by Kevin Chong
Tso was looking out the window when the Japanese woman coughed again. As she rose Tso caught a glimpse of the bloody Kleenex she clutched in her hand. (If Tso’s observation is correct, this would be one of the earliest indications that the infection had progressed to its pneumonic form. This would have preceded the first officially documented case by at least three days.) The woman walked to Grossman’s seat while the bus was stopped at a red light. She whispered in Grossman’s ear, but the driver’s headset microphone broadcast the woman’s brief statement: “I believe I have it.” Grossman turned off the mike. The bus lurched into the intersection.
She switched on her mic. “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen and those of you who are both and neither, we will not be going to Stanley Park, as I promised. Not yet. Instead we will be embarking on the off-the-menu part of our tour,” she said. “Our first stop is the West End where you’ll find many bike-rental shops, a fine pierogi place, and, oh look, the answer to your picture-framing needs. Famous residents include that dipsomaniac novelist Malcolm Lowry. Growing up on the east side, I thought everyone who led an interesting life in Vancouver—and there weren’t many—inhabited these streets. I would take the bus down here as a teenager, look at comic books on Granville Street and wander these residential streets, hoping someone from one of the buildings would run out onto the street and kidnap me into their cosmopolitan life.”
The Japanese woman was visibly sweating. She had taken a seat directly behind Grossman now. She shivered and repeated the same Japanese phrase in a baby voice. Tso tried to talk to her, but the woman waved her off. The bus turned down Nelson Street.
Grossman related the story of Errol Flynn’s death as they entered the emergency department lot. She took a wide turn in the driveway and blocked an ambulance. The hospital, with its arched Edwardian windows and tin roof, seemed to contain the city’s reserve of red brick. (It was one of only a few anomalous throwbacks in this city of steel and glass condo towers that were built to melt into one another.) “Well, I hope I haven’t soured you on our fine healthcare system in the city and country. Here we are at St. Paul’s Hospital where you’ll be free to disembark and look around. The next tour bus will pick you up only six blocks from here. Please direct all comments and suggestions to our website or office number. Have a great day.”
Grossman draped the Japanese tourist’s arm over her shoulder and led her off the bus. People filed out after them. The Asians were spooked, the Europeans bemused. The Americans tried to give cash tips. Tso stood by the open bus door, watching as the Japanese passenger stopped and turned back.
“She wants her purse,” Grossman told her.
Tso found the purse on her seat. As she stepped out, an ambulance driver told her to move her vehicle. Tso offered to check the woman in at reception so Grossman could re-park her bus. “You don’t want to lose your job,” Tso told her. “I’ll handle it.” Grossman’s reaction—a slight recoiling—suggested that she didn’t often get much assistance, and being offered help felt like a questioning of her competency.
In the waiting room, people took inventory of one another as they coughed and shivered in their chairs. Some were doubled over, others wore blankets. She found a seat for the woman and tried to check her in using the information in the passport that she’d retrieved from her purse.
“How are you related to this woman?” the nurse asked from behind a partitioned booth.
“I don’t—I’m not. I met her on the tour bus. We’re tourists.”
“I see. And you were saying she was feeling uncomfortable?”
Tso hesitated. Should she mention she’d seen this woman coughing blood? What if she had just imagined it? She no longer trusted her memory. What she said would affect this woman’s treatment. What if she withheld the detail—what would happen then? Finally, she told the nurse what she saw. The clatter of the nurse’s data entry slowed.
“It was just what I thought I saw,” Tso said.
“That’s all you need to tell us. The doctors will check your observation.”
Tso returned to the Japanese woman slumped in her seat. “Yuko?” she said, repeating the name on the passport. The woman looked up. Tso told her that she would be getting help. Did she understand? She nodded. How was she feeling? She nodded again. Did she need anything? She made a drinking gesture with her hand. Then she said, “Water.”
At the vending machine she dug through her collection of Canadian coins. How lucky she was not to be sick in a foreign country. Like Yuko. People imagine the ideal death to be in your own bed. Tso thought that she’d be satisfied dying in a country in which she was a passport-holder.
