State of Wonder

were twenty of them or more ranging from very tiny to a few who were slightly bigger than Easter, and they stamped out a complicated pattern of footwork and then hopped in a large circle on one foot while sounding out the hue and cry of warriors. The tourists, enchanted, took pictures with their cell phones. A girl of ten or twelve with a red hibiscus tucked behind her ear stepped forward to dance a solo with a boa constrictor around her neck and so nicely did it hang and sway from her arms that one could not help but be reminded that a feather boa was made to imitate a snake. The mothers of the dancers quickly spread cloths on the ground and set out an array of small blow guns, tiny carved white herons, and string bracelets woven with red seeds. Having been given an opportunity to shop, the white women began bartering, wanting a bracelet and a necklace for the price of the bracelet alone. One of the women handed her husband the camera and then came and stood beside Marina. “Take my picture with this one,” she said. “She’s twice the size of the rest of them.”

Marina, in her Lakashi dress, put her arm around the woman’s waist so that her own red seed bracelet would show in the picture.

Easter went and stood beside one of the men with a tall kettle drum and put his hands on either side of the base. After a minute he began to nod his head in time. A boy came out with a three-toed sloth and hung it around a tourist’s neck and the animal, barely awake, tilted back its head and seemed to smile at her. The sloth, for posing in pictures, was an even bigger hit than Marina. A heavyset woman in a dirty T-shirt and cutoff jeans then arrived with a struggling fifty pound capybara in her arms. She held it on its back the way one would a baby, possibly thinking the large rodent would take a nice picture as well, but the animal squealed and writhed and then finally bit her so that she was forced to drop it and watch it sprint away into the undergrowth, shrieking in fear. That was when two very old men in enormous feathered headdresses came skipping slowly out of a thatched hut shaking rain sticks, and the dancing children fell into a line behind them. The elder of the two men, the one with no teeth, stopped and took Marina’s hand, tugging at her gently.

“You’re supposed to dance,” Nancy said.

“I can’t do this,” Marina said.

“I don’t think there’s any choice.”

Marina looked at the crowd and then at the Indians and the message on every face was exactly the same: no choice. And so she took the chief’s hand which he then held high above his head, about the level of Marina’s cheekbone, and together they did the slow skip forward while the men beat their drums and the tourists took their pictures and the children followed with their dances, their snake and their sloth. In this group Marina danced with the people who were not white while the white people watched them. It would never have been her preference to be part of a tourist attraction. One of the children handed her the sloth and she took it. She hung it around her neck and continued her dance, feeling the soft, warm hair against her skin. Had anyone given her a choice, she would have chosen instead to be back on the porch behind the storage shed beneath her mosquito netting reading Little Dorrit. Still, she knew it was somehow less humiliating, less disrespectful, to dance with the natives than it was to simply stand there watching them.

Dollars accumulated in a woven basket, offerings to the gods. The letters were given to the tourists’ guide, who said he had two hours off in Manaus the next day and would mail them himself. Benoit had been talking to the man the entire time and receiving strong advice on the importance of English and German. He should speak Spanish as well. Portuguese was nothing more than a baseline accomplishment.

On their way back from the trading post, Marina and the Saturns gave Benoit all of their attention. They looked at every bird and monkey he pointed to and when he found the correlating picture in the book they told him how to pronounce the words in English, spot-billed toucanet. Alan had brought binoculars and showed Benoit how to use them. Perhaps the tourists had rubbed off on them because they behaved as tourists now. They kept their collective gaze focused on the water and the leaves and the sky and scarcely looked at one another at all. They caught a glimpse of pink dolphins and discussed birds. They took a few unnecessary turns up very small tributaries because Benoit pointed them out to Easter and Easter, being free of all agenda, was happy to oblige. Marina and the Saturns had burned through so much emotion earlier in the day that now they all felt remarkably placid, or perhaps only exhausted. They had not passed another living soul since they left the Jintas and the world seemed something silent and wide, belonging only to them. On the left there was what appeared to be a crisp field of floating green lettuce. Benoit tapped at Easter’s arm and the boy turned the wheel and took them in.

