State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [97]
“The bag you came with from Manaus?” Thomas said. “Wasn’t it on the boat with you?”
She turned to him. Suddenly the dress felt very small. “Of course it was on the boat with me but, my God, coming into all that fire and screaming, all these men climbing on board from the water, and then the next thing I knew Dr. Swenson was going up the dock. I wasn’t going to stay there and find my luggage.”
“Of course,” Thomas said. He did not offer her a single word of encouragement. He did not tell her as anyone would that this was a very small village and surely there was no place for her bag to go. The teenage girl was up now, slapping at Easter’s hands, and then the littlest girl, the toddler, came over and she hit him as well. “We should go now, Dr. Singh,” Thomas said.
“Please,” she said, surprisingly heartbroken over such a small loss. “Call me Marina.”
Eight
Marina had been in the jungle for a week before Dr. Alan Saturn, whom she thought of as the first Dr. Saturn, said he would borrow Easter and the boat and make a trip to the trading post two hours away to mail some letters. (The trading post was not a trading post at all but a larger village down river where the more advanced Jinta Indians had their camp. They were, for a small price, willing to hold letters and money until a trader passed through from Manaus, which they did with some frequency. For a larger price, the traders would then take the letters back with them to mail—no small request as the mail was going to Java and Dakar and Michigan and they themselves were not men born with a natural inclination to stand in long post office lines.) Once the trip was established, everyone save Dr. Swenson broke from work to sit down for some time after lunch to commit themselves to paper. Dr. Budi gave Marina three blue tissue Aerograms from her considerable stack and Alan Saturn said he would stand her for the stamps. Marina, whose luggage had yet to be recovered, had spent the past seven days in her Lakashi dress, though she had been given an identical spare out of either guilt or compassion by an anonymous tribe member. Nancy Saturn, the second Dr. Saturn, had given her two extra pairs of underwear and Thomas Nkomo had a toothbrush still in the plastic wrap. He put it in her hand very discreetly. It seemed to Marina that these were among the kindest gifts of her existence.
“This is why I don’t loan out the boat,” Dr. Swenson said, looking around the lab as the doctors scattered with paper and pens, those charming dinosaurs of communication. “Once you say it’s leaving no one seems to think there’s any work to do.”
But work was all there was to do. Marina had been set up in the corner of the lab and been given the job of running tests on the compound for stability, to see whether it was degrading with heat and exposure. Like Anders, she was a small molecule person. Their work had been in pills and while it wasn’t an exact match for the task at hand it was comfortably within her realm of experience. There was enough data piled up to keep her busy for years and she wondered if that wasn’t Dr. Swenson’s objective—to keep her busy. It was possible that they were feeding her problems they had already solved as a means of placating her or testing her competence. They had mice after all, they were clearly already onto testing the concentration of the compound in blood levels. Still, she knew that if she stayed in her corner looking over what they had given her she would be much more able to make a realistic assessment of how far they were from a first efficacious dose. She could sidle over to Dr. Budi from time to time—Budi was in charge of clinical research organization—and ask her questions about the Lakashi blood work. She could see now how ridiculous it had been to simply ask Dr. Swenson over dinner what her progress was. Working here she had the chance to make her own assessment, and that was what Mr. Fox had wanted all along.
And besides, if she wasn’t working, what was she going to do with her days? The jungle, with its screeching cries