minnow, a thought.
Dr. Swenson raised her head and, looking in Marina’s direction, she sighed. “There is a great temptation to tease you, Dr. Singh. Your earnestness makes you very vulnerable to that, I’m sure. The child has the lungs of a Japanese pearl diver. He’ll resurface two-thirds of the way across in a direct line with the boat.” She waited one count. “Now.”
And up came the head of the boy who flipped his wet hair aside and raised his hand and waved. The light on the planes of his face made him golden. Even at this distance she could see his enormous inhalation before he dove again, this time kicking his legs up straight so that the light caught the pink soles of his feet before they disappeared. Marina sank down on the case of apricots, the place from which those feet had so recently catapulted, and she cried.
“Peanut butter and marmalade,” Dr. Swenson said, dealing out six slices of bread along the top of a box as if it were a poker game. She twisted closed the plastic bag with a piece of wire and picked up a battered knife with a long narrow blade. She stuck the blade into a jar of marmalade. “Rodrigo got the Wilkins and Son. Now there is a man who knows how to keep his customer’s business. One underestimates the pleasures of marmalade until one has been separated from it. Be sure to enjoy the bread. When this loaf goes that’s it, no more. It just doesn’t keep. I bring back yeast and they bake some but it has almost nothing in common with the store-bought bread. This, I must say, is delicious.”
She had thought he was dead, and as stupid as that was she could not control her imagination. Of course the boy could dive, could swim. He would come back in the boat and take them where they needed to go. How had she become so dependent on a deaf child in less than twenty-four hours? What in the world was she crying for?
“Pull yourself together, Dr. Singh,” Dr. Swenson said, keeping her attention fixed on the even distribution of peanut butter over bread. “He’ll be back on the boat in a minute and it will upset him greatly to see you carrying on. He’s a deaf child. He does everything to make you forget that, so it is your responsibility as the adult to remember. You can’t explain to him why you’re crying. I have not invented a sign with which to convey foolishness, so you cannot tell him you are just being foolish. You’ll frighten him, so stop it.” Easter was on the surface now doing an extravagant backstroke and the sound of his splashing was soothing to both of the women in the boat. Using the same knife, Dr. Swenson cut the sandwiches into triangles and left them there on the box. “Come and get your lunch now,” she said to Marina. It was an imperative rather than an invitation.
Marina pressed her eyes against the sleeve of her shirt. “It just scared me. That’s all,” she said. Neither her voice nor her explanation sounded convincing.
“We aren’t even there yet,” Dr. Swenson said, and took a triangle of sandwich for herself. “You’re going to have to toughen up or as God is my witness I will put you on the shore right here. There are more frightening things in the jungle than a boy going swimming in a still stretch of river.”
After Easter was back on the boat, as sleek and damp as a seal, and the sandwiches had been eaten (he handled the peanut butter jar with such gentle affection afterwards that Dr. Swenson consented to make him another), it was announced that there would be a nap. “Sesta,” Dr. Swenson said, and clapped her hands. The Portuguese made it sound essential. “It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.” She tapped Easter and pointed to a low trunk in front of the steering wheel, then she closed her eyes and rested her head against her folded hands in a child’s pantomime of sleep. Having his directions, the boy pulled two hammocks from the box and then set to clipping them onto poles beneath the shade of the boat’s tarp.
“Before I came to the jungle I didn’t believe in napping,” Dr. Swenson said, choosing the hammock nearest the steering wheel for herself. “I thought of it as a sign of weakness. But this country could make a napper out of anyone. It is important to pay attention to what the body is telling us.” She settled herself into the long piece of fabric and when she leaned back and lifted up her feet the hammock swallowed her whole. Marina looked at her teacher, a low-hanging lump cocooned in striped cotton swaying from side to side, the energy of her lying down to rest creating motion. “Go to sleep now, Dr. Singh,” the muffled voice said. “It will do your nerves a world of good.”
