State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [102]
Let me tell you the virtue of fever: it brings YOU here. I would have preferred it take me home and once or twice that’s happened but for the most part YOU arrive at 4:00 and take me out of this bed and we walk through the jungle, and Karen, you know EVERYTHING about the jungle. You know the names of all the spiders. You are afraid of nothing. I am afraid of nothing when you are here. Let me live in this fever. It is so much worse now, the hours I am well
Then nothing. Maybe these were the letters Anders didn’t finish, the ones he started and forgot, and Easter picked them up off the floor while Anders slept and tucked them away. Of the three she had received so far two were only paragraphs and the third was a scant two sentences:
What was the name of the couple who lived next door to us in the apartment building on Petit Court? I see them here constantly and I cannot think of their names.
Dr. Swenson had gone to her room at the back of the lab after being sick, and by the time she returned everyone had finished his or her letter except for Dr. Budi who seemed to approach the question of what to say as a spatial problem. She would stare for a long time at her paper and then turn her eyes up to the ceiling as if trying to calculate exactly how many words she needed to express her feelings and how many inches there were left on the paper for those words. Dr. Swenson returned after lunch looking like nothing had happened and when Marina started to ask her how she was feeling, Dr. Swenson waved her away. “Fine,” she said, without waiting for the question.
Alan Saturn stood in front of Dr. Budi and tapped the table with his fingers. “Give it up,” he said.
“You could have told me last night that you meant to go today.” She was a fine-boned woman of indeterminate age who wore her black hair in a single braid in the manner of the Lakashi. She folded her letter into thirds and ran her tongue along the glue strip.
“Nothing happens here,” Alan said. “No one needs that much time to write a letter.”
Dr. Budi reached into the pocket of the cotton smock she wore and pulled out several small bills which she handed over to Dr. Saturn along with the envelope. Then, without further conversation, she returned her attention to her work. In her devotion to her task, Dr. Budi was an archetype of a particular sort in the medical community, as much as the ill-tempered surgeon or the addicted anesthesiologist. Any time a group of doctors came together, there was always the one whose car would be in the parking lot when the others arrived at dawn and whose car would still be there when the others pulled away after midnight, the one who was standing at the nurses’ station at four a.m. reviewing a chart when it wasn’t her weekend on call, the one the other doctors privately ridiculed for having no life and yet with whom they felt a gnawing and irrational sense of competition. What was remarkable was how ably Dr. Budi filled this role even when there was no hospital, no parking lot, and no patients. When all they did was work, Dr. Budi worked more. She claimed that she had already read all the Dickens.
“Have you ever been to Java?” Alan Saturn asked Marina. “Anywhere in Indonesia?” She had followed him down to the dock with the Lakashi, not even asking herself why she was doing it. A departure, an arrival, she was beginning to see their appeal as a diversion. She was certain one of the men was wearing a pair of her pants rolled up at the cuffs. Pieces of her clothing walked by her from time to time and there was nothing to do but watch them pass. She shook her head.
“It’s my theory that Budi is more suited to the tropics than the