State of Wonder

was the way they had spoken to each other all along. It was such a long time ago that she had been married. She couldn’t imagine she and Josh Su had, in their twenties, ever had such an exchange.

“You said there were two things,” Alan said.

“Annick Swenson.”

“She isn’t in the story.”

“She is implicit in every story about Dr. Rapp. Your story tells as much by what you leave out as what you put in.”

“I leave out what was private in his life. Those matters didn’t concern me and they didn’t concern science.”

“Listen to him,” the second Dr. Saturn said, turning to Marina. “What is this, Meet the Press?” She pivoted back to her husband. “It absolutely did concern you. When one’s role model brings his mistress along trip after trip with a dozen boys and you are one of those boys then it concerns you. It concerns you when you later go to his house and have dinner with your mentor and his wife.”

“Dr. Swenson was his mistress?” Marina said. Just saying it brought a sour taste to her mouth. It was, she thought, a terrible word, and in no way representative. A mistress was a woman who waited in a hotel room.

“This is what I meant by private,” Alan said pointedly to his wife.

“Mrs. Rapp lives in Cambridge and has three daughters. She is ninety-two. We send her grapefruit at Christmas. I’m not saying people don’t have affairs, even very decent people, let us be so lucky as to fall into that category. But we cannot unbraid the story of another person’s life and take out all the parts that don’t suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do. He was a great scientist, I will grant you that, and by all accounts a true charismatic, but he was also deeply unfaithful to two women and frankly that bothers me. It bothers me that the man you say you wanted to become was a lifelong philanderer.”

“When did this start?” Marina asked.

“We can take the life apart. We do it all the time.” The veins on Alan Saturn’s temples were pressing forward with their new influx of blood. “Picasso put his cigarettes out on his girlfriends and we don’t love the paintings any less for it. Wagner was a fascist and I can hum you every bar in the opening of Die Walkure.”

“I don’t know Picasso and I don’t know Wagner!”

“And you didn’t know Dr. Rapp!”

The shouting caused Benoit to raise his eyes from the field guide he was studying. He pointed to the top of a tree and said in English, “Look!” But neither of the Drs. Saturn looked, nor did Marina, and of course Easter missed it completely.

“I know his wife!” Nancy said, her voice high. “I know his mistress! If I didn’t know those two women I feel certain you’d be right. It would be just another bit of gossip from the annals of history, but that isn’t the case. You can’t separate it out when it’s someone you know. I can tell you he wasn’t a good man.”

“He was the greatest man I ever knew.”

“He left you with a tribe of Indians in Peru when you had a fever of a hundred and five!”

“And they took me to Iquitos and eventually I got to Lima. It wasn’t as if he stretched me out next to a log in the jungle and walked away. We all understood the terms of the agreement going in. Anyone who slowed down the group would be cut from the group. Dr. Rapp was there to work and we were there to learn.”

“You were nineteen years old and he was picking mushrooms!” Nancy Saturn had a wild look in her eyes, as if she were telling the story of what had happened to her child and not her husband. “His mistress must have been through medical school by then. At the very least you would think she could have stayed with you.”

Alan Saturn would have stormed away at this point, the desire to leave her was plainly twitching in his muscles, working through his jaw, but they were on a boat on a river in the jungle. “The incident you are referring to happened a very long time ago.” His voice was steady and low. “I clearly made a mistake in confiding it to you.”

“I’m your wife. It would have come out eventually.” Nancy Saturn was not in the least bit ready to break away. She saw she had a game advantage and did not blink.

“You knew nothing about Annick and Dr. Rapp?” Alan said to Marina finally. There were still sparks of rage in his voice even when it was directed to her.

“Not a clue,” Marina said. She would have liked to separate herself from the Saturns now, to find a place on the boat without roaches where she could sit down, because even though she could say that based on the information that had been presented Alan Saturn was wrong — Dr. Rapp had behaved badly, and Nancy Saturn was right, such matters were worthy of judgment — she found herself siding with Alan because there was much in his single-minded devotion to a mentor that sounded a familiar note. In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.

“Yes,” he said, trying to slow his breathing, perhaps another learned technique. “Well, a private matter.” Nancy opened her mouth but he put his hand gently on her forehead and used his thumb to rub in a clot of sunblock that was clinging to the roots of her hair. He cleared his throat. He was trying very hard to settle them both. “You see that river there?” He was speaking to Marina. He nodded towards a tributary. It would have been easily missed, the small opening folded into the jungle so discreetly. “You follow that river to the Hummocca tribe. It’s two or three hours from here. They are the closest tribe to the Lakashi and yet in all the times I’ve been here I’ve never seen them.” It was his one heroic attempt to change the subject. He took his hand from his wife’s head and there passed between them a tacit agreement. They were on a boat. They were not alone. They would find a way to stop this.

“Dr. Swenson said that Easter was Hummocca,” Marina said, understanding that her part in the play was to pretend that nothing had happened.

“No one really knows,” Nancy said, weighing her words out carefully. “But it’s the only logical explanation. The Jinta wouldn’t have left him.”

“Did anyone try and take him back? See if they were missing a boy?” Marina looked over at Easter but he did not turn his head in the direction of the smaller river. Benoit was showing him a picture. He was steering with one hand.

“Tribes are like countries,” Alan Saturn said. “They each have their own national characters. Tribes like the Jinta are essentially Canadian. Other tribes, like the Hummocca, are more North Korean. Because we have no direct contact with them we have very little information about what they do, and the information we do have keeps us away.”

“Dr. Swenson has seen them,” Marina said. “She told me so when we were coming in.”

“And that’s all she’s told you,” Alan said. “The story doesn’t go any farther than that one piece of information: she’s seen them and they frightened her. Just the idea of Annick being frightened of something is enough to keep me away.”

“They’re cannibals,” Nancy said.

“They were cannibals,” Alan said, “which is only to say a small part of the meat was eaten in rituals, not that they subsisted on a regular diet of human flesh, and there haven’t been any reports of it happening in the last fifty years.”

They had passed the opening in the jungle now. Looking back over her shoulder Marina found it nowhere in evidence. Had they turned the boat around she wasn’t sure that she could find it. “No reports in the last fifty years, but it doesn’t sound like anyone is going up there taking regular surveys about their habits.”

“They’ve shot poisoned arrows at traders,” Nancy said. “Either they’re not very good shots and the arrows have landed wide of the boats, or they are very good shots and they mean it to be a warning. If Easter were at some point in his life a Hummocca, no one has plans to send him back.”

When they arrived at the trading post it seemed less like Canada and more like Florida. A dozen or so tourists had come with their guide in an open boat from their eco-lodge to watch the Jinta children in their grass skirts as they twitched their nonexistent hips in time to the thundering rhythm of drums. The drums were played by middle- aged men, shirtless and thick, who were most likely the fathers. The fathers had run stripes of what looked to be red lipstick down their noses and across their cheeks and thrashed their heads from side to side like members of a garage band. The drummers were good but their children were better, their wrists encircled in tufts of grass. There