State of Wonder (15 page)

So when there was knocking on her door, how much later she couldn’t say (sleep was like an anesthetic she broke out of and then slipped into again), Marina assumed it was Tomo. She put on the extra bed sheet that was her robe and answered the door.

Barbara gave her a hard stare up and down before speaking. “Oh, you are rough,” she said with her long, flat vowels. “Why didn’t you call me?”

Marina, disappointed that now she wouldn’t be able to go right back to sleep, retreated into her room, which was dark and stale. The Australian followed her.

“I’ve brought you things.” Barbara held up a small, dirty paper sack and a tapestry overnight bag as if they were enticing offers. The housekeepers hadn’t been in for a couple of days because Marina could not stop sleeping. Bits of crackers were scattered over the floor like sand. Mrs. Bovender turned on the light switch by the door and then opened the blinds. “You shouldn’t be living like this,” was all she had to say.

“My standards have changed.” Marina burrowed down into the bed. One would think it would be difficult to fall asleep in front of someone you barely knew but in fact it was the simplest thing in the world.

Barbara took a paper cup out of the bag and pried off the lid. “Here,” she said, and held it out to her. “Sit up. You’re supposed to drink it while it’s hot.”

Marina leaned forward and sniffed the contents of the cup. It was the river, boiled down to its foulest essence. It was even the color of the river. The steam that rolled off the surface was like the heavy morning mist. “Where did you get that?”

“From the shaman stand in the market, and don’t say anything dismissive about the shaman until you’ve given him a try. I’ve been bitten by half the insects in this country. I’ve had some awful fevers, some sores I wouldn’t even talk about. Jackie had food poisoning once. He ate some sort of grilled turtle from a vendor, which was idiotic in the first place. I was positive he was going to die. The shaman’s saved us every time. I could practically open an account with him.”

The shaman would no doubt have direct billing with Vogel. “But I haven’t been to see the shaman,” Marina said, applying logic where no logic could be applied. “What is he basing his diagnosis on? You haven’t seen me either.”

“I explained the situation. Actually, Milton explained the situation for me after I explained it to Milton. The shaman and I don’t exactly speak the same Portuguese, and I think it’s important to get it all right. Milton hopes you’re feeling better, by the way.” She pressed the cup against Marina’s breastbone and held it there until she took it in her hands.

“This is idiocy,” Marina said, looking down at the cloudy liquid. The cup was warm. The smell came up to her in layers: water, fish, mud, death.

“Drink it!” Barbara said sharply. “I’m tired of trying to help you. Drink it all down, one swallow, come on. This is what we do down here in hell.”

Marina, so surprised by the force of the order and by the look of mad frustration on Barbara Bovender’s face, did what she was told and took down the whole foul cup in one long swallow. It was not entirely liquid, it was thicker near the bottom, viscous, and there were tiny bits of something hard and twiglike that caught in her throat. The canoe they were in was a log and it rolled over to the side and she was thrown down with her father into the water. The water filled up her eyes and nose and mouth. She sank before she could swim and all she could taste was the river. She had forgotten until now how the river tasted.

“Put your head back and pant,” Barbara said. “Don’t throw it up.” She got down on her knees in front of Marina, putting her hands on Marina’s knees. Mr. Fox had said the difference between Marina and Anders was that Anders hadn’t had the sense to come home when he had first fallen sick, but oh, it wasn’t a matter of whether she was willing. It was all a matter of able. A chill passed through her, a great shuddering wave that washed over her wet skin and made her spine convulse.

“Okay,” Barbara said quietly, patting at her knee as if it were the head of a very small dog, “here’s the other thing. You’re going to be really sick now, but just for a little while, an hour or so, maybe two. It all depends on what needs to break down inside you. Then you’re going to be absolutely fine. You’re going to be better than fine. I’d be happy to stay with you. I’m free all afternoon.”

Marina looked at her guest but all she could really make out was the light of her hair which appeared to be receding down a tunnel. She said she did not want her to stay.

