Wish You Were Here(107)

Its feet are pedaling in the air, its head snicked back inside its shell.

I look around, wondering if there’s an attendant who will flip this poor little guy back over.

Well. They’re babies; they can’t be dangerous.

The retaining wall is only thigh-high. I put my foot on it, intending to climb over, complete a rescue mission, and leave.

I have no idea why the sole of my sneaker slips.

“Cuidado!”

I feel a hand grab my wrist the moment before I fall.

And I turn.




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AUTHOR’S NOTE


Humans mark tragedy. Everyone remembers where they were when Kennedy was shot, when the Twin Towers fell, and the last thing they did before the world shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

I was at a wedding in Tulum. The bride was an actress who—in a month—was going to star in the off-Broadway musical adaptation of Between the Lines, a novel I co-wrote with my daughter. I attended her wedding with the librettist and his husband, and our director and his husband. We all sat together at a table, drank margaritas, and had a wonderful time. From there, I met up with my husband in Aspen, where my son was about to propose to his girlfriend. There was buzz about coronavirus, but it didn’t seem real.

Then we got notice at our hotel that a guest had tested positive. By the time we flew home, New Hampshire was going into lockdown. My last trip to a grocery store was March 11, 2020 (and as of this moment, I still haven’t gone to one since). One week later I learned that all of the other people at my table at the wedding in Mexico had contracted Covid. Two were hospitalized.

I never caught it.

I have asthma, and I took quarantine very seriously. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve left my house in the past year—when, in previous years, I would travel cumulatively six months out of the year. Two of my kids and their partners came down with Covid, with fortunately mild symptoms. When my husband would go food shopping, and a clerk would dismiss the need for masks or social distancing, he always made sure to let them know that our kids had been sick. As Finn experiences in this novel—they usually jumped back a few feet, as if merely speaking of illness makes you contagious.

And me? I was at home, paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t breathe well on a good day; I couldn’t even imagine what Covid would do to my lungs. I was so anxious that I couldn’t concentrate on anything—which meant that I couldn’t distract myself with my work. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t even read. After only a few pages, I was unable to focus.

My reading slump broke first, thanks to romance novels, the only genre I could get lost in at the time. I think I needed to know there was a happy ending, albeit fictional. But writing was still elusive. I started working on a novel that I was supposed to co-write for a 2022 release, attempting to jog my muscle memory by doing research (via Zoom, this time), and somehow my brain remembered how to craft a book. But the whole time I was working on that story, I was wondering: How are we going to chronicle this pandemic? Who will do it? How do we tell the tale of how the world shut down, and why, and what we learned?

Several months into the pandemic I stumbled across an article about a Japanese man who got stranded in Machu Picchu during Covid. He was trapped there due to travel restrictions and, out of necessity, stopped being a tourist and became a resident of the community. Eventually the locals petitioned the government to open the historic site just for him, and he finally got to experience it as a visitor. Suddenly, I knew how to write about Covid.

The most pervasive emotion that we have all felt this past year is isolation. What’s odd is that it’s a shared experience, but we still feel alone and adrift. That got me thinking of how isolation can be devastating … ?but can also be the agent of change. And that made me think of Darwin. Evolution tells us that adaptation is how we survive.

I had never been to Machu Picchu … ?and I obviously couldn’t go there to do any research. But I had been to the Galápagos years ago, and I wondered whether there might have been a tourist stranded there during the pandemic. Sure enough, a young Scottish tourist named Ian Melvin found himself on Isabela Island in the Galápagos for months while travel was restricted. I tracked down Ian to interview him, as well as some of the residents he met there—Ernesto Velarde, who works with the Darwin Foundation, and Karen Jacome, a naturalist guide. I wanted to write about what it felt like to be stuck in paradise while the rest of the world was going to hell.

But I also wanted to talk about survival. About the resilience of humans. It is impossible to attribute meaning to the countless deaths and smaller losses we have all suffered—and yet, we’re going to have to make sense of this lost year. For that, I began by interviewing the medical professionals who have been in the trenches fighting Covid from the beginning. I heard their frustration, their exhaustion, and their determination to not let this damn virus win. I poured their hearts into Finn’s voice, and I hope I’ve done them justice. We will never be able to thank them for what they’ve done, or to erase the memories of what they’ve seen.

Then I turned to those who had such severe Covid that they were on ventilators—and who lived to tell me about it. It is worth noting that when I put out a social media call for survivors who had been on vents, I received over one hundred responses in an hour. Overwhelmingly, the people I spoke with (who were all ages, sizes, races—this virus doesn’t discriminate) wanted others to know that Covid isn’t “just the flu”; that there’s a reason for masking up and social distancing, and politics has no role in it. Like Diana, nearly every person I interviewed experienced incredibly detailed, lucid dream states—some that were snippets of time and others that lasted for years.