Petrichor

The first sign was a sandwich. Tuna fish on rye, homemade. Hannah sealed it in Tupperware, slipped it into her purse, and left for work. The sandwich was unimportant at the time, discernible as the turning point only in retrospect.

At the office, everyone was murmuring about this new virus. It was still in Asia then, an ocean away, but the media could talk of little else. “Much ado about nothing,” Hannah said, leaning against the copier as it shuddered and squeaked. “They’re just trying to scare us. Anything for a headline. Tomorrow they’ll be freaking out about North Korean nukes again.” She believed this, believed that the media had become a perpetual motion machine, powered by panic, that created an endless supply of its own fuel.

But still, throughout the morning, she found herself googling viruses. The body count in Asia was rising, she learned. Viruses were not living things at all, she learned. They inhabited a nether realm of existence, inert until they came into contact with life, which activated them, inducing them to replicate. Zombies, Hannah thought, and turned off her computer for lunch.

After one bite, she threw her sandwich away in horror. The celery crunched, the mayonnaise oozed, everything looked and felt normal. But the whole thing was wrong in a way she could not initially define, something she had never in her thirty-six years of life encountered. There was a terrible sweetness, a misalignment of sandwich and smell: an aftertaste, or maybe an afterthought, of peaches and cream.

○

Next came the roses with a potent aroma of peanut butter. Hannah leaned in to feel the velvet petals against her face and recoiled in confusion. Her morning coffee tasted like spaghetti. On a fitness walk with her sister, Hannah kept pausing, sniffing the air, wondering aloud if a fire was burning somewhere near. But no—it was pollen on the wind, not smoke, according to both her sister and the internet.

Strange, but not yet frightening. Hannah examined her nose in the mirror, familiar, freckled, and flat. Was the glitch in her nostrils or in her brain? Perimenopause, her sister suggested. Cancer, WebMD offered.

And still, the news could talk of nothing but the virus, which had reached the shores of Europe, battering Italy and Germany. The body count rose by the day, by the hour.

Hannah woke in a panic on Sunday morning. Something was missing—something so primal and essential that she could not immediately identify it. She counted her limbs and digits. She laid a palm on her chest, checking for a heartbeat. She inhaled deeply, trying to calm herself, but the feeling persisted—a raw absence, as if some fundamental aspect of the world, or of Hannah herself, had been erased.

Another inhale. Deeper, choking her lungs with air. She understood now what was lacking. The lemony odor of her apartment, the lingering tang of fabric softener in her sheets, the pleasant stink of her own garish sweat. Gone.

○

“Anosmia,” her doctor said, and then chuckled. “It’s a funny word, isn’t it?”

Hannah did not return his smile. “How do we fix this?”

The doctor gave a longwinded, hand-wavy reply that meant I don’t know.

“How long will it go on?” Hannah asked, trying to keep the desperation out of her voice. “I can’t just stay like this forever.”

Her first thought had been to call the police. The loss felt as violent as theft, as intimate as a break-in. Someone had stolen one of her five senses.

“We’ll keep an eye on it,” the doctor said, nodding sagely and ushering her out of his office.

In another month, everyone would recognize anosmia as one of the first symptoms of the virus. Just then, however, Hannah’s private suffering seemed unrelated to the news coverage of the first recorded case found on American soil, a couple hundred miles north near Seattle.

○

She took the rest of the day off work. The internet told her that food would now lose its savor, which was true; everything tasted like cardboard. She spritzed perfume directly into her face and smelled nothing, though her sinuses ached afterward. She took a long walk along the river, pausing to breathe intensely when she spied a dead fish. Everywhere, anywhere, the air was blank and meaningless.

Her friends offered their condolences, but politely, briskly. Even her sister did not seem particularly interested. Jo kept changing the subject to the virus, which was spreading through the Pacific Northwest like a wildfire. It would reach their small Oregon town any minute, if it hadn’t already. Jo was considering pulling her children out of school as a precaution, but she and her husband could not agree.

Sleepless, Hannah sat up late. She couldn’t bear the thought that she would never again inhale the spice of a freshly peeled orange or the bright, brassy scent of her niece’s hair after a long day in the sun. It occurred to her for the first time that vision was the favorite child of the English language. Every color had a synonym. There were a dozen descriptors for the quality of light alone—glitter, gleam, shine, flash, shimmer—but not a single word for so many of the things she had lost: the mouthwatering, sugary bouquet of a bakery, the sting of fresh nail polish, or the omnipresent fume rising from the ocean. Why were there not more nouns like petrichor? Hannah had learned the word in childhood, a musical encapsulation of the smell of rain on dry earth. Her late mother had loved its specificity and rhythm, rolling the r’s down her tongue.

