Of course there were times when neither the poncho nor the awnings were enough and the rain drove Marina to run in her flip-flops back to the hotel, every drop pricking her skin like a hornet. The chemicals in her sunscreen mixed with the DEET in her insect repellent and when she tried to wipe the water from her face it burned her eyes until she was half blind. Back at the hotel she showered and napped and did her best with the James novel, and when she’d had enough of that she read about the reproductive endocrinology in the Lakashi people.
As Anders had tried to explain to her when she had been so disinclined to listen, the Lakashi were an isolated tribe in the Amazon whose women appeared to continue to give birth to healthy infants well into their seventies. Securing accurate ages on the women was of course an inaccurate science. Still, it did not undermine the point: old women were having babies. The Lakashi were reproducing for up to thirty years beyond the women in the neighboring tribes. Families containing five generations were commonplace, and aside from what could perhaps be called a heightened exhaustion, they all appeared to enjoy a state of health commensurate to that of their indigenous peers. Birth defects, mental retardation, problems with bones, teeth, vision, height, weight, everything came out as average in both mothers and children as compared to members in neighboring tribes over a thirty-five-year period of study.
Marina rolled over onto her back and held the journal above her. A thirty-five-year period of study? That would mean that while Dr. Swenson was, to the best of her knowledge, teaching a full load at Hopkins she was also studying the Lakashi in Brazil? Of course, who knew what she did on the weekends, spring breaks, Thanksgiving vacations. It was possible she had been flying to Manaus all those years and hiring a boat to take her down the splitting tributaries of the Rio Negro. Had it been anyone else she would have been certain the whole report was an ambitious fraud, but Dr. Swenson had always exhibited a relentless energy that defied all human understanding. If someone had told Marina that while she was stumbling through her rounds half asleep in Baltimore, Dr. Swenson was taking the red-eye to Brazil to collect data, she would have been impressed but not amazed. In fact, the very paper she was reading included research from a dissertation for which she had been awarded a doctorate in ethnobotany from Harvard. It seemed there was a great deal about Dr. Swenson she didn’t know.
When the rains came hard and caught her out too far to run back to the hotel, Marina would go to the Internet café and pay five dollars to look up information about Dr. Swenson or her tribe, but as she sat there trying not to let her hair drip on the keyboard she found there was remarkably little information to be had. Google Annick Swenson and there were course descriptions, appearances at medical conferences, papers—mostly related to gynecological surgery—some tedious postings from medical students who complained that Dr. Swenson’s classes, and probably all of their classes, were unfairly difficult. Most of the mentions of Lakashi linked back to the New England Journal of Medicine article, although the name also came up in relation to the famous Harvard ethnobotanist Martin Rapp, who had first interacted with the tribe while taking plant samples in 1960. His interest in them as a people appeared nominal, as his writing about their habits was limited to which species of fungi they did and did not consume. There was a single picture of him, an extremely thin sunburnt man with light hair and a straight English nose who stood a head above the natives on either side of him. They were all holding up mushrooms. Marina read everything she could find about Dr. Rapp and the Lakashi in hopes that there might be some clues as to their location, but the most specific directive she found was “central Amazon basin.” Leave it to Dr. Swenson to somehow manage to keep the Internet out of her business.
“Tell me they’ve found the suitcase,” Mr. Fox said as soon as he answered the phone. Mr. Fox had somehow become more focused on whether or not she had made successful contact with her luggage than with either Dr. Swenson or the mythical Bovenders.
“Apparently the airport code for Manaus is MAO. Madrid is MAD. The theory is that an O starts to look like a D after a certain number of suitcases and so they start sending bags to Spain.”
“I’m going to mail you another phone,” he said. “I’ll get it programmed and shipped down there tomorrow. You’re going to need more Lariam soon anyway. Make a list of what you want.”
“Nothing,” she said, looking at the rings of insect bites that braceleted her wrists and ankles, hard red bumps that she longed to dig out with her fingernails. “I don’t need anything. The second you send another phone my suitcase will show up and then I’ll have two.”
“So then you’ll have two. You can give one to Dr. Swenson. There may be someone she wants to call.”
In fact, Marina enjoyed not having a telephone. She had started out as an intern with a pager and then added to that a cell phone that later turned into a BlackBerry. In Manaus, there was an almost indescribable sense of freedom that came from wandering around in a strange city knowing that she was unreachable. “Speaking of Dr. Swenson, I’ve been reading about the Lakashi.”
“It’s always good to read up on people before you meet them,” Mr. Fox replied.
“It’s an interesting article but she doesn’t exactly give anything away.”
“Dr. Swenson doesn’t mean to give things away.”
“So what’s the secret ingredient? Does she even know? Certainly the Lakashi don’t know. I don’t care how primitive these women are, if they understood what they were doing that was causing them to remain fertile unto death they’d stop doing it.”
Mr. Fox fell silent on his end and Marina waited.
“You know and you don’t want to tell me?” Marina said, laughing. Surely his secretary, the very serious Mrs. Dunaway, had walked into his office at that moment and forced him to wait on his reply.
“It isn’t a matter of want,” Mr. Fox said finally.
