by Kevin Chong
Most of the men only wanted to talk. They offered theories on the infection: A few suggested that the disease had been introduced by angry Communist Party officials in China in an attempt to temporarily depress the price of real-estate held by Chinese tax evaders. Given her heritage, she tried to work through her mixed feelings about being Westernized enough to be included in such dubious conversations.
One hotel resident, a criminal court judge named Jeffrey Oishi, told her that the disease had prompted his wife to kick him out of their home. “The missus prefers dying alone than waiting on me at my deathbed or being waited on by me,” he said right after he introduced himself. “How could I question her resolve?” He drank apple juice through a straw, a habit that contributed to his aura of listlessness. He had taken time off from work to find a new home, but admitted that he hadn’t looked around—a hotel room was better for him now in his uncertain state.
The camaraderie inspired by the hotel lounge allowed them to confess to one another their fear of dying alone. The judge had elderly parents in assisted living and younger siblings preoccupied with their own families. “I was raised to be the responsible, self-sufficient one,” the judge told Tso. “If I die, I don’t want it to interrupt anyone’s life. Not even my daughter’s.” He was a compact man in his fifties with a round bald head. He had married later in life, and his daughter was still a child. His manner, lacking the usual membrane between thought and speech, made him seem youthful. His demeanour as a judge must have been the complete opposite, Tso surmised.
“Let’s make a pact,” Tso said. “If we don’t see one another for twenty-four hours, we will call the front desk.”
“Okay, but let’s call the police in case there’s a false alarm,” the judge said as they shook hands. “I would rather piss off the 9-1-1 operator than the hotel staff.”
Only two weeks earlier, Megan Tso had felt desperate not to be found. She had changed her numbers and blocked her ex from everything, fearing that he would chase her down. The day before she left Los Angeles, she found an unopened bottle of his antipsychotic meds—the ones she’d begged him to take—in a shopping bag hanging from the front door of the AirBnb cottage that she’d been renting under a friend’s name. Now, to want to be traced created a cognitive whiplash.
As Megan crossed Denman Street on a pedestrian light, a car veered into the intersection and stopped just short of hitting her. The driver threw his hands up in the air as though she had gotten in the way. She spit on his car. He blasted the horn at her. His tires squealed onto Denman. She hurried back to the hotel. I don’t need a biblical disease to die, or a chemically unbalanced ex, just an idiot behind the wheel.
It was in this hotel that Tso also became a friend of Raymond Siddhu. They met in a way that is typical of Vancouver acquaintanceships. They saw each other and each felt a vague recognition. Siddhu’s image and byline filled the city newspaper, the one she used to track local reactions to a story being reported globally. In his columns, the new mayor’s efforts to curtail a pandemic were being compared with his predecessor’s handling of a garbage strike and the bulldozing over of an opioid-ravaged neighbourhood. For his part, Siddhu recognized her from a photo and write-up that appeared in the free weekly before her event. They Googled biographical data on each other after they shared an elevator to their rooms on opposite ends of the fourth floor. But they refused to acknowledge one another for several days.
On the day Tso was to meet her mysterious consulting client, she found Siddhu in the restaurant for breakfast. The eating area had become fuller, homier, more like a rooming-house kitchen. The waitresses brought everyone their drink of choice without being asked. Judge Oishi was lingering at a table with the reporter. “Hey, everyone’s here!” he declared. This time he drank milk through a straw. He told her to pull over a chair. Mint tea was brought to her.
She often saw Siddhu early in the day speed-shuffling from the far end of the fourth-floor hallway, slinging one arm into a tweed blazer as he panted toward the elevator. He reminded her of the scene in Disney’s Fantasia when the hippos mince around in tutus. He appeared effeminate in his gestures and mortified at his bulk. He swirled the stir stick in his black coffee like the wing of a hummingbird, seeming to take pleasure in the motion. A gold wedding band stood out on his dark, hairy hand. Siddhu had the same frayed appearance as the other men in the hotel, the same melancholy, but he projected the purposeful desperation of a man worried about missing his last chance.
“You’re up late,” Siddhu said to Tso as she sipped her tea.
For any true Vancouverite, Tso learned later, proximity precluded introductions and served as the larval stage of acquaintanceship.
“I’ve been getting ready to meet a client,” she told him. “Shouldn’t you be at the newspaper?”
“I’m starting a new job today,” he said, lips curling into a smile as she acknowledged him. “Their workplace culture involves oversleeping. I’m surprised you haven’t gone for your run today. What kind of client does a woman who writes about death meet with?”
Now that’s a big small-town introduction, Tso thought to herself. “It’s a secret,” she told him. “He’s press shy.”
“My daughter is visiting me tonight,” the judge interjected. “If you two get in early enough, please join us for dinner.”
Tso agreed. A black SUV picked her up outside the hotel, as had been confirmed. The driver, dark-haired, vaguely Slavic-looking, wouldn’t respond to her questions. This better be good. They crossed a bridge to the other side of the city. The driver took an off-ramp that led them to a busy street, then turned onto a road that ran alongside the water. The houses facing the water were built on the cliff side below. She could only see hedges and gates. Then they reached the longest hedge of them all and then the biggest gate. The car approached a roundabout driveway that encircled a marble fountain. A man was waiting at the door.