Now Hannah whispered it like a mantra, “Petrichor, petrichor,” and wept.

○

Without smell, she was reduced to taste, a lesser version of the olfactory rainbow. Smell infused the world with context and significance. Smell offered a thousand shades, while taste provided only five: sweet, sour, bitter, salt, and umami.

On her lunch break, Hannah sat on a bench outside, despite the drizzle. A couple walked past, nestled under a single umbrella, both wearing cloth masks. She watched them, wondering if they were doctors, though they were awfully young, and dressed in jeans, not scrubs. Was the woman wearing perfume? Did the man have stinky feet? Hannah would never know. Without smell, the world stood at a remove. She might have been a filmgoer watching the biopic of her own life; everything was flattened as though on a screen, lacking the verisimilitude of odiferous reality.

Hannah opened her lunch. Since the onset of her anosmia, she had packed meals that encompassed the sad little spectrum that was left to her. Today: sliced apple for sweet, sauerkraut for sour, gouda for umami, sautéed Brussels sprouts for bitter, and dried seaweed for salt. As a kindness to the unimpaired noses of her coworkers, Hannah ate outside now, even in the pervasive Oregon rain.

She had prepared the Brussels sprouts according to her late mother’s recipe, sautéed in oil and liberally spiced, though, as she chewed, she realized she might as well have eaten them raw. Plain bitterness, nothing more. Sauerkraut: the bracing tartness of vinegar. Gouda: a round, meaty contentment. The apple gave no lingering aroma of the forest, no multifaceted juices, only bare sweetness, unaccompanied. Smell was a wide-open gift, billowing on the wind, available for the taking. Taste was stingy and small, cloistered in the hollow of the human mouth.

Hannah saved salt, her favorite, for last. Dried seaweed on her tongue. Crunchy, melting into spongy. She waited for the top note of salt. Waited. She probed the seaweed, the feel of it, nap and grain, but no taste—nothing but texture.

Where was salt?

Salt was gone.

○

She lost sweet that same afternoon. Umami and sour had vanished by the next morning. Bitter lingered long enough that Hannah thought, even hoped, that it might stay with her forever; a bitter world was better than an empty one. She sipped coffee all the way to the doctor’s office, relishing each charred, earthy mouthful.

Ensconced in the plastic coffin of the MRI machine, Hannah thought of Bergamo, Italy, the latest virus hotspot. A doctor over there had described it as a war zone, bodies filling the morgue, crematoriums at capacity, funerals unattended because the loved ones of the bereaved were sick too. A military caravan had carried the dead through the streets; no other vehicles were large enough. Would that happen here, in the small town where Hannah had lived since childhood? Neither she nor Jo had ever felt the inclination to leave their bucolic home.

Her brain was fine. The doctor showed it to her on a screen. To her the image was a Rorschach; to him, a diagnosis of good health. He pointed: “Here, you see, and here?” No lesions, no tumors, nothing at all to explain her symptoms.

Hannah reached for her thermos of coffee with shaking hands, took a lukewarm sip, and found that bitter, too, had abandoned her.

○

Schools closed. Businesses went remote. At Hannah’s office, a few junior members of staff lost their jobs, no longer needed to restock the copiers or fetch coffee. Hannah’s own work was easier at home, streamlined by solitude.

She told no one about the vanishing of her sense of taste. It was too profound, too achingly personal, and at the same time too silly, given the backdrop of a world teetering on the brink. Her sister caught the virus and was in bed for a week, followed by her husband, who was sick for even longer. The kids either didn’t catch it or didn’t show symptoms. They went feral, from what Hannah could tell over the phone, snarling and gibbering in the background as Jo coughed wetly into a tissue and her husband moaned in the other room.

Virtual meetings were a joke, fifteen faces stacked in boxes like fish in an aquarium, the boss droning on, the chat filled with reports of whose uncle tested positive, whose grandmother was on a ventilator. Hannah wore pajama bottoms off-screen, under her smart blazers. She kept her feet bare. She found herself watching her own face almost exclusively, the turn of her throat in the light, the flutter of her restless fingers as she gestured. She wondered if the others were all doing the same, each narcissus granted a private rectangle in which to gaze.