She recalled that a doctor who’d treated an early SARS patient had travelled from Guangdong to Hong Kong to attend a wedding in 2003. He went through the security controls that kept Mainland Chinese from Hong Kong. The former British colony was under its own sequester. The first press report about SARS was a denial, but everyone knew better and began to stockpile vinegar, a traditional remedy for the disease. They cleaned their hands in vinegar, wiped bus seats with it. The doctor was aware that the case of flu he had seen was atypical. Over three hundred people had already become ill; five of them had died. But he had taken precautions and deemed himself safe to travel. He took a ninth-floor room in the Metropole Hotel in Kowloon. The next day, he felt too ill to attend the wedding but well enough to walk to a nearby hospital. When he was admitted, he told them to lock him up. No one at the Kwong Wah hospital knew what they were dealing with. A month later, the doctor died, and eighty-seven medical staff members and students had fallen ill. The disease spread from his hotel room to Hanoi, Singapore, Taipei, Toronto, and Vancouver. Only in Vancouver were necessary precautions taken—an infected fifty-five-year-old man was isolated—and an outbreak was prevented.
When Tso turned back, the Japanese woman was no longer in her seat. Only her purse remained; she had taken her phone. She was being wheeled down a hall by nurses in hazmat suits. The hall seemed to stretch further in Tso’s head than in reality as she thought about Yuko’s reaction to not having a purse. She had written something about how dying people reach for their wallets when they wake. We’re trained to think of every process, even the biological ones, as a transaction. Tso grabbed the purse and called out to them. The doors closed.
7.
Raymond Siddhu needed the walk home from the bus stop to clear the exhaust fumes from his lungs. There was no sidewalk where they lived, so he would step into the outer lip of a grassy ditch whenever a car passed by. A neighbour once called the cops when he saw him on his evening stroll. Siddhu could not fault his neighbour; being a pedestrian qualified as a suspicious activity here. The physical aloofness of suburban life—different from the more social standoffishness seen within the city limits—would keep his family safe as long as they avoided the mall and cleaned their hands after paying at the drive-thru window.
When he came through the door, his boys tottered toward him, each holding out their arms like high-wire performers. They’d started walking only two weeks earlier, and he saw their steps grow more steady with each new day.
Perhaps, Siddhu considered, the image of their father grimacing at them would have no effect on their psyches. They would not remember the days when Daddy pried them off with a closed umbrella on the way to the sink to scrub his hands. He returned, eyes smiling, grabbing each of them under his arms and spinning around until they squealed and giggled.
“Put them down,” Uma Siddhu said. She was wearing an apron and a high-school era sweatshirt. “Time to eat.”
“You should have started without me.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“You know you get angry when you’re hungry.”
“And you know you get stupid when you open your mouth.”
So far, there had been no reports of the disease outside the city’s downtown core. Uma still suggested that he take a leave from work. “You’re being an alarmist,” he said accusingly as Uma placed thei
r dinner on the messy table where their boys had already eaten.
“What are you, then?” she asked back.
“Being rational.”
She scoffed at him. She was the even-tempered one in their marriage, the one who found compromise. He was the impulse shopper grabbing fistfuls of chocolate bars at the checkout counter. “There are no rationalists in these situations,” she told him. “There are those who let it happen to them and the alarmists. Pick a side.”
As they ate, they watched their boys in the living room ambling around, looking for something to topple. Before too long they would find each other. They would fight over a box. Tears would follow.
“This tastes good,” he told her. He didn’t even know what he was putting in his mouth. It was brown—it had been pressure-cooked—and served on rice. Her parents, who lived on the other side of the duplex, were in Asia, so he and Uma relished their ability to eat quick meals.
