State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [84]
What are your dreams about? her mother asked her when she was a child screaming in her bed. What did you dream? Mr. Fox asked, his hands holding the tops of her arms. “My father,” Marina said. “I’m with my father and then we’re separated somehow. I can’t find him.”
Dr. Swenson stood up with some difficulty. The interview had reached its conclusion. “Well, that doesn’t sound too bad.”
Marina would concede the point. When presented as a single sentence without embellishment it didn’t sound bad at all.
Seven
At dusk the insects came down in a storm, the hard-shelled and soft-sided, the biting and stinging, the chirping and buzzing and droning, every last one unfolded its paper wings and flew with unimaginable velocity into the eyes and mouths and noses of the only three humans they could find. Easter slipped back inside his shirt while Dr. Swenson and Marina wrapped their heads like Bedouins in a storm. When it was fully dark only the misguided insects pelted themselves into the people on board while the rest chose to end their lives against the two bright, hot lights on either side of the boat. The night was filled with the relentless ping of their bodies hitting the glass.
“Dr. Rapp used to say how easy it was for the entomologists,” Dr. Swenson said, turning her back to the onslaught. “They only had to switch on a light and all their specimens came running.”
Marina was less comfortable in the jungle now that she couldn’t see it. She felt the plant life pressing against the edges of the water, straining towards them, every root and tendril reaching. “Not only do the specimens come to you, they then have the decency to kill themselves.”
“This is worse than a hailstorm,” Dr. Swenson said, spitting a small winged beetle onto the deck. “We can do without the lights.” And then she turned off the lights.
In an instant the veil of insects lifted and Marina saw nothing as she had never seen nothing before. It was as if God Himself had turned out the lights, every last one, and left them in the gaping darkness of His abandonment. “Shouldn’t Easter be able to see where he’s going?” she asked. She could barely hear the sound of her own voice over the engine. A boy who could find a single branch in a thousand miles of uninterrupted trees could surely find his way home in the dark. She was the one who wanted the lights back on.
“Open your eyes, Dr. Singh,” Dr. Swenson said. “Look at the stars.”
Marina put her hands out in front of her and batted at the air until she found the rope at the edge of the boat. She held tightly to it when she leaned to the side. Beyond the spectrum of darkness she saw the bright stars scattered across the table of the night sky and felt as if she had never seen such things as stars before. She did not know enough numbers to count them, and even if she did, the stars could not be separated one from the other, the whole was so much greater than the sum of its parts. She saw the textbook of constellations, the heroes of mythology posing on fields of ink. She could see the milkiness in everything now, the way the sky was spread over with light. And when, finally, she could tear herself away from the theater above them to look forward again she saw yet another light blinking like a mirage on the horizon. It was small and orange and as they came towards it, the light appeared to stretch into a single line, and when she thought she had the line fixed in her vision it broke apart. It scattered and spread, bits of it popping on and off. “There’s something up there,” she said to Dr. Swenson, and in another minute she said, “It’s fire.” What she meant to say was Turn the boat around.
“Indeed,” Dr. Swenson said.
It was a dozen fires, and then the fires tripled, and then Marina could no longer count them. What had been a line had spread into layers, and in those layers