by Kevin Chong
“That leaves us with one option,” Grossman said. She then committed to building her own casket for her father. For half of that day, she was engrossed in the project, following online instructions for a “toe-pincher” style pine coffin. She and Tso went to the hardware store to collect the boards, handsaw, nails, wood glue, clamps, and rope. Grossman put it together in the former grocery store that had once been Janet’s art studio. The ice-frosted windows of the store allowed in more light than Tso expected and was reflected in the polished wood floors. On the interior walls, some oil paintings by Grossman’s former lover still hung. In those paintings, Grossman was depicted fully clothed—not as a figure of beauty but a dominating presence. In one image, she was pictured as a herder in a field of goats. In another, she leaned into a pool table lining up a shot. “I’ve been meaning to send those back to Janet,” she said once she noticed Tso looking at the paintings. “She wants to burn them. She says the style is too primitive. And that she used Indigenous imagery that might be considered appropriative. She’s worried I’ll ruin her career,” she added, measuring the casket’s centre floorboard. “What she should really be worried about is the novel I’m writing. It’s in the fantasy genre to avoid defamation, but it’s really about her.”
By nightfall, Grossman and Tso had put together the pine casket. The website suggested that it could also be used as a stage or Halloween prop. When they were done, they had realized that promise. It looked like something without being that something. Grossman sobbed at the result. “We’ll figure out an alternative,” Tso told her. She led her upstairs and back to sleep.
That evening, Tso allowed Grossman to spoon her until she began to snore. Once she detached herself, she stepped out of the apartment, across the landing, and knocked on Farhad Khan’s door.
“Ah—my saviour!” Khan shouted. He was bare-chested, in a pair of running shorts. “Please, come in.”
The front hallway to the apartment was lined with liquor boxes and cartons of cigarettes. Tso walked by the kitchenette where she had found him after his suicide attempt. The upturned chair remained on the checkerboard floor. “You seem to have some new business concerns,” she said.
“Yeah, I have some friends who fix me up,” he said, flopping into the middle of a couch. She couldn’t help noticing that he had the torso of a swimmer: a tanned, hairless inverted triangle. The torsos she’d seen most recently had all been narrow, wiry, and tattooed. Between the couch and a large television playing cable news, she saw a hookah. “You smoke?” he asked.
“Not in a long time,” she said, remembering a trip to Istanbul as a backpacker. She sat across from him in a matching armchair that she didn’t remember from her last visit. He huffed the hookah pipe, blowing smoke that made his eyes water, and passed it to her.
The water at the bottom of the blue-glass basin bubbled. She held up her hands, staring at the mouthpiece as if it were the barrel of a pistol. “We’ve got to be careful about infection these days.”
He broke out in laughter. His eyes were red and glassy as he took another puff. “Okay, maybe you are right,” he said. “But look at Mr Izzy—such a careful man. So proper, so clean. He doesn’t want to be around no one. Not even his nice daughter. And he dies. So if I die, I should die with others.”
Tso decided she would get to the point. “You said you could help. By that you mean you can get goods through the barricades?”
“Before I got depressed, I used to sell and re-sell. Long time ago, it used to be bad things. It was bad, not so bad.” He leaned back into the couch. “The kind of things kids get in trouble selling. When this sickness happened, it was like a wake-up call. I need to get back to business. I need to make money. I need to love life.” He pointed his pinched fingertips in the air in emphasis and took another hookah hit to settle himself. “Let us … jump chase. It’s easier to bring things into the city, but I can also take things out.”
“You mean like mail?” Tso asked, knowing immediately she’d missed the mark.
He dipped his nose and looked at her with incredulity. “I am saying I can get you out. Isn’t that what you want? I won’t take money from you, but my associates will charge a fee. It won’t be cheap.”
She shook her head. “No. What I need is a coffin for Mr Grossman.”
He laughed again. “Ah, that is easy. I get you one by tomorrow—the day after, at the latest.”
When the coffin arrived the next day, Khan waved off any attempts to pay him. “Maybe I ask for a favour back,” he told Tso. “Like in The Godfather.”
Three days had passed, and Tso left Grossman’s house knowing that she had done as much as she could for her friend. At the funeral, so many people came to pay their respects to Izzy Grossman that the small room was quickly filled. Latecomers listened to Janice Grossman’s eulogy, which was funny enough to earn a standing ovation, from the hallway.
Within two months of the quarantine, when weekly deaths peaked at two hundred and twelve, the scarcity of burial space in Vancouver would become an issue that distracted people with righteous anger. The city crematorium operated seven days a week. City land earmarked for a playground was used for those who needed urgent burial for their loved ones, but even then, bodies and remains were stacked on top of one another. If only Grossman knew this at the time, Tso thought. Her father hadn’t really gone too early. He was first in line.
13.
