State of Wonder

“May I drive you somewhere?” Milton asked.

Dr. Swenson shook her head. “It’s a perfectly good night. I’m sure we can manage a walk. Can you manage, Dr. Singh?”

Marina, in her column of gray silk and her high heels, was not entirely sure she could manage, but she said that a walk would be good after sitting so long.

“We’ll take Easter back to the apartment,” Barbara said. The child had begun to braid the section of her hair that he was holding on to.

Dr. Swenson shook her head. “He hasn’t eaten. He’ll come with us. Put him down, Jackie, he isn’t a monkey.”

Jackie set Easter on the ground and the boy looked from one party to the other. In spite of not having heard he seemed to be in tacit agreement with the plans. “We’ll see you later then,” Jackie said, finding the part in the boy’s hair with his fingers and smoothing it down. Then, remembering what in fact was new, he held out his hand and Easter shook it goodbye. “Brilliant,” Jackie said.

The streets around the opera house were made of flat stones fitted together into an uneven jigsaw and Marina found herself wishing that Milton had come with them, if not to drive then at least to keep his hand under her arm. Marina was a very tall doctor who worked in a lab in Minnesota and those three things: the height, the work, and the state, precluded the wearing of heels, giving her little experience to draw from now that she needed it. She shifted her weight forward onto her toes and hoped not to wedge the heel of Barbara’s shoes into a crevice. Even as Marina slowed, Dr. Swenson kept to her own unwavering pace, a trudge of metronomic regularity that Marina remembered. In her khaki pants and rubber-soled shoes, she was quickly a block ahead without seeming to notice that she was alone. Easter stayed behind them both, perhaps to alert Dr. Swenson in the event that Marina went down. The crowd from the opera had dispersed and all that remained were the city’s regulars who stood on the street corners in the dark trying to decide whether or not to cross. They watched Marina as she pulled her borrowed shawl up over her shoulders.

“Are you coming, Dr. Singh?” Dr. Swenson called out. She had gone around a corner or stepped into a building. Her voice was part of the night. It came from nowhere.

Are you coming, Dr. Singh? She would dip so quickly into a patient’s room that suddenly the residents would lose their bearings. Had she gone to the right or the left? Marina squinted down the street, the darkness broken apart by streetlights and headlights and bits of broken glass that showered the curb and reflected the light up. “I’m coming,” she said. Her eyes shifted constantly from one side of the street to the other in a slow nystagmus. In order to steady herself, she made an organized list in her mind of all the things that were making her nervous: it was night, and she wasn’t exactly sure where she was, though she could have easily turned around and found her way back to the opera house and from there, her hotel; she was unsteady in her shoes, which, along with the ridiculous dress, made her the human equivalent of a bird with a broken wing to any predator who might be out trawling the streets late at night; if there was a predator, she now had a deaf child to protect and she wasn’t exactly sure how she would manage that; as she felt the blisters coming up beneath the sandals’ straps she could not help but think of the countless explorers throughout history who had been taken down by the lowly blister, then she reassured herself that there was very little chance that this was how she would meet her end given the three different types of antibiotics Mr. Fox had sent along with her Lariam and the phone; and since this was a list of anxieties, she could not neglect the most pressing fear of all: assuming she made it to her destination tonight, she was then to sit down with Dr. Swenson and have a discussion about what exactly? Vogel’s rights and interests in Brazil? The location of Anders’ body?

Then, without so much as a footfall to announce him, Easter came up from behind her and put himself in the lead. At first she thought he must be bored by how slow she was and figured he meant to leave her, but instead he aligned himself to her pace. He would have been in easy reach had she just put out her hand. He had made himself her seeing-eye boy. As she watched his back, his shoulders barely wide enough to hang a shirt on, half the anxieties on her list fell away. With one hand she held Mrs. Bovender’s wrap firmly to her chest while her other hand was full of the silk of her skirt which she held up in order not to trip on it or let it drag in the pools of muddied rain left over from the late afternoon deluge. The night air pressed against her, moving roughly in and out of her lungs. It was very recently that she had been ill. Despite the pins and the spray and the black lacquered sticks with the gold Chinese fans, she could feel random sections of her hair breaking free and sliding damply down the back of her neck. When they reached the corner, Easter turned right, and without question or thought, she followed him.

