The Plague

by Kevin Chong

  As he waited for a response, he continued the couples therapy that he and Uma had begun in late January. During their sessions, Siddhu revealed his previous infidelity to his wife. Although she had long suspected the incident, she felt its sting, but she also appreciated his confession as an attempt to reduce her own sense of guilt over her affair. Siddhu realized that the schism in their marriage had been exacerbated by the strain of separation; it was a fissure that had been growing since their sons were born.

  They each wrote a list of their daily childcare tasks. He’d known she did more work around the house, but this chart was striking. “The list is skewed,” Siddhu insisted at first. “She’s been on maternity leave.”

  Now out of work, Siddhu began to take his sons to the park. He did their laundry and cooked dinner on the days when Uma, whose internet fling had ended, did the books in the office of her brother’s Honda dealership. Uma texted him during the day to check on his emotional temperature. Saturday nights alternated between date nights and “me” nights—when either Siddhu or Uma were free to do what they wanted.

  He followed the coverage around Elliot Horne-Bough’s arrest for invasion of privacy and began to craft a proposal for a true-crime book. Out on bail, Horne-Bough remained an enigma worthy of study, but Siddhu had found his erratic leadership style to be exhausting. Writing about him, especially if he were to cooperate, would return Siddhu to his mercy for an indefinite period of time.

  That’s when he received a call from the mayor’s office for an interview as a communications director. They set up an appointment for the Monday after the city gates opened. “The mayor obviously knows your work,” his aide told Siddhu. “He wants you on his team.”

  Siddhu knew he didn’t want to be on the team of any person or party or company. As a journalist, he had aligned himself with the objective truth. At least he strived to do so beyond any of his inherent biases and the limitations imposed on him by deadlines and access. He also knew he had to feed his family. And he liked Parsons. Given a choice between Horne-Bough and Parsons, he’d work for Parsons.

  Orla Castello completed paperwork for early retirement. When she met with Rieux for coffee, she had already made plans with a nonprofit to help coordinate the founding of a hospital in Sierra Leone. A new wave of the Ebola virus had decimated the medical system, taking down ten percent of its doctors and nurses. She would leave in the spring.

  “I want to get out of here before they start handing out medals—not that I expect to get any,” Castello said.

  “You’d be the first in line,” Rieux told her.

  “I have a feeling that the wrong people will get those medals. They’ll be the ones who come out of it talking about ‘lessons learned.’ They’ll talk about innovation and say it was simple. It was actually complicated. People suffered no matter what we decided to do.”

  She asked Rieux about his wife.

  “Elyse has made a remarkable recovery—I shouldn’t have called her treatment quackery,” Rieux said. “But we’ve grown too far apart. She’s leaving Mexico but has no plans to come home.”

  She leaned across the table toward him. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I love both of you.”

  He squeezed her hands.

  This was the first time he’d admitted out loud that his marriage was over, something he hadn’t even told his mother. He felt like he’d stabbed himself.

  “I didn’t know how poorly I cared for her—until all this happened,” Rieux said. “Things might be different if I’d understood her pain.”

  “You always tried, Bernard. She knew that,” Castello said. “You’re too hardworking. When are you going to take a vacation?”

  “In about two weeks,” he said with a smile. “I still have patients to see and paperwork to put together.”

  The bill came to the table. She snatched it from the plate like a cat swatting at a bird. “Go on holiday earlier,” she told him. “People are going to live and die whatever you do.”

  The Sanitation League met an unceremonious demise as calls to its hotlines and emailed requests plummeted more drastically than the rate of infection. Tso and Rieux personally thanked every volunteer for their service. They talked about throwing a party after the quarantine was over, but neither could manage to do anything. Besides, Tso needed to leave.

  Through the US consulate Tso purchased a ticket home. The time in Vancouver had drained her savings—the consulate would reimburse her, but the lag in processing meant that she pushed up against her credit-card limit. She needed to make money soon, and her old job had opened up. A friend in Los Angeles emailed to say that she was moving in with her boyfriend. Tso had always loved her apartment. Did she want it? Tso could take over her lease in March.

