Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

When the Lakashi had finished what had been asked of them, they walked off in groups of two and three and four, not looking back at the trees or acknowledging the scientists. They picked up the children who were too small to walk reliably and let the others trail behind as best they could. They were done.

“Do they come every day?” Marina watched as the entire lot of them receded into the thickening woods as if a school bell had been rung. They left without so much as a glance back to the doctors or the trees. Their work was done.

“They chew the bark every five days, though the entire female sector of the tribe doesn’t come on the same day. Their visits are regular. How they figure the five days is beyond us as they have no apparent system for marking time. I can only assume that it has at this point become a biological craving. They don’t come when they’re pregnant. In fact the bark repulses them from what seems to be the moment of conception. Dr. Swenson confirms this. Because of this pregnancies seem especially long out here. We know about them for a full thirty-nine weeks. They also don’t come when they’re menstruating, though conveniently they’re pretty much on the same cycle so we get a few days off every month.”

“All of them?”

Nancy nodded. “It takes the new girls a while to get it straightened out and no one is perfectly regular after giving birth, but other than that.”

Dr. Budi walked over to a tree near her and looked to find a place where the bark was darkest yellow and dry, then she leaned towards it and bit, her teeth making that same scraping sound. “You’ll try it?” she said, looking back at Marina.

“I should take her vitals,” Nancy said, pulling out the blood-pressure cuff again. “Budi, take her temperature.”

“Why would I?” Marina said.

“We need people to test. People who aren’t Lakashi. We do it.”

“But I’m not going to get pregnant.”

Nancy Velcroed a cuff around Marina’s arm and began to pump it tighter and tighter. Dr. Budi held up a flat plastic thermometer and Marina, sure of nothing, opened her mouth.

“You would not be alone in that,” Dr. Budi said.

“Believe me, there are plenty of things to test you for. You don’t have to get pregnant.”

“Thomas will tell you,” Dr. Budi said, and then as if on cue, Dr. Nkomo broke through the thicket outside the stand of Martins and was walking towards them.

“I see I am sufficiently late,” he said, bowing his head to the three women.

“Men and women don’t come to the stand at the same time,” Nancy told Marina. “The women chew the trees and the men gather the Rapps.”

“Division of labor,” Dr. Budi said. Nancy removed the blood-pressure cuff and pressed two fingers to the side of Marina’s wrist to find her pulse.

“First time, yes?” Thomas said.

Marina nodded, keeping her mouth fixed to the thermometer.

“Ah, very good. Just remember to keep your tongue pushed down. Otherwise you can get splinters.”

“Although we’re geniuses at taking them out,” Nancy said. “Pulse sixty-four. Well done, Dr. Singh.”

Thomas brought his mouth to the tree beside him and, far above the band of scarring, began to scrape down the bark. Marina took the thermometer out of her mouth. “Wait a minute,” she said.

“The Martins have many purposes,” Nancy said. “For years Dr. Rapp thought that part of the hallucinogenic qualities in the mushrooms must come from the root system of the tree, that it must in some way be leached from the trees themselves, so he assumed that by chewing bark the women were, in essence, giving themselves a little bump. It was Annick who made the connection between the trees and extended fertility. Apparently he never noticed that they kept getting pregnant.”

“She still is always giving Dr. Rapp the credit,” Dr. Budi said, not as a correction, simply as a statement.

“If you look at their notes from that time it’s quite clear.” Thomas took a handkerchief out of his pocket and touched it to the corners of his mouth.

“It wasn’t until 1990 that she made the connection between the Martins and malaria,” Nancy said. “And that was definitely her discovery. Dr. Rapp was barely in the field by the nineties.”

“She still gives him credit,” Dr. Budi said. “Says he had mentioned it before.”

Thomas Nkomo shook his head by way of acknowledging the sadness of a woman who was so quick to assign her achievements to a man. “This is the greatest discovery to be made in relation to the Lakashi tribe. Not the Rapps or the fertility but the malaria.”

“I don’t understand,” Marina said, and she didn’t, not any of it.

“Lakashi women do not contract malaria,” Dr. Budi said. “They have been inoculated.”

“There is no inoculation for malaria,” Marina said, and the other three smiled at her, and Thomas bit the tree again.

Nancy Saturn pointed out the small purple moth resting on the white inner bark of the tree. It was the spot that Dr. Budi had recently chewed and there was still the slightest glimmer of saliva on the surrounding outer bark. “The Martin is a soft bark tree. Once the bark is broken the Lakashi have no trouble scraping through the inner bark and down into the cambium where the living cells are. This creates an opening, as you can see, a sort of wound in the tree, and into that wound comes this moth, the purple martinet.”

“You can’t be serious,” Marina said, leaning in for a better look. “Is there anything he didn’t name for himself?”

“The Lakashi tribe was not a Martin Rapp discovery. If it had been, this place would surely have been Rapptown.” Nancy put a finger just beneath the moth which, like the Lakashi, seemed impervious to the invasions of its privacy. “ Agruis purpurea martinet. It takes liquid from the pulp of the Martin, not the sap, which is deeper inside the tree. The insect subsists on the moisture in the wood itself. It ingests and excretes almost simultaneously, processing the proteins from the pulp. Once a year it lays its eggs.”

“In the bark?” Marina asked. When the moth opened its wings it showed two bright yellow dots like eyes, one on either side, then it folded back up again. A butterfly rests with its wings open and a moth rests with its wings closed, she had read that somewhere years ago.

Nancy nodded. “Like the Martins and the Rapps, the purple martinets seem to exist right here. You’ll see one in camp from time to time. They’ll go as far as the river, but we have no record of it feeding outside this area. The key to fertility is found in the combination of the Martin tree and the purple martinet, although we haven’t isolated the moths’ excretions from the proteins in its larval casing. What we know is that it works.”

Dr. Budi wiped an alcohol swab over her own finger and then pricked it herself.

“What about the blood samples?” Marina asked. “Can you actually read hormone levels on such a small amount of blood?”

“Nanotechnology,” Budi said. “Brave new world.”

Marina nodded.

“We’ve isolated the molecules as they are metabolized in the bark of the tree,” Budi continued, “but we’re still charting the impact of the Lakashi saliva, their gastric juices, plasma. What we don’t know is what combination of factors is also giving the women protection against malaria.”

Marina asked if the men in the tribe were susceptible to malaria and Thomas nodded. “After they have completed breast-feeding, the male babies are as likely as any member of comparable tribes to contract malaria, as are female children between the ages when they cease to be breast-fed and the onset of their own first menses, when they begin chewing the trees.”