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By Root 816 0

on her feet that she didn’t see where they were going until they stopped. The place that Easter brought her to was a tin box built onto stilts. He leaned over and lifted up a rock, took out a key, and unlocked the door. Marina had not expected a door in the jungle, much less a lock. Inside the room Easter swept the flashlight over a table and some chairs, stacks of boxes, some of which she thought she recognized: the juice, the hash. They were in the storage room. Easter, who kept hold of her hand even now, led her to the back of the room where they went through a second door and out onto a wide porch, or maybe it was a room as well. It was hard to tell. There was no breeze other than what was stirred up by a hundred thousand wings of flying insects. Easter pointed the light to a long column of mosquito netting that was suspended from the ceiling and fanned out over a cot. He pointed to her, to the cot. All of this would be different in the daylight. Nothing would feel so daunting once she could properly see.

When she sat down on the edge of her bed, Marina realized that in her concern about fire and snakes and the wandering hands of the natives she had walked off and left her suitcase on the boat, and while she would have liked to change out of her clothes and brush her teeth she wasn’t even sure where she could find a basin of water. She could imagine no pantomime for Easter that would express her desire to be accompanied back to the boat and she wasn’t about to make the trip on her own, and so she decided to forget about the whole business. What she would have liked was the telephone. She should have called Mr. Fox before they left Manaus. She knew by now he would have left a dozen messages and that when she listened to them in the morning she would be able to chart the panic mounting in his voice. It had been nothing but petulance on her part, his punishment to spend the day not knowing where she was, and now that it was too dark to try and find the phone there was no way to comfort him. Or maybe he would think she was halfway to Miami now, coming home on the next flight the way she had told him she would, although Marina didn’t think he had ever really believed her.

She took off her shoes and pointed to Easter. You sleep? He turned the flashlight to a wall six feet from the foot of her bed and showed her a hammock, an empty casing waiting for a boy. Then, handing her the flashlight, he pulled off his shirt and climbed inside while she stood there shining the light in his direction, dumbstruck by the little hanging cocoon he made. By her good fortune, she was sleeping in Easter’s room. She tried to imagine it was a stroke of extraordinary kindness on Dr. Swenson’s part when in fact it was probably the only bit of available space covered by a roof. It didn’t matter; she realized now she could never have slept there without him. In her cot, beneath her net, Marina could easily calculate the ways in which her circumstances could have been worse. She stretched out and clicked off the light, listening to the steady breathing of the jungle. This was better than the Hotel Indira. The cot was no less comfortable than that bed. Clearly the Lakashi were prepared for guests no matter how insistently Dr. Swenson claimed to dislike them. People had come and stayed here before and probably they had all lain beneath this mosquito net thanking God that Easter’s hammock was six feet away. Marina opened her eyes. In the dim light of the moon she looked into the white cloud of her net. Anders would have slept here. Easter was with him when he died, that’s what Dr. Swenson had said. She sat up. Anders. It came over her, this dark, this porch, this cot. In his fever he looked through this net. Marina got up, put her feet back in her shoes. There had to be a pen somewhere. She got the flashlight, checked the small figure of Easter supine in his cloth. She had nothing, not a handbag, a rucksack. She went back into the storage room. Now that she held the light she could see that it functioned as nothing more than an outsized closet—boxes