Wish You Were Here(16)

Which, maybe, they do.

We try not to stay in their rooms. We don’t touch them unless we have to. No one really knows how long the virus lasts on surfaces, so we assume the worst. When we come out we take off our gloves, toss them into the trash, and wash our hands. Then the cap goes into the trash, and we wash our hands. The gown is placed in a plastic bin, and we wash our hands. Then the shield comes off, and we wash our hands. Our N95 masks we have to reuse, because there aren’t enough. So we take them off and stick them in little cubbies, tagged with our names, and wash our hands. In Italy, docs are wearing hazmat suits like they’re entering a nuclear reactor, and I’m washing down my face mask with a fucking wipe.

My knuckles are cracked and bleeding.

I should not complain.

Today I had to do an emergency cricothyrotomy on a Covid patient. He was crashing, minutes away from going into cardiac arrest. I called RICU—the respiratory team—stat, but the guy’s neck was too thick and the anesthesiologist couldn’t get a good visual to intubate him fast enough. It was just me and the anesthesiologist and the nurse and the man gasping for air. I had to step in and do the emergency cric to secure the airway and get him intubated before it was too late. I was terrified, because, you know, if you do it wrong, if you miss one detail, you might get infected. I had to squeeze my hands together to keep them from shaking before I made the incision. I kept telling myself to do this efficiently and quickly and to get the fuck out of that room and sanitize myself.

When it was over the anesthesiologist and I left like we were on fire. I pulled off all my gear in the right order and scrubbed my hands and used Purell afterward and then I realized that the nurse was still in that room, with all those airborne molecules of virus. She was all of maybe 25. She was stroking the patient’s arm, and I saw her brush a tear from the man’s cheek, even though he was fast asleep. She was talking to him, even though he was sedated and couldn’t hear her.

Here I am bitching about wearing a paper space suit and making a cut, and she was providing real, true patient care.

And I thought: She’s the fucking hero.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It feels good, though, to know you’re listening.



I don’t know how long I sit on the main street in Puerto Villamil rereading Finn’s email, the sun baking the back of my neck and the crown of my head. His description of the city and the hospital feels unreal, dystopian. How could so much change in just forty-eight hours?

Suddenly it feels juvenile and entitled to be upset about not staying in the hotel I booked, or being hungry. There is no way in hell I’m going to complain to Finn.

It’s so beautiful here, I type. It’s hard to know where to look—there’s water so clear you can see fish on the bottom and crazy dramatic hunks of lava rock and iguanas crossing Main Street.

The people are superfriendly too, I write.

I describe the sea lion on the dock in Santa Cruz and the choppy ferry ride and I completely leave out the mob of frantic tourists that met me when I reached Isabela.

The only bad thing, I add, (aside from the lack of cell service) is that you’re not with me.

I hate that I’m here, and that you’re in the thick of it. I wish I could be there for you.

I do not tell him that even if I decided to head home, there’s no way for me to get there.

I hit send.

I stare at the screen, holding my breath, until the notification pops up: No internet connection.

In the field of auctions, video representation is nowhere near as important as the physical catalog. It’s far more important to have your clients pore over the stunning photographs, read the copy about the object’s provenance, to determine—from the placement in the book—how important the piece might be. After graduating from Sotheby’s with a master’s in art business, and training for a year, I was hired in 2014 as a junior cataloger in Imp Mod. My job was to write the words that accompanied the photos. A specialist might bring in the painting, but it was my task to bring it to life.

The library at Sotheby’s isn’t really a library, but rather stacks of bookshelves that line the hallways of every floor of the office. As a cataloger, I would scour the materials, trying to piece together initial research on the market value of a piece, how much money similar works had sold for, and whatever little tidbits I could add. The way to hook people on a piece of art is to find a detail that sticks in their minds—something that can personalize the work: this was painted the day before he met the mentor who would sponsor him as an artist; this was the first painting he did in oils; this image was influenced by Degas, Gauguin, Cézanne. Every snippet of copy was reviewed and edited and arranged to grab the interest of the buyer and keep him turning pages.

What this meant for me, practically, was that I rarely sat down during the day, unless it was to type a revision, and then I’d run mock-ups and edits from one specialist to another, to the marketing people, and to the art department that organized the catalog for printing. Also, we were always on a strict deadline to get the catalog off to the printer in time for the actual auction.

That was the reason I didn’t take the elevator one day, three years into my tenure at Sotheby’s. By then my boss—Eva St. Clerck—was the head of sale for Imp Mod. I was running something to her to meet a deadline, and with the elevator stuck on another floor, I opted for the emergency staircase instead. But I was in such a hurry, I missed a step and found myself tumbling down the stairs, breaking my fall with my left arm outstretched.