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By Root 812 0

do with the humidity, which is the enemy of all machines. While I am told there is an Internet connection in a village several hours west of Manaus (which is nowhere near us anyway) it only works when there have been two entire weeks without rain, which means de facto no connection. The second phone you gave me, along with my second suitcase, disappeared after my arrival in the Lakashi Village. I have been a poor steward of my belongings. It has been so long since I’ve been able to tell you where I am that I worry by now you must think I’m dead. I am hoping the mail service comes through for me and you get this letter quickly. I’ve been here a week and this is my first hope of getting a letter out of the village, though Dr. Nkomo told me that when Anders was here he would stand on the banks of the river with a letter in his hand and watch for any passing dugout canoe. What I most want to say is that you shouldn’t worry about me. Life among the Lakashi has been better than expected. I have a small job in the lab and over time I feel I will be able to discern how much real progress has been made on the drug. While everyone is friendly no one is particularly forthcoming as to what aspects of the research they are responsible for. I will tell you that the pregnancies are astonishing. Ages are difficult to document in the older members of the tribe (Dr. Swenson began to document the children when she first arrived fifty years ago) but there are pregnant women here who seem clearly to be in their seventies. The more I see the more I understand your commitment to this drug, no matter how much time it takes to reach the first human dose.

Marina was at the end of her fold-over sheet and she hesitated at her closing. Love was not a word that had made its way into their parlance and yet she was certain it was implicitly true. She couldn’t see how, given all that had happened, that there would be anything shocking about its introduction here. And so she wrote it in ink, Love, Marina. She followed this letter with very brief notes to her mother and Karen in which she used most of her paper explaining why the note was so short. After all, the boat was leaving soon and she didn’t want to keep anyone waiting. She promised to start longer letters immediately and save them for the next departure.

It was true that Anders had been impatient with the mail system, several people had commented on that. He would take Easter to the river and they would stand for hours waiting for anyone to paddle past, then when finally someone did, he would have the boy swim out with the letter and the money. Dr. Budi said he tried to get a letter in every boat that went by just to increase his chances that one or two might actually find their way home to his wife. But after a while he was too sick to go down to the water himself, too sick to spend so many hours in the sun, and so he sent Easter alone. It did not require a great deal of inquiry on Marina’s part to put this together, nor much conjecture to fill in the missing pieces: Anders, sick, wrote letters to his wife. Easter, worried, did not want to leave Anders for the amount of time it would have taken to find a boat going past. The traffic on their little tributary was thin at best and on some days not a single person floated by. While Easter would have understood the ritual of giving the blue envelope to someone in a boat, he could not have understood what a letter was or what it represented, only that Anders wrote and wrote. He would have only just come back to the sleeping porch and his friend would want to send him out again with another envelope.

The first time Marina found one of those blue paper rectangles in her bed, perfectly sealed and addressed to Karen Eckman in Eden Prairie, she froze as solidly as a blood sample in the very bottom of the freezer. She leaned over the railing and shined the flashlight into the night jungle looking for a flash of Anders running away, her heart in full arrhythmia, but it didn’t take her long to figure out who had delivered it. For Easter, these envelopes were