The Plague

by Kevin Chong

  The mayor accepted these kind but patronizing words stoically, like a donkey accepting lashes to his hide.

  Parsons was outside this woman’s house when he told Rieux that he needed to sit down. The woman lived near Commercial Drive, and her house faced a park that was filled with men playing bocce ball in the summer. Rieux pulled the mayor’s arm over his shoulder and led him to a park bench. Parson’s face was hollowed and clammy. Only minutes earlier, he had been joking with the woman, whom he’d started to called “Cookie.” He was a nicknamer. He had pet names for his staff and people he was comfortable around. He hadn’t given many nicknames out since his scandal. He still addressed Rieux as “Doctor.”

  Rieux placed his hand on Parson’s forehead. He was feverish.

  “You need to go to the hospital,” Rieux told him.

  “I will do no such thing,” Parsons answered in his gravelly baritone. “You can drop me off at home.”

  Rieux told him to wait as he collected his car and pulled up by the park bench. As the car moved, Parsons slumped against the side window and began to shiver. Rieux insisted on taking him back to his condo.

  Mrs Rieux was displeased to see a sick man brought into their home. She fumed outside on her son’s deck, cleaning the gas grill.

  Rieux set the mayor up in his own bed. He called Tso and asked her to go to Parsons’ temporary digs and collect his clothes and other personal items. She arrived with Grossman that evening. They each took turns watching Parsons, who waved off requests to speak to any of his estranged family members.

  The disease advanced quickly. His cheeks were papery and his cough was severe. Parsons’ forehead was shiny with sweat. At times, he howled like a cornered animal.

  “I need you to do me a favour,” Parsons asked Rieux during a lull in the pain. “If I am in too much pain, I want you to kill me. I’m afraid I can’t bear it.”

  Rieux said he would. But he said it knowing he was unlikely to carry out the request. Parsons would have to be lucid to agree to medical assistance in dying right before any lethal injection. In his present state, he would probably become delirious, howling for death but unable to give his consent. He would then die in one quaking shudder.

  Grossman kept watch over Parsons after he fell asleep. In a supine position, Parsons looked like a handsome mannequin, but he’d aged severely in the past six months.

  Mrs Rieux had regained her equilibrium, offering Tso hot water and cookies. She chatted with her briefly before returning to her room to listen to Cantonese opera.

  “Your mother reminds me of my own mother,” Tso told Rieux as they sat at his dining room table. “They had different faces, but there are times when I catch your mom from the corner of my eye and see mine. They were built alike. My mother also smelled like sandalwood and wore jade bracelets around her slender wrists.”

  Over the past two months, since the Sanitation League had been founded, she and Rieux found themselves exhausted but not willing to be alone (or without the other). Sometimes Grossman or Siddhu would join them. Most of the time it was just the two of them. They walked from Rieux’s apartment to Ken Lum’s East Van Cross or to the Olympic Village. They stopped for tea or a glass of wine. They talked about books, films, TV, travel, food, work, and relationships. In all that time, Rieux never heard Tso refer to her family. He remembered only a passing mention of an aunt. He knew better than to ask her about the subject. She always deflected.

  She stared at her hands as she told her story. To Rieux’s ears, it sounded as if she had not told this story often—if at all. It came out in fragments. She backed up a few times in her narrative to correct an earlier point in her account. The following story is an edited, condensed version.

  “My mother died when I was six. I only have a few memories of her. In one of them, I’m running toward her on the beach. She’s wearing sunglasses. I fall in the sand and start crying. She picks me up. For many years, I tried to suppress every reminder of her. I had an older brother, too. He was eight. His name was Paul. He had Down’s. He was born in China. I can hardly remember him now.

  “My father had come to the United States to do a PhD in physics. My mother arrived in his second year with my brother and studied part-time to be a nurse. First we lived in Pennsylvania where I was born. Then my father dropped out of grad school. He told my mother that another student had made a complaint about stolen research. He claimed that he was falsely accused. The university sided with my father’s colleague because he had more influence. The West was not as different from China as my parents had hoped it would be.

  “If I was born with an ability to handle social situations, then it came from my father. He was a great talker. He was confident. I don’t remember anything he said, only the way people gathered around him. He was short so he wore platform shoes. It was his charm that allowed him to get a job as the manager of a seafood restaurant in Flushing, Queens—where we’d moved—without any previous experience in restaurants or as a manager.

  “In public, he was the star of any room. In private, he fumed about slights. He imagined my mother was having an affair. He would beat her regularly. He hoped to interrupt her training as a nurse by relocating, but she was able to transfer her credits to a school in New York. He screamed at my brother for having Down’s. He never screamed at me, though. Even when I got between him and the rest of the family, he simply took me by my shoulders and led me to the room I shared with my brother and closed the door on me. Then he’d start to shout again.

  “I don’t actually remember any of this—it was all told and retold to me, in bits and pieces, by my mother’s sister—the woman who raised me. I’d blocked it out.

