paper for those words. Dr. Swenson returned after lunch looking like nothing had happened and when Marina started to ask her how she was feeling, Dr. Swenson waved her away. “Fine,” she said, without waiting for the question.
Alan Saturn stood in front of Dr. Budi and tapped the table with his fingers. “Give it up,” he said.
“You could have told me last night that you meant to go today.” She was a fine-boned woman of indeterminate age who wore her black hair in a single braid in the manner of the Lakashi. She folded her letter into thirds and ran her tongue along the glue strip.
“Nothing happens here,” Alan said. “No one needs that much time to write a letter.”
Dr. Budi reached into the pocket of the cotton smock she wore and pulled out several small bills which she handed over to Dr. Saturn along with the envelope. Then, without further conversation, she returned her attention to her work. In her devotion to her task, Dr. Budi was an archetype of a particular sort in the medical community, as much as the ill-tempered surgeon or the addicted anesthesiologist. Any time a group of doctors came together, there was always the one whose car would be in the parking lot when the others arrived at dawn and whose car would still be there when the others pulled away after midnight, the one who was standing at the nurses’ station at four a.m. reviewing a chart when it wasn’t her weekend on call, the one the other doctors privately ridiculed for having no life and yet with whom they felt a gnawing and irrational sense of competition. What was remarkable was how ably Dr. Budi filled this role even when there was no hospital, no parking lot, and no patients. When all they did was work, Dr. Budi worked more. She claimed that she had already read all the Dickens.
“Have you ever been to Java?” Alan Saturn asked Marina. “Anywhere in Indonesia?” She had followed him down to the dock with the Lakashi, not even asking herself why she was doing it. A departure, an arrival, she was beginning to see their appeal as a diversion. She was certain one of the men was wearing a pair of her pants rolled up at the cuffs. Pieces of her clothing walked by her from time to time and there was nothing to do but watch them pass. She shook her head.
“It’s my theory that Budi is more suited to the tropics than the rest of us. This air, these smells, they must be second nature to her. She looks up so seldom I imagine she thinks she’s home.” Dr. Saturn was working to loosen a knot in a rope that held the pontoon boat to the shore and in his struggles he made the knot more intractable. Easter came down the dock and thumped him on the shoulder. His point was clear. “Now, take Nancy and me coming from Michigan,” he said, “well, that’s going to be harder. It doesn’t matter how long we’re here or how often we come, we never fully acclimate. The foreignness of the place is always going to be a distraction for us.”
“Dr. Swenson was born in Maine and she doesn’t seem distracted.”
“Dr. Swenson may never be cited in conversations about how normal people respond to their environment.” Some freakish brand of great white bird with a wing span of a pterodactyl flapped down the river towards them. It had a bare black head, a long black bill, and a red ring around its skinny neck. They all stood paralyzed by the sight of it, watching until it took a hard left into the foliage and vanished. Dr. Saturn formed his hand into a visor against the afternoon sun. “Anders would have known what that was.”
After a flurry of turning pages, Benoit held up the picture of the bird in Anders’ book, thrilled to have found it so fast. He showed it to Dr. Saturn, who nodded approvingly at the correct match. “Jaribu stork,” Dr. Saturn said.
Benoit, one of those young men who hoped for a career in tourism, had as a child been collected for a missionary school that had popped up briefly several tributaries away. Thanks to a group of Baptists from Alabama he could read and write in Portuguese and had memorized Bible verses which he could recite at will, skills that had made him one of the least contented members of his tribe. Marina came over to look at the picture.
