State of Wonder

the boom, suddenly thought she would drown standing up.

There had been many occasions in Manaus when Marina had outrun a storm, or outrun the worst of it, she had pounded up the street in her flip-flops, finding shelter beneath an awning before the sky broke apart, but to run in a jungle one must have been born in a jungle, otherwise the roots and vines are snares, leg breakers, with mud that slicks the landscape into oil. The Lakashi had long since vanished with the birds and those other skittering unknowns, all of them back to home and nest and hole, leaving the place empty for Marina and Dr. Nkomo who made slow progress on the uneven path. Every drop of rain hit the ground with such force it bounced back up again, giving the earth the appearance of something boiling. Marina moved her hands from tree to tree, steadying herself on branches, trying to regulate her breath in the flow of water.

Dr. Nkomo tapped one of his long fingers against her fingers. “Excuse me, but it is not the best idea,” he said loudly. “You never know when there is something hiding in the bark you shouldn’t touch.”

Marina pulled her fingers back quickly and nodded, then she turned her palms up and washed her hands in the rain.

Dr. Nkomo went on, more or less shouting to pitch his voice above the roar of the storm. “I leaned against a tree once and a bullet ant bit through my shirt, bit into my shoulder. You may know it by the genus, Paraponera?” He removed his glasses, which the rain had rendered useless, and put them in his shirt pocket. “It was only one ant, as long as my thumbnail, and I was in bed for a week. No one likes to complain of such things but the pain was memorable. No bullet ants where you are from, is that correct?”

Marina thought of the crickets and the meadowlarks, the rabbits and the deer, the Disney book of wildlife that slept in the wide green meadows of her home state. “No bullet ants,” she said. Her scalp was soaked, her underwear, the ground beneath her feet loosened as streams of water sluiced between the trees. They heard a high whistle piercing through the thunder and wondered if it was their imagination. Imagination played a major role in the jungle, especially during a storm. They stopped and waited until the whistle came again and then a silence. Marina turned her head and saw that what she had taken for a tree to her left was actually a pole. There were four poles, and five feet above her head there was a platform, and above that a palm roof. Four Lakashi leaned over the edge, watching. Dr. Nkomo looked up, waved, and the four waved back.

“It is an invitation,” he said to Marina. “We should go up, yes?”

Marina, who could barely hear for the water building up inside her ears, climbed the ladder first.

The single wide, open room that was the house was miraculously dry given the absence of side walls but the roof was several feet wider than the floor in every direction and dipped down low on the sides. Marina and Dr. Nkomo both looked up instinctively to admire this barrier between the rain and their heads while one of the women sat on the floor intricately knotting three very long palm fronds together into shingles as if to demonstrate how such things were possible. She was so taken with her work that she seemed not to notice the arrival of the guests, and yet Marina was certain she had been leaning over the edge of the floor and staring at them thirty seconds before. The sound of water pummeling palm fronds was infinitely more gentle than the sound of water beating against her skull and she was grateful to this woman for the work she did. Two men, who may have been thirty or fifty, came over to slap their hands against Dr. Nkomo’s chest and back, though the slaps were more respectful and restrained than the ones that had been meted out to Easter the night before. Then, chatting endlessly with one another, they picked up pieces of Marina’s sopping hair, examined her ears briefly, and let the hair drop. A much heavier woman in her sixties or seventies was chopping up a pile of whitish roots using the floor as her cutting board and the same knife that had recently been in the employ of the boat builders. Because there were two men in the room there was a second similar knife on the ground behind her. There was a teenage daughter, replete with pimpled skin and bitten nails, who cast her gaze aimlessly around the room as if she were hoping to catch sight of a telephone, a sprinting toddler of two or three who wore a very small version of the crude shift dress that all Lakashi women seemed to wear, and a naked boy baby crawling at a good clip across the splintered planks. Marina quickly calculated the speed at which the baby was traveling and the remaining length of the floorboards and immediately leapt across the room, catching the boy by his small brown foot just as his left hand had reached into the empty air in front of him.

