State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [76]
“So he would have let her bleed to death.”
“He would have respected the order that was in place.”
Marina nodded, thinking perhaps she was luckier than she realized to have found herself with an expedition still capable of making errors of compassion. “Is Dr. Rapp still alive?”
She might as well have asked if President Kennedy had survived his assassination attempt. “Do you read, Dr. Singh? Do you live in this world?”
It was a beautiful question to be asked by a woman on a boat who was taking her down a river into the beating heart of nowhere. “I do,” Marina said.
She sighed and shook her head. “Dr. Rapp died nine years ago. It will be ten years this August.”
And Marina, sensing that sympathy was in order, said that she was sorry to hear it, and Dr. Swenson thanked her.
“Were you studying mycology at the time? Is that how you came to work with Dr. Rapp?” It seemed possible, after all; anything was possible. She may have been coming down here as an operative for the CIA.
“I was a student of Dr. Rapp’s, and the location of his classroom was unpredictable. I followed him through Africa and Indonesia, but the Amazon was the source of his most important work. He studied botany, and I was free to study the workings of a true scientific mind. As an undergraduate at Radcliffe I wasn’t allowed to take his class at Harvard, Harvard couldn’t have stood for anything as radical as that, but Dr. Rapp let me travel on the expeditions. He was the first teacher I encountered who saw no limitations for women. As it turned out he was the only one.”
They were quiet for a long time after that, both staring off at different aspects of the jungle as it rolled past them, the same bit of scenery recycled indefinitely. Two hours later, Easter left the protection of the right-hand bank and crossed the width of the Negro to the left. There he turned up a tributary that was in every way similar to the countless other tributaries they had passed, and while it was unmarked, it was the exit ramp from the interstate, the one that would eventually take them to the street where Dr. Swenson lived. No other boats followed them though the entrance was wide at the mouth. In a matter of minutes the nameless river narrowed and the green dropped behind them like a curtain and the Negro was lost. Marina had thought that the important line that was crossed was between the dock and the boat, the land and the water. She had thought the water was the line where civilization fell away. But as they glided between two thick walls of breathing vegetation she realized she was in another world entirely, and that she would see civilization drop away again and again before they reached their final destination. All Marina could see was green. The sky, the water, the bark of the trees: everything that wasn’t green became green. All in green my love went riding.
Dr. Swenson announced that lunch was now in order. “The boy deserves a break. He stands up there so rigid that I think he would shatter if a nut hit him just right. There is no way of communicating that one should relax, do you realize that? You can shake out your arms and swivel your neck and it all looks like nonsense.” Dr. Swenson put her hands on her thighs and pushed up but she did not stand. She was thicker around the middle than she had been in Baltimore and the weight and the long time sitting seemed to keep her tied to her case of hash. Dr. Swenson, so far as Marina could calculate, would be in the neighborhood of seventy. It was possible at this point that even Dr. Swenson was tired. Marina stood up and extended her hand. Dr. Swenson rubbed her knees