The normalcy of her own face was both reassuring and haunting. There was her broad nose pointing down like an arrow, her thin lips, her elegant brows; she looked the same as always. No one would know that her tongue was as dumb as her fingertips now, all its specialness gone. No one would know that food had become a chore, the dull answer to a nagging question. Hungry? Food. Without smell, without taste, the stuff on Hannah’s plate was not a meal; it was matter, mere solid substance, differentiated only by temperature and texture, hot or cold, dry or damp, crisp or soft. She might as well have snacked on clay and sand.

Her dreams were filled with creamy cakes, steaming plates of nachos, the grease of fresh pizza, and the snap of peanut brittle. Hannah woke with a hunger that could not be satiated. Wasn’t there a Greek myth about someone in a similar quandary: starving and parched, surrounded by fresh water and ripe grapes, just out of reach?

The CDC claimed that outdoor activity was fine, probably safe, almost certainly safe, even recommended, so long as one was masked and maintained a six-foot distance from other humans and did not step into the contrails left by fast-moving joggers or cyclists. Hannah took long walks around her neighborhood, despite the persistent rain. She gave other pedestrians a wide berth, crossing the street to avoid them, eschewing even eye contact, as though a momentary gaze could be infectious. In her slicker and rain boots, she moved with urgency. She had the nagging sense that she was looking for something out there.

She lost weight without meaning to, without thinking about it, noticing the change only when she saw herself in her reflecting pool during a Monday meeting. Hollows beneath her cheekbones, the gaunt jut of her chin. She did not hear one word her boss said, fixated instead on her new, narrow face.

As soon as the first tests for the virus became available, Hannah hurried to her doctor’s office. She was desperate for anything that might explain her predicament. Loss of smell was a symptom, she now knew, though loss of taste did not seem to be, and she did not have any of the other usual indicators either—sore throat, difficulty breathing, cough, headache, blood clots, pneumonia, fever, or death.

The results were negative. However, the doctor explained that the tests were so new as to be somewhat unreliable. In addition, Hannah had first developed her anosmia long enough ago that even if she had been infected then, the antigens from the virus might not show up in her blood now.

“What does that mean?” Hannah asked. “What’s happening to me?”

“We’ll keep an eye on it,” the doctor said. “It’s hard to know what’s what. This virus is unlike anything else I’ve seen. This virus . . .” His gaze lifted to the window, and he never finished the sentence.

○

Then came the day when the volume on Hannah’s laptop stopped working—at least, that was what she thought at first. Everyone in the morning meeting seemed to be mumbling, their voices tinny and fractured. “What?” she said, leaning close to the speaker. “Are you on mute? What did you say? Can you repeat that?”

You’re yelling, Hannah, someone wrote in the chat.

Their voices drifted further away. Mouths moved. Her boss was gesticulating, one hand rolling in midair, everyone else nodding along. Hannah tilted her head right and left, doglike, watching herself onscreen. No sound came from her laptop.

Something’s wrong with my connection, she typed into the chat. I’m going to sign out and back in again.

She went to fill the kettle while her computer was buffering. She used to prefer coffee, but tea was a comfort now in a purely tactile way—the heat in her palms, the cloud of steam against her cheeks. Besides, tea had never offered much in the way of smell or taste, whereas every sip of coffee was a brief but devastating loss.

Leaning against the counter, Hannah watched the rain bejewel the windowpane. A gray, dreamy day. She wondered if she ought to call her sister, if she had the bandwidth to take on that litany of understandable but overwhelming complaints. Jo had recovered quickly from the virus, but her husband was still bedridden, and the kids were home all day now. No school, no playdates, no routine, the impossibility of working remotely with children at one’s elbow, no privacy, no end in sight.

Hannah reached for her phone and saw steam gushing from the spout of the kettle, a frantic, silent blast.

For a moment she did not understand. Everything was breaking down—first her laptop, then the kettle. And the rain, that was broken too. A downpour splattered the kitchen window, urgent drops that smashed into shards and distorted the world outside, but there was no accompanying rhythm, no patter or splash.

Hannah snapped her fingers. Silence.

She clapped her hands. Silence.

She put her palms over her ears, tried to locate the thump of her own heart.

“Help me,” she said, and she felt her larynx tighten, her tongue lift, the mechanism of her voice functioning like always, producing nothing she could hear.

○

During the MRI, tears welled up and poured down in a slow waterfall. Hannah did not wipe them away, even as they dripped into her ears; she was not supposed to move. Last time, there had been electronic creaks and groans as the machine took scans of her brain, but this time she was caged in suffocating stillness.