  She decided that a sudden return to her old life would be the best cure for any hangover that came from her experience in Vancouver. Leaving these new friends behind would be bittersweet, but there was no point in staying in one place when everyone else’s lives were being reordered. You either leave people, or you’re being left behind, she told herself.

  At the US consulate, she was given an envelope. It had been couriered from their Japanese counterparts. The note was written on tissue-thin writing paper in a frail hand.

  Dear Megan Tso,

  I apologize for our late reply. I apologize also for our simple English.

  Thank you so much for sending to us the passport of our daughter, Yuko. The consulate official said you tried to help her when she became sick.

  We thought you might want to know more about Yuko.

  Yuko was our only daughter. She was twenty-two years old. She studied English for a year in the United Kingdom. She wanted to work for an airline and travel. She loved dogs.

  We are very sad since she died. But we know that she lived a life that made her happy.

  Thank you for reading this letter about our daughter.

  Yuko’s Mother (and Father)

  Tso’s hands trembled as she reread the note. She saw a girl running down the beach into the embrace of the person who made her.

  After being released on bail, Elliott Horne-Bough announced his latest venture with philanthropist and family friend Frederick Graham. Evermark™ would create luxury monuments for the ultra-rich, built to last a thousand years.

  “I think we should keep an eye on Farhad,” Grossman told Tso a few days after the reopening was announced. She had heard him screaming into the phone in his apartment.

  The smuggling trade had not yet been affected. As inspection protocols remained in place, contraband was still required to meet the city’s more celebratory appetites for foie gras, champagne, and Atlantic lobster. But within a few weeks, his services would no longer be in demand.

  It was Oishi’s move into Izzy Grossman’s apartment that prompted Khan’s next outburst. When he saw the judge outside the house with the moving van, he ran up to Grossman’s apartment, pounded his fists against her door, and demanded that she open it.

  Tso, who had moved to Grossman’s couch until she left the city, was wearing her pyjamas when she cracked open the door. Khan slipped his foot in the crack and pried it open.

  “What message are you trying to send to me, eh?” Khan asked. “Have I not been your friend? Why do you rent to that judge?” he asked. “Is there a reason why you’re torturing me?”

  Grossman appeared a moment afterward. Khan shouted to her over Tso’s shoulder. He kept thumping his bare chest like an over-emotive singer.

  Grossman didn’t know about Oishi’s connection to Khan. “He needed a place to stay,” she said.

  He threw his hands in the air. “A man needs to feel like he’s at home. Not like he’s on trial.”

  He stomped back into his apartment. When they heard glass breaking and other noises, Grossman called the police. Khan stormed out before they arrived. Grossman prepared an eviction notice for him, but he never bothered to pick it up. He never returned to the apartment.

  A few days before the quarantine w
as lifted, one of Gastown Annex’s newest condo projects, set to cast the rest of the block in its shadow, was set ablaze. Police and firefighters found Khan sitting on the curb with two tanks of gasoline.

  The damages to the stone and steel foundations were superficial, yet the developers wanted Khan punished severely. Later that year, when Khan stood in the courtroom for his sentencing, he swayed back and forth until his lawyer asked him to stop. He dutifully answered the questions that the judge asked him but otherwise looked swept up in his own private music. He seemed disappointed that his prison sentence wasn’t longer.

  24.

  When the reopening was announced, Rieux booked a ticket back to Hong Kong for his mother. Mrs Rieux had begun to sigh at the pictures of her growing grandchildren recently sent by his sister. She had been here too long. “I imagine Elyse will be home soon,” she told him. “I don’t want to get in her way.”

  Rieux resolved to spend more time with his mother now that an end-date to her visit came into sight. She was at the age when any visit could be her last and he would only be able to see her in Hong Kong, where he found it difficult to breathe in the smog and heat.

