• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 885 0

the end of all the earth. I assumed that Dr. Eckman was dead. I remember feeling surprised, as sick as he was I had thought he would pull through. We came onto the porch and Easter had a flashlight. He showed me the bed, he showed me the room. Dr. Eckman was gone. While Easter was asleep in his hammock Dr. Eckman had wandered off in the night. I went to wake Benoit and he rounded up a group of Lakashi, but no one could find him. Not that night or all the next day. We never found him. You’ve been out there. It isn’t so hard to imagine that a man who was very sick would last about twenty minutes in the jungle at night. He would step on a spider. He would crawl into the hollow of some rotting tree and never wake up. Something had eaten him, something had dragged him away. I didn’t know what it was but he was gone, Dr. Singh, he was as gone as any man who had died, and so that’s what I said. I told the other doctors the Lakashi take away their dead in the middle of the night. I wrote a letter saying we had buried him. And I believed I had handled the situation with as much humanity as was possible until Barbara Bovender turned up the wrong tributary and saw her father.”

Marina had thought she understood this place. She had spotted the lancehead after all, she had cut apart the anaconda. She had performed surgeries she was neither licensed nor qualified to perform on a dirty floor and had eaten from the trees and swum in the river in a bloody dress only to find out that none of those things were on the test. There was in fact a circle of hell beneath this one that required an entirely different set of skills that she did not possess. She would have to go there anyway. She had been foolish enough to think that she had given up everything when in fact she could see now that she hadn’t even started. Anders Eckman could still be alive. Anders her friend, Anders father of three, was down the river with the cannibals waiting for another boat to go by. “Is there any safe way for me to do this?” she said finally.

Dr. Swenson covered her eyes with the heels of her hands. “No. In fact, I imagine they’ll kill you.”

Anders took off his lab coat and put on his jacket that was hanging on the back of the door. He retied his tie, took his briefcase off the desk. “If I have to go to one more meeting it is going to kill me,” he said to Marina.

Marina looked out the open door. Somehow it was still morning. It wasn’t two hours ago that she had been eating the Martins. “I should go now,” she said.

“After we’ve thought it through,” Dr. Swenson said. “First there has to be a plan.”

Marina shook her head, thinking of Karen Eckman and what she had said about Anders not being comfortable with the trees. She would have walked off the path at that moment. She would have gone straight into the jungle to find him. “I don’t think tomorrow’s going to be any better.” And with that she left, Easter trailing behind her. She could hear Dr. Swenson calling her name as she went past the lab but she didn’t go back. They could have talked it over for the rest of their lives. Marina only wanted to be on the boat, out on the water, heading towards Anders and her own fate. She was floating now, caught in a current that pulled her ahead and to her surprise she did not mind it. She was content to float, to be pulled under or tossed up. She would give herself over to the force of the river if the river took her to Anders. She would have gone straight to the dock but she needed to take something with her. She was trying to think of what she could offer the Hummocca in exchange for her friend. She looked around the storage room, opening boxes, and found ten oranges left in the bottom of the crate. She took them along with the peanut butter. She put the white nightgown Barbara Bovender had given her around her neck like a scarf, thinking if there was in fact a universal language of surrender it would at least give her the means to do so. She wished for buttons and beads, knives and paint. She wished for something other than syringes, litmus papers, glass tubes with rubber