The journey to the emergency room had been a farce. Hannah intended to drive, but the simple act of picking up her keys left her reeling; the absence of the cheerful jingle of metal on metal, that homey, everyday chime, was more than she could bear. Instead, she booked a rideshare on her phone, but that presented its own problems. Standing on the street corner, Hannah was bewildered by the lack of ambient sound. She stared into the trees, watching birds open and close their beaks like defective automatons in a museum exhibit, their electronic music stilled by age and disuse. Wind gusted; Hannah could feel its breath, but there was no accompanying rustle of leaves. A plastic bag wafted past in eerie silence.

Probably her driver honked. Probably he called to her and waved. Only when the man got out of his car and approached her, red-faced, did Hannah snap to attention. Beady eyes, maybe he smelled like cigarettes or sweat, he seemed to be yelling, flecks of spittle, was it possible he was singing opera? She had so little to go on.

“I can’t hear you,” she said finally. “I can’t hear anything.”

It was impossible to tell if she had pitched her voice correctly—too loud, too low? Her voice was theoretical now.

To her surprise, the driver smiled. He began to gesture at her, changing the configuration of his fingers and bumping the heels of his palms together. Sign language, Hannah realized. She had never studied it. Why would she? Was learning ASL part of the man’s training to become a rideshare driver? That seemed unlikely.

“I just lost my hearing this morning,” she told him. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

He stared at her in alarm, obviously concerned that she might be insane. She did not blame him; what was happening to her did sound insane.

How long had she been in the MRI machine? She opened her mouth to ask the technician, then remembered that she would not be able to hear the answer. What if they had forgotten about her? What if they had all gone to lunch? What if they had left for the weekend? What if she died in here?

She breathed, waited, breathed and waited.

○

They sent her home without a diagnosis. We’ll let you know, the technician scrawled on a piece of paper. The lobby was overrun by people who were coughing—or pantomiming the act, anyway, lurching forward in a spasm, hand over the mouth. Hannah could not hear them, left to imagine their hawking and rheumy breath. Flushed faces, fevers. She wrapped her scarf around her face to protect herself from germs and hurried out with her head down.

○

At the window, Hannah sat for hours, watching people go by and imagining the click of heels, the carillon of children’s voices. Enough passersby wore masks now that the occasional bare face seemed indecent. It was mostly men who went about this way, mouth and nose exposed and spewing particles. Sometimes a husband and wife would walk past, the woman masked, the man apparently unwilling. Hannah observed it all, cataloguing these little injustices.

Framed in a window across the street, a fat tabby lolled in the sunlight, sometimes grooming its luxurious mane, sometimes charting the paths of birds, sometimes locking eyes with Hannah with an expression rather like sympathy. Two indoor cats, they kept watch over the street together.

Finally the doctor got back to her with results. The takeaway from all the scans—the MRI, the audiologist’s report, the painful probing of nose, mouth, and ear—was that medical science was stumped. According to every metric, Hannah was a healthy woman. The only thing that belied the numbers was her own experience, her own testimony.

Poss. psychosomatic, the doctor wrote at the end of his email. Referring you to psychologist.

Hannah resisted the urge to throw her laptop across the room. She vowed to find a female physician who would take her experience as truth, who would not treat her as hysterical. Just as soon as she could make an appointment among the thousands of sick and dying people infected with the virus, desperate for aid.

○

A steady rain settled in for weeks, unrelenting. Hannah no longer took walks around her neighborhood. Though the CDC continued to recommend outdoor exercise, it was too frightening in her current state. Everything startled her. An airplane in the corner of the sky made her flinch. A jogger in her peripheral vision triggered some latent prey response; she would cower like a zebra on the prairie flanked by a lion. There was never any warning now—no distant grumble of airborne engines, no car horn, no footsteps. She kept whirling around to see what was behind her. Anything could be back there, a mugger, a truck bearing down on her, a tornado.

The shock of her loss—her many losses—left her weary and timid. She slept often and suddenly. Fatigue overtook her on the couch, in the bath; she had never been a napper, but she had also never been so tired. There was less of a delineation now between dreaming and waking, between day and night. The sky was always gray, rain fell, her senses were muted and muffled as though in a nightmare, it was hard to keep track of what was real. Her orbit shrank: bed to couch to kitchen stool and back again. She ordered groceries online and sanitized them as the internet had instructed. The news was filled with the virus, so she turned it off; her own suffering was so intense and bizarre that she could not summon empathy for others, even the dead.

She was not sure how the hours passed, but they did.

At the emergency room, she had taken a hearing test, sitting in a fabric box with headphones on, the technician staring at her through a thick pane of glass. Hannah was supposed to raise her hand each time she heard a beep or buzz. She did not raise her hand once. The technician shone lights in her ears and measured the bounce of her eardrum with a sharp-edged machine. Everything about her auditory system appeared normal, the cochlea vibrating, the minuscule bones dancing. But the signal was not being transmitted to her brain.

