The Plague

by Kevin Chong

  While Rose coloured a placemat with crayons, Oishi explained that it was a professional development day at school. His estranged wife needed to work, so he’d agreed to watch Rose for the day only if she could spend the night with him. The hotel staff had set up a cot. Oishi told Tso that his estranged wife hoped he could extend his stress leave to watch Rose during the days through the quarantine. “I see her point. But there’s a backlog of cases already,” he told her. “I still have another week of this leave. What are the chances things will get better by then?”

  Tso stared over his shoulder at the setting sun in a stupor. She suddenly realized she was being asked a question and apologized for not hearing it.

  “Are you okay?” Oishi asked.

  “I need a glass of wine,” she said eventually. “Except for that, I’m fine.”

  She felt something wither inside her. She had trapped herself within this city to meet with a pompous rich dude. Her own greed had led her to these woeful circumstances. She ordered two glasses of wine. One for me, and one for me.

  Tso’s mind circled back to Yuko. Although Tso had returned her bag, she remembered the meeting on the day planner. Out of curiosity, she decided to keep Yuko’s appointment for her. She hoped to learn more about this woman.

  She wandered further east than she’d ever gone before in the downtown core to the Annex. The outdated map she had been given at the hotel called the area by a different name. People were always excited to talk about this neighbourhood—the new art gallery and bubble tea shops, the restaurants and cocktail bars—after making all the necessary disclaimers about gentrification and displacement. To longtime residents, the reclaimed area was like having a new room in an old house.

  She arrived at a white-tiled coffee shop with gleaming chrome tables and leafy plants. A woman sitting by the window with a single rose put down her phone and stood up.

  “Yuko?” she asked.

  Tso realized that she bore a passing resemblance to Yuko. Although their mannerisms set them far apart, if you’d only seen one picture on a screen, it would not be blatantly offensive to mistake one of them for the other.

  “Gudrun?” Tso answered back.

  She was tall with blonde dreadlocks and wore a short top that showed off her tanned and toned midriff. Gudrun stooped down to hug her. “You never confirmed,” she told Tso. “But I’m glad I took a chance you’d show up.”

  There was a chai latte in front of Tso when she took her seat. “That’s your favourite drink—did I get that right?” Gudrun asked.

  “Yes,” Tso said quietly.

  Gudrun took over most of the conversation, perhaps because Yuko wasn’t a native speaker of English. She announced that she was tired of worrying about the quarantine and disease. Could they agree that those topics were off-limits? Tso nodded. Gudrun was pleased. She told Tso about her training to become a registered massage therapist. She was from Vancouver Island, where everyone hiked. She loved sushi.

  Tso’s replies were quiet and clipped, and she ducked her head in an ill-informed approximation of a Japanese bow.

  “I feel like I’ve done all the talking,” Gudrun said, her eyes wide and teeth flashing. “You mentioned you haven’t come out to your parents. What are they like? What are their names?”

  Tso prepared a lie. Then her throat clenched. She started to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” she admitted. “I’m not Yuko. I don’t know why I was pretending.”

  She had known she couldn’t maintain her roleplay for long. The more she knew about Yuko, the more difficult it had become to impersonate her. After Gudrun’s last questions, she’d instantly imagined a different life for this dead Japanese woman, a life that she had finally begun to control. No more.

  10.

  Only once Raymond Siddhu was buzzed into the building did he get a key fob from GSSP’s managing editor, Harper, a woman who looked exactly twenty-three years old. “You have your own laptop, right?” she asked. “Our IT guys need to do some stuff to it first. They work off-site and they look like lizards. He hides it well, but Elliot’s obsessed with security.” The space felt more like an oversized home office than he was expecting it to be.

  Siddhu had not yet told his wife that he’d quit the newspaper. He didn’t want to tell her that he’d left without a severance package. His boss had shuffled some papers and said, “I know it sucks here, everyone’s dealing with something. I didn’t realize that ‘legacy’ could be a verb until it was applied to my industry. Don’t you want your name on the front page when we run our final edition? Besides, this whole situation has given us a reason to be. Your stories have never been read this much. And now you decide to find work in communications?”