  He received two tickets from the Cantonese Opera troupe. The actress whom Rieux had attended to had recovered and regained her strength. To celebrate their imminent departure and to show their appreciation to the city, the company would stage a farewell performance before they travelled home to China. Rieux and his mother were invited backstage afterward.

  “Once was enough,” Mrs Rieux said. “You don’t even like the opera!”

  “It was my fault. I didn’t put in the time to understand it,” he explained. “I read about this one.”

  She nodded. She wanted to go. “Thank you, Bernard,” she said.

  The performance took place in the same theatre, but this time the house was full. Since the reopening had been announced, pedestrians filled the streets to the curb and passengers on buses stood shoulder-to-shoulder. People behaved as though they were already free. Rieux was reminded of visiting less temperate Canadian cities in the spring and seeing shirtless joggers running alongside towering snowbanks that had only begun to thaw. Vancouverites would have looked the same way to outsiders: like maniacs.

  He flipped through the program. The original version of The Peony Pavilion, written at the end of the sixteenth century, consisted of fifty-five scenes and took days to perform. This popular adaptation, which featured eight scenes, lasted only for an evening.

  The lights dimmed on a stage that was made to look like a garden. The actress he had treated stood in the green light. Her cheekbones seemed to jut out more noticeably, but it was hard to tell in her makeup. She played the lead character, a young woman named Du Liniang, and was followed onto the stage by another woman, who played her maid. To Rieux’s relief, this performance was subtitled.

  Du Liniang comes from a wealthy family, which confines her to the estate and the manicured gardens that surround it to preserve her innocence. In her boredom and sadness, she wanders outside and falls asleep. In a dream she meets a man named Liu Mengmei, who convinces her that they are destined to fall in love. She wakes up from her dream, dismayed it wasn’t real. In her despair, she wastes away and dies.

  Three years later, a scholar stops at a temple to get away from a snowstorm. He presents an offering to a painting of a young woman. He sees his own name, Liu Mengmei, within the poem that accompanies the portrait.

  Du Liniang’s ghost appears. She tells him about their fated love and instructs him to unearth her tomb. The god of the underworld has allowed her to return to life and re-unite with her lover. Since it is a comic opera, they must succeed in proving to everyone—the cemetery custodians, her parents, the Emperor—that he is not a graverobber and she is not a ghost. And that they belong together.

  Rieux’s mother was again stirred and delighted. The story was a comedy along Renaissance lines: not a lot of yuks, but an expression of vitality. Life has more good parts than bad ones … let’s end this story on a high note.

  Mrs Rieux sang along to the songs—audibly. She did not even feign resistance when he suggested they go backstage. Once there, she clung to her son’s side as they waited to congratulate the performers. She offered the same crooked smiled she used when she’d met the parents of Rieux’s classmates and was embarrassed to speak in English. One actress noticed a trace of an accent in her Cantonese and asked her about her family’s hometown. “We come from the same village!” the actress gasped.

  The doctor’s mother sighed contentedly during the drive home. As a child, Rieux often discovered her asleep on the couch, her arms cinched around a pillow that he always imagined to be a stand-in for his father. It was a fanciful notion. His mother hardly talked about her husband. It seemed difficult to imagine how deeply his parents had fallen in love when they could barely speak the same language.

  Rieux was pleased by her reaction to The Peony Pavilion. While he found himself drifting in and out of the performance, it would not be fair to say that it had left him unaffected. Throughout the opera and the ride home, his mind latched onto the idea of lovers existing outside of time and space. Wasn’t it simply a fanciful notion rooted in anguish?

  People fell in love at the wrong time, all the time.

  People fell in love out of time, all the time.

  The city was full of people still in love with ghosts. Always, but now more than ever. And ghosts waiting to be reborn and reunited.

  For Rieux, his days at the clinic swung so far back in the direction of normalcy that it felt like another type of abnormal. During the quarantine, Rieux had noticed not only a drop in volume, but an outright reluctance in patients with everyday ailments and chronic conditions to come in. No one wanted to go to the doctor unless they feared their lives were at risk. With the reopening of the city in sight, his office was crowded with patients with asthma or hepatitis C.

