Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

Marina looked out the open door. Somehow it was still morning. It wasn’t two hours ago that she had been eating the Martins. “I should go now,” she said.

“After we’ve thought it through,” Dr. Swenson said. “First there has to be a plan.”

Marina shook her head, thinking of Karen Eckman and what she had said about Anders not being comfortable with the trees. She would have walked off the path at that moment. She would have gone straight into the jungle to find him. “I don’t think tomorrow’s going to be any better.” And with that she left, Easter trailing behind her. She could hear Dr. Swenson calling her name as she went past the lab but she didn’t go back. They could have talked it over for the rest of their lives. Marina only wanted to be on the boat, out on the water, heading towards Anders and her own fate. She was floating now, caught in a current that pulled her ahead and to her surprise she did not mind it. She was content to float, to be pulled under or tossed up. She would give herself over to the force of the river if the river took her to Anders. She would have gone straight to the dock but she needed to take something with her. She was trying to think of what she could offer the Hummocca in exchange for her friend. She looked around the storage room, opening boxes, and found ten oranges left in the bottom of the crate. She took them along with the peanut butter. She put the white nightgown Barbara Bovender had given her around her neck like a scarf, thinking if there was in fact a universal language of surrender it would at least give her the means to do so. She wished for buttons and beads, knives and paint. She wished for something other than syringes, litmus papers, glass tubes with rubber stoppers, bottles of acetone. She sat down on a box of fruit cocktail and closed her eyes. She saw Anders sitting on his desk looking through birding guides to the Amazon. She tried to think of something that was as valuable as Anders’ life. And then Marina remembered the Rapps.

Easter stayed with her though he had never followed her out to the Martins before. The sun was high and hot though it was not yet nine in the morning. She carried a very large basket that she had found in the storage room, something the Lakashi had woven out of heavy grass. She had never come so late. In the two hours since she had last taken this trail the jungle had installed an entirely different set of birds screeching out an entirely different hue and cry. The mid-morning shift of insects replaced their early-morning brethren and clicked and vibrated a new and distinct set of messages. Marina kept her mind on the snakes that wrapped around trees and tangled themselves into vines and she placed her feet down carefully. She could not afford to make a mistake now. She stopped for a minute at the edge of the Martins, leaning forward to wipe the sweat off her face with the hem of her dress. The way the bright sunlight came into the field now turned the bark a softer yellow and she stood there, making a point to notice everything. She picked a Rapp and held it up to Easter, then she put it in the basket. She picked another and another and he followed her, going to other trees, taking just a few from every individual community of mushrooms, thinning them out while the basket rounded into a pile of pale blue jewels. No matter how many they picked the plants did not appear to be diminished. Maybe that was part of their secret. She had never realized how many of them there were. Protecting the Rapps meant protecting the Lakashi, and the Martins, and the fertility drug, and the malaria vaccine. No one could ever know where the Rapps had come from. But who had thought to protect Anders? If this is what was available to her then this is what she would use. When she picked up the basket it was scarcely heavier than it had been empty, and she covered the whole thing up with the nightgown and made her way back.

The mushrooms she knew were her best chance but she had Easter carry the peanut butter and the oranges just in case. She loaded all of it onto the boat. Thomas met her on the dock, Benoit was beside him. “I cannot believe what Dr. Swenson has told me,” Thomas said, the panic rising in his voice, “What must Anders have thought, that in all this time we never came to look for him?”

Marina shook her head. “We didn’t know.”

Thomas took her hand. “I am going with you to find him.” The Lakashi were there now, waiting to leap aboard.

It was all a set-up. Dr. Swenson would have called out for Thomas as soon as she was gone, telling him everything, telling him he had to go with Marina, and Thomas, guilt stricken in his ignorance, played right along. But it was not his destiny to see this thing through. “Anders was my friend,” Marina said, and squeezed his thin fingers. “He’s the reason I came here. I think I should be the one to go.”

“I understand that,” Thomas said. “But he was my friend as well and so it is equally my right. And you have no language with which to ask for him back.”

“You don’t speak Hummocca,” Marina said.

“What Benoit and I have between us will be closer to Hummocca than your English. I will not wait on this dock and wonder what’s become of you. I will not wait to see if Anders is alive.” His face shone with such bright earnestness it was nearly unbearable. “I have already made a promise to Dr. Swenson. We are going along.” Benoit nodded his head without understanding exactly what was being promised. Marina thought it was a nod of considerably less conviction.

“If you wait much longer to decide, Alan Saturn will hear about this,” Thomas said. “He will insist on going. He has always been interested in the Hummocca. And Nancy would never let him go without her, you know this, so factor her in as well. I do not imagine Dr. Budi would agree to stay behind to watch Dr. Swenson but I could be wrong. If she insists on coming as well then we will need to put Dr. Swenson on the boat. We could make her a pallet on the deck out of some blankets.”

If Anders were in fact alive in a tribe down river he had been there for more than three months. Marina would not have him there another night. “Alright,” she said, finally. It only mattered that she left right away. It mattered less who was with her. “Alright.”

Thomas nodded gratefully, glad that this part of the negotiations was complete. When he told her their next step was to find a gift she told him about the oranges and the peanut butter but didn’t mention the mushrooms.

“I wish we had more,” he said, looking at the ten lonely oranges with discouragement. “But we will make a good presentation. We will say to them, ‘We have brought gifts’ and ‘Let us have the white man.’ ” Thomas said the two phrases to Benoit in Portuguese and Benoit gave back the closest approximation in Lakashi. Standing on the dock, the three of them repeated the words over and over again. Marina prayed the linguist was correct, that this was an uninteresting language that came off the same predictable root as the languages of all surrounding tribes, though it seemed doubtful the linguist had ever found the Hummocca. The Lakashi interrupted them as they practiced their lines. Benoit tried to explain that the gifts and the white man did not concern them. Marina’s mind clamped down on every syllable, embedded them in her brain— I have brought gifts. Let us have the white man.

“We should go now,” Thomas said. “Before the others arrive. We can practice when we’re on our way.”

“I need to get some water,” she said, looking around the boat, “and a hat.”

Thomas stepped onto the dock. “I will go,” he said, and then he nodded towards the Lakashi. “You keep them off the boat.” He turned back and raised his hand to her and at that moment Marina realized how easily she could lose Thomas on this trip. Suddenly she pictured him dead, an arrow in his chest, his body slipping over the side of the boat. She shuddered, blinked. How could she risk the life of Mrs. Nkomo’s husband while going off to find Mrs. Eckman’s husband? She tapped Easter hard on the shoulder, motioning for him to start the ignition while she untied the line. As they pulled back, Benoit yelled at her, pointing to the place where Thomas Nkomo had so recently stood, and with that she pushed Benoit backwards into the water. Easter seemed to think this was hysterical, Marina pushing his friend into the river, and he gunned the engine so the two of them could get away.