State of Wonder

“The Lakashi tribe was not a Martin Rapp discovery. If it had been, this place would surely have been Rapptown.” Nancy put a finger just beneath the moth which, like the Lakashi, seemed impervious to the invasions of its privacy. “Agruis purpurea martinet. It takes liquid from the pulp of the Martin, not the sap, which is deeper inside the tree. The insect subsists on the moisture in the wood itself. It ingests and excretes almost simultaneously, processing the proteins from the pulp. Once a year it lays its eggs.”

“In the bark?” Marina asked. When the moth opened its wings it showed two bright yellow dots like eyes, one on either side, then it folded back up again. A butterfly rests with its wings open and a moth rests with its wings closed, she had read that somewhere years ago.

Nancy nodded. “Like the Martins and the Rapps, the purple martinets seem to exist right here. You’ll see one in camp from time to time. They’ll go as far as the river, but we have no record of it feeding outside this area. The key to fertility is found in the combination of the Martin tree and the purple martinet, although we haven’t isolated the moths’ excretions from the proteins in its larval casing. What we know is that it works.”

Dr. Budi wiped an alcohol swab over her own finger and then pricked it herself.

“What about the blood samples?” Marina asked. “Can you actually read hormone levels on such a small amount of blood?”

“Nanotechnology,” Budi said. “Brave new world.”

Marina nodded.

“We’ve isolated the molecules as they are metabolized in the bark of the tree,” Budi continued, “but we’re still charting the impact of the Lakashi saliva, their gastric juices, plasma. What we don’t know is what combination of factors is also giving the women protection against malaria.”

Marina asked if the men in the tribe were susceptible to malaria and Thomas nodded. “After they have completed breast-feeding, the male babies are as likely as any member of comparable tribes to contract malaria, as are female children between the ages when they cease to be breast-fed and the onset of their own first menses, when they begin chewing the trees.”

“So they aren’t actually inoculated. The tree and the moth act as a preventative, like quinine.”

Dr. Budi shook her head. “Preventative while breast-feeding, inoculated when eating the bark. The question is why the entire tribe hasn’t evolved to eat the bark in their youth, but considering how many children die of malaria, there could be a terrible population explosion among the Lakashi were they all to live.”

“But how do you know?” Marina asked. Her head was swimming with this. Had they convinced some men to eat the bark? How had they tested the children? “Could you get some of the women to stop eating the bark?” She looked up again at the trees. She could see now far away against the ceiling of sky the clusters of pink flowers that hung as heavy as grapes.

“There have been a few cases of women who were unable to conceive who after a while stopped participating in the group visits to the Martins,” Nancy said. “But because they had already eaten the bark they were inoculated.”

“Mostly we have experimented on ourselves,” Thomas said.

“With what?”

Dr. Budi looked at her, blinked. “Mosquitoes.”

“So what drug is being developed exactly?” Marina asked. A purple martinet dipped past her and then landed on the front of her dress, its purple wings opening and closing twice before flying off again.

“There is enormous overlap,” Thomas told her. “In exploring one we learn about the other. They cannot be separated out.”

Nancy Saturn was a botanist. She could be playing for either team. But Dr. Budi and Thomas and Alan Saturn all seemed to be on the side of malaria. “Is Dr. Swenson the only one working on the fertility drug?”

“That is certainly her primary project,” Thomas said. “But we believe the answer to one is the answer to the other.”

“It’s a lot to take in,” Nancy said. “We understand that. Just give the bark a try, see what you think. You probably won’t be here long enough to be part of the tests but you should at least give it a go. The number of non- Lakashi who have had the chance to chew the Martins is very small.”

“It is an honor,” Dr. Budi said, leaning forward to take another bite herself.

What was it Anders had said to her? “Pretend for a moment that you are a clinical pharmacologist working for a major drug development firm. Imagine someone offering you the equivalent of Lost Horizon for American ovaries.” Marina closed her eyes, pressed down her tongue, and opened her mouth. It was not as natural as it appeared. It was more like milking a cow, easy as long as someone else was doing it. The secret seemed to be in the angle of the head, not coming at the tree straight on. In truth the bark was nearly soft, yielding. It offered up the slightest amount of pulpy liquid that tasted of fennel and rosemary with a slightly peppered undertone that she could only imagine had to do with the excrement of the purple martinet. It wasn’t bad, but then it couldn’t be bad. Generations of Lakashi women and a handful of scientists would not persist in chewing a foul tasting tree. How had that first Lakashi woman thought to break the bark with her teeth, and how did that first moth, who must have been eating something somewhere before this, flutter in behind her? Marina pressed in somewhat harder and felt a sharp stab in her upper gum line but she was not deterred. She was not seventy-three. She was not so old at all, and there were plenty of women who had children at her age, women who certainly never went as far as this. As ambivalent as she was regarding her own ability to reproduce, she was not the least bit ambivalent about the science of the experiment. Now she wanted that global satellite phone. She would have called Mr. Fox from where she stood and told him what was possible.

Dr. Budi tapped her shoulder. “Enough now,” she said. “Too much at first affects the bowels.”

Nancy handed her a swab sealed inside a test tube. “For later,” she said. “You could just drop it off on my desk.”

Marina touched her fingers to her lips and nodded. “Did Anders come here? Did he try this?”

There was a look that passed between the other three, a very brief flash of discomfort. “He was interested in our work,” Thomas said. “From the beginning. He was with us here for as long as he could be.”

“I want to see where he’s buried,” Marina said, hoping it was here in the field of Martins. She hadn’t asked before because she wasn’t sure she would be able to bear the sight of it, looking down at all the ungodly growth and knowing that Anders was beneath that weight forever. But it would be easier to remember him in a beautiful place. She could describe all of this to Karen. She could explain the openness. Even if he wasn’t here, this is what she would tell her.

“Ah,” Nancy Saturn said, pressing the toe of her tennis shoe against the root of a Martin.

“We don’t know,” Thomas said.

“Who does know? Dr. Swenson knows.”

After a period of silence it was Dr. Budi who spoke up. She was not one to leave a difficult job to someone else. “The Lakashi bury people during a ritual. They take the body away, they take the Rapps. It is a private matter for them.”

“But he wasn’t one of them,” Marina said. She saw him laid out on a makeshift bier being carted off into the very trees he hated, Gulliver dead and dragged away by Lilliputians. “It makes a difference. It makes an enormous difference.” She said it knowing full well it made no difference whatsoever. He was dead and that was all that mattered.

“They were very fond of Anders,” Thomas said, patting her shoulder. “They would have given him every care.”

“It was raining hard that week,” Dr. Budi said. “It was very hot. The Lakashi would not bury him where we asked and we could not bury him ourselves.”

“So you gave him up.” She saw Karen so clearly in her mind, sliding down to her kitchen floor, taking the dog in her arms. Karen had felt it fully even then, never having seen this place. “It was the only thing Dr. Swenson said in her letter, that he had been buried in keeping with his Christian traditions. I don’t even know if he had any Christian traditions but I doubt he planned to be buried in a jungle by a group of people eating mushrooms.”

“She said it to comfort you,” Dr. Budi said.

“Let’s go back,” Nancy said, and put an arm around Marina.

There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it. Karen Eckman had wanted Marina to go to Brazil to find out what had happened to her husband, but now that she was here she understood what Dr. Swenson had