Wish You Were Here (30 page)

I wave the hand that’s not holding the phone. I rip my mask off my face. “Hi!” I say, almost desperately. “Over here!”

She sees me and walks to the edge of the porch. I do the same, and the phone falls away from my ear. She looks healthy and steady and all the things she was not in my dream. Unexpectedly, my throat is so tight I can’t speak.

She flattens her hand to the screen and tilts her head. “Is it warm for this time of year?”

I know she has no idea what time of year it is, but this is her way of trying to pry open a conversation.

“It
is
warm,” I manage.

“Maybe they’ll let the fire hydrants run,” she says. “My daughter loves that.”

I am afraid to move, to speak, because I am afraid to ruin this moment. “She does,” I say.

I move closer and press my palm against hers. There’s a screen between us.
Where are you?
I wonder. The world that my mother inhabits, it’s not this one. But that’s not to say it isn’t real to her.

It might be the first thing we’ve had in common.

If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said my mother was a burden, an albatross, a grudging responsibility. She was someone I owed a debt to. But now?

Now I know everyone has their own perception of reality. Now I’m thinking that when we’re in crisis, we go to a place that comforts us. For my mother, it’s her identity as a photographer.

And for me—right now—it’s
here
.

“You look good, Mom,” I whisper.

Her vision clouds; I can see the exact moment that she slips away from me. I pull my hand back from the screen and tuck it into the pocket of my jacket. “I think I might come visit you more often,” I say softly. “Would you like that?”

She doesn’t respond.

“Me, too,” I say.

When I get back to the parking lot, the old man is sitting in his car with the windows open, eating a sandwich. I order my Uber and awkwardly smile at him.

“Good visit?” he asks.

“Yes. You?”

He nods. “I’m Henry,” he says.

“Diana.”

“My wife, she’s got white matter disease,” he says. He taps his head, as if to underscore this is a brain thing. But then, everyone in the building has a brain thing. Alzheimer’s affects the gray matter, not the white, but the outcome is the same.

“She only has three words left,” he says. He takes a bite of his sandwich, swallows. Then he smiles. “But they’re the three words I need to hear.”

The sound of ambulance sirens is constant. It gets to the point where they become white noise.

In the middle of the night, I wake up and roll over to realize Finn is missing. I have to shake myself out of sleep to remember whether he’s pulling a night shift. It’s hard to tell time when every day is the same.

But no, we brushed our teeth together and climbed into bed. Frowning, I sit up and pad in the darkness to the living room, calling softly for him.

Finn sits on the couch, limned by moonlight. He is bent like Atlas, bearing the weight of the world. His eyes are closed and his hands are pressed tight against his ears.

He looks at me, his face bruised from his mask, shadows ringing his eyes. “Make it stop,” he whispers, and it’s only then I hear the whine of another ambulance, racing against time.

My therapy session with Dr. DeSantos—like everything else—is going to take place over Zoom. She has been recommended to Finn, and apparently is doing him a favor to schedule a session with me so quickly. When I ask Finn how he knows her, the tips of his ears go red. “She was made available to residents and interns,” he says, “when a bunch of people started losing it during their shifts.”

Finn is at the hospital during our session, for which I am grateful. I have not told him about my excursion to see my mother—I know he’ll be angry that I went out. I have convinced myself it is kinder
not
to tell Finn.

I can convince myself of virtually anything these days, it seems.

“What you’re talking about,” Dr. DeSantos says, “is ICU psychosis.”

I’ve told her about the Galápagos—haltingly at first, and then with more abandon when it became clear she wasn’t going to interrupt. “Psychosis?” I repeat. “I wasn’t psychotic.”

“An elevated dream state, then,” she points out. “Why don’t we call them…ruminations?”

I feel a prickle of frustration. Rumination. Like what cows do.

“It wasn’t a dream,” I reiterate. “In dreams you do things like fly through walls or come back to life or breathe water like a mermaid. This was a hundred percent realistic.”

