State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [62]
Marina pulled out a chair beside Easter, across from Dr. Swenson, and felt a significant throbbing in her feet as the blood shifted back up her legs. She decided to be grateful for the chair and for the audience.
After taking in all the information the menu had to offer, Dr. Swenson laid it down. Now that she knew what she would have for dinner she was ready to begin. “Allow me to be direct, Dr. Singh,” she said, folding her glasses back into their padded case. “It will save us both some time. You shouldn’t have come. There must be a way of convincing Mr. Fox that continual monitoring does not speed productivity. Maybe that can be a project for you when you return home. You can tell him I am fine, and that it would better suit his own purposes to leave me alone.”
A waiter approached the table and Dr. Swenson proceeded to order for herself and the child in broken Portuguese. When the waiter turned to Marina she asked for a glass of wine. Dr. Swenson added to the order and sent the waiter away.
“I’m glad you’re fine,” Marina said. “And you’re right, I’ve come to find out about the progress of the drug’s development, that’s part of the reason I’m here. But I was a close friend of Dr. Eckman’s. I am a friend of his wife’s. It’s important for her to understand the circumstances of his death.”
“He died of a fever.”
Marina nodded. “So you wrote, but she would like to know more than that. It would help her to be able to explain to their children what happened.”
Easter sat at the table without fidgeting, both of his feet on the floor or nearly on the floor. He tore neat pieces off his bread and ate them slowly. He did not seem to be the least bit bothered by waiting, which caused Marina to wonder if he had had a great deal of practice.
“Are you asking me if I know what caused the fever, if it had a name? I do not. The list of possibilities is too long. I suppose at this point checking his recent vaccination records would be a place to start. I can also give you a list of antibiotics he failed to respond to.”
“I’m not asking you what kind of fever it was,” Marina said. “I’m asking you what happened.”
Dr. Swenson sighed. “Is this my deposition, Dr. Singh?”
“I’m not accusing—”
Dr. Swenson waved her hand, brushing the words out of the air. “I will tell you: I liked Dr. Eckman. Every aspect of his visit was a great inconvenience to me but there was something ingenuous about him. He had a sincere interest in the Lakashi, in the work. You were a friend of his and so you know this about him, he had a singular ability for demonstrating interest, if it was in birds or in the estrogen levels in the collected blood samples; he asked a great many questions and took in every word of the answers he was given. He was polite and affable even when I was trying to convince him to leave, which, you should note to his wife, I did constantly.” She interrupted herself to finish her glass of water and before the empty glass had come to rest on the table it had been refilled by the hovering waiter. “Mr. Fox was an idiot to send him down here. I’ve hardly ever seen a man so ill suited for the jungle, and that’s saying a great deal. Most people are ill suited for the jungle. The heat, the insects, even the trees made him anxious. Now, one would think when a person comes to a place where he doesn’t want to be and he is not wanted, he would have the sense to go. Dr. Eckman lacked that sense. He told me that the company needed me to speed up the progress of my work, that they needed to see my records, bring in other researchers, move as much of the project back to Vogel as soon as was possible. I believe our entire exchange could have taken place in an hour, fifteen minutes if both parties were succinct, but there was something about Dr. Eckman. It was as if he needed to see everything for himself. He had come a long way and by God he wasn’t going to take my word for the fact that there was a drug in development. He felt the need to retrace the entire course of my work. He was going to rediscover the Lakashi tribe himself. He was going to find the