Barbara sat back on her heels looking disappointed. She took Marina’s cold fingers in her hand and bounced them. “Okay, I’ll come back then at five and we can talk about what dress you’re going to wear tomorrow. I brought a few that I think will be pretty on you. It’s good that you have a friend who’s as tall as you are.” She waited. “Are you going to be sick now? Try to wait as long as you can. The longer you can hold it down the better it works. Panting really helps.”

Lines of sweat began to run down Marina’s forehead, down from the crown of her head, down the back of her neck. A clear, thin mucus came from her nose at a rate that exceeded both the perspiration and the tears that were pouring from her eyes. She did not lift her hand to her face. She let the slick wall pour unabated. It was early still but she realized very clearly there was nothing she could do to stop this from happening. The trembling shook her hard enough to knock her teeth and she tried to keep her mouth open. Even if there were an antidote she would never get to it in time. This was the end of the end. She knew what it felt like now. If she lived to see it come again she would call it by name. In one of her last clear thoughts, Marina wondered if she had been murdered, or if by taking the cup herself, she had committed suicide.

Far outside the city the tree frogs were calling her, and the deep, rhythmic pulse of their voices set the blood flow to her heart.

M
arina woke up on the cool tile of the bathroom floor, her head resting on a pile of towels. She opened her eyes and watched a bright red spider of medium size slip beneath the sink cabinet. The details of the time that had elapsed, she didn’t know how much time it was, were not clear, and for that she was grateful. She breathed in and breathed out, moved her fingers and toes, stretched open her mouth and closed it again. The shaman-induced illness had left her and in the violence of its departure had scraped out whatever illness she had had in the first place. She was alive, possibly well. Her hip was sore from the angle she had been lying at but that hardly seemed important. Carefully, slowly, she pulled herself upright and then moved the short distance over the ledge of the bathtub where she sat in the bottom just to be safe and let the hot shower beat against her head until the water slipped to lukewarm. After that she brushed her teeth and drank a bottle of water. She was sore and raw but she experienced that distinct mental clarity that marked a fever’s end. She rolled her head from side to side. She walked naked into the bedroom, a towel around her head, to find the room was clean and Barbara Bovender was sitting in a chair by the window reading the
New England Journal of Medicine
.

“Look who’s up!” Barbara said.

“You were leaving,” Marina said, but very little sound came out. She coughed, trying to reset her vocal cords which had been stripped from vomiting. “You were leaving.” She found the bathrobe sheet folded on the foot of the bed and pulled it around her.

“I was going to, but you got sick so fast. It really went right to work on you. I thought I should stay just to make sure you didn’t fall and hit your head on the toilet, anything like that. But you’re better, right? I can tell just by looking at you.”

“I am,” Marina said. She couldn’t bring herself to thank the person who had so recently poisoned her, nor could she deny that the poison had improved her circumstances.

“I’ve never read this article,” Barbara said, holding up the journal. “It’s fascinating, even the science parts which I really don’t follow. I kept thinking about how lucky it was that things worked out so that I was sitting in your hotel room for a couple of hours. I have to tell you, I really didn’t understand Annick’s work at all before this. To think of being able to wait and have your children whenever you want them, forty, fifty—sixty even, that would be amazing.” Barbara stopped and looked at her hostess. “You know, I’ve never asked you, do you have children?”

“I do not,” Marina said. The air conditioning had been turned up to high and she was starting to shiver in the cold. “I’d like to get dressed now.” For the first time in days she was hungry.

“Oh sure, of course.” Barbara got up from her chair. “Do you mind if I borrow this? I know Jackie would want to read it.”

“Fine,” Marina said.

“Try the dresses on and let me know which one you like.” Barbara stopped at the door. “I really am so glad it all worked out and that you’re better. I’ll tell the shaman, he’ll be so pleased. We’ll pick you up tomorrow at seven, alright?”

But she didn’t mean it as a question. Before Marina had a chance to answer, Barbara Bovender and the
New England Journal of Medicine
were gone.

