by Ann Patchett
“Enough of that,” she said, and the men with their hands on Marina jumped back onto the toes of ones standing behind them who were waiting their turn, which caused all of them to still their tongues in their mouths and look at Dr. Swenson with expectation. In that moment Marina knew two things for certain: the Lakashi did not speak English, did not know the word enough, and that despite this minor hindrance they would do whatever Dr. Swenson told them. The snap in Dr. Swenson’s voice had driven Marina’s pulse higher than the men with their wet fingers. They, after all, seemed more curious than menacing. In this hierarchy, Dr. Swenson was the uncontested kingpin and Marina felt herself to be closer to the natives than to their ruler. “Go on,” Dr. Swenson said, and pointed to the side of the boat, where one by one they walked obediently off the edge, often landing on some unfortunate in the water. “They are an extremely tactile people,” Dr. Swenson said when the last one had disappeared with a splash. “They don’t mean anything by it. If they can’t touch it, it doesn’t exist.”
“They don’t touch you,” Marina said, running her sleeve over
her face.
Dr. Swenson nodded. “At this point they know I exist. I’ve been able to do away with the rest of it.”
There was a narrow dock sticking out of the bank, a single, beckoning finger, and Easter brought up the boat snug alongside it, at which point the men handed their burning sticks to the women and boarded the boat in an orderly fashion, picking up boxes and baggage and carrying them off into the night. Most of them gave Marina a tap on the shoulder or stopped to touch the side of her head, but there was work to be done and no one lingered. Now it was the women who were singing out, and as Marina left the boat with Easter and Dr. Swenson they raised their torches overhead to cast a wider band of light. They wore homemade shift dresses in dull colors and kept their hair in long braids down their backs. There were children tied across their chests in slings, children holding on to their ankles, children balanced on hips, their dark round eyes reflecting the fire all around them. Dr. Swenson trudged up the dirt path into the jungle, nodding from time to time at the women who trilled their vowels in rapture. The children on the ground reached out and touched Marina’s pants, women ran their fingers around her ears and tapped at her collarbone. Occasionally a child, a very small one, would extend a hand to Dr. Swenson and the mother would snatch it back.
“They didn’t know you were coming tonight,” Marina said, hurrying a bit to be closer to Dr. Swenson. She even went so far as to put a hand on her arm. “Sometimes you stay longer in Manaus, two nights, three nights.”
“Sometimes I stay a week,“ Dr. Swenson said, looking forward. “I don’t enjoy it but it happens.”
A pregnant woman reached into the path in front of them and pulled back a low-hanging branch from a tree.
“But if they have no sense of time, and you have no means of contacting them, how do they know when you’re coming back?”
“They don’t.”
“Then how did they know to stage all of this tonight?”
Dr. Swenson stopped and turned to Marina. The terrible darkness was broken apart by so many separate fires that the shadows, like the voices, came at them from every direction. From time to time a chunk of burning stick would fall into a pile of leaves. It was hard to understand how the entire forest had not been reduced to a pile of smoldering ash. “I suppose they do it every night when I’m gone. I don’t actually know. You can ask Dr. Nkomo in the morning. I’m going to say good night, Dr. Singh. Easter will get you settled from here. I’m tired now.” As she spoke the words, Dr. Swenson began to weave a bit from side to side and Marina took a firmer hold on her arm. Dr. Swenson closed her eyes. “I’m alright,” she said, and then she looked at Marina. She seemed to struggle for her breath. “Sometimes this is more difficult than I had imagined.” Dr. Swenson held out her hand and a woman standing beside the path, a woman with one sleeping child tied across her chest and two more children, twins perhaps, holding either calf, took that hand and led her forward into the night. As Dr. Swenson walked away, all the light and sound went with her, the crowd formed itself around the fire she was holding. It should have been Marina who asked for a torch because before very long she was standing alone in the dark.