  “I don’t remember New York at all. I don’t remember my father losing his job. And I can’t recall the accusations of embezzling from the restaurant. Or the night we left our apartment in Queens with only our clothes and a few photo albums and got into a car. We drove to California in three nights and four days. My father had a friend there who put us up until we found our own place. He had a lead on a job with an import-export company. California is where the memories of my family start. I was nine years old. There was the beach and Disneyland.

  “My mother might have left my father in New York if he had chosen any other destination. She had already completed her training as a nurse. She had friends in Queens. But her sister, my Aunt LiLi, lived in Los Angeles. And while my mother would have to learn to drive, she liked the idea of a winter without snow.

  “She got a job as a nurse, and my father found work too. We had a nice house with a yard. My father purchased a convertible. My mother started playing Mahjong again. My brother was placed in a special school that he liked. The arguments stopped for a while. But then my father lost his job. He was stealing from work. My mother was planning to leave him. The arguments started again.

  “I don’t remember much about my first year without my mother and brother. I know I must have gone to school. I remember the room I had in my aunt’s apartment. I remember a new school where everyone walked around me and talked very slowly. Aunt LiLi worked as a secretary for a Chinese-language church. At night, we knelt at my bed and prayed to God to watch over my mother’s and brother’s souls. She kept photos of my mother and brother in her room, above the dresser. There were no pictures of my family that didn’t also include my father. I hated going into her room because I had to see their faces.

  “I just recalled another memory of my mother waiting for my dad to leave the apartment. She asked me to pick out my favourite doll, my favourite dress, and my favourite book. She packed them into a suitcase along with my brother’s action figures. I saw her outside, stowing the suitcase in the trunk of her car.

  “Here are other things I have no memory of: the shooting itself. The police coming. Leaving the house that night. The first few days after the shooting. The interview with the police officers and the child therapist. But all of that happened to me.

  “My father had forged the signature of his boss
to obtain lines of credit that he used to play Blackjack. His boss wanted to see him in jail. My mother may have known this. In his note, he indicated that he would take his entire family away before he could erase the shame of his own life. I have long wondered why he changed his mind. Why did he spare me?

  “‘God saved you,’” Aunt LiLi told me. “‘It was a miracle.’” In truth, I was my father’s favourite. This is my opinion: I was the one possession of his that didn’t arouse shame. He was simply too vain to kill me.

  “I have hardly anything of my mother’s. She left a tube of lipstick at my aunt’s house when she was visiting the week before her death. For years, I slept with it in my hand. Even when I couldn’t bear to look at her picture. Even during the time I was telling my friends in high-school that I never knew my mother.

  “A year after my mother and brother were killed, Aunt LiLi insisted I get baptised. I didn’t resist her. She was a good woman. The church we attended—the one my aunt worked for—had a wading pool built into the stage. I was baptised with a few other new members. Each of them had their head dunked into water. I began weeping as I stepped toward the priest. I was upset because I had an irrational fear that the priest would drown me. I was upset, too, that I was sinful. And I was upset that the water would wash away my mother from me.

  “When Markus died, some memories of my family were cracked open. I saw everyone afresh.

  “Why did Markus choose to obsess over me? Did I choose Markus because he reminded me of my father?

  “Some people have gleaned my family story. They pried into my silences for my own good. They asked well-meaning questions. I answered them as briefly as I could. You’re the only person I have told this story—the most complete version—to. I’m going to tell Janice too.” She looked up at him. She was done. “This felt good.”

  Rieux sat with this story once it was complete. It was three in the morning, and he could not account for how much time had passed. They must have talked about other things. Throughout Tso’s account, he had asked questions and sought clarifications. Tso had cried, but not as much as he would have thought. At that time, everyone cried; tears had been as omnipresent as face masks and hand sanitizer since the outbreak and quarantine. The economical choice would be to describe the times nobody wept.

  He worried throughout her telling of the story that he was not reacting to it properly. He wanted to convey his empathy. But he was allergic to expressiveness by disposition and profession. He could not touch her.

  “I want you to know I appreciate learning everything about you,” he told her finally.

  “You don’t know everything,” she said.

  “The rest is trivia.”

  Tso looked at him, then the table. She nodded.

  Grossman interrupted them, flapping her hands as though they were aflame. “He’s awake.” She removed a glass from a cupboard and filled it with filtered water from Rieux’s refrigerator.

  The mayor was sitting upright in bed. His hair was matted to his forehead with dried sweat. He swallowed the water in a gulp and asked for more. Rieux examined him. The fever had passed. The doctor did not have any extra “dipsticks”—the white plastic devices that could detect the bacterium in a blood or urine sample without a laboratory test—on hand. Now he thought that Parsons might not have had the disease. Perhaps it was a flu brought on by exhaustion. It may have been a coincidence, too, that patients brought in during the final weeks of the quarantine responded better to treatment. Their recovery rates were a reversal of the dismal results witnessed near the beginning of the outbreak.

  Grossman returned with another glass of water. Parsons drained it and asked for yet another. Midway through the third serving, he put the glass on the nightstand. “I’ve finally had my fill,” he told them, wiping his wet chin with his hand.

  Rieux and Tso exchanged looks of disbelief. For each of them, Parsons’ recovery was their first pleasant surprise in months.