Five

T
he point of an evening at Teatro Amazonas was not so much to see an opera as it was to see an opera house. They had tickets for Gluck’s
Orfeo ed Euridice
, but only because there had to be tickets for something. The building itself was the performance, the two long marble staircases curving up in front, the high blue walls piped with crisp white embellishments, the great tiled dome that must have been torn from a Russian palace by a monstrous storm and blown all the way to South America, or so a tourist had told Marina one morning when she stopped to take a picture of it with her phone. There was no real explanation for how such a building was conceived for such a place. Marina thought of it as the line of civilization that held the jungle back. Surely without the opera house the vines would have crept up over the city and swallowed it whole.

“The natives swear that nobody built it,” Barbara said, taking the tickets out from her tiny black lacquered evening bag. “They say it just happened.”

Jackie nodded. It was the version of which he most approved. “They say it was brought down in a space ship for some prince because this was the only place he could have sex.”

Barbara Bovender was wearing a short ivory-colored dress that showed the full length of her leg, a shameless expanse of tanned calf and thigh that was exaggerated by a very high pair of evening sandals. It was a dress she had first offered to Marina and Marina had declined. Every dress Barbara had brought over in her tapestry bag was missing some essential piece of fabric: the front or the back or the skirt, leaving Marina to decide which part of herself she could best afford to leave uncovered. The ivory dress had a modest neckline and long sleeves but was short enough to embarrass a third-grader. In the end she settled on a long straight dress of dark gray silk that left bare her arms and back because Barbara consented to lend her a wrap, even though she said it ruined the lines. Once Marina’s fever had broken and the vomiting had stopped, she was in fact grateful, not only for her shaman cure (though she wished she had taken a vaccine for hepatitis A before leaving on her trip) but for the loan of an inappropriate dress and the chance to go to the opera. She appreciated having a reason to scrub beneath her fingernails, to leave her room in the evening, to listen to music. What’s more, Mrs. Bovender came back to her hotel before the performance to pin up Marina’s hair and apply her eyeliner as if she were a bride. Marina had had many friends in her life who could recite the periodic table from memory but not since high school had she had a friend with a particular talent for hair. When Barbara was through with her considerable work she led Marina to the mirror so that she could be overwhelmed by the results, and Marina, who didn’t remember looking as beautiful on her wedding day, obliged. “You have to make a point of looking nice every now and then,” Barbara said, clamping a significant gold cuff around Marina’s wrist. “Believe me, if you don’t do it down here then everything is lost.”

When the three of them moved through the lobby, the crowds of opera goers turned to watch them pass. Jackie, slightly stoned, with his lightly tinted glasses and glossy hair, looked like a man who was likely to arrive with two women. He wore a white linen shirt with white embroidery down the front, a surfer’s version of formal wear. Marina was only sorry to think that this beauty she was doubtlessly incapable of replicating was being spent on the Bovenders. After all, Mr. Fox enjoyed the opera. It wasn’t so unreasonable to think he could have visited her here. She imagined the weight of her hand resting inside his arm.