  “I’ve taken a reporting job elsewhere,” Siddhu told him.

  The editor’s phone started to buzz; he looked at it and then pushed it away from him like an emptied dinner plate. Siddhu hadn’t liked Curt when he came in two years earlier. He was too managerial and threw around too many buzzwords. But he had taken part in pub trivia nights. He listened to The National, loud, in his corner office on days when he had to deliver termination notices. He knew the names of his workers’ spouses and sometimes their children. He’d gained twenty pounds since he started the job; though he kept a treadmill in his corner office, he hung dry-cleaning from the handles. “I’m not going to ask you where,” he told Siddhu. “What’s gotten into you? Right, you’re feeling stuff. Have you talked to Uma about your decision?”

  Last night, he and Uma had used Skype to attempt video sex fifteen minutes after Siddhu’s sons bawled at the sight of their father onscreen. They looked around for him and then wailed in their room until they fell asleep. He could not stop worrying that they would forget who he was. As a result, Uma accused him of looking distracted during their virtual intercourse and ended their call by throwing her smartphone across the room.

  “I won’t change my mind,” he told his editor. In the past week, he had become the paper’s disease reporter. At every turn, Horne-Bough’s website had beaten them. It was not about intrepid reporting, Siddhu convinced himself, it was Horne-Bough’s personality creating a new business model. Maybe it wasn’t sustainable or lucrative, perhaps it was something quixotic, but GSSP could still produce the definitive record of this epidemic.

  “If you just wait until the end of the next fiscal quarter, there will be another round of cost-cutting,” the editor-in-chief told him. “I don’t need to let you go empty-handed.”

  Siddhu shook his head. He had a new job. He offered to give them the next two weeks, but he wanted to leave today. He left escorted by security.

  At GSSP, there was a story meeting scheduled at a table crowded with takeout boxes and dirty Ikea silverware. This seemed to be the only raised flat surface in the office. No one except Harper, who was preoccupied by a malfunctioning router, was in attendance for the official 11:00 a.m. meeting time. Siddhu straightened up the table and admired the view of the city’s railyard in the distance.

  “You can see it even better from our rooftop,” Horne-Bough told him when he eventually arrived, throwing his winter coat onto a chair. “If you don’t see us here, you can find us upstairs. We’ve got a gas grill and lawn furniture set up.” He was accompanied by the website’s other two reporters, including the former intern who had written better, detailed, and timelier versions of Siddhu’s own stories that week. The young media mogul looked at the table. “Thanks for cleaning up.”

  The meeting was brief and uneventful. Each reporter spoke about the stories they were pursuing and how they were spending their days. The actual writing of the pieces, Siddhu seemed to understand, was done in coffee shops. When it was Siddhu’s turn to speak, he was relieved that neither of his new co-workers had wanted to cover the anti-immigration and anti-racism rallies being staged concurrently at the old Art Gallery.

  “After you get your security software installed, we were hoping you would take that story,” Horne-Bough said, eyes gleaming. It occurred to
Siddhu that there was likely a vaporizer on the rooftop as well. “You see, we’ve been spreading ourselves too thin. And I need help to break a big story on a, um, prominent figure.”

  Siddhu leaned toward the table. “I want in on this.”

  Horne-Bough centred his index finger on his lips. “Who knows if we’re being bugged? That’s why I prefer the rooftop.” He and the former intern, who had been given the original tip, had been sworn to confidentiality. “Negotiations are ongoing—we might need to crowdfund. Thankfully, we’ll be bringing in someone who’s good at passing around the hat.”

  “You’re not going to pay a source, are you?” Siddhu asked.

  “Not if we don’t have to,” Horne-Bough replied. He noted Siddhu’s dismay and added, “We are attempting to do things differently. If it burns us in the ass, you can blame the no-longer-rich white kid.”