Marina had relaxed into the conversation and spread herself out across the bed but a bolt of incredulity forced her to sit upright again. “What?”
“There is an agreement of confidentiality—”
“I’m in Brazil,” she said. “I found a lizard in the bathtub this morning the size of a kitten. I don’t know where Dr. Swenson is or how to find her and now you’re saying you aren’t going to tell me how the Lakashi women maintain fertility? Is there something I still need to do to merit your trust?”
“Marina, Marina, it has nothing to do with you. It’s contractual. I’m not allowed to talk about it.”
“It has nothing to do with me? Then why am I here? If this
has nothing to do with me then I would very much like to come
home now.”
In truth, she did not care. She did not care that the Lakashi were having 3.7 times the number of children as compared to other indigenous Brazilians over the course of their lifetimes. She didn’t care where they lived or if they were happy or if they wanted the children they had. What she did care about, cared about very much in fact, was that her employer, who had virtually proposed marriage and then sent her off to the equator after one of Vogel’s employees had died there, now refused to share with her the basic information of the research in question. “When I find Dr. Swenson and all those pregnant Lakashi people, am I supposed to avert my eyes so I won’t figure out how they’re managing this? Do they make it a practice of killing anyone who finds out their secret?” And then she saw Anders standing ankle deep in the muddy river, holding a single blue envelope in his hand. “My God,” she said. “My God, I didn’t mean that.”
“They chew some sort of bark while it’s still on the tree,” Mr.
Fox said.
Marina did not care at all about the bark or the trees. “I didn’t mean that.”
“I know,” he said, but all the light had gone out of his voice, and in another couple of sentences they had wrapped it all up and gotten off the phone. Marina put her shoes on and went back out int
o the street. The rain had stopped and the sun was beating the pavement and buildings and people and dogs into a flat sameness. She didn’t want to walk to the river or the market hall and so she walked for a while around the square in the choking humidity thinking of how Anders must have walked around the square as well. Maybe he hadn’t felt hopeless when he came here. Maybe he was glad to go on day-long birding excursions into the jungle and drink pisco sours alone at the bar at night. Marina bent over to look at the carved trinkets that a group of natives were selling off a blanket. She picked up a bracelet that could have been smooth painted beads or red seeds with holes drilled through the centers. She let the woman on the blanket tie it to her wrist with a complex and permanent set of knots and then bite off the ends, her lips somehow never touching skin. One of the children, a narrow-chested boy of nine or ten, looked through the menagerie of tiny carved animals that were spread out in front of him and picked out a white heron that was two inches high, a tiny fish caught in the needle of its beak, and he handed it to her. Marina had meant to refuse it, but once she held it up she thought it was in fact very fine, better than anything else she had seen, and so she agreed to buy the heron and the bracelet for a handful of bills she thought worked out to be about three dollars U.S. She put the little bird in her pocket and walked down a series of side streets, careful to keep all her turns in mind. She wasn’t in the mood to get lost. The farther she walked the more she noticed that no one was looking at her. The small boys with stacks of T-shirts and dazzling butterflies pinned to boards inside cheap wooden frames didn’t follow her. The ice cream vendors didn’t call to her, nor did the man with the mustache and a small monkey on each shoulder who was barking at tourists in Portuguese. With her black hair caught back in a barrette beneath the hat she’d bought and her cheap clothing and her flip-flops, she was able to pass in Manaus the way she was never able to pass in Minnesota. Here they looked at her and seeing someone who looked something like a woman they knew, looked away. When she was spoken to it was only a simple greeting, that much she understood, and she nodded her head in recognition and kept walking. Anders would have been mobbed everywhere. He was so blue-eyed and overly tall, his skin was very nearly luminous, as unfamiliar to these people as snow itself. Any passerby could see deeper into Anders than he could the Rio Negro. Marina thought of all the times he’d come to work on Monday after a weekend spent paddling the boys around some lake in the summer, and how his skin would be scorched, his lips and nose already starting to peel. “Haven’t you heard of sunblock?” Marina said. “Hats?”
“They keep all that information from men.” He didn’t wear a tie to work on those days and his shirt collar stayed open. The sore, red visage of his neck was something Marina made a point not to look at. Who thought it would be a good idea to send Anders to the equator? Her own skin was darker now. The sun had extended its reach past the hats and creams. It was inevitable.
When Marina turned again, a turn that was as aimless as all the others she had made, she found herself back at Rodrigo’s store. There were no crowds out front this time, no one peering in the window. In the daylight it didn’t appear to be such a compelling attraction. The street outside was empty of people, empty of cars. In fact when she went inside, thinking she would say hello, buy a bottle of water, there was only one young couple in the store, a man and woman in their twenties pointing up to something that was over their heads. The woman was long-limbed and tan in a red sundress and she stretched to try and reach for whatever it was she wanted. Her long yellow hair, which was held away from her face by a large pair of sunglasses pushed back on her head, was the brightest aspect of the room, as it seemed that Rodrigo was no more inclined towards electricity during the day than he had been at night. The young man, who may have been a little taller than the woman, stood back in his T-shirt and baggy shorts and watched her stretch. His hair was pale brown and shaggy and his face, which was nearly too pretty, was half covered up in what was either a beard or several days spent not shaving. They hadn’t noticed her come in, and so Marina watched them, in part because they made an unusual sight for Manaus, and in part because she was sure that they were the Bovenders.
