“Who’s Isabela?”
“Rodney,” I say quietly, “I want to tell you something. But it’s going to be hard for you to believe.”
“Like, how hard? On a scale from bike shorts and blazers during Fashion Week to Lady Gaga’s Meat Dress?”
“Just listen,” I say, and I sketch my other life: my arrival on Isabela and the closed hotel and Beatriz self-harming and her broody father. My mother’s death. The fierce and foolish night Gabriel and I spent together. The waves closing over my head.
When I finish, Rodney is silent. “Well?”
“I don’t know what to say, Di.”
I roll my eyes. “Rodney, I’ve seen you pass judgment on a five-year-old’s unicorn backpack. You have thoughts. You always have thoughts.”
“Mmm. It reminds me of something … ?oh, I know. Remember the guy who sleeps outside the Sephora on East Eighty-sixth? The one in the rainbow onesie who preaches End of Days?”
My face flames. “You’re an asshole. I didn’t make this up, Rodney.”
“I know that,” he says. “Because as it turns out, Isabela Island in the Galápagos did indeed close for two weeks, starting on March fifteenth.”
“What?” I gasp. “How do you know that?”
“Gooooogle,” Rodney says slowly.
“That’s the day I got there, on the ferry. Or dreamed I got there. Whatever.”
“Well, if you were running a high fever in the hospital that day, you probably weren’t doing Web searches.”
“Maybe it was in the background, on the television …”
“Or maybe,” Rodney says, “it wasn’t.”
When I hear those words, my eyes fill with tears. I don’t think I realized how much I needed someone to believe me.
“Look, baby doll, I got too many relatives who dabble in the occult to not give you the benefit of the doubt. Who’s to say you didn’t tumble into some fourth-dimension shit?”
“Okay, that sounds even more insane,” I mutter.
“More insane than having an affair with a figment of your imagination?”
“Shut up!” I hiss, although no one but me has heard him.
“So the million-dollar question is: have you told Finn about your, um, extracurricular excursions?”
“He thinks it’s a symptom from Covid, from the sedation on the ventilator.”
Rodney pauses. “If it was real … ?even just to you,” he says, “you’re going to have to tell him.”
I rub the heel of my hand between my eyebrows, where a dull ache has started up. “I can’t even see him. He’s working around the clock, and I’m not allowed to have visitors here. I feel like a leper. I can barely stand on my own feet, I haven’t had a shower in so long I can’t remember the date, and based on my experience trying to dress myself, bras may be a thing of my past. When I’m too tired to do therapy, my mind starts going in circles and I can’t remember what’s real and what’s not and then I start panicking even more.” I let out a shuddering breath. “I need a distraction.”
“Girl, I have two words for you,” Rodney says. “Tiger King.”
Other things that happen on my second day in rehab:
1. I put on my own shoes and socks.
2. CNN reports that eighty percent of people on ventilators have died.
I am actively fighting against my own body. My mind is laser-focused, screaming things like lift, hoist, balance. My muscles do not speak the language. Like any other kind of dissonance, it’s exhausting. The only good thing about working so hard during the day is that at night, I am so exhausted, I don’t resist sleep. It fells me with blunt force, and I am too tired to dream.
I wonder, too, if the reason that I can fall asleep here the way I did not in the step-down ward is that I know every morning, Maggie will appear with a new torture device. I may not trust her with my physical progress yet, but I do trust her to bring me back to the real world.
On my third day, my occupational therapist, Vee, comes into the room and watches me struggle to squeeze toothpaste onto a toothbrush. It’s something that I used to do without thought but now requires Zen focus. I finish brushing my teeth just as Maggie enters. She is pushing a weird, squat box, which she sets at the side of the room. “Time to stand,” she says.
She glances around, her gaze landing on the walker she brought in for yesterday’s dose of therapy. She sets it on the side of the bed. “Let’s get up close and personal with Paul,” she says.