“I’ve brought hats!” Nancy Saturn said, coming down to the water. “I have two. Now you can come with us.” She handed Marina a wide brimmed hat and when Marina hesitated, Dr. Saturn took it from his wife and put it on Marina’s head. The age span between the Drs. Saturn was greater than the span between Mr. Fox and Marina. One could imagine, though it had not been said, that he had once been her teacher. Marina recognized the way the wife leaned towards the husband when he spoke as it was not unlike the way she had often leaned towards Dr. Swenson. In one late-night conversation over a bottle of pisco brandy in which the first Dr. Saturn was holding forth on matters of tropical medicine, the second Dr. Saturn actually took a notebook out of her pocket to write down something he had said. She was discreet, and the paper might have gone unnoticed had Dr. Swenson not asked her rather loudly if she wasn’t capable of simply relying on her memory. Dr. Swenson leaned decisively away from the female Dr. Saturn, whom she clearly regarded as a gate-crasher, a hanger-on, though the younger woman, a botanist with a degree in public health, was probably best qualified to be of assistance. Certainly her credentials were closest to Dr. Rapp’s. “I never rely on my memory when I’m drinking,” was what Nancy Saturn had said.
Easter turned the key and the motor of the pontoon boat began to spit and cough. All of the Lakashi pressed forward now and Marina felt herself jostled from side to side by the shirtless men in running shorts and the women with their pregnant bellies. She found herself looking at their ears and the strings of seeds and animal teeth around their necks and suddenly she realized she had not dreamed of India all week. Her father, who had been missing from her life for so many years, was gone again, and for an instant she had a vivid recreation of that hollow, hopeless feeling of having lost him in the crowd. As she wondered if the Lariam was out of her system now, a mosquito bit the back of her knee.
“Jump!” Alan said, jumping onto the boat himself with the rope in his hand. Immediately the current caught the boat and pulled it away from the shore. He turned around and reached his hand to Marina. “The entire tribe is going to be on board in five seconds,” he called. “Hesitation is the same thing as a straight-up invitation around here.”
It was true, the Lakashi were poised to begin boarding, all of them. Benoit pushed ahead of the pack and jumped without solicitation. He clearly meant to go somewhere, and Nancy followed him. Two more Lakashi leapt onto the boat but before they had gotten their balance Benoit tipped them back into the water, and then Marina jumped without ever meaning to go. Easter laughed at her flat-footed landing and she went and stood behind him, both of her hands on his shoulders. Every night they went to sleep separately, he in his hammock and she in her cot beneath the netting, and every night his dreams woke them both. His dreams, not hers, and she would go and scoop him up, bring him back in with her where they would sleep out the rest of the night in her little bed. They had gotten good at it. In only a week they had learned how to stretch and turn in unison.
The Lakashi were wading into the river and with the cross of breaststroke and dog paddle they favored, they swam. Marina looked at their dark heads in the water and wondered if she would have swum out too, just to have something to do. Nancy Saturn removed her hat and waved it at them, showing the short auburn hair she cropped herself. She called out an enthusiastic series of farewells — goodbye in English and
“They only want a little recognition,” Nancy said, watching and waving as they fell farther and farther behind. “If you don’t acknowledge what they’re doing they just keep doing it. Frankly, I don’t think they’re such good swimmers. You can’t have half the tribe drowning on the way to the trading post.”
“Nancy would have made a great social behaviorist,” Alan Saturn said, dropping a very tan arm over his wife’s shoulders. “Dr. Rapp would have loved her. There were so many things we missed back then that Nancy picked up on the very first time she came out here.”
“You knew Dr. Rapp?” Marina asked.
Nancy raised her eyebrows briefly and then sighed with the recognition of what was to come. “How in the world did you miss that lecture?” she said, stepping out from under her husband’s arm and rifling through her bag for sunblock and bug gel. She handed one tube to Marina and began to use the other on herself.
Alan Saturn lifted his sunglasses to better show the delight in his eyes. “I was his student at Harvard! I was actually enrolled in that famous mycology class the year he broke his ankle in New Guinea and wound up coming back to teach for the entire semester. Those were the lectures that were published by Oxford University Press, and there have been no end of papers written on them. I’m sure you must have read some of them. There were a great many legends built up around that class. It was listed in the catalogue every year but Dr. Rapp virtually never made his way back to the classroom for more than a day or two. In reality it was taught by some graduate student who had been in the field himself and was qualified to do no more than read the notes and mark the tests. So while
