Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

his hair.

“I don’t know what happened,” Marina said, her eyes straight up to the point where the net knotted together. “It doesn’t make any sense. He saw a snake in the water and he pulled it onto the boat? Why would he do that?”

“Benoit wants to be a tour guide and the stock and trade of an Amazon tour guide is the ability to pick things up — tarantulas, Caiman lizards, all sorts of ridiculous things. Pulling an anaconda into a boat is an extraordinary accomplishment. I’ve never seen anyone manage it, and I’ve seen people try. Had it ended better he probably would have asked you to write a letter to the National Board of Tourism.”

“It’s a miracle the thing didn’t bite one of them. I’ll be seeing those fangs for the rest of my life.”

Dr. Swenson shook her head. “Teeth,” she said, “not fangs. I’m told the bite is extremely painful and it’s a monstrous business getting the head disengaged, but it isn’t a poisonous snake. What that snake was doing to Easter was a much more serious business than biting.”

Marina turned her head to face her mentor. “What about his liver, his spleen? If we were home I could take him for a CT.”

“If you were home he wouldn’t have been squeezed by an anaconda. He would have been hit by an SUV while riding his bike. His odds were better against the snake.”

“What?”

“It’s dangerous here, you don’t need to tell me that, but it’s more dangerous there. This is where he understands things, he knows how to get along. Maybe he’s cracked some ribs, but you watch him, he’ll be fine. Dr. Eckman had ideas about taking Easter home with him. He felt if the hearing loss were nerve-based he might benefit from a cochlear implant, but you can’t change people like that. You can’t make a hearing boy out of a deaf boy, and you can’t turn everyone you meet into an American. Easter isn’t a souvenir anyway, a little something you pocket on your way out to remind you of your time in South America. You kept your head, Dr. Singh, you saved his life. I commend you for this. But if you think the reward for saving the boy’s life is keeping the boy, then I must tell you this is not the case. A simple thank you will have to suffice. He is not available.”

It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Marina to tell Dr. Swenson that she had no idea what she was talking about, when what Dr. Swenson was saying was perfectly clear, she had simply put it into words before Marina had made it a complete thought, the same way she would answer the questions on Grand Rounds the split second before Marina had them formulated in her mind. Marina was in fact moments from coming to the conclusion that the thing to do would be to take Easter home with her, that it was what Anders had wanted, that it was what she wanted, that in some bizarre way this was the child of their union, the product of the seven years Anders and Marina spent together in a cramped lab. Easter was her compensation for what she had lost. Dr. Swenson had simply seen it before Marina, and in seeing it, she cut her off at the pass. “It was horrible,” Marina said weakly, wanting at least some sympathy for what she was being asked to forfeit. She meant the snake.

“I’m sure it was.” Dr. Swenson put her hand against the boy’s forehead, checking for fever, and then dipped two fingers into his neck to count his pulse. “Did you ever want children of your own, Dr. Singh?”

And there she was again, anticipating the next emotion, following Marina’s train of thought backwards: I cannot keep this child. I should have had a child . She wondered if she were particularly transparent or if Dr. Swenson just had a special knack for reading her. “There was a time,” Marina said. She could not make peace with the stench of the snake. She was amazed that Dr. Swenson hadn’t commented on that.

“And that time has passed?”

Marina shrugged. It was a peculiar kind of therapy, lying flat out with the child you had only now realized you wanted while being asked if you had wanted a child. “I’m forty-two. I seriously doubt my life will change so much in the next year or two that it would be possible.” She was no longer sure about what she wanted from Mr. Fox, and hers was not an age for indecision.

“There will be nothing but time, don’t you understand? That’s what the Lakashi are offering. If I can have a child at seventy-three, then why shouldn’t you have one at forty-three, forty-five? I’ll tell you the truth, Dr. Singh, what I have discovered about these trees is not what I expected. It will not be what your pharmaceutical company expects. It is something much greater, much more ambitious than anything we had hoped for. That was Dr. Rapp’s great lesson in the Amazon, in science: Never be so focused on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.”

Marina was sitting up now. She had disengaged her hand from Easter’s though the two were fairly stuck together from where the snake’s blood had dried and sealed them into one unit. She came outside her net. “You’re telling me you’re pregnant?”

Dr. Swenson blinked. For a moment she looked more surprised than Marina. “You thought I was fat?”

“You’re seventy-three years old!”

Dr. Swenson folded her hands on top of her stomach in a universal gesture of pregnancy. It was something Marina was sure she had never seen her do. Her shirt rode up and showed the roundness of her belly. “I know you have seen women here who are my age or older and they are pregnant. I’ve heard you comment on them.”

“But they’re Lakashi.” Marina wasn’t sure if what she was saying was racist or scientific. This distortion of biology is for them, not for us. She could still hear them singing by the river, beating on drums, no doubt tenderizing the snake before they held it on sticks above the fire, or whatever one did to cook a snake in these parts.

“They are Lakashi indeed, so that is the question. We know that if they eat the bark consistently from the onset of first menses their ova appear not to deteriorate. But Americans wouldn’t feed their daughters a monthly pill from the time they’re thirteen on the off chance the child will want to wait until she’s fifty to reproduce. What we have to find out is whether or not the bark can reinvigorate the reproductive capacity of the postmenopausal woman.”

“And you’re the test case? You couldn’t find someone else to do this?”

“There are no postmenopausal Lakashi. That’s the whole point.”

“Then you get a Jinta. You don’t take it yourself.”

“How quickly we put our medical ethics aside. I developed this drug. If I believe in it, and clearly I do, then I should be willing to test it on myself.”

“Who is the father?”

Dr. Swenson looked at her with the gravest disappointment, the disappointment she reserved for first year medical students. “Really, Dr. Singh, you are not serious.”

Given the circumstances of the day, Marina would have sworn that there was nothing left to upset her, and still she felt her hands shaking. “I understand that you are conducting an extremely limited initial trial on yourself but the end result of this experiment will be a child and, with all good wishes for your longevity, you may not be around as long as you might like to look after it. If there is no father in the traditional sense, then what happens to the outcome?”

“There are plenty of children around here. Do you really think one more is going to break the tribe? I am very well regarded. Any outcome of mine, as you so warmly describe this child, would be welcomed and well cared for.”

“You’re going to leave it here? Annick Swenson’s child will be raised by the Lakashi?”