He didn’t want to make her angry. He did not want to tell her that he’d spent the day at a hospital speaking to health officials, who claimed to be waiting for results, and doctors. Or that he’d been in a hospital with people who didn’t cough into their elbows. Maybe Uma had a point about safety—he couldn’t take chances, now that he was a father. That’s why he’d sold his motorcycle and stopped playing rec hockey after he broke his ankle.
And he wanted to have sex with her that night, even if he needed to put the boys to sleep on his own (so she could relax) and take a shower. He listened to himself chew, to the clack of cutlery on plates.
“You know this is a great story,” he said. “It’ll be the only chance I get to write one.”
He could hear one boy creak, a prelude to angry sobs of a wish unheeded. The other one was cackling wickedly. Siddhu was reminded of the fact that his own younger brothers hadn’t called him since the summer.
“If you took on the metro beat, you could write about gang warfare. You could be first on the scene of every drive-by execution. If you pry enough, we might get threatening phone calls at night. You might even get killed, but you wouldn’t bring disease into this house,” she suggested. “Would that be exciting enough for you?”
“It’s not about excitement,” Siddhu told her. Correction: It was only partially about thrill. He was carrying out a promise he’d made to himself: The newspaper would die, but not because of his departure. He was a self-appointed officer aboard a sinking ship.
“Let that website cover the story,” she told him. “They’ve beaten you so far.”
It was true that GSSP had broken the news about the first fatalities. They had been the first to comment on the delays between setbacks in infection management and reports from the Health Authority. On one level, Siddhu had been glad that someone had reported the story. And yet he was stunned—up until then, GSSP’s reporting had been inept, even with its click-generated wealth. Until recently, they had only one reporter, the website owner, Elliot Horne-Bough, whom everyone referred to as Hornblow. He dressed in skinny neckties and took photos using a Polaroid camera. How could I be losing stories to him? And why does he want to hire me? Meanwhile, Siddhu was interviewing city councillors about the restricted access to disease flashpoints. In these areas, signage had been erected advising only local traffic to enter. Other notices strongly advised wearing face masks.
Today, he’d attended a mid-afternoon special council meeting that ended in a fight when a councillor from Romeo Parsons’ party attacked the mayor for his inability to immediately provide better temporary housing and showering stations in economically disadvantaged parts of the city. It represented Parsons’ first broken promise in his initial month as mayor, the councillor told him. Siddhu watched Parsons’ face as it tightened into something rigid and clenched before loosening back into appealing handsomeness.
The councillor, a twenty-nine-year-old advocate for sex workers, had been personally recruited by Parsons. When the mayor deflected her earnest pleas, she rose from her seat in the cherry-panelled council chambers. She was seated at the far end of the room from the mayor, and as she rushed toward him another female councillor, a Parsons loyalist from the same party, took her by the arm. The first councillor struck the other one with an open hand and left the council chambers.
Siddhu tried to change the discussion with Uma. He asked her about the boys’ music class—they banged tambourines on play mats while the teacher sang nursery rhymes. The range of their conversations had narrowed to two sharp points since the boys were born.
She brought out her smartphone. He decided not to repeat his question.
Siddhu offered to give the boys a bath while his wife watched Netflix. He decided against washing their hair to avoid tears and let them play with a plastic tea set. After their bath, he dried and dressed them, then flashed his yo-yo as both boys pulled themselves up against the crib railing. He was working on a more intermediate-level trick: Split the Atom. It started out like a Brain Twister but involved another step. The boys lost interest as he worked on the pushing motion. He won them back with his old standbys until they had slumped back into their cribs. Then he waited at the door until they cried themselves to sleep.
In the weeks that ensued, he would summon each of these moments to savour like heirlooms from a lost world.
His wife waited for him under the covers, already naked. As he stripped down, she held up a corner of the duvet for him like an open car door and he felt the chill of the air on his chest. He rolled toward her in bed, and they reached for each other, pulling all the compulsory levers. There was no time to tease or upgrade from the basic package. They felt grateful for the certainty of their flesh. A cry from the other room would force them to freeze; a longer wail would shut things down. Hurry, hurry. Success, success.