She would have worried about Dr. Swenson then, how the Amazon appeared to be defeating her, but instead thought of the lanceheads. She wondered if they slept on the ground or in the trees and, if it was in the trees, did their coils ever loosen in the night? Her best bet was to follow the crowd, to stay within the light, but after taking a few steps she felt uncertain as to where she should put her feet. There was so much crackling and breaking all around her. Small thorns tugged at her clothes and she was certain something was crawling on her neck. Just as she was about to call out she saw a light coming up from the direction of the dock, a light that formed itself in a long, steady beam. A flashlight! She felt as if she had never seen anything so modern in her life. Clearly it was Easter who was coming for her. Easter didn’t use a flashlight like a boy. He kept the light focused on the path. He didn’t shine it in Marina’s eyes or illuminate the tops of trees. When he got to her he took her hand and together they walked further into the jungle. There was a sort of narrow path, although it could have been nothing more than a random break in the growth of underbrush. Marina stayed one step behind Easter, putting down her feet in the places from which his feet had been lifted while Easter cleared everything in their way, low-hanging vines and spiderwebs of such size and strength they could have easily ensnared a small pig. Marina’s attention was so wholly focused on her feet that she didn’t see where they were going until they stopped. The place that Easter brought her to was a tin box built onto stilts. He leaned over and lifted up a rock, took out a key, and unlocked the door. Marina had not expected a door in the jungle, much less a lock. Inside the room Easter swept the flashlight over a table and some chairs, stacks of boxes, some of which she thought she recognized: the juice, the hash. They were in the storage room. Easter, who kept hold of her hand even now, led her to the back of the room where they went through a second door and out onto a wide porch, or maybe it was a room as well. It was hard to tell. There was no breeze other than what was stirred up by a hundred thousand wings of flying insects. Easter pointed the light to a long column of mosquito netting that was suspended from the ceiling and fanned out over a cot. He pointed to her, to the cot. All of this would be different in the daylight. Nothing would feel so daunting once she could properly see.
When she sat down on the edge of her bed, Marina realized that in her concern about fire and snakes and the wandering hands of the natives she had walked off and left her suitcase on the boat, and while she would have liked to change out of her clothes and brush her teeth she wasn’t even sure where she could find a basin of water. She could imagine no pantomime for Easter that would express her desire to be accompanied back to the boat and she wasn’t about to make the trip on her own, and so she decided to forget about the whole business. What she would have liked was the telephone. She should have called Mr. Fox before they left Manaus. She knew by now he would have left a dozen messages and that when she listened to them in the morning she would be able to chart the panic mounting in his voice. It had been nothing but petulance on her part, his punishment to spend the day not knowing where she was, and now that it was too dark to try and find the phone there was no way to comfort him. Or maybe he would think she was halfway to Miami now, coming home on the next flight the way she had told him she would, although Marina didn’t think he had ever really believed her.
She took off her shoes and pointed to Easter. You sleep? He turned the flashlight to a wall six feet from the foot of her bed and showed her a hammock, an empty casing waiting for a boy. Then, handing her the flashlight, he pulled off his shirt and climbed inside while she stood there shining the light in his direction, dumbstruck by the little hanging cocoon he made. By her good fortune, she was sl
eeping in Easter’s room. She tried to imagine it was a stroke of extraordinary kindness on Dr. Swenson’s part when in fact it was probably the only bit of available space covered by a roof. It didn’t matter; she realized now she could never have slept there without him. In her cot, beneath her net, Marina could easily calculate the ways in which her circumstances could have been worse. She stretched out and clicked off the light, listening to the steady breathing of the jungle. This was better than the Hotel Indira. The cot was no less comfortable than that bed. Clearly the Lakashi were prepared for guests no matter how insistently Dr. Swenson claimed to dislike them. People had come and stayed here before and probably they had all lain beneath this mosquito net thanking God that Easter’s hammock was six feet away. Marina opened her eyes. In the dim light of the moon she looked into the white cloud of her net. Anders would have slept here. Easter was with him when he died, that’s what Dr. Swenson had said. She sat up. Anders. It came over her, this dark, this porch, this cot. In his fever he looked through this net. Marina got up, put her feet back in her shoes. There had to be a pen somewhere. She got the flashlight, checked the small figure of Easter supine in his cloth. She had nothing, not a handbag, a rucksack. She went back into the storage room. Now that she held the light she could see that it functioned as nothing more than an outsized closet—boxes and boxes, plastic bins, plastic tubs, boxes of food, bottles of