It was the same for her nose. The air was rife, as rife as it had always been, with the molecules cast off by tuna sandwiches and rose petals and underarm sweat, sucked up by Hannah’s nostrils with each breath and scanned by her olfactory nerves—and then a malfunction, a lack of communication, the data sitting in somebody’s inbox, never passed up the chain.

Taste too. So many chemicals in every kind of food, in water, in metal, in paper, in human skin, all the things Hannah had licked and nibbled in vain over the past few weeks, searching for stimulation. Her taste buds were doing their job, collating and categorizing the data, but her cerebral cortex never got the memo. Her body was healthy, her brain was healthy, but one could not communicate with the other.

This raised a terrifying question: Was she a body, or was she a brain? She had always thought of herself as the former. She had believed that her mind and flesh were inextricable, smelling and tasting and hearing the whole of the world together simultaneously. But now she was beginning to suspect that the real Hannah consisted of nothing more than the three pounds of gray matter tucked in the cocoon of her skull. Her body was a vessel—not the essence of herself but a mere vehicle. The real Hannah was a tiny pilot locked in a windowless, soundproof room, receiving information from the outside world only through a network of nerves.

She did not see. Light entered through her corneas, blazing on her retinae, transfigured by her photoreceptors into electrical impulses, whizzing up the optic nerve to the cockpit. She did not feel. Touch receptors in every inch of her skin sent signals along the bundled fibers of the spinal column. The tiny pilot got these precious messages and knew, from a distance, what lay beyond that protective sheath of bone. Everything Hannah had ever experienced came to her secondhand, delivered through the tubes and wires of her nervous system. One by one, these links were breaking down, leaving her brain, that tiny pilot, marooned, insensate, inside the useless vehicle of her anatomy. What had she lost? What could she yet lose?

○

Her father had died when she was six. She still missed him, a vague ache, though she remembered only a little about him distinctly anymore: his bristly beard, a sneeze like a cannon blast, and the smell of peppermint soap.

Her mother died when Hannah was in college. After the funeral, empty of tears, she and Jo sat up late, drinking wine and arguing about the soul. Her sister believed in heaven. She believed that their parents still existed in some recognizable form, spirits or ghosts or angels, waiting for their daughters.

Hannah did not. She was the analytical one. Like most siblings, she and her sister had grown up both in sync with and in opposition to each other. Jo was a romantic, a daydreamer, hopeful and well-liked. Hannah lived in her senses, in reality, believing what she could perceive. Her parents were gone, but she would remember them. In this way they would live on—in the minds and memories of their loved ones.

That night, she and Jo stayed awake until dawn. Neither of them wanted to face the possibility of sleep, which would lead inevitably to the terrible awakening on the other side, the funeral over, nothing left to plan and prepare for, only the unending, aching absence of their mother. So they sipped their wine, got another bottle.

At one point, Hannah’s phone rang. She checked the screen—another grieving relative—and did not answer. Slumped on the couch, Jo snickered. Then she straightened her spine and, in a dead-on imitation of their mother, chirped, “Ring ring!”

“The Mommings!” Hannah gasped, beginning to laugh. “Oh my god, the Mommings!”

She had almost forgotten. Their mother had been sick for years, long enough that she had lost much of what made her unique, including the little quirks her daughters had loved and mimicked throughout their childhood. Certain everyday events—a particular sound, a smell—would elicit specific reactions from their mother, a combination of words and gestures, offered the exact same way every time they happened.

The phone was one of them. Whenever a telephone sounded in her presence, their mother would lengthen her spine like a ballerina and sing out on a high note, “Ring ring!” She would do it in public, in a work meeting, on the bus, anywhere.

Peanut butter was another one. Their mother preferred the oily, organic kind that required stirring, and whenever she opened a new jar she could be found circling her hips in concert with the knife and chanting in a deep bass, “PB for me!”

When Hannah and Jo were young, they had cataloged all the Mommings and could reliably make each other laugh to the point of wetting their pants by imitating them. Now, pouring more wine, they named and incarnated each one.

“Moment of silence,” Hannah said, bowing her head solemnly. Their mother had done this in a restaurant whenever there was a crash of dishes hitting the floor.

“Nothing better,” Jo purred in honeyed tones, laying her palm on her belly. The taste of chocolate provoked this response and no other.

“Boom,” Hannah said, shimmying her palms like a hummingbird’s wings. Their mother’s reply to thunder—low voice, jazz hands.