Siddhu lay there afterward in the light from the hall. The bedroom took on a grainy quality, and he slept poorly. Uma and the boys were still asleep when he awoke and packed his lunch. When he got on the bus, he found a seat—normally, he had to stand. On the SkyTrain, he was one of only two people in his car. From the station, he stepped outside to see that the sun had broken. The office buildings glinted in the damp air with the sheen of plastic wrap.
It had taken a potential health crisis for the mood in the office to brighten. People moved quickly. No one here thought that their work would gain new subscriptions or earn them kudos, but it seemed like a rewarding diversion. Like Siddhu, they saw opportunities for noble career deaths.
At his mentor’s retirement party, the paper’s thirty-year veteran—the Chicago-born wife of a draft dodger—took him aside and asked him to start sending out his résumé. “I’m not worried about old goats like me,” she told him. “And I don’t know the newbies well enough to give a shit. But I’m worried about you. You’ve been here for all of the bad years and none of the good ones. The paper looks like it’ll die by the end of the work week, but it’s going to keep sputtering for a few more years. I’m worried that, by then, you’ll be too long in the tooth to be employable. Even worse than that, I’m concerned that it’ll make you a good family man, at the expense of your work. They say no one dies wishing they worked more. Absolute bullshit. Maybe if you’re selling hot dogs. Not so much when your job is looking at the world.” Siddhu remembered her talk verbatim. She had never said that much in their entire working relationship.
He took his place at her desk and started her old computer. In his inbox was a notice from the city’s communications director about a press conference. It related to the fight in council. He caught the train to City Hall and arrived early, taking his place in the front row next to Horne-Bough.
“It’s definitely about the fight,” Horne-Bough said in a stage whisper. He held his Polaroid camera with both hands. “The mayor’s ego has been clipped by the radical wing of his party. They’re going to lift the restrictions on the area around the Annex. ‘Freedom is given to everyone in this city, or no one.’”
“Maybe you should be holding the press conference,” Siddhu s
aid through glassy laughter. He had a feeling that the mayor would repeat those same sentiments, in those words. “Who’s your source?”
“I’ll tell you, if you answer my own question. Where does one get the best craft Kölsch in the downtown area?”
“Are you counting Strathcona?” Siddhu asked. He’d occasionally post about breweries for the paper’s food and drink blog. Horne-Bough had been doing his research.
“Anywhere within a fifteen-minute cab ride.”
Siddhu offered a detailed and comprehensive ranking of breweries that any reasonable person would describe as overkill.
“As you know, I’ve been trying to get you to our offices for two weeks,” Horne-Bough said after Siddhu’s disquisition. “Maybe you’re afraid of me. I don’t take it personally. A more informal venue might help. What if I were to invite you for one of those Kölschs tonight?”
Romeo Parsons bounded in front of the podium. Siddhu noticed that he had a habit of mouthing certain phrases, the money lines of his prepared remarks, before he spoke. He wore a blue tie that matched the curtains behind him. Those curtains were a lighter tint of blue than the blue used by the previous mayor. The colour change had been a recommendation from a branding firm—at a cost of $12,000. “They really bring out his eyes,” the reporter from a local radio station snickered. It was the first time that Siddhu had heard an unkind remark uttered about the mayor.
Parsons began with an apology for the fight in City Hall. “These are tense times. There’s been unnecessary panic and finger-pointing,” he said. “We’ve seen nothing like this in our city since the Spanish Influenza at the end of the First World War.” Siddhu had heard that the city councillor who’d attacked him had left the caucus. (Later that day, she announced she was sitting as an independent.)
What made Parsons an electrifying speaker was a modest amount of eloquence refracted through joyfulness. Even now he smiled, but it wasn’t a hayseed smile; Parsons was a Rhodes Scholar, and he sat on the board of directors of the Art Institute of Chicago. The rest of his remarks fell in line with Horne-Bough’s prediction. Parsons added that he regretted the advice he’d been given from the Coastal Health Authority about the neighbourhood restrictions.