The Plague

by Kevin Chong

  Castello said she would visit again and left. She seemed uncomfortable with Rieux as a patient. An hour passed. Tso closed her eyes. By the time they fluttered open, another three hours had vanished.

  Rieux had been making a whimpering sound. People afflicted with the disease typically flailed and screamed. Rieux suffered the way he lived: he was reserved, still, stoic. He kept his arms by his side and his jaw set.

  His eyes remained fixed ahead as though he were a tightrope walker unwilling to look at the ground. Tso moved to the side of the bed and leaned over so he could see her face. His pupils slowly adjusted. With great effort, he wrenched his mouth out of a pained wince. If he couldn’t force a smile, he was able to create an unflappable expression.

  “Where’s my mother?” he asked.

  “Janice drove her home. I told her to get some rest.”

  He closed his eyes. “That’s good. I’m thirsty.”

  She offered him water from a cup, guiding the straw onto his colourless bottom lip. He thanked her. He began to say something but let out a moan. He tried again, with the same result. She realized that he only wanted to talk so he could hear other voices. She pulled up her chair and began to speak. First, she related the plotline of a TV show she’d watched the other night. One character reminded her of Siddhu. She relayed details of her last conversation with the reporter. She wished she had a book she could read to Rieux.

  He fell asleep. She drifted off too and woke up when Mrs Rieux arrived. Grossman followed her into the room with a bag that contained family photos and the iPhone charger that Tso had requested. Rieux was awake and looked comfortable. He had adjusted the bed so he was sitting upright.

  “It’s just a lull,” he told them.

  Rieux spoke as though he were holding an invisible stopwatch as he raced through his instructions. He explained that he wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered into the water at Locarno Beach. He did not want a funeral service. His will was located in a safety deposit box at his bank. He left some money for his mother’s care, but the rest would go to Elyse. There was also a small life insurance policy.

  He plowed through these orders, ignoring Tso and Mrs Rieux’s repeated pleas to relax. Rieux glared at Tso and told her she needed to write down his instructions. He could still make people do things. She removed her pen and some scrap paper from her bag. Finally, Rieux added, he needed Tso to contact Elyse.

  After the instructions were recorded, he relaxed. He asked his mother for water, then sipped it slowly from a straw.

  Tso’s iPhone was giving out. Grossman handed her the cellphone charger in a bag that also contained a notebook along with other hastily gathered items. Tso had seen Rieux jotting in the notebook in his car, and she’d noticed it on his dining-room table but had never been curious about its contents until she held it in her hands.

  She flipped it open and saw their names. “What is this?” Tso asked Rieux.

  He grimaced. “A hobby.”

  “Why do you refer to everyone by their last name?” she asked.

  “To be impartial.”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t work.”

  Rieux told her not to read it. He was not done yet. He feared that he wouldn’t ever be done. “Someone needs to tell it,” he told her. “Otherwise it will recede in memory. The way we forget everything. You should write it.”

  She frowned in dismay. “I would turn it into something else. Raymond would want to look at it too.” He reached for the notebook, trying to take it back. In doing so, he dragged one of the lines from the machine. “This part with Siddhu, for instance—”

  Mrs Rieux had a way of innocently interrupting others. Since her command of English was basic, she often tuned out conversations and forgot to wait for a proper break in a chat before voicing a thought.

  “Megan,” she said in Cantonese, “you should go home and rest.” She took the notebook from her. “I will keep this for now.”

  Tso walked back to Grossman’s house. She was relieved to have shed her latex gloves, which irritated her skin. She removed her face mask and took in the moist air. A heavy rain had fallen the night before, warming the ground. At Grossman’s, she showered, changed, and ate a sandwich. She had never gotten around to charging her phone. When she returned to the hospital, Rieux’s face was obscured by a respirator. His eyes widened when he saw her. She saw his lips moving. He began to cough. She went to the bed and took his hand.

  His fingers looked as though they’d been powdered in coal dust.

  “He started babbling shortly after you left,” Grossman explained. Her eyes were swollen. “Then he started coughing. There was blood.”

  He looked like someone riding a roller coaster. His other hand was by his side, balled into a fist. He looked ahead into the distance, beyond the room’s glass partition, as though he was gaping at some great drop that he was inching toward.

