Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

“How’s Easter?” Nancy Saturn said.

Marina gave Nancy the credit for saving Easter’s life, for having the presence of mind to say the word knife when Marina was still attempting to win a wrestling match with a snake. It was Nancy Saturn who had set their salvation in motion. “He was sleeping when I left. Dr. Swenson gives him half an Ambien at night now, otherwise the pain wakes him up.”

“Blessings from Allah on that,” Dr. Budi said, nodding.

“We’re going out to the trees,” Nancy said casually, laying her hand on the bag of notebooks that hung across her chest. “Why don’t you come along?”

Before Easter’s accident, if pulling a snake into a boat can be called an accident, Marina had asked several times to see the trees, but her requests had been met by a vague evasiveness — they had already been or this wasn’t the week to go. Since the anaconda, she had frankly forgotten about them. Her notions of what was important had shifted. The jungle was not short on trees and she had seen many of them. It was difficult to imagine that some would be so substantially different from the others. Still, now that the invitation had been extended she accepted with pleasure, feeling that her patience had been noticed and rewarded.

In fact, she had written just such a sentiment last night to Mr. Fox, sitting on the floor of the sleeping porch and using the chair as a desk because Easter had already gone to bed. (Since the snake, his hammock had hung empty until a marmoset took it up for afternoon naps. It was a filthy little creature.) I find myself following your advice now that I have no direct way of reaching you. You would tell me to wait and observe. You would tell me there is more to this situation than I could immediately understand and you would be right, just as you were right to tell me to come here and right to tell me (I know this is what you would say) to stay. Look how agreeable I’ve become since I’ve been gone! I can hardly believe how close I came to getting on the next flight home. I would have suffered through Manaus only to miss the very thing I had come for.

Far to the west, Budi and Nancy and Marina heard a rustling of branches as two young women laughing and talking in what Marina still considered to be an impenetrable language passed at a distance, nodding their heads with disinterest when they spotted the doctors. One of the older women was walking from the direction of the river holding the hand of a young girl. Three more suddenly appeared from behind a large, dead stump. “You would think they all had alarm clocks,” Nancy said as more and more women stepped from the underbrush and headed in the same direction. They were on a path Marina didn’t think she had been on before although she couldn’t be sure. Paths opened up when she studied the undergrowth carefully and then disappeared as soon as she turned her head. She had a mortal fear of following one path into the jungle and then being unable to find it again when she was ready to go out. If Marina had it all to do over again she would have brought sacks of red yarn with her so she could tie one end of the ball to the foot of her bed every time she entered the labyrinth.

“It is the Lakashi biological clock,” Dr. Budi said, and Nancy and Marina laughed. Dr. Budi smiled shyly, having made so few successful jokes in her life.

It wasn’t often that Marina dwelled on the contents of either of her lost suitcases but there were moments, and this was such a moment, when she would have liked a real pair of shoes instead of the rubber flip-flops. She would have liked a long sleeved shirt that would have saved her arms at least from the smaller thorns, and a pair of pants to protect her from those random blades of grass which when brushed past at exactly the right angle could slice the shin like a razor. The small amount of blood that beaded and then seeped from her leg was an advertisement for all she had to offer. It felt as if they were going a very long way, but distances, like directions, were hard to measure. It could have been that this particular path (were they on a path?) had more fallen trees lying across it that required clambering over, more mysterious sinkholes of standing water heralded only by a sudden sponginess underfoot. It could be that they were only two or three straight city blocks away from their destination but that distance was meaningless given the obstacles they had still to overcome. Marina brushed her hand across the back of her neck and dislodged something with a hard shell. She had learned in time to brush instead of slap as slapping only served to pump the entire contents of the insect, which was doubtlessly already burrowed into the skin with some entomological protuberance, straight into the bloodstream.

The Lakashi women were singing now. No, they weren’t singing. It was just that so many of them were talking at once and when their voices came together it sounded vaguely like a section of Torah as sung by a group of bar mitzvah boys whose voices had yet to change. “Do you know what they’re saying?” Marina asked.

Nancy shook her head. “I catch a word every now and then, or I think I do. We had a linguist with us for a while. He had been a student of Noam Chomsky’s. He said the language wasn’t particularly difficult or even interesting, that all the languages in this region of the Amazon came from a single grammatical base with variations in vocabulary which meant at one point the tribes must have been connected and then split apart. It made me wish we had a language that was a little bit more obscure so we might have kept him. He made us some charts with phonetics so we can put together some basic phrases.”

“Thomas is very good at it,” Dr. Budi said. She held up her arm and the other two women stopped and waited while a very large, low slung lizard dragged itself across their path, its loose green skin hanging over the rib cage like chain mail. “I don’t know that one,” Dr. Budi said, watching it carefully.

Nancy leaned over to peer at the lizard as if it were someone she could almost place, then she shook her head. “Neither do I.”

It was another twenty minutes past the lizard before they came to a clearing, or, if not a clearing, a place where fewer, thinner trees stood farther apart from one another, and all the trees were the same. There was no thick coat of undergrowth covering the ground, just a light wash of grass, there were no hairy ropes of vines strangling the trees, only the smooth, straight expanse of bark. Sunlight fell easily between the pale oval leaves and hit the ground in wide patches. “It’s beautiful,” Marina said, dropping her head back. Such sunlight, such pretty little leaves. “My God, why don’t they live here?”

“Too far from the water,” Dr. Budi said, looking at her watch and making a note of the time.

A dozen Lakashi women were already there. Marina knew most of them by sight even if she couldn’t properly reproduce the series of tones that made up their names. Over the next few minutes two dozen more arrived and took their places against the trunks that were a buttery yellow color and ranged from ten to twenty inches around. Without ritual or fanfare, with no apparent consideration, the women went for bigger trees, the ones already bitten, and left the saplings alone. Pressing in like a partner for a slow dance, they opened their mouths and began immediately to scrape their teeth down the bark. The jungle on this morning was particularly quiet and so it was possible to hear them, a small sound amplified by so many women making it at the same time.

A few stragglers wandered in and stopped to greet the women at the trees around them who stopped their biting and chewing long enough to receive the greeting and return it. Two of the women who had a great deal to say to each other took opposite sides of the same tree and from a distance they appeared to be kissing. Women who had brought their children left them in a pile in the center of the trees and the older children herded the younger ones back when they tried to crawl away. One of the older women went into the group of children and led a girl of twelve or thirteen to a tree and the others stopped all at once, turning their heads from their trees to watch her. When the girl tilted her face to the side, looking uncertain of how she should approach it, the others hooted lightly and slapped their trees to make a kind of tree-plus-human applause. The thin branches trembled and shook the delicate leaves from side to side. The girl, whose hair was unbraided and disheveled by sleep, looked embarrassed to be the center of so much attention. She then began to nibble at the bark. After the others felt certain she was performing this primal act correctly they all went back to their work. From the nubile to the beldame they scraped and chewed without pleasure or distaste. They had turned the fairly exotic act of biting a tree into nothing more than factory work.