water, smaller boxes of test tubes and slides. She found a broom, a pile of cloths, a giant spool of twine. There was not a drawer or a shelf. There was not a logical place to put a pen, there was no logic to any of it. And then she remembered that Anders’ pens had gone to Easter when he died. That was the boy’s legacy, a handful of Bics. She went back to the sleeping porch, shined the light on some buckets, traced the beam of light around the line where the wall met the floor, and there, just beneath the hammock, she saw a metal box, bigger than the kind used for documents and smaller than the kind used for tackle or tools. She went down on her knees and reached beneath the boy, slid the metal over the rough hewn planks of flooring. There was no lock, just a fold-over hasp that kept the box shut. On the top was a small metal tray full of feathers and she held them up in groups of two and three and four, more than two dozen feathers in colors Marina had never realized feathers came in, lavender and iridescent yellow, each one perfectly clean, the barbs zipped up tight. In the tray there was a rock that in its size and marking looked startlingly like a human eyeball. There was a perfect fossil of a prehistoric fish pressed into shale and a rolled-up red silk ribbon. Beneath the tray was a blue Aerogram envelope with the word EASTER written on the front and when unfolded read: Please do all that is within your power to help this boy reach the United States and you will be rewarded. Take him to Karen Eckman. There was his address, his phone number. All expenses will be reimbursed. REWARD. Thank you, Anders Eckman. Beneath that, the note was written out again in Anders’ college Spanish. He did not speak Portuguese and so the Spanish was his best chance. Marina sat back on her heels. There was a pocket-sized spiral notebook that contained the alphabet, a letter on each page, each of them printed in uppercase, and at the end the word Easter and then the word Anders and then the word Minnesota. Anders’ driver’s license was in the bottom of the box along with his passport. Maybe Easter had wanted his picture or Anders wanted him to have it. There were three twenty dollar bills. There were five rubber bands, a half dozen pens, a handful of coins, American and Brazilian. Marina was dizzy. She had meant to wake the boy up, to write the word Anders, one of the three words he knew. She would point to the word and then point to her bed. Did Anders sleep here? but she didn’t have to ask the question now. She put everything back the way she had found it. She arranged the feathers, closed the lid, and slid the box to the wall. She turned off the flashlight and followed the moon back to Anders’ bed and crawled inside. He had shown her his passport the day it came in the mail. The cardboard cover was stiff. His picture captured nothing of him. Even the color was off. The picture on his driver’s license was better. “You didn’t have a passport?” she asked him.
“I did,” he said, sitting on her desk and looking over her shoulder so he could see it again. “My junior year of college.”
Marina looked up at him then. “Where did you go?” Marina regretted that she had never spent a year abroad. She could never bear the thought of being so far from home.
“Barcelona,” he said, lisping shamelessly. “My parents wanted me to go to Norway. But who leaves Minnesota for a semester abroad in Norway? When I was there I never thought I’d go home. I used to write the letter in my head to my parents, explaining that I was meant for sun and sangria and siestas. I was the happiest American in Spain.”
“So what are you doing here?”
Anders shrugged. “My time was up. Somehow I wound up going home. I went to medical school. I never went back.” He took the passport from her and looked at it again. “Don’t you think the picture is good? I look so serious. I could be a spy.”
Marina didn’t dream that night. Whatever price the Lariam exacted on her subconscious had been paid that afternoon on the boat, but at some point when she was asleep and dreaming of nothing she was awakened by a breathless cry, the high, hopeless call of an animal in a trap. Marina sat up. “Easter?” she said. She turned on the flashlight and saw such a struggle in his hammock that her immediate thought was a snake. She leapt to her feet, meaning to grab the edges of the fabric and flip it over, to save the boy from what was devouring him, but by the time she had made it out of her net she understood what was happening and she took just a second longer to listen to the sound of his voice, then she reached inside and put her hands on his shoulders. She knew how to wake a person from a dream, how no one ever did it and how it should be done. She shook him gently, letting him flail beneath her hands. He was sweating, shaking, his eyes rolled back. She made all the appropriate sounds he couldn’t hear. She whispered, Okay, it’s alright now. She could not have stopped herself. She took him in her arms and let him cry against her neck while she made him promises, her hand tracing circles in the narrow space between his shoulder blades, and when he could breathe easily again and was falling back into sleep she straightened his hair with her fingers and turned to go back to her bed and he followed her there and climbed beneath the net. Marina had never slept with a child before, not since she was a child herself and had slumber parties with other girls, but it wasn’t a science. She made a space for him beneath her arm and pulled his back against her chest and before there was another thought they were both asleep, safe in the white tunnel of net.
