Wish You Were Audiobook Excerpt Transcript

I painted a corner of the sky when I was six years old. My father was working as a conservator one of a handful restoring the zodiac ceiling on the main hall of the grand central terminal, an aqua sky strung with shimmering constellations. It was late way past. My bedtime, my father took me to work because my mother, as usual, was not home. He helped me carefully climb the scaffolding where I watched him working on a cleaned patch of the turquoise paint.

I looked at the stars representing the smear of the milky way. The golden wings of pegasus Orion’s raised club, the twisted fish of Pisces, the original mural, had been painted. In 1913, my father told me: roof leaks, damaged the plaster and in 1944 it had been replicated on panels that were attached to the arched ceiling. The original plan had been to remove the boards for restoration, but they contained asbestos, and so the conservators left them in place and went to work with cotton, swabs, and cleaning solution erasing decades of pollutants. They uncovered historical signatures and inside jokes and notes left behind by the original artists were revealed.

Tucked in among the constellations there were dates commemorating weddings and the end of world war ii. There were names of soldiers. The birth of twins was recorded near Gemini. An error had been made by the original artists so that the painted zodiac was reversed from the way it would appear in the night sky. Instead of correcting it, though, my father was diligently reinforcing the error that night, he was working on a small square of space.

Gilding stars he had already painted over the tiny, yellow dots with adhesive. He covered these with a piece of gold leaf light as breath. Then he turned to me, Diana. He said holding out his hand, and I climbed up in front of him caged by the safety of his body. He handed me a brush to sweep over the foil fixing it in place.

He showed me how to gently rub at it with my thumb so that the galaxy he’d created was all that remained when all the work was finished. The conservators kept a small dark spot in the northwest corner of the grand central terminal where the pale blue ceiling meets the marble wall. This 9×5-inch section was left that way intentionally. My father told me that conservators do that. In case historians need to study the original composition.

The only way you can tell how far you’ve come is to know where you started every time, I’m in grand central terminal, I think about my father of how we left that night hand in hand our palms glittering like we had stolen the stars. It is Friday, the 13th, so I should know better getting from Sotheby’s on the upper east side to the Ansonia on the upper west side means taking the q train to times square and then the one up town. So I have to travel in the wrong direction before I start going in the right one. I hate going backward normally, I would walk across the central park, but I am wearing a new pair of shoes that are rubbing a blister on my heel shoes. I never would have worn it if I’d known that I was going to be summoned by kitomi it, so instead, I find myself on public transit but something’s off, and it takes me a moment to figure out what it’s quiet.

Usually, I have to fight my way through tourists who are listening to someone singing for coins or a violin quartet. Today, though, the platform is empty. Last night, Broadway theaters had shut down performances for a month after an usher tested positive for covid out of an abundance of caution. That’s what Finn said anyway. New york presbyterian, where he is a resident, has not seen the influx of coronavirus cases that are appearing in Washington, state and Italy, and France.

There were only 19 cases in the city. Finn told me last night, as we watched the news when I wondered out loud. If we should start panicking yet wash our hands and don’t touch our faces, he told me it’s going to be fine.