Ann Patchett: State of Wonder

Marina shook her head. “You overestimate Dr. Swenson. And me. We would be strangers to one another.” This was halfway true. It was the truth in one direction.

“You were her student, her bright student who went on to do well in her field. It’s a connection. It’s more of a connection to her than anyone else has.”

“Except for her employer.”

He raised his eyebrows but it wasn’t enough to mock surprise. “So now you think I should go?”

“Are we the only two people available for this mission? I don’t think either one of us should go.” She could see Anders so clearly now. He had laid it all out for her and yet she had missed his point entirely. “She found a village of people in the Amazon, a tribe,” Anders had said, “where the women go on bearing children until the end of their lives.”

“Now there’s a chilling thought.” Marina was inputting numbers and listening to Anders the way she often did, with half of one ear.

“Of course their lives are on average shorter than ours by about a decade but that’s true everywhere in the Amazon — poor diet, little or no medical care.”

“All those children.”

Anders pushed off from his desk in his rolling chair. With his long legs and the short length of floor in the lab he maneuvered around the room easily with his heels. “Their eggs aren’t aging, do you get that? The rest of the body goes along its path to destruction while the reproductive system stays daisy fresh. This is the end of IVF. No more expense, no more shots that don’t end up working, no more donor eggs and surrogates. This is ovum in perpetuity, menstruation everlasting.”

Marina looked up. “Would you stop this?”

He put a thick bound report on her desk, Reproductive Endocrinology in the Lakashi People , by Dr. Annick Swenson. “Pretend for a moment that you are a clinical pharmacologist working for a major drug development firm. Imagine someone offering you the equivalent of Lost Horizon for American ovaries.” He took Marina’s hand as if in proposal. “Put off your reproductive decisions for as long as you want. We’re not talking forty-five, we’re talking fifty, sixty, maybe beyond that. You can always have children.”

Marina felt the words pointed directly at her. She was forty-two. She was in love with a man she did not leave the building with, and while she had not broached the subject with Mr. Fox, it wasn’t impossible to think that they could have a child. Improbable, maybe, but not out of the question. She picked up the hefty report. “Annick Swenson.”

“She’s the researcher. She’s some famous ethnobotanist in Brazil.”

Marina opened to the table of contents. “She’s not an ethnobotanist,” she said, glancing down the list of chapters: “Onset of Puberty in Lakashi Women,” “Birth Rates in Comparable Tribes”. .

Anders looked at the page she was looking at as if this information was printed there. “How do you know that?”

Marina closed the report and slid it back over the desk. From the very start she remembered wanting no part in this. “She was a teacher of mine in medical school.”

That had been the conversation in its entirety. The phone rang, someone came in, it was over. Marina had not been asked to sit in on the review board meetings or to meet Dr. Swenson on the occasion of Dr. Swenson’s single visit to Vogel. There was no reason she would have been. Obligations on review board committees were rotating and in this particular instance her number had not come up. There was no reason Mr. Fox would have ever known about the connection between herself and the chronicler of the Lakashi people except that clearly at some point Anders must have told him.

“What is she like, anyway?” Anders asked her two or three days before he left.

Marina took a moment. She saw her teacher down in the pit of the lecture hall, observed her at a safe and comfortable distance. “She was an old-style medical school professor.”

“The stuff of legends? A suicide in every class?”

Anders was looking at his bird books then, too distracted by tanagers to notice her face. Marina was caught not wanting to make a joke of something that didn’t have an ounce of humor in it, and at the same time not wanting to offer up any little crack that could be pried open into a meaningful conversation. All she said then was, “Yes.”

In the end neither Marina nor Mr. Fox could face dinner. They finished their drinks, two apiece, and drove back to the parking lot at Vogel, where Marina got in her car to go home. There was no further argument, no plans for the Amazon or the evening ahead. They had both been certain that the answer would be to go to bed together, hold each other through the long night as a means of warding off death, but there in the parking lot they split apart naturally, both of them too tired and too fundamentally alone in their thoughts to stay with the other.

“I’ll call to say good night,” Mr. Fox said.

Marina nodded and she kissed him, and when she was home and in bed after the bath she had so desperately wanted, he did call and said good night, but only good night, with no discussion of the day. When the phone rang again, five minutes or five hours after she had turned out the light, she did not think it would be Mr. Fox. Her first startled thought was that it was Anders. It had something to do with a dream she was having. Anders was calling to say his car had broken down in the snow and he needed her to come and pick him up.

“Marina, I’m sorry, I’m waking you.”

It was a woman’s voice, and then she realized it was Karen’s voice. Marina reached beneath her to try and straighten out the nightgown that had worked its way into twisted rope around her waist. “It’s all right.”

“Dr. Johnson brought some sleeping pills over but they didn’t do anything.”

“Sometimes they don’t,” Marina said. She picked up the little clock on her bedside table whose tiny hands glowed green in the dark, 3:25.

“They worked for everyone else. Everyone in the house is sound asleep.”

“Do you want me to come over?” She could go back now and sit on the kitchen floor with Karen and Pickles. She could lie on Anders’ side of the bed and hold Karen’s hand in the dark until she fell asleep. This time she would be ready, she would know what to do.

“No, it’s okay. I’ve got my family here, even if they’re asleep. It’s just that I’ve been thinking about all this, right? Of course I’m thinking about this.” Her voice was remarkably calm on the other end of the line.

“Sure.”

“And I’ve got all these questions now.”

“Of course,” Marina said, unable to think of a single question she’d be capable of answering.

“Well, why does she say in the letter that she’s keeping his few possessions for his wife? Does she think that I’m going to come by and pick up his watch?” Her voice wavered a bit and just as quickly she regained control. “Don’t you think she’d mail them?”

His camera, wallet, passport, watch, maybe the field guides and maybe some clothing but she doubted that. Dr. Swenson would return the things that she deemed important, which is to say she would set them aside and forget them. “Maybe she just thought she would give them to the next person who came down there. It would be safer. I imagine a lot of things get lost in the mail.” It occurred to her then that this letter could have been lost, or it might have come three days ago, or a month from now. How long would they have waited passively for news of Anders while they went about their lives?

“But what if she isn’t sending the things because he still has them?”

Marina rubbed her thumb and index finger into the corners of her eyes. She was trying to pull herself up from sleep by using the bridge of her nose. “I’m sorry. I’m not following you.”