Both sisters were crying now. Hannah could not tell if it was the laughter or the grief or the wine.

“Oh, oh,” Jo said, leaning forward, spilling from her glass. “We forgot the best one.” She mimed a chef’s kiss with her fingers and murmured throatily, “Petrichor!”

It was not raining that night, but for a moment Hannah could have sworn she smelled the pungent musk of parched earth melting beneath a drizzle. And for a moment her mother was there with them, standing at the window, gazing out at the night sky, inhaling the first caress of moisture against the dusty ground—the heady aroma rising, suffusing the air. A little miracle, rain after a dry spell. Certain stimuli were so perfect and holy that they required pause and acknowledgment, both gestural and verbal. That was the glorious truth beneath the silliness of the Mommings. Their mother had loved the world so much that it moved her to celebration.

○

Hannah opened her eyes. She closed her eyes. There was no difference.

Reality had been blown out like a candle. Her bedroom was gone. She was in the void of space, she thought, still half awake, blinking and blinking. Absolute emptiness, lacking even the stars.

Hannah could not breathe, and then she could. There was air here, that was lucky. How long would it last, though? One lungful, two?

Her hands grabbed for purchase. She discovered fabric, bunches of it. Some part of the universe remained, then. She sucked in another breath. Air flowed easily into her lungs; it did not seem to be running out. She registered the weight of her own body. So gravity persisted. Hannah herself persisted. She was not floating in outer space—that was her pillow under her nape, damp with sweat. Her calves slid against the mattress. She could feel (but not hear) the anxious knock of her heart.

It was not gray; it was not whiteout or darkness—it was absence, blindness, a woman lying on her back in bed, missing four of her five senses, clutching at the mattress for dear life, tethered to the world by touch alone.

○

Hannah was lost in her own apartment. Shuffling, arms held out like a sleepwalker, toes gripping the carpet, she could not find the front door. Her shoulder bumped against the lamp in the corner. Her fingers brushed the plane of the window. She turned, trying to locate the wall, and barked her shins on the coffee table. The couch was in the wrong place. Everything was in the wrong place.

Hannah collapsed on the floor, cross-legged like a child, and screamed as loud as she could. She felt her throat scrape, tongue rise, pushing the breath out like a bellows; she was making sound she could not hear. Screamed. Screamed.

A tremor beneath her. The door opening, she hoped, or being broken open. And then hands, other people’s hands, pulling her to her feet.

○

Probably a hospital. All Hannah knew for certain was the bed, scratchy sheets, a thin pillow, and a needle taped inside the hollow of her elbow, attached to a plastic tube.

Hands came and went. Doctors and nurses, Hannah assumed. She could not access time; she might have been in that bed for hours or days. Weeks, even. She had never before understood the relief of a clock, the simple but vital ability to quantify the vast, shapeless wash of consciousness. Without time, there was only now, and now was unbearable. Hannah groped for her jugular vein and took her own pulse, just to have something to count. The present moment was torture, but the future was coming, heartbeat by heartbeat.

She tried to picture her surroundings, to give herself the comfort of a mental image at least. She imagined the reek of bleach, the beep of machinery, the murmur of concerned voices. She blinked often, waiting for her sight to come back on like a light switch being flipped. What was more quintessentially human than sight? People said “I see” when they meant “I understand”; it was that primal.

Gradually she came to know the different hands. They changed every so often, according to some tidal rhythm. There were the cold, quick-moving ones, the fingers hard and inhuman. There were the hammy pincers, crushing Hannah’s wrist to find her pulse. There were the slim, kindly ones, which announced their presence in the room each time by squeezing Hannah’s toes through the sheets, then tapping her elbow in a friendly way before examining her IV port and taking her vitals. All the hands wore rubber gloves. Every so often they would do something shocking, like injecting Hannah’s shoulder with a solution that burned like venom. Once a clever, nimble hand settled in the cup of Hannah’s palm and began to change shape, kicking its fingers like a Rockette’s legs. Sign language, she guessed. Helen Keller, she remembered. The hand contorted against her skin for a while as Hannah said aloud, over and over, “I don’t understand.” Eventually the fingers went limp and withdrew.

Sometimes the hands urged her out of bed and pulled her limbs this way and that like a child playing with a doll, stripping off her gown and replacing it with an identical one. They steered her into the bathroom at intervals, controlling her path with a viselike grip on her upper arm. They bathed her with a rough sponge. They gave her trays of food—presumably it was food—which she chewed and swallowed obediently. No smell, no taste, and she could not even see it. She scanned the surface with fluttering fingertips: a carton of milk, a fruit cup, a sandwich. Her tongue, no longer a subtle sensor but a blunt instrument, added few details: some kind of condiment soaking the bread, maybe mayonnaise, maybe mustard, and in the middle a mysterious lukewarm substance that could have been deli meat or fried egg.