At some point during the night the fire juggling, fiercely screaming Lakashi had been replaced by a working-class tribe, a sober group of people who went about the business of their day without fanfare or flame. Marina found them by following a path to a clearing on the banks of the river, although when she had walked through this spot the night before she would have sworn it was solid jungle. There were women washing clothes in the river and washing children, women gathering sticks into baskets and braiding the hair of girls, every movement they made exposed to the merciless sunshine. There was a large assortment of naked toddlers slapping the water with their hands and stamping in puddles, so many toddlers and crawling babies that Marina wondered if she had wandered into the tribal day care. There were fewer men in evidence but still there were a handful of them carving down the inside of a very large log. They were shirtless, shoeless, and when Marina walked by them they gave her a brief, disinterested glance as if she were a tourist and they had seen her kind before. Boats, of course, were key to river life, and other logs carved into boats were jumbled together on the shore, and in the water a man was paddling away. Two small girls came by wearing shorts and no shirts, each of them with a tiny monkey around her neck that held on to its own prehensile tail with its hands to form a clasp. The monkeys both swiveled their heads towards Marina and showed her their pointy yellow teeth in extravagant smiles. The monkeys alone looked
her in the eye. Then one of the monkeys caught sight of some infinitesimal life form in the hair of his little girl and reached up and snatched it off her scalp and swallowed it.
Marina had not as yet been able to locate the two people she knew on this river. Easter was not in her bed when she woke up this morning, not in his hammock, and she marveled at the thought that anyone could be quiet enough not to wake her, especially a child who was himself unacquainted with sound. She hadn’t found Dr. Swenson yet either but that she imagined would be more of a challenge. Dr. Swenson was either standing right in front of you or she could not be located, and in this case there was no waiting outside her office door hoping she would turn up.
The pontoon boat swayed lightly on its rope at the edge of the dock exactly where it had been left the night before and Marina took this as a sign that for the moment all was well. When she went on board the men who had been scraping at the log stopped what they were doing and stood up straight to stare at her, their curved knives tapping against their thighs. It was a matter of seconds before she established her bag was not on board. The deck was empty and there was no place a piece of luggage could be hidden away. Marina ran her tongue over her teeth and thought again of her toothbrush. The morning was already hot and the air was thick with the smell of leaves rotting and leaves unfolding. Down by the water the mosquitoes helped themselves to her ankles and dug a well into the nape of her neck. One flew down the back of her shirt to bite beneath her shoulder blade in a place she would never be able to scratch. She wanted this suitcase much more than she had wanted the one that never arrived in Manaus. She wondered if somewhere in the storage shed where she was sleeping there might be a case of insect repellent, and for the first time she considered the word insecticide in relation to the word homicide. Suddenly she felt a shift among the Lakashi, a collective straightening of spines that was followed by an animated chatter she could not parse into any words she knew. Then she saw a very tall black man as thin as a drinking straw emerge from the jungle, his small wire glasses glinting sunlight. He dipped his head in every direction in a gesture that was less than a bow but considerably more than a nod, and from every corner the people stood and dipped their heads in return. A few of them called out a phrase of greeting and he repeated it back to them, capturing perfectly the same rhythmic swing at the end of the sentence that threw the crowd into raptures. The women held up their babies and wagged them towards him, the men laid down their knives. They proceeded then to engage in a sort of call-and-response, a person in the tribe throwing out a phrase and the tall man repeating it. No matter how complicated a sentence they served he managed to volley it back. The Lakashi were rocking side to side in complete satisfaction, at which point the man gave a much lower bow that seemed to indicate it had all been great fun but now was the time to return to work.