“You were on an island…one you’ve never been to…and you were living with local residents,” the doctor says. “That sounds pleasant. The mind is remarkable when it comes to protecting us from pain we might otherwise feel—”

“It was more than just a vacation. I was sedated for five days, but in my head, I was gone for months. I went to sleep dozens of times there, and I woke up in the same place, in the same bed, on the same island. It wasn’t a…a hallucination. It was my reality.”

She purses her lips. “Let’s stick to
this
reality,” she says.

“This
reality,
” I stress. “What about this feels real? I lost ten days of my life that I can’t remember, and when I woke up suddenly everyone is standing six feet away and we wash our hands twenty times a day and I lost my job and there’s no more sports or movies and all the borders are closed and every time my boyfriend goes to work he runs the risk of catching this virus and winding up—”

I break off.

“Winding up…?”

“Like me,” I finish.

Dr. DeSantos nods. “You’re not the only one with PTSD,” she says. “Dr. Colson tells me that you work for Sotheby’s?”

“Worked,” I correct. “I’ve been furloughed.”

“You know what surrealism is, then.”

“Of course.” It was a twentieth-century art movement that elevated the subconscious and the stuff of dreams: Dalí’s dripping clocks and Magritte’s
The False Mirror
. The whole point is for the art to make you uneasy, until you realize the world is just a construct. An image that doesn’t make sense to you forces your mind to free-associate—and those associations are key to analyzing reality on a deeper level.

“The reason this all feels surreal is that we’re in uncharted territory,” the doctor says. “We’ve never been through something like this—well, at least most of us haven’t. There aren’t too many people who survived the 1918 Spanish flu who are currently alive. Humans love to find patterns and to make sense of what we see. When you can’t find those patterns, it’s unsettling. The CDC tells us that we have to social distance, and then the president is on TV without a mask, shaking people’s hands. Doctors say if you feel sick you should get a test, but the tests are nowhere to be found. Your kids can’t go into a classroom, even though it’s the middle of the school year. You can’t find flour on the grocery shelves. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, or six months from now. We don’t know how many people will die before this is over. The future is completely up in the air.”

I stare at her. This, this is exactly how I feel. Like I’m in a little panga, adrift in the middle of a great, wide ocean.

With no motor and no oars.

“Of course, that’s not really accurate,” Dr. DeSantos says. “The future is going to come, in some form, whether we like it or not. What we really mean is that we can’t
plan
for the future. And when we can’t plan—when we can’t find those patterns that make sense—we lose the skeleton of life. And no one can remain upright without that.”

“But if everyone’s experiencing this right now,” I ask, “then how come I’m the only one who got dropped into an alternate life?”

“Your
rumination,
” she says gently, “was your brain doing its damnedest to make sense of a very stressful situation for which you had no reference. Plus, you were on medications that mess with consciousness. You created a world that you could understand, from building blocks that were lying around your mind.”

I think about the guidebooks I had highlighted. The places I’d seen on Isabela. G2 Tours.

“What you keep referring to as another life,” Dr. DeSantos says, “was a defense mechanism.” She pauses. “Are you still having dreams of the Galápagos?”

“No,” I say. “But I don’t sleep much.”

“That’s very common for people who have been in the ICU. But it’s also possible that you’re not dreaming because you don’t
need
to anymore. Because you survived. Because the outcome isn’t as vague anymore.”

My mouth is suddenly dry. “Then how come I still feel lost?”

“Build your scaffolding again, but while you’re conscious. Use the bricks that you’ve still got, in spite of the pandemic. Make coffee in the morning. Meditate. Watch
Schitt’s Creek
. Have a glass of wine at dinner. FaceTime the friends you can’t see in person. Whatever habits you used to have, stack them up and give yourself structure. I promise. You won’t feel as unsettled.”

I think about surrealist paintings, how you can be startled out of your understanding of what the world should be. To my surprise, tears spring to my eyes. “What if that’s not the problem?”

“What do you mean?”

“I
wish
I could dream about the Galápagos,” I whispered. “I liked it better there.”

The psychologist tilts her head, pity written on her face. “Who wouldn’t,” she says.

