State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [124]
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.