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By Root 751 0

at some point when she was asleep and dreaming of nothing she was awakened by a breathless cry, the high, hopeless call of an animal in a trap. Marina sat up. “Easter?” she said. She turned on the flashlight and saw such a struggle in his hammock that her immediate thought was a snake. She leapt to her feet, meaning to grab the edges of the fabric and flip it over, to save the boy from what was devouring him, but by the time she had made it out of her net she understood what was happening and she took just a second longer to listen to the sound of his voice, then she reached inside and put her hands on his shoulders. She knew how to wake a person from a dream, how no one ever did it and how it should be done. She shook him gently, letting him flail beneath her hands. He was sweating, shaking, his eyes rolled back. She made all the appropriate sounds he couldn’t hear. She whispered, Okay, it’s alright now. She could not have stopped herself. She took him in her arms and let him cry against her neck while she made him promises, her hand tracing circles in the narrow space between his shoulder blades, and when he could breathe easily again and was falling back into sleep she straightened his hair with her fingers and turned to go back to her bed and he followed her there and climbed beneath the net. Marina had never slept with a child before, not since she was a child herself and had slumber parties with other girls, but it wasn’t a science. She made a space for him beneath her arm and pulled his back against her chest and before there was another thought they were both asleep, safe in the white tunnel of net.

At some point during the night the fire juggling, fiercely screaming Lakashi had been replaced by a working-class tribe, a sober group of people who went about the business of their day without fanfare or flame. Marina found them by following a path to a clearing on the banks of the river, although when she had walked through this spot the night before she would have sworn it was solid jungle. There were women washing clothes in the river and washing children, women gathering sticks into baskets and braiding the hair of girls, every movement they made exposed to the merciless sunshine. There was a large assortment of naked toddlers slapping the water with their hands and stamping in puddles, so many toddlers and crawling babies that Marina wondered if she had wandered into the tribal day care. There were fewer men in evidence but still there were a handful of them carving down the inside of a very large log. They were shirtless, shoeless, and when Marina walked by them they gave her a brief, disinterested glance as if she were a tourist and they had seen her kind before. Boats, of course, were key to river life, and other logs carved into boats were jumbled together on the shore, and in the water a man was paddling away. Two small girls came by wearing shorts and no shirts, each of them with a tiny monkey around her neck that held on to its own prehensile tail with its hands to form a clasp. The monkeys both swiveled their heads towards Marina and showed her their pointy yellow teeth in extravagant smiles. The monkeys alone looked her in the eye. Then one of the monkeys caught sight of some infinitesimal life form in the hair of his little girl and reached up and snatched it off her scalp and swallowed it.

Marina had not as yet been able to locate the two people she knew on this river. Easter was not in her bed when she woke up this morning, not in his hammock, and she marveled at the thought that anyone could be quiet enough not to wake her, especially a child who was himself unacquainted with sound. She hadn’t found Dr. Swenson yet either but that she imagined would be more of a challenge. Dr. Swenson was either standing right in front of you or she could not be located, and in this case there was no waiting outside her office door hoping she would turn up.

The pontoon boat swayed lightly on its rope at the edge of the dock exactly where it had been left the night before and Marina took this as a sign that for the