He appeared to her to be around sixty, but trim and youthful. As she approached she noticed his blue eyes. He had a full head of greying hair, side-parted, that was a shade lighter than his goatee. He introduced himself as Graham. “First off, I must apologize for the timing of our meeting,” he told her. “There are better cities to be trapped in. I mean, I would be happily trapped in Barcelona. This city—ugh. It’s like Hong Kong run by the Swiss.”
“No problem,” she said blithely as she took in the gold-encrusted decor. He’s not putting me up in a nice-enough hotel. “I mean, I was the one who initially delayed.” He had wanted to meet a month earlier, but she’d needed to combine her two Vancouver events.
“I hope you’re getting good material,” he said, leading them into a kitchen that looked recently remodelled. Graham offered her a coffee as she looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows. Beyond the pool and tennis court, there was the ocean dotted with stranded oil tankers that were hemmed in by red-hulled Canadian Coast Guard boats. Past them were the mountains in the far distance, outside the quarantine zone. Despite this opulence, Tso felt as though only a fraction of this man’s wealth was being flaunted. His leather shoes were expensive, likely Italian, but battered.
“Perhaps I can occupy you for part of this layover,” he said. Graham stood alongside her and began by explaining that he was not religious. “I wish the idea of the afterlife felt credible. Not believing in hell led me to self-indulgence. World-class stupidity! But I am preoccupied with leaving a mark.” He was divorced, childless—“There’s a shitty nephew of mine who will be sorely disappointed when he gets nothing from me”—and he wanted to spend all of his fortune creating a legacy. “I didn’t accomplish much to get so wealthy. Not blowing it was my achievement. My grandfather and father were rich, and I took over the business when my older brother developed a cocaine habit. I’ve done well simply by not screwing up.”
Some of that accumulated wealth he’d spent altruistically. He had donated to a local hospital to erect a wing in memory of his parents. A greyhound rescue foundation received a large sum in
the name of his favourite aunt. “I’m a pretty good guy, within reason. I want you to know that before you get your panties in a knot,” he told her, eyes flaring with provocation. Tso ignored it. “Now I want to do something for myself.” He led her to a glass-topped kitchen table, and handed her an iPad. First there were images of a snow-covered mountainside with a mirrored glass cube jutting from it. She saw images of a room with grey concrete walls and maple floors. The lighting and displays seemed to suggest a museum, but the images didn’t look like simulations. She swiped until she found the image of a rectangular metal object which looked at first like a martini shaker, before she realized it was much larger.
“You look like someone who grew up fascinated by mummies,” he began. His eyes traced her body from head to toe. Tso felt like he was running his finger over her for dust, like she was a window ledge, only to stop halfway with a fingertip blackened by soot.
“Well, I did, but I never grew out of it,” she said.
He told her that he wanted to construct a monument in the Canadian Arctic. It would be buried a thousand metres within a mountain on Ellesmere Island. “I could tell you what I’ve already spent on this, but you’d be furious, and I don’t have time for class warfare.” Within this structure would be a sarcophagus. “When I die, my executors will have instructions to announce to family and shareholders that I have been cremated. What will actually happen is that they’ll transport my body to this location in my bespoke casket.”
The mirrored cube entrance, inspired by the front door of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, would be covered up for a century with a façade made from natural materials that would disintegrate in that time. Graham envisioned the monument going undiscovered for at least that long. He wanted it to be found accidentally by people who would not recognize it. “My best-case scenario would be for aliens to happen upon it after our species has become extinct. Realistically, people will probably find it in fifty years when the Arctic Circle becomes habitable after more climate change.”
“What do you need me for?” she asked. “You have this figured out.”
His mouth puckered with displeasure. “I have put a lot of thought into this. You get a lot of input when something like this enters your head. You get a lot of static. You don’t know my family’s line of work, do you? We’re in advertising. My work is about messaging. What I want to do is advertise to the future. But I realize I might need some outside input, you see? Come, since you want my song and dance, I need you to follow me. Come.”
She didn’t so much as decide but feel compelled to follow him. He had the voice of a high-school principal. She was led down a corridor until they reached a mudroom—shoes, boots, scuba gear. He took her through an ordinary door to an unexpectedly grand room, about the size of a gymnasium. The concrete floor had been lowered. At the centre of the room was a glass cube.
“This is a replica of the structure on Ellesmere,” Graham told her. “It’s my playroom.”
They walked down a ramp that took them to the floor and approached the cube. Two panels swept open like the doors of a spaceship. They stepped into a dark void.
A light came on slowly and she saw that the space was decked out like the drawing room of a tony country club, with wine-coloured leather chairs and leather-bound volumes in glass-fronted bookcases. In a cabinet were family photos and a set of war medals. What stood out in this tableau were two metal caskets that lay in the middle of the room like unpacked furniture.
