“If it were me,” he says, looking down at the fire, “and if you were the person I love…I’d want you as far away as possible so that I could battle the monsters and not have to worry about you getting hurt.”

  “That’s not a relationship,” I argue. “That’s…that’s like a beautiful piece of artwork you don’t display because you’re afraid it will get damaged. So, instead, you crate it up and stick it in storage and it doesn’t bring you any joy or any beauty.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Gabriel says softly. “What if it’s something you’d fight like hell to protect so you can someday see it one more time?”

  His words make a shiver run down my spine, so I unzip my sleeping bag and slide into it. It smells like soap and salt, like Gabriel. I lie down, my head still spinning a little from the caña, and blink at the night sky. Gabriel does the same, lying on top of his own sleeping bag, his arms folded over his stomach. The crowns of our heads are nearly touching.

  “When I was a boy, my father taught me to navigate by stars, just in case,” he murmurs. I hear a catch in his voice, and I think that of all he has told me tonight, the one thing he hasn’t revealed is why he is a farmer, not a tour guide. Plans change, he’d said. Shit happens.

  “How bad was your sense of direction?” I say, trying—and failing—for lightness.

  The fire hisses in the quiet between us. “Everything you’re seeing up in the night sky happened thousands of years ago, because the light takes so long to reach us,” Gabriel says. “I always thought it was so strange…that sailors chart where they’re going in the future by looking at a map of the past.”

  “That’s why I love art,” I say. “When you study the provenance of a piece, you’re seeing history. You learn what people wanted future generations to remember.”

  The sky looks like an overturned bowl of glitter; I cannot remember ever seeing so many stars. I think of the ceiling at Grand Central Terminal, and how I restored it with my father. It is hard to piece out the constellations here, and I realize that’s because on the equator, you can see clusters from both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. There—I find the Big Dipper. But also the Southern Cross, which is normally hidden beneath the horizon for me.

  It feels like a peek at a secret.

  “I can’t usually see the Southern Cross,” I say softly. It makes me a little disoriented, like the whole planet has shimmied off course.

  I wonder if I had to come to this half of the world just to see it a whole different way.

  After a moment, Gabriel asks, “Did you have a good birthday?”

  I glance at him. He has rolled to his side. While I’ve been looking at the sky, he’s been looking at me.

  “The best,” I say.

  To: DOToole@gmail.com

  From: FColson@nyp.org

  Sometimes I wonder if I’m ever going to do an appendectomy again. I’m a surgeon. I fix things. Your gallbladder’s infected? I got it. Hernia repair? I’m your guy. If I have any ICU patients, it’s temporary, a complication from surgery that I know how to fix. But with Covid, I can’t fix anything. I’m just maintaining the status quo, if I’m lucky.

  Also, I’m a resident, which means I’m supposed to be learning—but I’m learning nothing.

  I’m good at my job. I just don’t know if my job is still good for me.

  Three days ago, when I left the hospital, 98% of the beds in the ICU were occupied, and all my patients were on oxygen and dying. On the way home, I called my dad to check in. You know he voted for Trump—so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised when he told me that the Covid numbers are inflated, and that the shutdown is a cure that’s worse than the disease.

  I get that not everyone is seeing this virus firsthand. It’s another thing entirely to disavow it.

  I hung up on him.

  Fuck. I just remembered your birthday.

  * * *

  —

  My mother was often asked how she “did it all”—juggled the roles of wife, mother, and one of the most renowned crisis photographers of the century. In real life, the answer was simple—she didn’t do it all. My father did most of it, and if there was a balance between motherhood and her career, it canted hard to the latter. In interviews, she would always tell the same story about the first time she took me to the pediatrician. She bundled me into my snowsuit, loaded her pocketbook and the collapsible stroller and the diaper bag into the car, and drove off—leaving me buckled in my infant carrier on the floor of the kitchen. She was in the doctor’s parking lot before she realized that she’d left her baby behind.

  My mother never told me that story directly, but I had seen so many interview clips on the internet that I knew where she paused for dramatic effect, the part where she smiled wryly, the bit where she rolled her eyes in self-deprecation. It was an act, and my mother never broke character. She and the interviewer would both laugh, in a charming, what-can-you-do way.

  What about the baby, I used to think, as if it were not me, as if I were a mere observer. What about this is remotely funny?

  Finn—

  Last night I had a supervivid dream of you. Someone had kidnapped me and drugged me and I was in a basement and there weren’t any doors or windows where I could escape. I was tied to something—a pole, a chair? Then all of a sudden, you were there, wearing a costume. I couldn’t see the bottom half of your face, but I knew it was you because of your eyes and because I could smell your shampoo. You kept telling me to stay awake so you could get me out of there, but I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Then I realized we weren’t alone. There was another woman with you, and she was in costume, too.

  I was the only one who hadn’t been invited to the party.

  * * *

  —

  It’s somewhere around the fourth hour of a seven-hour hike to the Sierra Negra volcano that I wonder why, exactly, Gabriel thought this was a birthday gift anyone would actually enjoy. I am hot and sweaty and sunburned when we reach a small tree with a black rock in a crotch of its limbs. “This is the spot where tourists leave their overnight packs,” Gabriel says, and he shrugs off the gear he’s been shouldering. “Some of them stay overnight before hiking down into the caldera. No one’s allowed up here without a ranger or guide.”