It was as if Dr. Swenson had vanished from the boat, as surely as Easter had vanished from it when he went over the side. Marina watched the hammock until its motion had settled. It was a magic trick: wrap her in a blanket and she’s gone. The quiet that was left without her was layered, subtle: at first Marina heard it only as silence, the absence of human voices, but once her ear had settled into it the other sounds began to rise, the deeply forested chirping, the caw that came from the tops of trees, the chattering of lower primates, the incessant sawing of insect life. It was not unlike the overture of the opera in which the well-trained listener could draw forth the piccolos, the soft French horn, a single meaningful viola. She leaned out from the shade’s protection and looked into the sun. Her watch said two o’clock. Easter sat on the deck in front of one of the many boxes that made up their furniture, a ballpoint pen in his right hand. Marina touched the empty hammock and then pointed to him. She folded her hands together and rested her head on them.
Easter shook his head, pointed to her, the hammock. He closed his eyes and dropped his chin. When she only stood there watching him he pointed again, this time using the pen for emphasis. She was supposed to go in the hammock.
It wasn’t a bad idea. She was tired. Still, she had the feeling that vigilance was in order. Didn’t someone need to stay awake and watch the jungle? Didn’t someone need to make sure the child did not fall overboard?
Easter got up and spread out the fabric with both hands, holding it open for her like an envelope and nodding instructively, as if perhaps the operation of a hammock was confusing to her. So he would watch the jungle. He would make sure she did not fall into the water. Obediently, she sat down, she lay down, and when she was settled in, Easter put his hand on her forehead and held it there as if she were a sick child. He smiled at her, and smiling back she closed her eyes. She was on a river in a boat in Brazil. She was in the Amazon taking a nap with Dr. Swenson.
She had had a good imagination as a child, though it had been systematically chipped apart by years of studying inorganic chemistry and charting lipids. These days Marina put her faith in data, the world she trusted was one that she could measure. But even with a truly magnificent imagination she could not have put herself in the jungle. She felt something slip across her rib cage — an insect? a bead of sweat? She kept still, looking out through the top of the hammock at the bright split of daylight in front of her. The midday heat tacked her into place. She thought about medical school, the fluorescent halls of that first hospital, the stacks of textbooks that made her back ache as she lugged them home from the library. Had she known that Dr. Swenson caught the last flight to Manaus after Thursday’s lecture on endometrial tissue, would she have wished that she could come along? Could she have seen herself in the Amazon at the side of her teacher on an expedition that forged ahead in science’s name? Dr. Swenson certainly had no trouble envisioning herself in the Amazon with Dr. Rapp when she was a student. Wasn’t it possible that she could have managed the same? Marina attempted to shift the knot of her hair to one side so that she was not lying on it so directly and in doing so set herself back into a gentle rocking. The answer was no. Marina had been a very good student, but she only raised her hand when she was certain of the answer. She excelled not through bright bursts of inspiration but by the hard labor of a field horse pulling a plow. On the few occasions Dr. Swenson noticed her she had approved, but she had never been able to remember Marina’s name.
When the rocking stopped Marina tilted her hips back and forth to start it up again. There were layers upon layers of scents inside the hammock — the smell of her own sweat which brought up trace amounts of soap and shampoo; the smell of the hammock itself which was both mildewed and sunbaked with a slight hint of rope; the smell of the boat, gasoline and oil; and the smell of the world outside the boat, the river water and the great factory of leaves pumping oxygen into the atmosphere, the tireless photosynthesis of plants turning sunlight into energy, not that photosynthesis had an odor. Marina inhaled deeply and the scent of the air relaxed her. Brought together, all those disparate elements turned into something wholly pleasant. She wouldn’t have thought that would be the case.
Marina closed her eyes. She could feel the boat wagging gently in the current of the river as it pulled on its line. She could feel the light and layered motion of the water coming up through the boat and up the poles that held the hammock and from there into the hammock and into her bones, and that was the movement that sent her to sleep.
Her father was there, but he was in a terrible rush. She was going back to the university with him. He was