Beneath the sounds of bird calls there was the most delicate sound of crunching, as if the boat were making its way through a lightly frozen pond in December and the ice, half the thickness of a window pane, was breaking apart to let them pass. Marina leaned over the front of the boat and watched the lettuce compact beneath the pontoons while behind them the plants knitted themselves back together, smoothing over the path they had made without so much as a damaged leaf. We are here, Marina thought, and we were never here. It was a green so much brighter, so much fresher than anything she’d seen in the jungle. Long toed birds strolled across the delicate meadow with such confidence it was tempting to think those tiny floating plants might hold the weight of a single pharmacologist. The question then was whether the water was a foot deep or twenty feet deep. Benoit smacked at Easter again and held up his hand and Easter stopped the boat. Benoit lay down on his belly then, his head and shoulders over the side. He had seen something. The Saturns came and leaned over him, Marina leaned over him. “Is it a fish?” Nancy said. “Peixe?”

Benoit shook his head.

“I don’t see anything,” her husband said.

Easter kept his eyes on Benoit, who, without looking at his captain again, pointed his hand to the left, to the right, and then a little back. Easter held the throttle low and scooted the big boat around in the smallest possible increments until Benoit, every ounce of his attention fixed into the sweet spring of lettuce, abruptly raised his hand and Easter killed the engine altogether. The silence was startling. The budding naturalist, still flat on his stomach, then dove that same hand down through the leaves and began to pull the colossus of all snakes into the boat.

Human instinct dictated first that the snake must be kept away from the face, and so Benoit straightened his arm to rigid as if wishing to cast it away from his body while holding on too tight for the snake’s comfort. The reptile’s long, recurved teeth snapped ferociously into the air, diving towards Benoit’s wrist while Benoit whipped the head from side to side, buying time until he could close the distance between hand and head. He rolled onto his side and then his back, managing somehow to pull the first half of the reptile on board while it flailed like a downed electrical wire. At its neck the snake was as big around as Benoit’s wrist, and from there its body, smooth scales of darkest green with black blotches on the back and then creamy light underneath, swelled into a size more in keeping with his thigh. The snake kept pulling up and pulling up, more and more of itself slithering up and onto the deck in thick, muscular rolls where it sought to make its way onto Benoit’s body, extending out against him, kneading him, while Benoit struggled mightily to keep their two faces apart. Do not let the faces touch.

“Put it back!” Nancy screamed in English, the language that stood between Benoit and his dream of being a tour guide. “Drop it!”

“Fuck!” Alan Saturn said, and then repeated the word endlessly for good measure.

He had caught it sure enough but he hadn’t caught it close enough to the head. There was too much available snake above Benoit’s hand, and the snake’s enormous gaping mouth sought purchase, its jaws opening wider than such a little head should reasonably dictate. In a flash there was evidence of many rows of smaller teeth lined up and waiting to clamp into skin. Only by swinging it wildly did he keep the snake from sinking into his wrist. Benoit seemed fixated only on the six inches of the snake between the top of his fist and the tip of its tongue while completely ignoring the enormous body that was working its way heavily onto his own body now, and Benoit, who was wet with sweat and the water the snake brought on board, was laughing. There on his back pinned like a wrestler in an unsporting match, he roared with a powerful joy while he tried to work the one hand upwards with the assistance of the other hand. Easter, ever helpful, grabbed onto the lower half of their guest and tried to pry it off of his friend. There was too much coiling and uncoiling for an accurate measurement but the snake appeared to be fifteen feet long, eighteen when it stretched. Benoit appeared to be five feet, five inches, and he was outweighed by as much as fifty pounds. The three doctors pressed away, screaming various invectives in an unhelpful language. Marina wanted to jump in the water and to run across the lettuce with the long toed birds, but who could say the snake didn’t have a family down there? There was an odor none of them recognized, the smell of a furious reptile, an oily stench of putrid rage that sunk into the membranes of their nostrils as if it planned to stay there forever. The back half of the snake whipped up and made itself a knot around Easter’s slender waist and wrapped and wrapped and at the moment its head swung past, Easter reached into the air, his hand a quarter second faster than the