  We are breaking curfew, Gabriel isn’t really a guide anymore, and the volcano happens to be active. What could possibly go wrong?

  Till this point, the climb has taken us along dirt paths, through lush, thick greenery. The trail begins 800 meters above sea level, Gabriel tells me, and by the time you reach the volcano, you’re 1,000 meters up. From the pack he’s carried, he takes out a lunch Abuela has made and spreads it between us. There are plastic bowls of rice and chicken, and a chocolate bar that is already soft with heat, which we share. I stretch my legs out in front of me, looking at the dust on my sneakers. “How much further?” I ask him.

  He grins at me, his eyes shaded by a baseball cap. “You sound like Beatriz, when she was little.”

  I try to imagine Beatriz, smart and demanding, as a little girl. “I bet she was a handful.”

  Gabriel thinks for a moment. “She was just the right amount.”

  I open my mouth to explain the idiom to him, but then realize his answer is already perfect. “Don’t think I didn’t notice that you avoided my question…”

  “You’ll know,” he says. “Trust me.”

  And, I realize, I do.

  We gather up our trash and put it into Gabriel’s pack, falling into an easy rhythm as we hike to the top of the caldera. “What are the odds,” I ask, “that this is going to go all Mount St. Helens on us?”

  “Slim to none,” Gabriel assures me. “There are twelve geological systems tracking its tremors, and it gives out plenty of hints before it erupts, which happens every fifteen years or so. I was here the last time. My father and I hiked in and we slept on ground that was warm, like it had heated pipes underneath. He taught me how to gauge the wind and the slope, so that we wouldn’t wind up in the path of the eruption. We took pictures, when it happened. I remember you could see the orange lava in the cracks of the earth, just a foot or so below. My shoes stuck to the rocks, because the soles had melted.”

  “When was this?”

  “Two thousand five. I was a teenager.”

  I do the math. “So…this volcano is overdue to blow?”

  “If it makes you feel better, the Galápagos are moving eastward on their tectonic plate, so even though the hot spot is in the same place, the lava flows mostly to the west now…which means the eruptions aren’t as dangerous to the people living here anymore.”

  It does not make me feel better, but before I can tell him that, the caldera comes into view.

  The crater stands out in stark relief to the lush green that cradles it. It’s black, six miles of it, sprawled beneath a cloud of mist. It looks desolate and barren, otherworldly. From where we hike along the precipice, I can see the ocean and the rich emerald of the highlands to the right, but also the ropy, frozen black swirls of the caldera to the left. It feels like standing on the line between life and death.

  We have to climb down into the caldera, trek across it, and then hike up to the fumaroles—the active part of the volcano. As we walk across the scorched belly of the crater, with its melted eddies of charred lava, it feels like we are navigating a distant planet. I follow behind Gabriel, stepping where he steps, as if one wrong move might plummet me to the middle of the earth.

  “You know,” he says over his shoulder. “You’re different from when you first came.”

  I glance down at myself. I know, from looking in the mirror in the apartment bathroom, that my hair is streaked blonder from the sun. My shorts hang on my hips, likely because I’m not eating every day at Sant Ambroeus, the café in the Sotheby’s building, and because I’ve been running and hiking instead of just briskly walking to work. Gabriel has slowed, so that we are shoulder to shoulder, and he sees me doing a self-inventory. “Not like that,” he says. “In here.” He puts his hand over his heart.

  He starts walking again, and I fall into pace with him. “You came here like every other tourist. Wound up supertight, with your checklist, to take a picture of a tortoise and a sea lion and a booby and put them on Instagram.”

  “I didn’t have a list,” I argue.

  He raises a brow. “Didn’t you?”

  Maybe not literally, but sure, there were things I had wanted to do on Isabela. Touristy things, because what’s the point of crossing off something on your bucket list if—

  Shit. I did have a list.

  “Visitors come here saying they want to see Galápagos, but they don’t, not really. They want to see what they can already see in guidebooks or on the internet. The real Isabela is made up of stuff most people don’t care about. Like the feria, and how trading a pair of rubber wading boots can get you a meal of fresh lobster. Or how people who live here mark a path—not with a wooden sign, but with a lava rock set in the notch of a tree. Or what dinner tastes like, when you’ve grown it yourself.” He glances at me. “Tourists come with an itinerary. Locals just…live.”

  “Gabriel Fernandez,” I say. “Was that a compliment?”

  He laughs. “This is your birthday present,” he admits.

  “You must have seen a lot of ugly Americans,” I say. “Not physically ugly. I mean the spoiled, entitled kind.”

  “Not too many. There were way more turistas who came here and saw what nature looks like when it’s wild, when you haven’t contained it and confined it into twelve square city blocks or an exhibit at a zoo, and they were just…humbled. You could see the gears turning: How do we make sure these beautiful things are here for other people to see? How can I keep my corner of the planet alive, to help? The best part of being a tour guide was planting a little seed in someone’s mind, and knowing you wouldn’t be there to see it, but that it would grow and grow.”