In my past life, I’d groan when my alarm went off and choke down a piece of toast with my coffee and join the millions of people in New York City getting from point A to point B. I’d spend my days buried in work, a mountain that only seemed to get higher the more I climbed it, and when I came home I was too tired to deal with groceries or cook so I ordered in. Sometimes Finn was here, sometimes he was doing an overnight at the hospital. There were weekends I worked but also weekends when I took walks to Chelsea Piers, down the High Line, through Central Park. I’d force myself not to think about office politics or what I could be hammering away at on my laptop to get a head start on the coming week. I’d go to the gym and watch rom-coms on my phone while running on the treadmill.

Now, I have nothing to do and nothing but time. I can cook, but only if I can find a time slot for grocery deliveries, and only if they have the actual ingredients I ask for. And there’s only so much homemade bread a single human can consume.

I finish
Tiger King
. (I think she’s totally guilty.) I binge
Nailed It!
I become obsessed with Room Rater, and after seeing a pundit on television I immediately go to see how their home space fared. I hold virtual happy hours with Rodney from his sister’s home in New Orleans. I stop wearing pants with buttons. Sometimes, I just cry until I can’t anymore.

One day, I type
Coma dreams
into the search bar of Facebook.

There are two videos and a link to a story in the Cedar Rapids
Gazette
. The first video is a woman who was in a coma for twenty-two days after giving birth. When she woke up, she did not recognize her baby, or remember that she had been pregnant. While unconscious, she’d found herself in a palace and her job there was to interview cats—all of which were dressed like courtiers, and all of which could talk. In the video, she shows sketches she has created of each of them, with tiny ruffs or dangling diamond eardrops or velvet doublets.

“My God,” I whisper out loud. Do I sound as unhinged as that?

The second video is another woman. “When I was in a coma,” she says, “my brain decided that the hospital was a conspiracy theory. My ex-boss—I was a barista, before the accident—owned the hospital and millions of other corporations. In real life, she’s kind of flaky and has a misspelled Chinese tattoo. Anyway, she wanted me to sign a contract with her and I didn’t want to. She got so mad she kidnapped my mother and my brother and said that if I didn’t sign the contract, they’d die. Now, I was in a coma just for two days, but this went on for weeks. I went all over the country trying to find friends who had money I could borrow. I flew on jets and stayed at hotels and saw things at places I’ve never been to in my life—but when I came out of the coma and looked them up on the internet, there they were.” There’s a muffled question, and she shrugs. “Like that shiny mirrored bean in Chicago,” she says. “And this place in Kansas that has a twenty-thousand-pound ball of twine inside. I mean,
why
would I have known that?”

The video ends before she can give me what I really want: an explanation. More than the cat lady’s, this woman’s experience resonates with mine. She, too, lived through more time while she was unconscious than she did while she was hooked up to machines. And her journey was filled with real-world details that weren’t part of her life pre-accident. But then, who knows what cognitive thorns caught in the folds of her brain? Like Dr. DeSantos said—maybe she had read the Guinness World Records when she was younger; maybe the facts she unconsciously retained bubbled up to the surface of her subconscious like a hot spring.

The third story is a newspaper article about a fifty-two-year-old man named Eric Genovese, who has lived in Cedar Rapids since birth. He was a Poland Spring truck driver and he got hit by a car as he was crossing the street with a corporate water delivery. In the time it took EMTs to resuscitate him—a matter of minutes—he said he lived an entirely different life. “When I looked in the mirror I knew it was me, but I was completely different. Younger, and with a new face, and that felt right. I had a different job—I was a computer engineer,” he was quoted as saying. “The woman who worked next to me in a cubicle, she had an abusive boyfriend, and I spent months trying to get her to ditch the guy and to realize I was in love with her. I proposed and we got married, and a year later we had a little girl. We named her Maya, after my wife’s mother. When I woke up, after I was revived…none of it made sense. I kept asking where my wife was, and my baby girl. For me, years had passed, but for everyone else it was like twenty minutes. I had this burning urge to pray a bunch of times during the day and I knew whole passages of religious text that no one could identify, not even me. Turned out to be the Quran. I was raised Catholic; I went to parochial school. But after I woke up, I was Muslim.”