  Rieux completed one day at the clinic with his favourite patient, Walter, whom he saw for the first time since Rieux had visited his home. He noticed that Walter had added another band of red marks to his arm as the days of quarantine continued. As idle chatter during the exam, the doctor asked Walter whether he had any trips planned for after the reopening. Walter told him that he’d had been evicted from his apartment. He had a week to find a new home at a fixed price range or stay in a shelter.

  “Things were better when everyone was afraid—they were too busy to hurt me,” Walter said. “Now that everyone is returning to normal, it’s back to survival mode.”

  Rieux didn’t know what to say. He placed one hand on Walter’s arm and held it. Afterwards, he renewed his prescription for medication to treat hypertension. He would take more time with Walter if he needed it. Rieux had gotten behind with waiting patients a few times that day, which cut into his break and lunch. He blamed the end-of-day fatigue on his lack of rest and food.

  “You look pale,” Walter told the doctor when he uncuffed the blood pressure monitor. “Drink some milk.”

  Back home, he told Mrs Rieux that he was tired from his work day and she shouldn’t worry. He admitted later that he had been feeling weak for the past several days, but Tso and Grossman were expected for dinner that night. They needed to distribute leftover money that had been donated to the Sanitation League, and there were several options to be discussed. Rieux remained in bed until woken by his mother, then changed back into his clothes and sat slumped on the couch, a cup of warm water in his hands, while his mother prepared the meal.

  His guests arrived. Grossman yelped upon encountering Rieux and his ashy complexion. “Doc, you’re not looking good,” she told him. “Let me show you.” She took his flash photo on her Samsung Galaxy and presented him with the image. “We need to take you to the hospital.”

  Even as Rieux suggested that it could be “just the flu,” he realized how he sounded. When he stood up, he felt dizzy. He saw his bag by the door and staggered toward it. He removed a white plastic stick that looked like
a home pregnancy test. Grossman helped him to the bathroom.

  “We’ll know for sure in fifteen minutes,” he said when he returned to the living room.

  He held the stick in both hands. Everyone watched the clock, repeating the same thought, It has to be the flu. It doesn’t make sense to get it now. A red line appeared over the positive sign. His eyes lidded, and he began to blink erratically.

  “It’s true,” he said. “It’s true.”

  An ambulance was called. Tso accompanied Mrs Rieux, who remained in her son’s field of vision at all times, to the hospital. He was sent directly from the Emergency Room to the Intensive Care Unit, where he was given the new antibiotics that were more effective in treating patients during the recent rounds of the disease. He slowly took in the room, the monitors, the lines attached to him. Seeing that everything was in place allowed him to relax.

  “What’s my prognosis?” he asked Tso.

  Mrs Rieux looked to Tso.

  “I’m not a doctor,” Tso said.

  “That’s why I like you.”

  He closed his eyes and slept. It was past ten o’clock. Tso told Mrs Rieux to go home. She assured her that she would remain by her son’s side. Who knew how long it would last? Tso called Grossman and asked her to drive the doctor’s mother home. She knew Mrs Rieux needed to rest.

  Tso pulled up her chair and scrolled through social media on her iPhone. She needed to save battery life in case Mrs Rieux called. Rieux slept with his head to the side. His legs were almost hairless. They were strong and lean, like statuary—his arms, too. Her eyes darted past the egg-shaped lumps that had formed on the sides of his neck. He had a scar under his eyebrow, a white horizontal line. She’d never gotten around to asking him about it.

  Nurses came and went. She was too worried to ask the doctors anything. Dr Castello stopped by—as a visitor—and told Tso that Rieux was being treated for both the bubonic and pneumonic versions of the disease. He had been exposed to the illness for months. Why now? Was it possible for his body to have resisted it until he completed his work? Tso wondered.