The sky looks like an overturned bowl of glitter; I cannot remember ever seeing so many stars. I think of the ceiling at Grand Central Terminal, and how I restored it with my father. It is hard to piece out the constellations here, and I realize that’s because on the equator, you can see clusters from both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. There—I find the Big Dipper. But also the Southern Cross, which is normally hidden beneath the horizon for me.
It feels like a peek at a secret.
“I can’t usually see the Southern Cross,” I say softly. It makes me a little disoriented, like the whole planet has shimmied off course.
I wonder if I had to come to this half of the world just to see it a whole different way.
After a moment, Gabriel asks, “Did you have a good birthday?”
I glance at him. He has rolled to his side. While I’ve been looking at the sky, he’s been looking at me.
“The best,” I say.
From: [email protected]
Sometimes I wonder if I’m ever going to do an appendectomy again. I’m a surgeon. I fix things. Your gallbladder’s infected? I got it. Hernia repair? I’m your guy. If I have any ICU patients, it’s temporary, a complication from surgery that I know how to fix. But with Covid, I can’t fix anything. I’m just maintaining the status quo, if I’m lucky.
Also, I’m a resident, which means I’m supposed to be learning—but I’m learning nothing.
I’m good at my job. I just don’t know if my job is still good for me.
Three days ago, when I left the hospital, 98% of the beds in the ICU were occupied, and all my patients were on oxygen and dying. On the way home, I called my dad to check in. You know he voted for Trump—so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised when he told me that the Covid numbers are inflated, and that the shutdown is a cure that’s worse than the disease.
I get that not everyone is seeing this virus firsthand. It’s another thing entirely to disavow it.
I hung up on him.
Fuck. I just remembered your birthday.
My mother was often asked how she “did it all”—juggled the roles of wife, mother, and one of the most renowned crisis photographers of the century. In real life, the answer was simple—she didn’t do it all. My father did most of it, and if there was a balance between motherhood and her career, it canted hard to the latter. In interviews, she would always tell the same story about the first time she took me to the pediatrician. She bundled me into my snowsuit, loaded her pocketbook and the collapsible stroller and the diaper bag into the car, and drove off—leaving me buckled in my infant carrier on the floor of the kitchen. She was in the doctor’s parking lot before she realized that she’d left her baby behind.
My mother never told me that story directly, but I had seen so many interview clips on the internet that I knew where she paused for dramatic effect, the part where she smiled wryly, the bit where she rolled her eyes in self-deprecation. It was an act, and my mother never broke character. She and the interviewer would both laugh, in a charming, what-can-you-do way.
What about the baby, I used to think, as if it were not me, as if I were a mere observer. What about this is remotely funny?
Finn—
Last night I had a supervivid dream of you. Someone had kidnapped me and drugged me and I was in a basement and there weren’t any doors or windows where I could escape. I was tied to something—a pole, a chair? Then all of a sudden, you were there, wearing a costume. I couldn’t see the bottom half of your face, but I knew it was you because of your eyes and because I could smell your shampoo. You kept telling me to stay awake so you could get me out of there, but I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Then I realized we weren’t alone. There was another woman with you, and she was in costume, too.
I was the only one who hadn’t been invited to the party.
It’s somewhere around the fourth hour of a seven-hour hike to the Sierra Negra volcano that I wonder why, exactly, Gabriel thought this was a birthday gift anyone would actually enjoy. I am hot and sweaty and sunburned when we reach a small tree with a black rock in a crotch of its limbs. “This is the spot where tourists leave their overnight packs,” Gabriel says, and he shrugs off the gear he’s been shouldering. “Some of them stay overnight before hiking down into the caldera. No one’s allowed up here without a ranger or guide.”
We are breaking curfew, Gabriel isn’t really a guide anymore, and the volcano happens to be active. What could possibly go wrong?