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.”