And then, without warning, a new hand—gentle, with a dry palm—slipped into hers. A pulse of recognition. Until that moment, Hannah had not believed that she would know her sister’s touch. She had never paid attention to the tenor and quality of Jo’s hands. Why would she? But she was certain—as certain as though she could see Jo’s rosebud mouth, smell her lavender shampoo, hear her husky voice, taste the salt tears that flowed down her own cheeks.

She gripped Jo’s palm in both of hers, and her sister responded in kind.

○

Nothing came next. Nothingness, rather. One morning, or afternoon, it was impossible to tell, Hannah lay with two fingers against her throat, counting her pulse. It was daytime, she thought, because of the heat on one side of her face, probably from a window, sunlight through glass, though it could have been an electric light, a trick. Hands came, taking away the lunch tray, adjusting the sheets with a tug and tuck, and patting Hannah’s shoulder in a reassuring manner—or maybe not, maybe it was just a tactile good-bye, offering no comfort, only communication.

The nurse’s hands left, and then the heat. Had the sun dipped behind a cloud?

And what about the bed, that reliable presence, the last sure thing in the universe, pressing always against her back? Where had it gone?

Her fingers still lay against her jugular, but there was no pulse. She could not feel her throat with her hand; she could not feel her hand with her throat.

She had the sensation of falling, as in a dream, a lurch into empty space.

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During that time, that timeless time, Hannah was locked inside her own flesh. Her internal sensors still functioned, but her skin, the largest organ in the body, as she had learned in grade school, provided no information. When she patted the bed, her finger bones spread apart, the muscles inside her palm tightened, but there was no answering touch from the mattress. When she sucked in a breath, she felt her lungs open, but when she blew out hard through her nose, there was no corresponding tickle against her lips. She had evidence of her own existence, but nothing beyond her body could be verified. The tiny pilot was marooned in ghastly solitude.

The many hands of the doctors and nurses, even her own sister, had abandoned her. Probably they were still there, unfelt, restraining her as she thrashed, trying to connect with something, to launch herself out of bed and slam into the floor, to find the wall with her fist; she would break bone if it meant contact. Maybe they strapped her down. Certainly they sedated her. She could feel it happen, the syrupy, somnolent warmth spreading through her bloodstream from one shoulder.

Sleep was a balm, the same as ever; her senses bloomed there. She dreamed of sitting in her father’s lap as a child, scraping her forehead against his beard. She dreamed of baking with her mother, side by side in the kitchen, licking the cookie dough off the spoon in flagrant disregard of doctors’ recommendations. “If this is what kills me,” her mother said, “tell them I died doing what I loved.” Hannah dreamed of running down a hill with Jo, young and strong, breathless with glee. She dreamed of the icy cocoon of the MRI machine. “Here’s the problem,” the doctor said, handing her a scan of her brain, a translucent sheet of black that showed the chalky bowl of her skull, which held not lobes and neurons but a doll-sized figure, its bones shining white, its posture contorted, waving in panic, signaling to be rescued.

Waking up was an emergency, every time. Hannah shrieked without sound and flailed without contact. “Let me die,” she roared silently. “Kill me!” But they did not, would not. They only sedated her again and again, lulling her back into the warm bath of sleep, where the solace of memory and dream awaited her, overlapping and melting into one—dreams as true as memories, memories as immersive as dreams.

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On a balmy, sun-swept morning, Jo enters the hospital for the first time in months. Vaccinated and boosted, she is no longer in danger from the virus, so the CDC says. Still, she wears a mask, mostly out of habit. For months, as hundreds of thousands of people died across the country, Jo donned a mask every morning, then slipped masks onto the delicate faces of her children, checked the straps, and pinched the folds of foil tight over their noses, as regular as prayer.

At the welcome desk, a pimply young man takes her temperature by scanning her wrist with a laser.

“I’m going to see my sister,” Jo tells him. He nods absently.

For months, the hospital has been besieged, running out of beds, running out of ventilators. No visitors have been allowed in, not even the partners of women in labor. Jo has called and called, annoying the nurses, who have more important things to do than report the same thing every day: “No change, she’s sedated now.”

