Syreta doesn’t even blink when I tell her about the Galápagos. “I had another patient who was convinced there were two stuffed animals on her windowsill, and every time I left the room, they waved at her.” She raises a brow. “There weren’t any stuffed animals on her windowsill. She didn’t even have a window.”
“You don’t understand … ?I lived there. I met people and made friends and I … ?I climbed into a volcano … ?I went swimming—Oh!” I try to reach my phone, on the table in front of me, but it is so heavy that it slips out of my hand and Syreta has to fish in the blankets to hand it to me. “I have pictures. Sea lions and blue-footed boobies I wanted to show Finn—”
I use my thumb to scrub across the screen, but the last picture on my phone is of Kitomi Ito’s painting, from weeks ago.
That’s when I notice the date on the screen.
“Today can’t be March twenty-fourth,” I say, the thought rolling like fog through my mind. “I’ve been away for two months. I celebrated my birthday there.”
“Guess you get to celebrate again.”
“It wasn’t a hallucination,” I protest. “It felt more real than any of this does.”
“Honestly,” Syreta mulls. “That’s a blessing.”
The Covid ICU is like a plague ward. The only people allowed to enter my room are my doctor, Syreta, and the night nurse, Betty; even the residents who do rounds talk to me from outside the plate-glass wall. There are too many patients and not enough medical staff. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I am alone, trapped in a body that will not do what I need it to do.
I keep watching through the window, but I am the bug trapped in a jar—peered at occasionally by people who are mostly just grateful I am no longer sharing their space.
I am so fucking thirsty and no one will give me water. It feels like I have been in a wind tunnel for days, unable to close my mouth. My lips are chapped and my throat is a desert.
I still have oxygen being piped into my nose.
I have no recollection of getting sick.
What I do remember, vividly and viscerally, is the sparkle of the rock walls of the trillizos, and how the dock in Puerto Villamil smells of fish and salt, the taste of papaya warm from the sun, and the soft curves of Abuela’s voice rounding out Spanish words.
I remember Beatriz, sitting on the beach with wet sand dripping from her fist.
I remember Gabriel treading water in the ocean, grinning as he splashed me.
Whenever I think of them, I start to cry. I am grieving people who, according to everyone here, never existed.
The only explanation is that in addition to catching this virus, I have gone insane.
I realize, when I try to breathe in and can’t, when I feel the heaviness of my broken body, that I should believe everyone who tells me how sick I’ve been. But it doesn’t feel like I was sick. It feels like my reality just … ?changed.
I’ve read about people who are medically sedated, and wake up fluent in Mandarin when there is no Chinese family history and they’ve never traveled to China; about a man who came out of a coma, demanded to have a violin, and went on to become a virtuoso who played sold-out concerts. I always took accounts like these with a grain of salt, because honestly, they sound too crazy to be true. I may not have a new linguistic or musical skill, but I would stake my life on the fact that the memories I have of the past two months are not delirium. I know I was there.
Wherever there was.
When I start to get so agitated that my pulse rate spikes, Betty comes into the room. It is telling that I am so grateful to see another human being in the same room with me that I begin to wonder if acting sicker means I will not be alone as much.
“What happens when you don’t get enough oxygen?” I ask.
She looks immediately at my pulse ox numbers, which are steady. “You’re fine,” Betty insists.
“Now,” I clarify. “But clearly, I was bad enough that I needed a vent, right? What if it messed my brain up … ?permanently?”
Betty’s eyes soften. “Covid fog is a real thing,” she tells me. “If you’re having trouble stringing thoughts together or remembering the end of a sentence before you finish speaking it, that’s not brain damage. It’s just … ?an aftereffect.”
“The problem isn’t not remembering,” I say. “It’s that I do remember. Everyone is telling me I’ve been in the hospital and that I have Covid but I don’t have any recollection of that. All my memories are of me in a different country, with people you’re all telling me are make-believe.” My voice is thick with tears; I don’t want to see the pity on Betty’s face; I don’t want to be thought of as a patient who doesn’t have a grasp on reality. What I want is for someone to fucking believe me.
“Look,” Betty says, “why don’t I page the doctor on call? That’s what intensivists are for. Someone who’s come through the kind of experience you have is likely to experience some PTSD; and we can get you some medication to take the edge off—”
“No,” I interrupt. “No more drugs.” I don’t want to lose these memories because of a pharmaceutical that makes me a zombie. I don’t want my mind erased.