Two blocks later, at about the point she was certain she would not be able to take another step, Easter dipped into a restaurant Marina had never seen before, on a street she couldn’t remember. He could not have seen Dr. Swenson go in but there she was, sitting at a table in the corner, a bottle of soda water in front of her that was already half consumed. If possible, the room was slightly darker than the night she had come in from and a small, single candle on every table stood in place of the stars. Half a dozen tables were occupied, a dozen more were empty. It was late. The boy, having completed his job, cut the shortest path between the other customers and sat in a wooden chair beside Dr. Swenson. Had she brought him in with her from the jungle or did Easter, along with Milton and the Bovenders, have his place on Vogel’s payroll? Dr. Swenson tilted the bread basket towards him and he took a piece and laid it nicely on his plate. Marina tried not to limp as she made her way towards them. For a moment she stood at the table saying nothing, her resplendence melted in the heat, and waited for the other woman to acknowledge her arrival. She could have waited for the rest of her life. “I lost you,” Marina said finally.

“Clearly you didn’t,” Dr. Swenson said. “Easter knew where we were going.”

“I didn’t know that Easter had been informed.”

Dr. Swenson was looking at the menu through a pair of half glasses. “I’m sure you realized soon enough. This place is a bit farther but that’s why the opera crowd avoids it. I can always get a table.”

Marina pulled out a chair beside Easter, across from Dr. Swenson, and felt a significant throbbing in her feet as the blood shifted back up her legs. She decided to be grateful for the chair and for the audience.

After taking in all the information the menu had to offer, Dr. Swenson laid it down. Now that she knew what she would have for dinner she was ready to begin. “Allow me to be direct, Dr. Singh,” she said, folding her glasses back into their padded case. “It will save us both some time. You shouldn’t have come. There must be a way of convincing Mr. Fox that continual monitoring does not speed productivity. Maybe that can be a project for you when you return home. You can tell him I am fine, and that it would better suit his own purposes to leave me alone.”

A waiter approached the table and Dr. Swenson proceeded to order for herself and the child in broken Portuguese. When the waiter turned to Marina she asked for a glass of wine. Dr. Swenson added to the order and sent the waiter away.

“I’m glad you’re fine,” Marina said. “And you’re right, I’ve come to find out about the progress of the drug’s development, that’s part of the reason I’m here. But I was a close friend of Dr. Eckman’s. I am a friend of his wife’s. It’s important for her to understand the circumstances of his death.”

“He died of a fever.”

Marina nodded. “So you wrote, but she would like to know more than that. It would help her to be able to explain to their children what happened.”

Easter sat at the table without fidgeting, both of his feet on the floor or nearly on the floor. He tore neat pieces off his bread and ate them slowly. He did not seem to be the least bit bothered by waiting, which caused Marina to wonder if he had had a great deal of practice.

“Are you asking me if I know what caused the fever, if it had a name? I do not. The list of possibilities is too long. I suppose at this point checking his recent vaccination records would be a place to start. I can also give you a list of antibiotics he failed to respond to.”

“I’m not asking you what kind of fever it was,” Marina said. “I’m asking you what happened.”

Dr. Swenson sighed. “Is this my deposition, Dr. Singh?”

“I’m not accusing—”

Dr. Swenson waved her hand, brushing the words out of the air. “I will tell you: I liked Dr. Eckman. Every aspect of his visit was a great inconvenience to me but there was something ingenuous about him. He had a sincere interest in the Lakashi, in the work. You were a friend of his and so you know this about him, he had a singular ability for demonstrating interest, if it was in birds or in the estrogen levels in the collected blood samples; he asked a great many questions and took in every word of the answers he was given. He was polite and affable even when I