited to the tropics than the rest of us. This air, these smells, they must be second nature to her. She looks up so seldom I imagine she thinks she’s home.” Dr. Saturn was working to loosen a knot in a rope that held the pontoon boat to the shore and in his struggles he made the knot more intractable. Easter came down the dock and thumped him on the shoulder. His point was clear. “Now, take Nancy and me coming from Michigan,” he said, “well, that’s going to be harder. It doesn’t matter how long we’re here or how often we come, we never fully acclimate. The foreignness of the place is always going to be a distraction for us.”

“Dr. Swenson was born in Maine and she doesn’t seem distracted.”

“Dr. Swenson may never be cited in conversations about how normal people respond to their environment.” Some freakish brand of great white bird with a wing span of a pterodactyl flapped down the river towards them. It had a bare black head, a long black bill, and a red ring around its skinny neck. They all stood paralyzed by the sight of it, watching until it took a hard left into the foliage and vanished. Dr. Saturn formed his hand into a visor against the afternoon sun. “Anders would have known what that was.”

After a flurry of turning pages, Benoit held up the picture of the bird in Anders’ book, thrilled to have found it so fast. He showed it to Dr. Saturn, who nodded approvingly at the correct match. “Jaribu stork,” Dr. Saturn said.

Benoit, one of those young men who hoped for a career in tourism, had as a child been collected for a missionary school that had popped up briefly several tributaries away. Thanks to a group of Baptists from Alabama he could read and write in Portuguese and had memorized Bible verses which he could recite at will, skills that had made him one of the least contented members of his tribe. Marina came over to look at the picture.

“I’ve brought hats!” Nancy Saturn said, coming down to the water. “I have two. Now you can come with us.” She handed Marina a wide brimmed hat and when Marina hesitated, Dr. Saturn took it from his wife and put it on Marina’s head. The age span between the Drs. Saturn was greater than the span between Mr. Fox and Marina. One could imagine, though it had not been said, that he had once been her teacher. Marina recognized the way the wife leaned towards the husband when he spoke as it was not unlike the way she had often leaned towards Dr. Swenson. In one late-night conversation over a bottle of pisco brandy in which the first Dr. Saturn was holding forth on matters of tropical medicine, the second Dr. Saturn actually took a notebook out of her pocket to write down something he had said. She was discreet, and the paper might have gone unnoticed had Dr. Swenson not asked her rather loudly if she wasn’t capable of simply relying on her memory. Dr. Swenson leaned decisively away from the female Dr. Saturn, whom she clearly regarded as a gate-crasher, a hanger-on, though the younger woman, a botanist with a degree in public health, was probably best qualified to be of assistance. Certainly her credentials were closest to Dr. Rapp’s. “I never rely on my memory when I’m drinking,” was what Nancy Saturn had said.

Easter turned the key and the motor of the pontoon boat began to spit and cough. All of the Lakashi pressed forward now and Marina felt herself jostled from side to side by the shirtless men in running shorts and the women with their pregnant bellies. She found herself looking at their ears and the strings of seeds and animal teeth around their necks and suddenly she realized she had not dreamed of India all week. Her father, who had been missing from her life for so many years, was gone again, and for an instant she had a vivid recreation of that hollow, hopeless feeling of having lost him in the crowd. As she wondered if the Lariam was out of her system now, a mosquito bit the back of her knee.