  The meeting was adjourned seventeen minutes after it commenced. Siddhu puttered around before asking Harper, on the phone with the company’s internet provider, about his payment information. The managing editor, once she was placed on hold by customer service, produced a wad of hundreds and asked him if he needed some cash to “blow off steam.” Siddhu hadn’t even bothered to negotiate a salary or his potential ownership share—he didn’t even know if he had dental coverage. At some point, if this all fell apart, he told himself he’d go into business with his brother Bobby, a contractor who tore down perfectly good houses to build new ones for a profit.

  Siddhu had more than thirty minutes to make it to the rally, so to kill some time he got a coffee. Thankfully, it was still considered an essential food item by authorities. He stood in line at the business—coffee shop sounded too homely, café too romantic—that Bernard Rieux had introduced him to; it was the closest to his new office. He took note of the tables and outlets; this might be his new workplace. He looked over his interview notes with the anti-racism protest organizer. The organization for “European-Canadian rights” had sent him a press release that advocated an immediate deportation of all residents of Canada who’d been born outside the country and were of non-European descent.

  As he ordered his Americano, he caught sight of Dr Rieux wearing a neon-orange cycling jacket. On their first meeting, Rieux had not smiled once. Today, his teeth were movie-star white and he seemed friendlier, more relaxed.

  “You got me hooked on this place,” Siddhu told him.

  “As I am with your news coverage,” Rieux answered brightly. “I read your farewell column. I’m sad to hear you’ll be leaving journalism.”

  Siddhu explained that he’d found a new job. He wanted to write better stories, more timely stories. “And my old workplace had become a graveyard,” he told the physician. He lifted his face mask to take his first sip of the Americano. “I wanted something novel.”

  Siddhu waited for Rieux to get his coffee. “Seems like there’s a lot of freedom in your new position,” the doctor told him. He seemed to pick his words carefully. “It must be exciting.”

  “It was an impulse decision,” Siddhu said, as they both stepped outside. “How has business been in your clinic?”

  “Surprisingly, nothing much has changed.”

  Before they parted ways, Siddhu mentioned his next stop. “It’s going to get ugly,” Rieux warned him. He shook his head. “Everyone wants to make this health issue political. Infectious disease doesn’t check your party affiliation. Suffering is universal.”

  It had been a cold, damp fall, but the first week of the quarantine offered glimpses of sunlight. Siddhu passed into Gastown and the business district and could see crowds forming on the other side of a police roadblock. As those with any familiarity with Vancouver’s outbreak might remember, the first week of the quarantine concluded with its only large-scale public conflict. For most locals, it felt inevitable, predictable, and tiresome. People were relieved that the rioting was limited and that there was only one during this period of protracted misery. Siddhu himself wouldn’t have predicted a riot that day, but he wouldn’t have ruled it out. He attended the protest knowing that the turnout would be high—that in itself was newsworthy. Tensions had risen and anxieties had culminated in a march by the city’s racist organizations (both its suits and its boots) and a concurrent counter-demonstration.

  Several years prior to the epidemic, the city experienced a violent riot when the professional ice hockey team lost a championship final game. Drunken hockey fans, more inflamed by the catharsis of frenzy than any disappointment, trashed downtown businesses and set fire to a police car. On the morning after, Siddhu spent several hours with the newspaper’s archivist going through clippings. He interviewed some local historians and academics. They all concluded that the city’s first riots had been caused by racial resentments and economic anxiety. The 1907 Anti-Oriental Riots stemmed from an influx of Chinese railway workers undercutting the bargaining power of white labour. Two riots in the Depression era originated, respectively, from a fight for longshoreman’s rights and disgruntled unemployed men cut off from government relief.

  In the last half-century, the motivations for and conditions that precipitated rioting, said the experts, became less overtly political. The Gastown riots in 1971 arose from a heavy-handed police response to a marijuana-rights protest. People rioted outside a Rolling Stones concert in 1972. The first hockey riot in 1994 seemed to result from genuine sports-induced nihilism. (Vancouver Police blamed the mass disruption and property damage on a short-lived alternative publication. In that free weekly, a columnist offered the cheeky suggestion of looting as a means to alleviating class envy.) These latter-day riots dramatized the struggle between personal freedom—to smoke, to rock out, to throw a tantrum—and state power. Some argued that they illustrated generational divides rather than friction between economic stratas. These were the types of riots reserved for a sleepy provincial city in an economically developed country.

