Ann Patchett: State of Wonder

In the dreams she is holding her father’s hand. They are walking up Indira Gandhi Sarani towards Dalhousie Square or following Bidhan Sarani in the direction of the college where her father is a professor. The farther they go along the more people start to come out of buildings and alleyways. Maybe the power has gone out again and the trams have stopped and all the fans in all the kitchens have stopped so that people who were in their apartments have come out to the street because the crowd is pushing in closer and closer as more people are joining in along the edges. There is the heat of the day to contend with and then the heat of so many bodies, their sweat and perfume, the sharp scent of spice carried in the smoke of vendors’ fires and the bitter smell of marigolds strung into garlands, and all together it begins to overwhelm her. Marina can’t see where she’s going anymore, only the people pressing into her, hips wrapped in crimson saris and dhoti-punjabis knocking her from side to side. She reaches out her hand and pats a cow. She can hear the persistent music of jewelry weaving through the shouted conversations, bangle bracelets stacked halfway to the elbow and anklets covered in tiny bells, earrings that function as wind chimes. Sometimes when the masses shift her feet are lifted from the ground and for a moment she is held a few inches aloft, a small weight distributed over various points on other people’s bodies as she drags behind her father like a low kite. She feels her shoe knocked loose from her foot and she calls for her father to stop, but he doesn’t hear her over the roar of voices. She can still see the little shoe flashing yellow on the hard packed ground not two steps behind them in the crowd. It is perfectly still, untrampled, and though she knows she isn’t supposed to, she lets go of her father’s hand. She dives for her shoe but the crowd has already swallowed it, and as quickly as she turns back the crowd has swallowed her father as well. She calls for him, Papi! Papi! but the ringing of bells, the calling and crying of beggars, has taken the sound from her mouth. She doesn’t know if he even realizes she’s gone. Some other child could have attached himself to her father’s hand when she fell off, in India the children are very fast. And then Marina is alone somewhere in the sea of Calcutta, folded inside the human current of chattering Hindi which she does not understand, her body swept along while she cries, at which point she would wake up sweating, nauseated, her black hair soaked to the skull. She would run down the hall to her mother’s room, throw herself into her mother’s bed, crying, “Don’t make me go!”

Her mother took her up in her arms, put a cool hand on her forehead. She asked her what the dream was about but Marina always said she couldn’t remember, something awful. She did remember, but wouldn’t speak it for fear the words would somehow cement the images into reality. From then on she had the dream every night: she had it on the plane going over to Calcutta and woke up screaming. She had it in the flat her father rented for her and her mother not far from his office at the college so that they would not disturb his second wife, his second children. They were separated getting onto a bus, her father let her go while they were swimming in the sea at a crowded beach. After so many dreams that were so much alike she became terrified of sleep. She was terrified the whole time they were in India, so much so that at the end of every trip both of her parents agreed that it might all be too much for her. Marina’s father said he would try to come to Minnesota more often, but that was never practical. Once they were back at home, after a week or two, the crowds that haunted her sleep would begin to dissipate, thin into smaller groups, and then break apart altogether. Slowly, Marina would forget them, and then her mother would forget, and within a year it would once again be decided that she was a much bigger girl now and maybe they should start thinking about a trip to India sometime in the future.

Was it possible that no one had troubled themselves to read the voluminous side effects of the Lariam? Marina liked to think she would have figured out the puzzle herself if her father hadn’t died when she was in college. At that point she hadn’t been back to Calcutta in three years. Had he lived and she had gone again, she would have been old enough to look into the medication herself, although it was true that a patient was less likely to question a set of symptoms she had always accepted. She had grown up believing that India gave her nightmares, seeing her father gave her nightmares, when all along it was the antimalarial. The drug, not the circumstances of her life, destroyed her chance to be with her father.

“Of course I knew it was the Lariam,” her mother said over the phone. “Your father and I were always worrying about it. You had such a terrible reaction.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me what it was?” Marina said.

“You don’t tell a five-year-old they’re going to have bad dreams. That’s like giving them an invitation to have more.”

“A five-year-old,” she said, “I’ll grant you that. But you could have explained it to me when I was ten, at least when I was fifteen.”

“I couldn’t tell you anything when you were fifteen. If I’d told you it was the pills that gave you nightmares you wouldn’t have

taken them.”

“Would that have been the end of the world?”

“If you had gotten malaria in India then, yes, I suppose it would have been. The end of the world had it killed you. I’m surprised this is still a problem. I would have thought they would have come up with a better drug to take by now.”

“They have and they haven’t. The new ones don’t make you so crazy but they also don’t protect from all the different strains of malaria.”

“So why in the world are you taking Lariam again?” her mother asked. It was the most important question and yet it only now seemed to have occurred to her. “Are you going back to India?”

What was so interesting about the nightmares now was the extent to which nothing much in them had changed. At forty-two she was still holding her father’s hand, the people around them rose up like a tide and she was then forced to let him go. It had never actually happened, this physical wrenching apart, and still her subconscious clung to the fear. Things that had happened to Marina, the memories she saw as the logical candidates for nightmares, never entered her sleeping life, and she supposed that for this she should be grateful. In her own home she got up and turned the lights on in the bathroom. Her hands were shaking and she ran a wet washcloth over her face and neck, careful not to look at herself in the mirror. It was surprising to discover that understanding the origin of her dreams offered her exactly no comfort at two in the morning. In fact, all she could think of now was her doctor’s careless admonition that she might want to jump off a roof. Her deepest fear, her father’s hand slipping from her hand, had held steady even when it was kept undisturbed in a pharmacy without her for twenty-five years.

“What about the funeral?” Marina asked Karen Eckman. They hadn’t seen each other all week, not since Marina had come with Mr. Fox on the day of the heavy snow. Now that she was leaving in the morning, both of the women thought it was important to say goodbye, though for different reasons. Marina wanted to see if Karen had given up on the idea that Anders might still be alive now that she’d had some days to sit with his death. Karen wanted to make sure Marina wasn’t thinking of backing out.

It was after dinner when Marina came by and the lengthening day had just gone dark. The boys had brushed their teeth and were watching television in the den. They were now allowed a show before bedtime every night, a childhood luxury previously restricted to weekends. Marina said hello to them when she first came in and they barely turned their heads towards her, the youngest two muttering hello in low unison when their mother insisted, the eldest saying nothing at all. Mr. Fox had made a mistake in telling Marina that she had been the first choice to go find Dr. Swenson instead of Anders. She now saw the entire world in terms of alternate scenarios.