State of Wonder

to take on a new responsibility. If you want to know how my work is going I will tell you: I am behind schedule. This is a delicate piece of science. I give it every waking moment of my life but at this point it still requires more time. I understand that it is not an unlimited number of years I have in which to finish this, both from Vogel’s perspective and from my own.” Dr. Swenson signaled the waiter to bring the check and drank the last of her water. “Someday I would like to leave the Amazon myself, Dr. Singh. I am used to this place but I am not in love with it. I have every possible incentive to complete this project as quickly as possible. Mr. Fox seems to think that I’m enjoying myself so much that I would need a series of Vogel emissaries to remind me that the goal is to finish. You may report back that I have not lost sight of the goal.”

Marina nodded. She understood that she was being given her ticket home.

Dr. Swenson put both of her hands on the table and gave it a gentle tap to signify that their interview was now concluded. “Easter and I will walk you back to your hotel. We’ll go right past it on the way to the apartment. There we will say good night and goodbye. This won’t be a long visit for me. You understand I need to get back.”

Marina cautiously moved her toes side to side. Her feet had swollen while she had been sitting and the straps of her sandals were now cutting deep into the skin. She reached under the table and, with some effort and a sharp strike of pain, pulled the shoes off. Easter, having finished the cake, ducked to look.

“I’m afraid I won’t be able to walk back,” Marina said. What harm would there be in telling the truth now? She was finished.

Dr. Swenson called out to the waiter and Marina clearly understood her to say Milton’s name. The waiter nodded. “He’ll come and pick us up,” she said. She motioned for Easter to hand her one of the shoes and she looked at it as if it were a rare archeological find. “It’s difficult for me to understand why a woman would choose to do that to herself.” She returned the silver sandal to its mate.

“It is a mystery to me as well,” Marina said. She would not try to defend the shoes. They were indefensible. She would walk barefoot for the rest of her life before she’d put them on again.

“Barbara tells me you were a student of mine,” Dr. Swenson said. Perhaps it was the shoes that made her think of it, she was wondering how a student of hers had learned so little about the workings of the human anatomy.

“Yes,” Marina said. All of her fears were floating away from her now. What difference did it make? One by one she met them and then let them go.

“That would have been Johns Hopkins?”

Marina nodded. “I’m forty-two.”

Dr. Swenson signed her name to the bill and left it on the table. It would no doubt be mailed to Vogel. “Well, I must not have done a convincing job if you went into pharmacology. But then here I am developing a drug. I suppose we both wound up in the same field after all.” She reached down to the floor and handed Marina’s sandals to Easter to carry. He seemed very pleased to have the job. “None of us knows how life will work out, Dr. Singh.”

Dr. Singh was in the process of agreeing with that exact impossibility as Milton, who must have been idling the car outside, walked in the door to take her home.

That night Marina spent a long time in the bath paying attention to her various wounds: the turned back flaps of skin that dotted her toes and heels, the pillowy blisters that had yet to drain, the different bites that were itching or bleeding or bruised, she scrubbed them all with soap and washcloth until the skin around the red lesions was red as well, then she dried off and slathered up with salve. All of this had to be done before calling Mr. Fox. It didn’t matter how late it was. She was planning on waking him up. She was hoping even that waking him up would give her something of an advantage in their conversation. She pictured the phone ringing on the night table beside the bed she had on occasion fallen asleep in but in which she had never slept an entire night, the very bed she hoped to go home to. Mr. Fox answered on the fourth ring, his voice alert and composed. He would have given himself two rings after waking to collect himself.

“Tell me you’re fine,” he said.

“Some blisters,” she said, gently pushing at one of them on her toe, “but absolutely fine. I found Dr. Swenson.” She said it straight out. She did not wait for him to ask her because he had asked her every time they spoke, as if finding Dr. Swenson was something that might have happened and then slipped her mind. She told him about the opera house, about Easter and the dinner. She told him what had been said about Anders and, in trying to recreate the conversation, she realized how little of a conversation it had actually been. She could report that the project was behind but moving forward. Even if she lacked the details she was sure about the essential fact: Dr. Swenson wanted to see this done more than anyone, and she would get it done, on that point she had been very convincing, though she had neglected to say when she projected the drug might be submitted to the FDA.

“No time line?” Mr. Fox said.

“Nothing absolute,” Marina said, but in truth she hadn’t asked. Why hadn’t she asked? All these years later, she still listened to Dr. Swenson as a student listens to a teacher, as a Greek listens to an oracle. She didn’t question her, she simply committed the answers to memory.

“Don’t worry about that,” Mr. Fox said. “It was a preliminary meeting. You’re smart not to push her yet. Do you think you’ll leave tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow or the next day. It depends on tickets. I’ll be on the first plane that has a seat.”

“You’ll take a plane?” Mr. Fox asked.

“To come home.”

The line was quiet, and into that silence Marina did not extend herself. Even as she realized the error of her assumption she wanted to stay with it for as long as possible. Her hopeful imagination had let her drift all the way home. She had no luggage. They had never found her luggage. Everything she had acquired in Manaus would be left behind, save the little white heron and the red beaded bracelet that was knotted to her wrist. Through the window of the Minneapolis — St. Paul airport she saw white blossoms. She drank the honeyed breeze as she stepped outside.

“Don’t quit this now,” Mr. Fox said. “Not after all the time it’s taken to find her.”

He would still be saying this after six months, after a year, Don’t quit this now. Maybe he wanted her to stay until she could promise she was bringing back the chemical compound for fertility in her pocket. “I delivered the message,” Marina said. In retrospect she was not entirely sure that she had said anything but she was certain that any message she delivered to Dr. Swenson would never be listened to anyway. Dr. Swenson didn’t listen to Marina, or Anders, or Mr. Fox. Listening was not Dr. Swenson’s habit. Marina was not going to change the course of the river. “Anders delivered the message. She told me that. She understands exactly what it is you want and I believe she will get it to you as soon as is humanly possible.”

“It isn’t the sort of thing you can take someone’s word on. The drug could be finished or she could never have started it. This is a project of enormous importance and expense. You need to find out where we are in development,” Mr. Fox said, and then he added the word “exactly.”

She looked at her feet, bright and raw in the overhead light, slick with Neosporin. “You’ll have to find somebody else.”

“Marina,” he said. “Marina, Marina.” He said it with tenderness in his voice, with love.

She could smell her own capitulation coming on from a mile away. It was her nature, her duty. She told him good night and hung up the phone. She couldn’t blame him much. Inside the envelope of his own warm, dry sheets, he really couldn’t understand what he was asking her to do. When she was still at home, she hadn’t been able to imagine this place either.

It was a Lariam day. She had been putting it off since this morning, but what difference did it make? She always wound up taking it in the end. The pills she had so cavalierly tossed in the airport trash had managed to find her again. Tomo never complained about having to come up from the front desk to settle her screaming by banging on her door. And if she dealt with intermittent nausea, paranoia, my God, she could hardly pin that on the Lariam. Even if she went home tomorrow she would have to take it for another four weeks. It was the drug’s way of reminding the patient that the trip isn’t over. The trip would be in the bloodstream, in the tissues. All the potential disasters of the place would continue to linger inside. Marina set the pill on her tongue and swallowed it with half a bottle of water which was sitting on her dresser, then she turned out the light. She was becoming accustomed to the dip in the middle of the mattress, to the foam-rubber pillow that smelled like cardboard boxes, to the sound of the water piping into the ice machine down the hall and then, hours later, the dumping release of its little frozen