In the first hours of the quarantine, a few Vancouverites managed to sidestep the Canadian Armed Forces roadblocks. Before additional Coast Guard patrol boats arrived, they took their private sea vehicles from the Burrard Marina to Richmond or Deep Cove. Others slipped through the wooded pathways of Central Park, carrying their essential belongings in backpacks and rolling luggage to get to Burnaby and beyond. Siddhu had heard stories of semi-organized gangs of twenty or more darting across Boundary Road in a stampede, knowing that the soldiers couldn’t catch them all. The soldiers had not yet been instructed to use force, the outer limits of which had still not been established, to contain them. In the early days, the spotlights that rimmed the city borders like neon beams had yet to be installed. The barbed wire had yet to be unfurled. The sentry towers would take another week to be built.
The first escapees evaded not only confinement but that sense of unreality that choked so many Vancouverites, that made them long for two-zone bus passes and suburban cul-de-sacs. Envy always overcame locals in between moments of panic and fear.
Siddhu pondered the escapees the way he might look at a friend who bought a stock that skyrocketed. It didn’t help that his wife regaled him with these success stories in their nightly Skype chats. By then, she knew that he had quit his job at the paper. She looked increasingly pale, her eyes puffier, as she spoke from their brightly lit kitchen, the pile of dishes overgrown in the sink. The boys would still be whimpering out their last waking moments from upstairs when she called. He wouldn’t be able to hear them, but she would turn her head and shush them.
Uma needed him to bear witness to her account of the day before she got too tired. People came to help: her mother (whose flight back from Chandigarh had been rerouted to Seattle), his mother, and Uma’s sisters and friends. They watched the boys and brought food, so she could get a massage or sit through a movie. “But then, they always leave,” she said. “Sometimes they go before I want them to, and sometimes they can’t go soon enough.” He knew she was talking about his mother. “What I’m left to do—it’s too much. I don’t blame you. Not when I think about it. But I need to be angry.”
In their relationship, he was the one who cried, the one who needed to be calmed down. Now, he held back his own tears as she worked through her displeasure. Afterward she would apologize through her sobs, and he would tell her to get some sleep. The worst way to end a call was when one of the boys started to scream. He would see her leave the kitchen and stare at the video image of his refrigerator for minutes, unsure of her return, before finally ending their call.
Afte
rward, he trudged through the snow to take his clothes to the laundromat on Davie Street. He was cycling through four sets of Costco-purchased shirts, pants, and undergarments and was careful not to spill anything on them. Unlike other hotel residents, he neither wore a paper bib nor showed up at the restaurant-lounge in stained T-shirts. When he returned from the laundromat, he would stay in the lounge for a drink with Oishi or Tso, both of whom, he noticed, began to look wan and tired in the Christmas lights. Tso had recently helped a friend deal with her father’s death. Oishi was negotiating the terms of his divorce as he returned to work. Two drinks later, Siddhu would be in his room in his underwear, practicing the yo-yo for a few minutes until he couldn’t keep his eyes open. Then he stretched out on the bed like a snoring starfish.
He had never lived alone, never gone an entire week without seeing his parents or spent more than a couple of nights away from his wife. This should have felt novel. Instead, the absence of these oppressive forces weighed on him. He should have felt lightened. He felt cheated.
A week earlier, a team of paramedics had rushed into his hotel room, led by a night clerk. One paramedic began to pull him out of bed. He screamed until they realized their mistake—they’d been meant to remove an infected hotel guest from the floor above. Ever since, he could not sleep for more than two hours before getting up and vigorously washing his hands.
He often arrived at the GSSP office wishing he could go to sleep, but then his brain perked up at the urgency of the stories he needed to tell. Horne-Bough offered no direction. He was busy speaking to international news outlets about the disease or was in conversation with his lizard-like tech guys. Why was he so obsessed with being surveilled? Horne-Bough seemed happy with Siddhu’s coverage—and his discretion—and even presented him with a gift: a life-insurance policy should he contract the infection while working. Siddhu had been looking online for coverage the previous week and felt buoyed by the synchronicity.
There were so many stories to tell: Siddhu could write about the disparity of infection rates between income groups that had flattened as the disease spread throughout the city but had since re-emerged. He could unpack the disagreements between provincial and federal agencies that led to delays in relief payments for locals whose incomes were decimated either by illness or quarantine. He tried to touch on these issues. And then there was the silence in City Hall surrounding the Mayor’s leave after his personal scandal and his subsequent refusal to resign. He avoided that one, and thankfully a colleague continued to poke at city officials.
As usual, people contacted Siddhu for publicity. Cleaning services touted their effective, environmentally friendly decontamination policies. Therapists wanted to be profiled on their trauma-counselling services. Even Rieux cornered him to write a story.
“In case you didn’t read my email, I am starting a sanitation league,” the doctor announced at their coffee shop. “Infection rates are too high in this area.”
“About that,” Siddhu answered, digging into his pocket to pay for his Americano, “I meant to reply. It didn’t fly in the story meeting.” That last part was a lie. “One question: Isn’t that the city’s job, sanitation?”
“Everyone in City Hall is preoccupied. Government acts too slowly. It’s up to private citizens to respond,” Rieux said. Siddhu saw an impatience in his rhetoric that reminded him of the nineteen-year-olds he’d known in university who wore neckties to class and read Ayn Rand. “More people will die than necessary.”
