late for the class he was teaching and the streets of Calcutta were packed in a human knot, more and more people pushing to find their place on the pavement, so many students rushing to get to class themselves. She held his hand as a way to keep from losing him in the crowd and she thought of how they must look, the two of them holding hands. When a woman walking quickly in the opposite direction with a sack of rice on her head wedged herself between them as if there was no other way she could possibly go, Marina latched onto the back of her father’s belt before he had the chance to slip away. She was trying to outsmart the dream. She knew it well enough by now. Her father was so fast! She was looking at the little bit of gray in the back of his hair, which was still very thick and mostly black, when suddenly a man with a cart full of bicycle tires rushed at them. How could he get so much speed in this crush? The dream was intent on its own historical set of rules — it is written that the two of them must be divided — and so he rammed his cart between them as if he meant to go through her arm. The blow hit her with such velocity that she went flying up into the air. It was like a dream, and for the instant she was above the crowd she saw everything, all the people and the animals, the terrible shacks that lined the road to the grand houses, the beggars and their bowls, the gates of the university, her father’s slim shoulders as he dashed ahead unencumbered by her weight. She saw everything, the impossibility of everything, before she crashed down on the pavement, the entire weight of her body coming onto her elbow.
“Is it a snake?” Dr. Swenson shouted at her. “Have you been bitten, Dr. Singh?”
Marina was on the deck of the boat. It was a very slight distance to fall. Suspended in her hammock she had been no more than three feet off the ground, but be that as it may the ground had come up hard and knocked the wind out of her. When she opened her eyes she saw feet in tennis shoes and beside them, small brown feet. She took another minute to breathe.
“Dr. Singh, answer me! Is there a snake?”
“No,” Marina said, her left cheek pressed hard to the filthy wood.
“Then why were you screaming?” The boat was moving now and Dr. Swenson gave Easter a poke in the shoulder and pointed him back to the wheel. They had resumed their journey at some point and for a minute there had been no one driving.
Oh, she could think of so many reasons to be screaming, not the least of which was the fire in every bone on the left side of her body. Marina eased over onto her back. She moved her left fingers gently and then explored the range of movement in her left wrist. She moved her feet from side to side to complete the inventory. Nothing broken. The fabric she had been sleeping in was now hanging just above her face. “I was having a dream.”
Dr. Swenson reached up and unclipped Marina’s hammock from the pole and then walked around her to the other side to take the hammock down. It had the effect of someone throwing open the draperies. The sunlight flooded her vision. Without intending to, Marina was looking up the bottom of Dr. Swenson’s shirt and saw the soft white ledge of her belly where it met the line of her drawstring pants. “I thought you had been bitten by a snake.”
“Yes, I understand that.” Marina was shivering slightly in the heat. She closed her right hand, tried to feel her father’s belt.
“There are lanceheads in these parts and they aren’t geniuses for hanging on to their branches. It is as stupid a snake as it is deadly. Everyone here knows someone who met their end stepping on a lancehead. They are perfectly camouflaged and they do nothing to get out of the way or make their presence known except for sinking their teeth into your ankle. Easter once kept me from putting my foot in the middle of one all coiled up in our camp. It must have been two meters long and it didn’t look any different from a pile of leaves and dirt. Even when he showed it to me I didn’t see it at first.” She stopped and gave herself a quick shake.
“Was I about to step on one?”
“They do occasionally fall into boats,” Dr. Swenson said tersely. “They like to get under things or into things. A hammock is a reasonable place for a snake to hide. It was startling, your screaming. I had to turn you out to see if there was a snake in there with you.”
“You turned the hammock over?” Marina had assumed she had thrown herself out in the course of her dream.
“Of course I did. Did you expect me to find the snake without waking you?”
Marina shook her head. Had there been a two-meter snake in her hammock, flinging it onto the ground while flinging Marina on top of it would likely not have saved her from being bitten, but where snakes were concerned people often made hurried decisions. She closed her eyes and covered them with both hands. Dr. Swenson would have thought she was thinking of the snake but she was thinking of her father. No one said anything for a while and then she felt something very cold tapping against her shoulder.
“Sit up,” Dr. Swenson said. “Drink a bottle of water. Sit up now. There’s ice on the boat. Do you want any ice?”
Marina shook her head.
“Ice is a luxury confined to this moment. If you want any ice, this is your chance. Sit up now, Dr. Singh. I can’t stand to see a person lying on this deck. It’s vile. You had a dream. Now sit up and drink your water.”
Marina sat up and then, remembering the cockroaches, she pulled herself back onto the box of grapefruit juice. Her head hurt. Then she noticed that the box she was sitting on was covered in letters, letters she was sure hadn’t been there earlier. It was a printed uppercase alphabet of an irregular size, or most of the alphabet. The letter K was gone, and when she moved her thigh she saw the Q was missing as well. Some letters, like the A, were perfectly rendered, while others, R and Z, were backwards. At the end of the string of letters were two words, EASTER and ANDERS, followed by a rudimentary drawing of a snail. Marina touched her fingers to Anders’ name. “What’s this about?”
“That is one of the many legacies left by your friend Dr. Eckman. I’m sure there are more I have yet to come across. In the brief amount of time he was with us he managed to teach Easter the fundamentals of table manners as well as the alphabet, or most of the alphabet. I see the K is missing.”
“And he can write their names.”
“I thought it was interesting that those were the two words he chose to teach the boy. Easter, well, that makes sense, but Anders? Still, he was very sick at the end. Maybe he felt it was a way to be remembered.”
Marina could see him sitting on a log, a pad of paper out across his knees, Easter pressed in close beside him. Of course he could teach a boy how to make his letters. He’d done it three times before. It wouldn’t make any difference to him that Easter couldn’t hear.
“Dr. Eckman wrote everything out for him, a sort of study chart. Easter practices constantly. I let him keep Dr. Eckman’s pens when he died. For a while he was making letters all over his arms and legs but I put a stop to that. I don’t know how much of the ink is absorbed through the skin but it can’t be good for a child. It’s a bad habit when there’s plenty of perfectly usable paper. I don’t know what he thinks the letters are exactly, but he remembers them, most of them. He gets them in the right order.”
“Maybe he thinks of them as something that belonged to Anders.”
Dr. Swenson nodded. She watched the boy watch the river. “Easter cries out in his sleep. It’s the only time I’ve heard his voice, but he has one. Months go by and I don’t hear him, but since Dr. Eckman died he’s had nightmares every night. It’s a terrible sound he makes.” Dr. Swenson turned then and let her eyes stay on Marina’s. “It’s a shame you can’t talk to him about it. It’s something that the two of you have in common. I will assume that the issue for you is mefloquine and that Mr. Fox did not send me a doctor with a debilitating mental illness.”
“I’m taking Lariam.” She wished she could bring back the box of grapefruit juice for Karen. It was, all things considered, a remarkable achievement.
“I’ve seen my share of screamers down here but when it happens I never think of Lariam. In the moment I always think it’s a snake.”
“Better to be safe.”
Dr. Swenson nodded. “Lariam is for tourists, Dr. Singh. I sincerely hope you are a tourist, out of here in the next canoe. But short of that I suggest you throw those pills in the river. Do you think I take Lariam? A person can’t live here having screaming nightmares and paranoia and suicidal fantasies. The jungle is hard enough without that.”
“I haven’t been suicidal.”
“Well, good for you. It can still come. I knew a young man who walked into the river one night and didn’t walk out. The natives saw him, thought he was going for a swim.”