  He turned in the bed and drew his legs to the floor. He became aware that he had been stripped down to his boxer briefs and undershirt. Grossman sat next to him and patted him on the knee.

  “We were almost finished writing your obituary,” she told him. “Thanks for nothing.”

  “You can save it for later,” he told her. “Maybe you’ll need to add a couple of new paragraphs at the bottom. I don’t like the way it ends right now.”

  Part Five

  23.

  By early February, optimism and anxiety coursed throughout the city. For the first time since the outbreak began, Coastal Health Authority officials reported steep drops in both infections and fatalities. The success was attributed to the vaccine, and the anti-vaxxers or those who’d found excuses to avoid a needle rushed to the various clinic sites. During this wave, supplies correctly anticipated the surge of demand.

  With good news came opportunities to call as many press conferences as possible. In the second week of February, one media event was arranged by Dr Orla Castello to announce the imminent closure of the auxiliary hospital. In the ensuing question period, Castello admitted that discussions about lifting the quarantine had begun. “There will be another press conference when we have a firm date in mind,” she added.

  Romeo Parsons kicked off a full return to his role as mayor by announcing a date in late May for a referendum on his anti-poverty plan. “It’s also a referendum on my leadership,” he said. If the people voted “No,” he would resign. He acknowledged again his personal troubles, blaming them on hubris and an “outdated sense of a private life” that had not considered digital security. In a separate press conference with Canada’s Prime Minister (onscreen through a satellite connection), he also announced details of a federal stimulus package that included infrastructure improvements like free wi-fi in the downtown core.

  The tentative date in mid-March for the reopening of the city was made known two weeks in advance. The barricade gates would be removed and the airport would open if the infection rate continued to drop. “It’s not unusual for these epidemics to lobtail,” Castello said. “We expect to see the last gasp of disease before the reopening.” Her tone implied that the reopening was conditional on our good behaviour.

  This caution was not heeded. Strangers waltzed cheek-to-cheek, mask-to-mask, on Robson Street. Cyclists on the icy bicycle lanes rang their bells cheerfully as they passed one another. Restaurants and bars gave away celebratory rounds of smuggled, premium-priced alcohol. Parents took their children out of school for ice cream and Go-Kart rides.

  To survive, Vancouverites had adopted a measured approach to the privations of the quarantine. They could not waste the energy needed to stay alert to infection. Their tears were reserved only for the suffering of those closest to them. With the deadline in sight, they lost their composure. Like long-distance runners with the finish line in sight, they began to notice their ragged lungs, sore joints, and aching muscles. They bawled and wailed in agony and relief.

  During those two weeks, people started to wonder about the future. Some of them used that transitional period to ready themselves, while others booked vacations to their “bucket list” destinations. Some romantic relationships crystallized in this period, and many more dissolved in anticipation of freedom and possibility.

  Not everyone prepared for their new life, but no one expected to return to their old one.

  Janice Grossman had been offered her previous job as a tour-bus operator, at reduced hours. She declined to return. She hoped to continue hosting performances at her unlicensed space. “I mean, I know the fucking mayor,” she told Tso. “I nursed him back from the grave.” To make up for lost income, she rented her downstairs apartment to Jeffrey Oishi.

  In the process of preparing the apartment for rental, she cleared some of her own space. She found Janet’s unopened letters and read them for the first time. There were three separate letters written three months apart in the first three months after their split. The first letter was the longest and most conciliatory
. The final one was cold and brief. The second one fell in the middle of those extremes.

  “She basically wrote the same letter three different ways,” she told Tso. “The third letter was the clearest one.” In her unanswered correspondence, she explained that she felt guilty for mistreating Grossman and that she could not repay her. She would never be happy trying to repay her. She chose instead to live with her guilt and move on.

  The admission of fault moved Grossman. “It means more to me than her saying she would always love me,” she said. “Because love fades. It’s guilt that lasts.”

  To celebrate the city’s reopening, Grossman reactivated another “long-dormant thing,” her internet dating profile. She invited Tso over for tea so that she could share her initial impressions about her romantic prospects. Hanging on a clothes line from the wall over the kitchen table was what at first seemed to be a chain of paper dolls. Upon closer inspection, Tso realized that the dolls, held to the clothesline with binder clips, were pictures of Grossman. They were the cut-out images of herself from Janet’s paintings.

  Grossman noticed the figures had caught Tso’s attention. “I’m not sure I’ll keep the cut-outs like that,” she said. “I might put them all in a scrapbook.” She had arranged the paper dolls from the youngest-looking one—Grossman wearing her Gertrude Stein T-shirt—to depictions of her from later in their relationship. Each figure, stripped from its tableaux, was finely detailed. As the paper dolls danced across the clothesline, the depictions of Grossman’s features gained wrinkles and the tint of her hair mutated. Her expression grew lighter, less like a horny satyr and more restful and content, as she collected experience. At the end of the line, Tso saw her friend.

  From outside the quarantine zone, Raymond Siddhu sent out resumes for various communications jobs in the public and private sector.