  At its outset, the riot that Vancouver experienced during the period of this narrative had the markers of the city’s earlier scenarios in that there was an existential crisis that flushed out base resentments. As Siddhu progressed through the crowds, he had trouble finding the original European-Canadian rights group. The sign-bearing anti-racist crowd was far more prominent and formed a throng around the fencing and line of police security along Robson Street leading to the south side of the old Art Gallery.

  Food carts were stationed at the outskirts of the demonstration, lending a festive atmosphere to this political event. A majority of the crowd consisted of people who might otherwise describe themselves as bystanders. Siddhu assumed—hoped—they might be anti-racist. Their ethnic make-up was varied, although their identities were largely concealed. Face masks were effective in obscuring identities. Protestors covered their heads in toques and hooded sweatshirts, and as it was also unseasonably sunny, many wore mirrored sunglasses. A number wore backpacks, although Siddhu could not discern whether there were more backpacks than usual.

  The active demonstrators began to jeer as the small parade came from an indeterminate point west toward the Art Gallery. He recognized the old Red Ensign flag, the one with the Union Jack in the top-left corner, slung over the shoulders of two young men in black bomber jackets and bleached blond hair who marched beside some older men holding up a banner with the name and URL of their European-Canadian rights group.

  He heard the explosion first and then a burst of flame in front of the marchers. It was like thunder and lightning. Later he would realize that the sound had come from a Molotov cocktail that had been launched at the rear of the parade. This sound was, in his memory, like a starter’s pistol at a sprint. The chanting stopped behind the metal gates. The young marchers in black formed a defensive circle around the men carrying the banner. The fences gave way and the police line cracked. Siddhu stood behind a VPD officer who shouted at him to move back. The officer distracted him. Siddhu couldn’t see who threw the first punch, but soon limbs had been extended and were in motion.

 
The police buffered the two groups, minimizing the violence between them. The crowd of non-protestors seemed to disperse during this confrontation. Siddhu realized that it had merely moved down Robson Street, away from the police detail, and toward the shops. Siddhu was too far away to hear the glass smashing. Cellphone photos posted that day showed people in face masks stuffing their backpacks with electronics and handbags, others carrying stolen clothes by the rackful. For this segment of the crowd, the demonstration was a pretext to steal, a distraction from the spectre of death. Siddhu asserted his size and jostled himself out of the crowd as the air began to smell like gasoline and burning plastic. He succeeded in turning away from Robson Street, heading back toward Gastown, where he would find a place to write his story. He would piece it together from his own observations and the firsthand reports that he skimmed from social media.

  Longtime Vancouverites felt as though they were following a script as the images and self-congratulating police press conferences ensued. But there were significant divergences from the previously established template. Many have noted that, unlike the previous riot, Vancouverites could not blame this embarrassing event on the “Bridge and Tunnel” elements. They owned this: the racists, the counter-protestors, the onlookers. More importantly, in previous iterations, the riot served to cap off tensions or, at the very least, acted as a release valve. From violence rippled sobriety, introspection, and remorse. Even as they watched homemade firebombs going off—relieved, this time, that no police cars were burned to charred hulls, and that the extent of the rioting was limited to two square blocks—they knew that this did not signal the final throes of turmoil. The rancor in our city had not been discharged; it festered. It made the people of this city sicker.

  The day after the riot, Romeo Parsons gave his first televised speech since his election. It was broadcast on television and radio and streamed live. Vancouverites watched it with the single-mindedness of previous generations who’d been limited to only print and broadcast media. They saw Parsons’ response as the definitive, official reaction to recent events. On a provincial and federal level, politicians had already expressed concern; some called for a redoubling of medical resources and additional relief funds. But Vancouverites regarded their comments with indifference. They felt second-hand, patronizing. Parsons, whatever his political powers might be, was trapped with the rest of the citizenry. They regarded him as their leader and he still radiated the optimistic feeling that had given him a landslide victory.