“Aaaahhh!” the crowd said, and laughed. Marina, breathless, looked over the edge where the water from the roof churned into a pit of mud and vines like it was pouring off Niagara Falls. She dipped an arm beneath the child’s midsection and carried him back to the center of the room again. The baby was laughing too. What was the joke, exactly? That she really thought he was going to go over the same way she had thought that Easter would not break the surface of the water again? That this was how they ensured an intelligent race, by letting the careless babies fall like ripe fruit from the trees? She held the child beneath his arms to face her. He was no doubt thinner than the average American model but very healthy, kicking and gurgling with pleasure. The toddler stopped her running for a minute to pick up the unemployed knife and began to knock it against the floor behind the older woman. The baby then urinated on Marina, a long exuberant stream against the front of her already soaking shirt. The men laughed harder now and the women laughed more sedately, shaking their heads at all the silly foreigners in the world who don’t know enough to hold a baby in the right direction. The toddler’s knife got stuck in the floorboards and after a momentary wail she pulled it out and plunged it back again, missing the old woman’s back by six inches. “Could you pick up that knife?” Marina said to Dr. Nkomo.

Dr. Swenson would no doubt have argued for respecting the natural order in which babies sailed off the edge of a flat earth and toddlers played with the knives they would one day need to understand in order to feed themselves. These children had escaped without major injury before Marina arrived and chances were no doubt good that they would continue to exist after the company departed, but still, Dr. Nkomo was willing to pry the knife from the unwilling hands of the little girl, and when he had handed it to one of the men she put her face down on the floor and wept. The woman weaving shingles stood up and said something to Dr. Nkomo, pointing at Marina, pointing at him. The teenage girl came and took the baby away.

“Have I done something already?” Marina asked.

“It is something about your clothes,” he said. “Clothes is the only word I recognized, and maybe I am not sure of that.”

The older woman now got up stiffly from the floor and began to unbutton Marina’s shirt. Marina caught the woman’s fingers and shook her head but the woman simply waited until Marina let her hands go and then she started again. Her touch was both patient and persistent. It made no difference to Marina that there was urine on her filthy, soaking clothes but there was no way to explain that. When Marina stepped away the woman followed her. She was considerably shorter than Marina, they all were, and so Marina was left to look at the part in her gray hair, the long braid that went down her back. Her dress pulled against her belly and her belly pressed against Marina’s groin. The woman’s belly was high and hard and suddenly Marina saw the woman’s arms were thin, her face and legs were thin. Only her stomach protruded. Marina considered this as she stepped away from her again and again until it seemed possible that they might both go over the edge. Marina stopped, considering the ways to extricate herself while the woman resumed the work with the buttons, her stomach pressed against her, and then she felt the baby kick.

“My God,” Marina said.

“I think she wants to wash your shirt,” Dr. Nkomo said, seeming deeply embarrassed. “Once they are on to an idea it is very difficult to dissuade them.”

“She’s pregnant. I felt the baby kick,” Marina said. “It kicked me.”

The baby kicked again as if grateful for the recognition and the woman lifted her face and shook her head at Marina as if to say, Kids, what can you do? Her forehead was deeply creased and her neck was wattled. There was a dark, flat mole of an irregular shape on the side of her nose near the eye that could have been a melanoma. Buttons undone, she helped Marina out of her shirt and Marina let her take it. What was it that Anders had said? Lost Horizon for ovaries? How many children had this woman undressed and how many of the people in this tree house were her children? The toddler weeping for her knife? The woman weaving the roof? The men waiting to get back to carving their boat? The other woman came with a rag that was small and not particularly clean and rubbed down Marina’s arms and back, rubbed her stomach and neck. She touched Marina’s bra and said something to the older woman who leaned her nose between Marina’s breasts to inspect the lace edge of the white cups more closely. Dr. Nkomo busied himself with the toddler, his back decisively pointed in her direction, but the other two men folded their arms across their chests, watching the show with interest, and Marina was not bothered by any of this. She had been kicked by a fetus whose mother was at the very least sixty and could easily have been more than seventy. The teenage girl stood in front of Marina and held up her