Rieux told him that he’d lead his sanitation squad on weekends and evenings and already had two volunteers. Siddhu was tired enough as it was. He thought of people like Rieux—inexhaustible and determined—and believed it must be fear that drove them. Not fear of disease or dying; Rieux was chasing something else away.
Siddhu left it at that and returned to work. His young employer texted him from the rooftop to come up and discuss a story. Siddhu grabbed his coat and scarf and took the two steep flights of stairs with dread. Even the cold and snow hadn’t persuaded Horne-Bough to find another place to conduct his private meetings. Instead, he installed a heat lamp under which he huddled in a fur-lined parka and fingerless gloves while vaping. Siddhu stood under the lamp as if it was an umbrella.
“I wanted to discuss your performance,” Horne-Bough said.
Siddhu, his boss explained, had been providing comprehensive coverage of the spread of the disease. He had proven himself worthwhile on that end. His contact list and pedigree were also assets. But he hadn’t broken any news. He had yet to generate the kind of excitement that drove web traffic and earned subscriptions.
“I’ve been doing what I thought was best,” Siddhu said. “We haven’t had any real story meetings.”
“We don’t do those.” Horne-Bough half-shrugged. “You’re new here, but I don’t want you to get surpassed,” he said. “So that’s why I’ve come up with a story idea. I want you to conduct the first interview with Romeo Parsons since his scandal.”
Horne-Bough had already been contacted by the PR company that the wealthy mayor had hired privately. “I insisted that you, as our senior writer, be the one to speak to them,” he said. “There was push-back, but we kicked the shit out of it.” He presented Siddhu with a contact number on a scrap of paper. “Can you set something up?”
Siddhu nodded and took the number. He already had a story to cover that night.
Early in the evening, Siddhu took a car2go to the edge of the Grand-view Highway until he reached a set of electronic roadwork signs placed a few blocks before the spotlights, fences, and guard towers. They were typical roadwork signs that warned drivers of a stoppage ahead and asked them to take an alternate route. They were like trigger warnings that cautioned locals who wanted to pretend that nothing had changed to avoid going farther.
He came to the foot of the guard tower. Between the towers, guards with rifles on all-terrain vehicles patrolled the length of the fence. On the other side, coming into the sealed city, was an unloading area where the freight of a fleet of eighteen-wheelers was being inspected by men with machine guns. A Canadian Armed Forces captain, who wore a pair of binoculars around his neck, stepped out of a door. Siddhu held up the lanyard with his ID, but the army captain didn’t bother to look.
“You’re the reporter,” he said. “You missed all the fun.”
Siddhu was invited into the guard tower where he was given a bullet-proof vest. The army captain was a reservist who lived outside the city in Chilliwack. He wore light fatigues and stood about as tall as Siddhu—a few inches past six feet—but, when they shook hands, the officer’s hand enveloped the reporter’s. He told Siddhu he’d been stationed here since the outbreak began.
The eighteen-wheelers brought basic food items, medical supplies, and fuel into the city. The officer’s job was to make sure that nothing was being smuggled in or out. Alcohol, hard drugs, and luxury items had been confiscated while he was on duty. “Even in a quarantine zone, some people can’t live without their $25,000 watches,” he said. “We do a good job catching their middlemen.”
“But why has the black market been thriving?” Siddhu asked. “You can still buy all these goods through connections—or online—if you have enough money.”
“We have our theories. Smuggling doesn’t occur through trucks or trains—we handle that. The airports have been closed. It exists only by boat,” he said before he seemed to notice the voice recorder in front of him. “That was off the record.”
Siddhu decided not to correct him about what “off the record” meant. He let the officer disparage the work of the coast guard until a truck approached the gate. It had been emptied of its cargo. The driver rolled down the window and presented him with a security card, which the army captain swiped through a tablet encased in a bulky military-looking shell and had a reader attached to it. The inspection process took nearly a quarter of an hour, as the line behind the truck grew. Drivers, by law, were not allowed to step out of their vehicles. Most of them carried piss
bottles because they couldn’t use the washroom. Soldiers with dogs boarded the cargo holds while others in gas masks fumigated the trucks’ exteriors.
Over a period of three hours, dozens of trucks came in and out. Siddhu chatted with the army captain, who was amiable, and enjoyed his company. When he felt comfortable enough, Siddhu asked him about rumours made about compassionate “exceptions.” The soldier’s expression remained fixed as though he hadn’t heard.
“There are stories in the ether about people who have been let out of the city because there’s a relative in another city who’s dying,” Siddhu added. “I’ve heard people talking about diplomats who succeeded in getting citizens of their countries airlifted back to their home nations, where they are isolated for a period of time and released. Do you know anything about this?”
The captain’s tone became much more officious, even stilted. “The only people who have been in and of the city, as far as I know, have been truck drivers or infectious disease experts,” he said. “I get asked that question a lot.”
“My family is in the suburbs,” Siddhu explained. “I’ve been living in a hotel. My boys are a year old.”
“If you’re going to escape,” he told him without making eye contact, “the best way would be to go by boat. Find someone who knows what they’re doing, someone who has a licensed driver. Now, that’s off the record, too.”