She had pictured the Bovenders as being closer to her own age, without any of the drama inherent to so much bony attractiveness, but the minute she walked in the store she revised the imaginings of her idle mind. There was a tattoo banding the young man’s ankle, a decorative vine, and around the woman’s ankle a small gold chain. Marina had exactly one word of description to work from, bohemians, and these were the only two bohemians she had seen in three days.
Rodrigo came into the store from a room behind the counter. He told the couple something in Portuguese and the young woman disagreed and once again reached above her head helplessly while the young man folded his arms across his chest. Was it the soap pads she wanted? When Rodrigo turned for the ladder he saw Marina standing just inside the open door and in the course of a single second he placed her, remembered who it was she wanted to find, and was pleased at the luck of being the one to make the introductions. “Ola! Dr. Singh!” he said, and when the young couple turned to see who it was Rodrigo knew, he opened his hands towards his other guests. “Bovenders.”
The young Bovenders, in possession of a highly evolved social instinct, were beaming as they walked towards her. If they had been working to avoid her they were masters at hiding it. In fact, it seemed as if meeting her in this store on this afternoon was the very thing they were most looking forward to in all the world and they would not hold it against her that she had come a little late. “Barbara Bovender,” the young woman said, extending her hand. She smiled to show the slight disorder among her large white teeth.
“Jackie,” the young man said, and Marina shook his hand as well. The accent she thought was Australian but she wasn’t positive. They seemed too tan to be English.
Rodrigo said something to Barbara and she squinted at him slightly when he spoke, as if she were translating each word separately and then reassembling them into a sentence in her head.
“Nos?”
“Dr. Swenson,” he said.
“Yes, of course,” Barbara said, looking almost relieved. “You’re looking for Dr. Swenson.”
“People don’t look for us,” Jackie said.
“That’s because nobody knows where we are,” Barbara said, and then she laughed. “That makes it sound like we’re hiding.”
Marina tried to put this couple together in her mind with Dr. Swenson. She tried to picture the three of them standing together in the same room. She could not. “I’ve left letters for you.”
“For us?” Jackie asked. “At the apartment?”
“At Dr. Swenson’s apartment building. I left them at the desk.”
At this point Rodrigo got the ladder and climbed up towards the ceiling to get a box of dryer sheets. The hierarchy in which different items were desired, needed, and sold, could clearly be charted based on what was closest to the ceiling and what was closest to the floor. Dryer sheets appeared to be hovering on the edge of obscurity for everyone in Manaus save Barbara Bovender.
“All the mail goes straight into a box,” Jackie said. “Annick picks it up when she comes into town.”
“Or she doesn’t,” Barbara said. “She isn’t very good about the mail. I’ve told her I’d open it for her, sort it all out, but she says not to bother. I think at the heart of it she just doesn’t care.”
Jackie turned then to face his wife. Was she his wife? The Bovenders could have been siblings or cousins. The general resemblance they bore to one another was striking. “She has a lot on her mind.”
Barbara nodded, half closing her eyes, as if she were considering all the many weights Dr. Swenson had to bear. “It’s true.”
“We have a postbox,” Jackie said. “That way when we get to the next town they’ll forward it on.”
“Are you leaving?” Marina asked.
/> “Oh, we will, sooner or later,” Barbara said. She looked over at Rodrigo who now had the box of dryer sheets in his hand. “We’re always leaving. We’ve stayed here longer than anywhere.”
Somehow Marina was hoping she didn’t mean Manaus. She couldn’t imagine how she would last out the week. “In Brazil?”
“No, here,” Jackie said, and held up his open hand as if he meant to say that they had spent an endless stretch of time in Rodrigo’s store.
Barbara then got a serious look on her face and tilted the slender rack of her shoulders towards Marina. “Do you know Annick?”
Marina hesitated so briefly that neither of the young people saw it. “I do,” she said.
“Well, then you know. Her work is so important—”
Jackie interrupted her. “And she’s been really good to us, my God.”
“It’s not like I think we’re helping her,” Barbara said. “We’re not scientists. But if she thinks we’re helping her, if there’s anything we can do to contribute, then it’s not a problem for us to stay for a while. It’s not a problem for me anyway. I can do my work anywhere. It’s really harder for Jackie.”
“What do you do?” Marina said, using the pronoun in the plural.
“I’m a writer,” Barbara said.
Jackie raised his hand and ran his open fingers through his hair. “I surf,” he said.
Harder, yes. Marina thought about the bath-warm water of the Rio Negro inching along towards the Rio Solimões so that they could flow together into the Amazon. She was planning to ask him something about this, how surfing constituted work or how he planned to solve the current problems of his employment, when the only other person she knew in Manuas came through the open door. When Milton saw the three of them together he was extremely pleased. He had left his suit in the closet at home and was dressed for the weather. All his light cotton clothes were neatly pressed. “Perfect!” he said. “You found each other without me.”