State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [67]
It was a Lariam day. She had been putting it off since this morning, but what difference did it make? She always wound up taking it in the end. The pills she had so cavalierly tossed in the airport trash had managed to find her again. Tomo never complained about having to come up from the front desk to settle her screaming by banging on her door. And if she dealt with intermittent nausea, paranoia, my God, she could hardly pin that on the Lariam. Even if she went home tomorrow she would have to take it for another four weeks. It was the drug’s way of reminding the patient that the trip isn’t over. The trip would be in the bloodstream, in the tissues. All the potential disasters of the place would continue to linger inside. Marina set the pill on her tongue and swallowed it with half a bottle of water which was sitting on her dresser, then she turned out the light. She was becoming accustomed to the dip in the middle of the mattress, to the foam-rubber pillow that smelled like cardboard boxes, to the sound of the water piping into the ice machine down the hall and then, hours later, the dumping release of its little frozen charges into the bin. She wondered how long these things would stay with her once she was home again. She wondered how long Anders would stay with her, and what it would be like to settle back into their lab alone and who would eventually come to replace him. She wondered how long it would be that she would think of him every day, and what it would feel like to realize that days had passed and she had forgotten to think of him at all. She thought about the stack of letters that Karen had written sitting in the drawer of the table beside the bed. She thought of Anders buried in the jungle floor three thousand miles from Eden Prairie. As tired as she was, it kept her awake. When the mind could no longer bear the news—Anders is dead—it busied itself with the details: Where is his camera? Where are his binoculars?
When Marina woke up she was standing in front of the window in her hotel room with no memory of having gotten out of bed. It was freezing. She and her father had been at the campus of the University of Minnesota where he had done his doctoral work in microbiology. The snow was coming down hard. All she could really remember were the Indians coming out of all the buildings, and how the women in their red and purple saris completely changed the landscape, the men in pink shirts broke the whiteness apart. They shivered in the arctic wind until the colors began to vibrate, making a sea of trembling, snow-covered poppies. She had gone to sleep with the air conditioner left on high and now the inside of the hotel window was so wet that she wondered from the stupor of interrupted sleep if it was finally raining inside. Beads of water streaked down the glass, reducing the view of the world outside to a deep purple darkness punctuated by balls of glittering light. The cold air blew gale force at the cheap cotton nightgown she had bought from Rodrigo. She squatted down in front of the unit beneath the window, her hair blown back by the wind, and blindly pushed the little buttons until the system gave one final frozen exhalation and died. She was shaking, and unsure how much of that was the temperature and how much was a dream. All she could be certain of was that she had been trying to go home and that she couldn’t because of the snow. She wasn’t going home. Maybe Mr. Fox had whispered in her ear all night, but while she slept the world shifted away from the airport and towards the docks. The clear resolve she had had in the restaurant seemed to have broken like a fever sometime during the night and as she was waking up she could feel Minnesota recede with the rest of her dream. She would not get back into bed now. She was finished with that bed. Like a somnambulist half awake she gathered up everything that belonged to Barbara Bovender, the gray silk dress that was muddied around the hem, the savage shoes,