The medley settles me, reminds me of San Francisco, where I spent almost a decade between med school and post-grad work. Auckland is like it in other ways too, glittery and surrounded by water, crowded and expensive, highly prized.
Looking over my shoulder as I set out, I see that my building, which seems to be at least partly residential, is quite distinctive with its Art Deco accents. It will be easy enough to pick it out. Still, I make a note of the address and the street I’m walking along.
The man behind the desk directed me to a mall, which leads me through a warren of tiny shops belowground, then spits me out on the busy main drag. Queen Street. Here, overhangs cover the sidewalk, allowing the crowds to bustle along in deep shade, and I’m grateful.
The electronics store is exactly like any other I’ve ever seen. Full of gadgets and cases and cords. The counters are staffed with young men and one girl. She steps up. “Hello, ma’am,” she says—which makes me feel ancient—“how can I help you?” Her accent is not at all Australian, which I’d been expecting, but something else entirely, more pinched and lilting.
“Yes.” I pull out my phone. “I need a charger.”
“American, are you?”
“Yes, but they said it doesn’t matter, right? A New Zealand charger should still work with my American phone.”
“No worries.” She smiles. Her face is round and milky. “I was just noticing. I’d so love to go to America.” She cocks a finger for me to follow her. “Over here.”
“Where do you want to go in America?” I ask, being polite.
“New York City,” she says. “Have you ever been?”
“Once, for a conference,” I say, but it’s blurry in my memory. “The only thing I really remember is seeing a painting I’d always loved.”
“Here we go.” She pulls a package off a rack, holds out her hand for my phone, double-checks them both. “Yes. This is right. Anything else?”
“No.” Eyeing the cords, I realize I’ll need one for my laptop too and tell her the make and model. We head for the cash register, and I give her my credit card.
“What was the painting?” she asks.
“I’m sorry?”
She gives me back the credit card. “What was the painting you wanted to see in New York?”
I smile, shaking my head, unwilling to admit it was a Pre-Raphaelite mermaid. “Waterhouse—do you know his work?”
“No, sorry.” She picks up the bag. “Have a nice visit.”
The exchange, really the memory of the painting, makes me think of my sister, though of course she hasn’t been far from my mind for even a minute since I saw her on the news. “I’m actually here on a sad errand. Do you happen to know where the nightclub fire was? Someone I knew was there.”
“Oh!” Her hand covers her mouth. “I’m so sorry. It’s not far; just head down toward the wharf and to your left just before the main street.” Her cheeks have gone quite red. “You can’t miss it, really. There’s a memorial.”
I nod. It’s as good a place to start as any.
She’s right. It’s not hard to find. The building sits on a corner. Police tape ropes off access on three sides. Smoke marks climb the building to the roofline, black and grim, and I pause for a moment to steady myself.
Then I walk around the corner and see the memorial, a pile of stuffed animals and candles and flowers, some fresh, some turning brown after a few days. There’s a smell in the air I associate with burn patients, scorched fabric and hair and blistered skin. Never good.
I’d done some reading on the fire before I arrived, but nothing particularly set it apart. It wasn’t terrorism—not an issue in New Zealand, hard as that is to fathom—just a wretched accident, an overcrowded club, a blocked exit, and a malfunctioning sprinkler system. The perfect storm. It only made the news in the US for its drama.
Disasters are always worse when they involve bunches of young people, and this crowd was very young indeed. I walk slowly past the photos that have been taped and tied and paper-clipped to the fence keeping everyone out. Mostly Asian, not a soul past thirty, their eyes still twinkling with everything ahead and nothing too terrible behind. Now they’ll be frozen there forever.
The vast losses thud in my gut. The parents who love them, the friends, the siblings, the shopkeepers who enjoyed their jokes. I think about it all the time in the ER, when it’s been more ghastly than usual—idiotic car accidents, domestic violence, and bar fights and shootings. Lives wrecked. Stopped. Nothing to be done about it.
It’s been getting to me. I’ve always hated losing patients, of course, but I loved the rush of saving them, being there at the moment of acute trauma and terror and helping bring them back from the brink, like the girl in the ER the night I saw Josie on the news, a bullet wound to the gut. Her boyfriend carried her in, and his hands were covered with blood from keeping the wound compressed. It saved her.
But it’s all the lost ones who haunt me lately. The mother who’d slammed her car into a tree, the boy who’d been attacked by a dog, the sweet, sweet face of the little boy who’d shot himself with his mother’s pistol.
I shove their faces away and focus on bearing witness to the collection of photos here in front of me, taking the time to look at each one. The girl with purple streaks in her hair and a crooked front tooth. The diva with red lips and a knowing expression. The boy laughing with a dog.
How many of their families will have the satisfaction of actual identification? A scene like this, with so many victims and physical damage, can be challenging.
The car that took the main blast on the train that supposedly killed Josie was in pieces, melted and evaporated, and so were the humans within. They found her backpack and the remains of one of her travel companions, a guy she’d mentioned once or twice in emails she sent home from the odd internet café, and we knew she’d been traveling with the group.
The phone call came in on my cell when I was on my way home to get some sleep after a grueling thirty-six hours of an obstetrics rotation at SF General, walking up the hill to the apartment I shared with four other residents, none of us home enough for it to matter that it was so crowded. The place was a pit, but none of us cared about that either. Food was all takeout, the environment be damned, and a local coffee shop downstairs in the building provided the caffeine. I’d been dreaming of a long, hot shower and washing my hair, then sleeping for a few hours by myself in the house, since I’d left all my roommates back at the hospital.
The phone rang, and it was my mother, howling. I’d only ever heard that sound one other time, after the earthquake, and it is carved into my bones. “Mom. What is it?”
She told me. Josie was dead. Killed in a terrorist bomb that demolished a train in France a few days before.
The weeks after were a blur. When I wasn’t on the phone with my mother or the funeral home or the authorities, I worked. Often I took calls between patient visits, ducking into a storage closet to get some privacy. I was too exhausted and overwhelmed to cry. That came later.
Next to me on the street in Auckland is a young woman, weeping, and I move away to give her privacy, wishing to make her path easier, knowing there is only one way to walk that road: step by bloody step.