The usher unlocked the door to their box with a heavy brass skeleton key that he wore around his neck on a velvet cord. He made a slight bow to each of them while distributing the programs. The three of them had eight red velvet chairs to choose from. Marina leaned over the brass railing on their balcony to watch the prosperous citizens of Manaus find their way to their seats. The inside of the house was a wedding cake, every intricately decorated layer balanced delicately on the shoulders of the one beneath it, rising up and up to a ceiling where frescoed angels parted the wandering clouds with their hands. When the chandeliers began to dim, Jackie put his hand on his wife’s thigh and she crossed her other leg over to pin him there. Marina turned her attention down to the orchestra. With a face of pure serenity, Barbara leaned towards Marina and whispered, “I love this part.” Marina didn’t know what part she meant, and didn’t ask, but when the house was dark and the overture rose up to their third-tier balcony she understood completely. Suddenly every insect in Manaus was forgotten. The chicken heads that cluttered the tables in the market place and the starving dogs that waited in the hopes that one might fall were forgotten. The children with fans that waved the flies away from the baskets of fish were forgotten even as she knew she was not supposed to forget the children. She longed to forget them. She managed to forget the smells, the traffic, the sticky pools of blood. The doors sealed them in with the music and sealed the world out and suddenly it was clear that building an opera house was a basic act of human survival. It kept them all from rotting in the unendurable heat. It saved their souls in ways those murdering Christian missionaries could never have envisioned. In these past few days of fever Marina had forgotten herself. The city was breaking her down along with the Lariam, her sense of failure, her nearly mad desire to be home in time to see the lilacs. But then the orchestra struck a note that brought her back to herself. Every pass of the cellists’ bows across the cellos’ strings scraped away a bit of her confusion, and the woodwinds returned her to strength. While she sat in the dark, Marina started to think that this opera house, and indeed this opera, were meant to save her. She knew the story of Orpheus, but it wasn’t until the singing began that she realized it was the story of her life. She was Orfeo, and there was no question that Anders was Euridice, dead from a snake bite. Marina had been sent to hell to bring him back. Had Karen been able to leave the boys, she would have been Orfeo. It was the role she had been born to play. But Karen was in Minnesota, and Marina’s mind was filled with Anders now, their seven years of friendship, the fifty hours a week they spent charting lipids, listening to the rise and fall of each other’s breath.

Barbara opened up her tiny purse and handed Marina a Kleenex. “Blot in a straight line beneath your eyes,” she whispered.

A woman sang the role of Orfeo in a baggy toga, her hair slicked back and caught beneath a crown of gilded leaves. She stood there center stage, a lyre in her arms to cover her breasts, and sang her sorrow to the chorus.

Jackie leaned across his wife. “Why is it a woman?” he whispered to Marina. Marina dabbed her nose and bent in to tell him that the alternative was to find a castrato for whom the part was originally written, but a hand reached between them and thumped Jackie on the shoulder with two hard taps.

“Quiet,” the woman’s voice said.

Marina and the two Bovenders straightened their spines as if the same small voltage had run up the carved chair legs and through the velvet seats. They began to turn, the three of them together, but the hand came back between Barbara and Marina and pointed to the stage. That was how they watched the rest of the opera, their eyes forward and their entire consciousness turned behind them to focus on Dr. Swenson.

Dr. Swenson! Back from the jungle and here at the opera with no announcement at all. And now they were made to wait, not to get out of their seats like reasonable people, step into the stairwell or go down to the lobby to begin the conversation that should have been started weeks ago. At first Marina had thought about how she would feel once she saw Dr. Swenson, but the longer she had stayed in Brazil the more she came to consider her chances of finding her to be hopeless. The scenarios she had run in her mind involved going home to tell Karen and Mr. Fox that she had failed. Euridice was behind Orfeo as they trudged the long road up from the underworld, Euridice constantly harping, complaining, her lovely soprano voice turned into a droning saw—
Why won’t you look at me? Why don’t you love me?
Dear God, even in her enormous beauty she was unbearable. Marina fixed her eyes forward and willed herself with everything in her not to turn around. She noticed that Jackie’s hand was no longer sandwiched between his wife’s thighs and that they were both staring at the stage with great concentration, no doubt wondering if they had properly aired the apartment, made the bed, returned all the lacy scraps of underwear to their proper drawers. Marina, who had folded the shawl in her lap once the lights went down because it was less than perfectly cool in this third-tier box, considered the visage of her naked shoulders and back that were presently obstructing Dr. Swenson’s view of the stage, the complicated twist of her hair held in place with two black sticks ornamented with tiny gold fans as if she were a Chinese princess. She imagined herself in a hospital room, sitting at a patient’s bedside in her dark gray silk, and suddenly Dr. Swenson came into the room behind her.
I was paged
, Marina said to her, trying to explain the lack of fabric in her dress.
I’ve been at the opera
.