Sometimes Jo wished that she could be sedated too. When she woke in the morning already counting the hours until she could go back to bed, when the death count was always the headline of the day, when her husband was too sick to stand up and her children were too antsy to sit still for remote learning, when Jo was slated to lead virtual meetings while her youngest was running around naked, heedless of the camera on her mother’s laptop, when the house descended into such an alarming state of filth that Jo would have called child services had she encountered it at someone else’s place, when her boss was on a ventilator, when her father-in-law died of the virus, when the world shrank and darkened to a pinpoint, no light at the end of the tunnel, only more of the same, absent of joy, absent of hope, Jo needed her sister. So much happened while Hannah lay in the hospital, more alone, it seemed, than any human has ever been.

At the door to her sister’s room, Jo pauses. Not knowing what else to do, she knocks. She is not sure what she will encounter inside—a wasted shell, riddled with bedsores, prematurely aged, fingernails overlong, hands gnarled? How much of Hannah is left?

There is a nurse in the room, changing the IV bag. Jo was not expecting to see anyone else. She waves, and he waves back, dressed in bright-blue scrubs.

Oh, Hannah. As thin as she was in her childhood, “all bones,” their mother used to say. Elbows wider than her upper arms. Her beesting breasts, so like Jo’s, have shrunk to mere suggestion, a prepubescent swell. Someone has been washing her hair, which shines and curls around her throat, oddly luxurious. Her expression is peaceful. She is pale, so pale, as ashen and still as a porcelain doll.

“How is she?” Jo asks.

The nurse shrugs. “There might have been some new activity on the last scan. I don’t know. She’s not usually one of mine. I’ll tell Dr. Alves you’re here.”

He rustles out of the room.

Jo takes a seat by the bed. She entwines her fingers through Hannah’s, hoping against hope for an answering squeeze. Last time, Hannah clung to her like a lifeline. This time, however, her sister’s hand is limp, and Jo must make do with the reassuring fact of bodily warmth, proof of life.

“It’s time to wake up,” Jo says. “You have to wake up now.”

In truth, the whole world is waking up. Jo’s children are back in school—thrilled to be dropped off each morning, waving good-bye like teenagers heading off to a rave. Her husband is back at the office, thank god. Jo loves to miss him, to miss the kids. Absence is necessary to affection, she understands now. Her work has stayed remote, which she does not mind. After school, she takes her children to the park, the zoo, the beach. Outdoors is better, the CDC says. The virus is not gone, the CDC says. Before the pandemic, Jo did not even know what the acronym stood for, but now she quotes the CDC’s pronouncements in everyday conversations, as though they are old friends. She cries often these days, sometimes from relief at seeing her children laugh on the playground, shaking off the caution they have absorbed like oxygen during the pandemic, and sometimes due to an emotion Jo cannot quite name—a kind of uncurling, the tears she could not shed when things were at their worst now finally released.

One day Hannah will learn all these things. She will learn what she missed. Her senses will return, Jo is sure. She cannot contemplate the other possibility, the outcome that is not recovery. One day, she and her sister will fall into each other’s arms again. They will leave this hospital together, stepping into the world with the raw astonishment of newborns, overwhelmed and delighted by every sensation, the flicker of sunlight through the leaves, the distant smoke of a barbecue, the hiss of bicycle wheels on pavement. Changed by what they have endured, stripped down to their essentials, they will revel in the simple, honest gift of the world the way it has always been.

Jo wipes her eyes, then goes to the window and opens it, letting in a gust of clean air. The sky is papered over with gray, the wind humid and slow. A droplet strikes the glass. It has not rained in weeks, a rare dry spell that appears to be drawing to a close. The clouds darken, coalescing.

There is a sound from the room behind her. Three sharp sniffs. Jo recognizes the noise as one of her sister’s unique quirks. Hannah would do that, sniff sniff sniff, when the aroma of pancakes wafted up the stairs, when their mother wore too much perfume, when their father brought home flowers as a surprise. Not one, not two, always three inhalations, canine in their quickness.

Jo turns, hardly daring to believe. Hannah’s eyes are closed, but one hand—yes, one hand has begun to twitch. The fingers swivel like the fronds of an anemone in a strong current. The elbow bends.

Another droplet smacks against the glass. The smell is overpowering, mud and stone, promise and renewal. As Jo watches, trembling all over, her sister lifts a hand to her mouth. Hannah touches her thumb against her fingertips and unfolds the palm. Her muscles are atrophied, but the gesture is unmistakable, a perfect imitation of their mother’s joyous, reverent chef’s kiss.

And then Hannah speaks, her voice weak, just one word. But Jo cannot hear it over the roar of the sky opening, the sudden, wild music of the rain.