  Given how prickly he’d been about me being a tourist when we first met and the fact that he isn’t a tour guide any longer, I wonder what changed.

  My nose prickles—the first clue that we have reached the fumaroles. The ground bleaches from black to white and yellow. All I can smell is sulfur. Instead of the melted ice cream whirls of cooled lava, there are endless small light rocks that shift under my sneakers with a light, tinkling noise, and steam belching from thermal vents.

  “There,” Gabriel says, pointing to a spot where lime-green smoke oozes out of a pore in the earth.

  I am six feet away from an active volcano.

  “Why did you stop?” I ask.

  He turns to me. “Because swimming in magma is overrated.”

  “No,” I say. “Why did you stop being a tour guide?”

  He doesn’t answer, and I assume that he is going to ignore me, like he has before. But maybe there is something about the primeval landscape and our proximity to the beating heart of the planet, because Gabriel sinks down to the jaundiced ground, and starts from the beginning.

  “We were taking out a scuba tour to Gordon Rocks,” Gabriel says, as I settle across from him, our knees nearly touching. “It was a live-aboard boat, with twelve divers. It was a gig we’d done hundreds of times. My father and I went out early to check the conditions, because that’s what you do. I was the one who went into the water, while he stayed in the boat. There was a slight current near the surface, no big deal.”

  He looks at me. “Gordon Rocks, it’s a cliff under the water, where just a little triangle of rock peeks out above the surface. We went back to the clients’ boat and we did the safety briefing. Because there were so many divers, we took two pangas. Everyone was given the same instructions for deboarding: get down twenty feet as quickly as possible, and bear to the right. But as soon as we were under the water it was clear that conditions weren’t what I’d thought they were. The current was swift, and it was deep.”

  Gabriel stares out at the flat horizon, but I know he’s not seeing what’s in front of us. “Ten divers got spread out to the right of the cliff wall. But one, who wasn’t quite as experienced at scuba, got sucked into the current to the left, and dragged down deep. My father, he pointed to the ten other divers and then he did this”—Gabriel touches his index fingers together—“he wanted me to stay close to them. I knew he was going to go after the other diver. I saw him swim into the current, and then when I couldn’t see him anymore, I went after the others.”

  He shakes his head. “There was a clump of divers clinging to the rock face, together. After I got to them, I led them to the surface and set off a float so that the panga driver could get them. The boat was already a half mile north, picking up others who had surfaced a distance away. It went like that for a while—me treading water and trying to see the heads of the other divers and make sure the panga rounded them up. By the time that was done, I counted eleven divers and me, but my father and the last diver hadn’t come up.

  “We zoomed out to the left of the rock. I had binoculars, from the panga driver, and I was staring so hard at the surface of the water looking for a bobbing head or anything that moved, but the ocean…” Gabriel’s voice caught. “It’s just so goddamn big.”

  He fell silent, and I reached into his lap and squeezed his hand. I rested our fists on my knee.

  “After an hour, I knew he couldn’t have survived. At the depths he was at, he could have been dragged by the current a hundred feet or more. The percentage of oxygen in the tanks was meant for a shallow dive, and he knew going deeper would mess with his brain and his ability to function. He would only have had enough air for ten or fifteen minutes, that far down. Between swimming hard to catch up to the lost diver and inflating the diver’s BC and unhooking his weight belt, my dad likely had even less time than that.”

  I think about my own father’s death. I was not with him, and it happened too fast, but at the hospital, I was able to see his body. I remember holding his cold hand and not wanting to let it go, because I knew it would be the last time I ever got to touch him. “Did your father…” I start. “Did he ever…” But I can’t seem to finish.

  Gabriel shakes his head. “Bodies that drown in the ocean don’t surface,” he says quietly.

  “I’m so sorry. What a terrible accident.”

  His gaze snaps up. “Accident? It was all my fault.”

  Dumbfounded, I stare at him. “How?”

  “I was the one who tested the conditions. Clearly I got them wrong—”

  “Or they changed—”

  “Then I should have been the one to go after the diver,” Gabriel insists. “So my father would still be alive.”

  And you wouldn’t, I think.

  He turns his head away from me. “I can’t lead tours anymore, not without thinking about how bad I fucked up. I can’t scuba-dive without thinking his body is going to drift in front of me. The reason I’m building the house and farming is because I have to be goddamn exhausted at the end of the day, or I have nightmares about what he must have been thinking in those last few minutes.”

  I’m quiet for a moment. “What he was thinking,” I say finally, “is that his son would be safe.”

  Gabriel dashes a palm across his eyes, and I pretend not to notice. He stands up, using his weight to pull me to my feet. “We’d better get back,” he says. “The return trip’s not any shorter.”

  All around us, fumes rise from little pockets in the ground, as if we stand in a crucible. It is prehistoric and dystopian, but if you look closely, here and there are tiny green shoots and stalks. Something, growing out of nothing.

  As we walk back across the fumaroles and the dark yawn of the caldera, Gabriel doesn’t let go of my hand.

  * * *

  —