Months passed in which her bed became her safe place, her bedroom a cave, the blinds shuttered to hide the cheeriness of the walls, the phone ringing and ringing, the messages piling up and never returned, Valentine bringing her soup, singing to her, leaving reluctantly when she did not respond to his words, to his overtures, and his patience was worn. Then in late December a knock on her door, and Dr. Jin was standing there. “So you’re here, Camille. I’ve sent you dozens of emails, left you numerous phone messages. I thought maybe you were away on a long holiday and hadn’t let me know. Then I ran into Dr. Osin and he told me what’s been going on. Dress and come to my office.”
She managed to shower, to wash her matted hair, then stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were cloudy and red-rimmed, and how weird that she’d forgotten their light hazel hue. She was the only one in the family without dark, darker, or darkest brown eyes, and her father used to tease her, calling her “Witch Hazel.” She’d hated that nickname as a kid, like glass shattering inside, but looking into her eyes, she finally understood what he’d been trying to teach her: that humor could coexist with seriousness, that she had needed to find the humor in herself even at that young age. She could hear him saying, “Come on, Witch Hazel, smile,” and she tried smiling at her reflection, but it was impossible. Still, with her father closer to her heart, it was a little easier to pull on dusty jeans and a wrinkled shirt and, under cover of a large orange umbrella, make her way in teeming rain to Dr. Jin’s office on campus.
“Sit,” Dr. Jin had said, handing her a fragile cup of green tea. “This happens to the most committed social anthropologists. Your world in the Trobriand Islands, kept alive through all the work on your dissertation, it’s still more real to you than this one, isn’t it?”
She had nodded.
“I know how difficult it can be to reenter one’s former life. I wish I had an instant fix for you. Sadly, there aren’t any assistant professorships available right now. I could make a few calls, to American Anthropologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnology, Oceania, see whether they have a rare vacancy. I haven’t heard of any, but I’m happy to double-check.”
She had shaken her head slowly because it hurt to make abrupt moves in the brightness of his clean office. “Dr. Jin, I think I just need another expedition, to be back out there. Is there a new one I could join? I don’t have to lead it, just be a team member.”
It had been Dr. Jin’s turn to shake his head. “No university-funded expeditions here or anywhere for the next two years. But even if there was, based on what Val Osin tells me, months barely functioning, you wouldn’t pass the psych eval right now.
“Here’s a way you could retrench. Return to the Trobriands by diving back into your dissertation. Take yourself to the library and try turning it into a book. Not a study that, alas, few will read these days, but something for a broad audience. There are publishers who would be interested in exciting nonfiction based on the real-life adventures of a young and interesting scientist. I know a few. When you’re ready, I could reach out to them on your behalf.
“It has real potential, Camille, a young woman who investigated the sexual practices of other young women living in a very different society. It’s been a long time since Malinowski’s Savages, and other than refuted Mead, with the adolescent Samoans, never investigated by a woman.”
“I was more intrigued by other aspects I researched,” she’d said, the words falling from her mouth one by one, and Dr. Jin nodded repeatedly. “Yes, of course. And I understand. But times are different now, not much call for ethnographies. And it’s very disappointing, but sex sells. From what I’ve been told, it also greatly helps if the young and interesting scientist is actually in the book.”
A nod was the most she could muster. She placed the fragile cup of untouched green tea on his uncluttered desk and left. The rain was still teeming, but the umbrella remained rolled up tight by her side. She had no energy for any project, but an exploitive tale about the Trobrianders and sex, with herself as a character? It was exactly what she couldn’t do: replace the wildness of the Trobriand Islands with an airless library, reduce her vibrant experiences into a trite narrative, massage that extraordinary time—the raucous freedom, the exploration of others, the bonding with people so unlike herself—into something so frivolous.
When she reached home, she was soaked through, more hopeless than before.
Since that meeting with Jin, she hasn’t so much as glanced at her dissertation, seven hundred pages of text, another two hundred of graphs, statistics, citations, and sources, thick as a tombstone gathering dust on her kitchen table. In fact, she doesn’t even notice it anymore, when she drops her keys next to it, or sits down to eat a quick meal.
Although never one to ask for help, when her depression did not lift, she took herself to the university counseling office. The counselor-in-training was useless, said only, “Wow, so you lived among natives, wild. Must be great to be back in the real world,” then adjusted her necklace. Camille didn’t bother seeking out a different counselor. She had no confidence anyone else would understand her nature more clearly and felt only exhaustion thinking about repeating her story again, explaining all the reasons why that other world remained realer to her than this one—the Trobrianders’ love for one another, their ties to the earth and the sky, their belief in rituals and magic. She decided to nurture herself with long walks every day, and applauded herself when she managed to do so sometimes.
On the last day of last year, on one of those walks, she stopped at a row of free-paper kiosks and took one she’d not read before. At home on the old couch, she flipped through it and came to a picture and article about the House of Lilac Love. She recognized the pretty lilac-painted building, not far from her apartment, but would never have guessed it was a hospice. As she read about the people cared for there, she imagined them as a tribe of the dying, and a minute amount of her vanished strength made itself known, enough to pick up the phone and inquire whether any jobs were available.
It had felt odd interviewing for a job that didn’t include discussions about prior tribe contact, what the research hoped to reveal, the term of the expedition, housing accommodations, shots required for travel, but there was Patty Donaldson, the head of Lilac Love, who looked to Camille like a highly experienced team leader. She had army hair, a crew cut strictly maintained, gigantic hoops in her ears, an easy laugh. Her bulk was crammed into a well-tailored Day-Glo lime-green pantsuit, and when she shook Camille’s hand, she said, “I like to be a splash of color for everyone. Now let’s talk about you,” and then exclaimed over Camille’s background, her experience in fieldwork, expressing veneration for her accomplishments, and her certainty that someone highly trained in dedicated listening would be a great addition. With Patty’s unceasing, honest smile aimed directly at her, Camille had felt the slightest renewing of what once had been her natural optimism.
Since January, for the last seven and a half months, she has been working as an end-of-life caregiver at Lilac Love. It is a job for which she needed no formal training: she does not insert needles into veins, or clear phlegm from throats, or dispense morphine, or arrange and empty bedpans. There are compassionate nurses for all of those tasks, selfless women who sail through the place like loving spirits. Now, five or six days a week, Camille wakes early, showers, dresses in clean and pressed clothes, fills up her thermos with her special coffee blend, makes a sack lunch, and walks to the hospice, to sit by bedsides, to ask questions that encourage exhausted tongues to recount their owners’ stories, to write dictated letters to family and friends, sometimes loving letters, sometimes letters filled with angst, sometimes letters filled with vituperative hatred aimed like poison-tipped darts at their intended recipients—as sharp, surely, as those arrows the Stone Age Sentineli carried and Dr. Jin prevented her from viewing up close. She can honestly say she feels most at home in that small, vertical palace where