Her own fear surprised her most, the dull thumping deep in her bowels that was associated with the instruction that she might now open her test booklet and begin. Or even later, being called on in Grand Rounds,
Dr. Singh, if you would then explain to us why the numbness persists.
Marina would have expected anger, confrontation. It wouldn’t matter that someone was singing, that everyone around them would hear her.
I want you to tell me what happened to Anders!
was what she had planned to say. What a thought. She had nothing to say to Dr. Swenson. She was waiting to hear what Dr. Swenson had to say to her.
Dr. Singh, of course I remember, you blinded that child in Baltimore.
The sweat under her arms came down her rib cage in an unimpeded line, and because of the way the dress was cut, fastened behind her neck and low across her back, it did not pool into a stain until it was nearly at her waist. Orfeo could not take it another minute, the badgering, the chilling doubt.
Isn’t it proof enough that I’ve come to hell for you?
he could have said
. Couldn’t you trust my love and wait another twenty minutes while I navigate this narrow path?
But no, it didn’t work that way. He had to see her. He had to reassure her of his love. He had to shut her up. He turned to his beloved and in doing so he killed her all over again, sending her down to that pit of endless sleep where the story had first begun.

With everything in her, Marina willed the singers to stop singing, the musicians to put down their instruments in recognition of the unbearable anxiety emanating from the third tier. Such is the stuff of dreams. It wasn’t enough that in this opera the dead were alive and then dead again due to the botched efforts of the protagonist, there were still more reversals of fortune and a very long dance segment to endure, but the ending did at last arrive. Marina and the two Bovenders applauded violently, all the repressed energy of waiting finally able to release itself into their slapping hands. “Brava!” Jackie called when the mezzo came forward on the stage.

“It was hardly as good as all that,” Dr. Swenson said behind them.

As if that sentence were their permission, they stood and turned, the three of them, Dr. Swenson’s chorus. “Probably not,” Barbara said, as if this were a conversation. “But it’s just so lovely to go to the opera.”

“Great seats,” Jackie said.

Marina, who was considerably taller in Mrs. Bovender’s shoes, neglected to take Dr. Swenson’s height into account and so looked directly over Dr. Swenson’s head when she turned. She saw another person in the box, a man in a suit who stayed beneath the eaves. Milton mouthed to her a silent hello.

Barbara put her arm around Marina’s shoulder and pulled her close. The gesture could have been seen as possessive or loving and yet Marina suspected it was really an attempt by the younger woman to remain standing. She could feel Barbara Bovender’s heartbeat as she pushed in hip to hip, rib to rib. A low current of trembling rumbled between them and she could not be sure which of them was the source. “Annick, you know my friend Dr. Singh,” Barbara said.

“Dr. Singh,” Dr. Swenson said, and offered her hand, neither confirming nor denying what she knew. The last thirteen years had not touched Dr. Swenson, except that her skin, which had seen very little sun in those Baltimore winters, was now quite tan, and her hair was more white than gray. It still floated around her broad, open face in the same disorganized cloud Marina remembered. She was blue-eyed, bright, her small hand round and soft in Marina’s own. Her clothing was wrinkled, sensible, making no concessions for a night at the opera. It seemed possible that she had come directly from the dock. This woman who had fixed the course of Marina’s life looked for all the world like somebody’s Swedish grandmother on a chartered tour of the Amazon.

“I’m very glad—” Marina began.

“Sit, sit,” Dr. Swenson said, and sat herself to set the example. “She’s going to sing the Villa-Lobos.”

“The what?” Barbara said.

Dr. Swenson answered her with a tremendous glare and took the fourth chair in the first row next to Marina while the soprano, the tedious and beautiful Euridice, put a modest hand to her breast and bent her head forward to receive the maelstrom of applause. The Villa-Lobos, Brazil’s singular contribution to the classical repertoire, was considerably more beautiful than the Gluck, or the soprano was inclined to sing the vocalise with more tenderness than she had been able to bring to her previous role, and for the briefest moment Marina was able to forget what was behind her (Anders’ death) and all that there was still to come (the now inevitable trip into the jungle with her professor) and she listened. It took eight cellos and a human voice to quiet her mind.