“We had a number of concepts that emulated ancient Egyptian and Chinese cultures,” he told her. “I couldn’t wrap my head around them. They weren’t me. But I want it to be more, you see.”
“Ancient burial sites spoke of an afterlife; they served to bridge this world to the next,” she explained. “That they were discovered was incidental.”
“I know that—I’ve hired you to tell me something I don’t know.”
“Why are there two caskets?” she asked him.
“I don’t plan to die anytime soon, even with this pandemic outside. I am going to take the long view. And, as such, there is a chance I could meet someone.” He paused to suggest an unrelated thought. “You know, I was really taken by your author photo. Obviously, photos convey a subjective truth.” When she didn’t respond, he laughed it off. “It’s a shame that I’ve gotten pickier in old age. I used to be one-size-fits-all, but now I’m looking for someone tailor-made for me, like a hand-stitched glove.”
She shivered but allowed him to enumerate the qualities of an ideal tomb mate. This gave Tso the necessary time to perform a series of calculations. How much of her consulting fee would she have to eat if she left now? How long would she be able to stay at her hotel without his financial backing? What were her chances of being locked in his sarcophagus should she rudely dismiss his project? She looked toward the door.
“I probably should have demanded more information about this project,” she told him. “I don’t think I’m the right person for it.”
His face flushed. “Wait a second—wait—I shall be the judge of that,” he stammered.
“I’m going to return your fee. Most of it now, the rest when I get out of here.”
“The money is nothing to me.”
“I should go.”
He pointed to one of the club chairs. “Sit down.”
“Your tone is scaring me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But sit down.”
She eased into the chair and was surprised by how comfortable it felt, like a broken-in pair of slippers. From one of the cabinets he brought out two glasses and a bottle. Graham held out one glass with two fingers’ worth of scotch in front of her. “You don’t need to accept this project,” he said, settling down in the other club chair with his drink. “But you had a gut reaction to this place. It wasn’t the one I wanted. And I want you to explain it to me. Just tell me why you hate it and you can keep the money I gave you.”
She took the glass. The whisky tasted like the ocean, a shoeshine, and a campfire. “I don’t know where to begin,” she said. “I mean, I was expecting something gaudier.”
“I wasn’t raised to show off.”
“Well, at least that would be something. This is what you come up with when you have no vision of life after brain function ceases.”
He drew to the edge of his chair. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“What is it that you want to endure for ages?” she asked him.
“That’s easy. Some traces of my life.”
“What about the world that we live in?”
“What about the cube itself? It’s a marvel of contemporary engineering,” he said. “The finished product will feature an introductory hologram.”
“This will be so five years ago in two years. What else?”
“That’s your job,” he told her. “I don’t need to haggle. I respect you. Name your price.”
She finished her scotch. Then she handed the glass to him and stood up. “There are some things you can’t buy. One of them is a vision.” She liked how that sounded even though she knew it was false.
He followed her as she hurried down the corridor. Each time he tried to catch up with her, she sped up. She was galloping by the time she reached the front door. The driver was playing with his phone. She waved him off.
“I believe in tons of shit,” Graham called after her. “Saving the whales. Free market social solutions. Bitch. The benefits of learning a second language. But what if you don’t think you’ll be anything after you die—then what do you do?” Tso didn’t look back.
Twenty minutes later, with the nearest bus stop still two kilometres away, she regretted the bravado of turning down the driver. She took a wrong turn that led her farther afield to a beach that had been empty since a metric ton of rats, skunks, and squirrels had died along the jogging path. Gulls circled above her, dismayed by the absence of garbage. The dog walkers, braving infectious disease to allow their pets time to poop and play, broke the desolation
. She wished she had that kind of love, everyday and unassailable, for anyone.
She thought she could see her hotel across from English Bay, two empty bus rides away, and took pleasure in knowing where to look. She persuaded herself that she was no longer a tourist in Vancouver; she was a founding citizen of this quarantined city. She ignored her sore feet and resolved to walk home, which took the whole afternoon. Back at the hotel, she showered and sat on the edge of her bed in a hotel bathrobe. She felt tired but unable to sit still. She listened to the air conditioner make a gurgling sound in the room next to hers. Someone was whistling down the hallway while jangling spare change in his pocket. She considered calling her stalker ex. His contact info was on her phone, and her trembling thumb hovered over his name. Back away slowly. She put on her sweatpants and headed downstairs where she found Judge Oishi with his daughter, Rose. He welcomed her into the empty seat across from him.
“You made it just before I hit the panic button,” Oishi told her.
“I’m having a french fries,” Rose announced. Thankfully, she was not the kind of child who needed to be coaxed into acknowledging the existence of an unknown adult. She was that age—three or four, Tso couldn’t tell—when a child’s speech was half-intelligible. The girl had skin the colour of a pecan, wide-set Asian eyes, and rippling curls. Tso foresaw a lifetime’s worth of conversations for her in which she would have to offer her ethnic pedigree or risk being labelled difficult.