  They tried their best to soothe him. Mrs Rieux wiped his brow with a towel. Tso held her hand over his on the railing. Grossman played music from his iPhone: singer-songwriters with acoustic guitars and harmonicas—Bob Dylan and the Band, Richie Havens, the McGarrigle sisters, Hayden, and Gillian Welch.

  Tso had researched end-of-life ceremonies for her book, and during her stint with the Sanitation League, she’d joined hands with family members and priests in prayers and last rites for the dying. She wished that they, if not Rieux himself, could have taken comfort in these rituals. She knew they would be an affront to him.

  A doctor came and consulted with a nurse. They decided that Rieux required heavy sedation. His medication was increased, and soon he slumped in rest. She looked at one monitor. She needed a nurse to explain that his blood pressure was dangerously low.

  Tso and Grossman decided they should eat. They made salad bar plates and bought bottled water in the cafeteria, then sat by the windows that looked out on a set of grey concrete apartment buildings.

  “I don’t think he’s going to make it,” Grossman said.

  Tso looked down at her lap. “He’s fighting. I wish I were more optimistic.”

  “This is triggering memories of my dad. Only this is worse. Maybe it’s worse because it’s happening now.”

  Rieux spent the rest of the day unconscious. His hands grew as dark as eggplants as the infection grew.

  “We need to let him pass,” Castello said when she came at ten. “He knew what the risks were. I don’t think he expected to last through it all.”

  Grossman took Mrs Rieux back home. Tso remained in a chair. She was supposed to call them should his condition take its final turn.

  Tso was woken up by a howling sound. Rieux’s eyes were open but unfocused. She rose and took his blackened hand, but he did not respond to her presence. He shrugged away from her and rolled to his side. He made a noise that grew thinner as the air left his watery lungs for the last time. And then the noise stopped, like a string on a musical instrument that had snapped.

  Tso called Grossman, who had stayed with Mrs Rieux. They arrived quickly, as though they had been waiting in another room. It was not yet six o’clock in the morning and still dark outside. The three women wept over Rieux with all the energy they had reserved. They knew this would be the last person they needed to mourn. There was nothing to hold back. Mrs Rieux addressed him by all his childhood pet names, stroking his hair. With all the regret of someone who had withheld a desire until the opportunity had passed, Tso yearned to embrace Mrs Rieux.

  She remembered her own mother’s funeral for the first time in a quarter century. Her mother lay in an open casket, eyes closed, and Tso saw with a surprise that she was wearing makeup. This was not her mother, and yet when they closed the casket, Tso needed to be held back from it.

  Rieux’s body was already starting to stiffen, but Tso ran her latex-covered fingers over his knee. She cupped his upper arm and brushed his cheek.

  And then Tso kissed him through her face mask. A nurse walked in and screamed at her to stop.

 
25.

  Given these hints, some might have already suspected the true identities of our authors. With this story coming to an end, it is time to tear away our masks.

  Megan Tso and Raymond Siddhu, the two of us, collaborated on the completion of the project based largely upon the notebooks of Bernard Rieux.

  We discussed many different approaches to this chronicle. That we settled on telling our respective stories, along with Rieux’s, in one braided narrative by no means suggests that it has been a seamless process. As the reader can tell from our authorial interjections, disputes arose as we stitched together this book in separate cities between other obligations.

  We also felt inclined to openly disagree with or contextualize some of the statements that Rieux made, as his views—though he shied away as much from the term “libertarian” as he did from any other label—could offend readers who might otherwise find him sympathetic. Rieux’s beliefs never hardened into dogma, and he was always receptive to our thoughts on social justice even if he never fully accepted them.

  Rieux’s writing style was clinical and based only on his firsthand experience. We chose to honour (for the most part) his formal constructions and his arm’s-length treatment of his characters. His notebook effectively formed the skeleton of this book.

  The late doctor wrote about his reflections during the outbreak and quarantine but refused to speculate on what the other figures in his story felt or thought. We decided that we could deepen the impact of this chronicle if we each brought to the story our own personal moments and excavated inner lives. As Rieux wrote between exhausting double shifts, we also suspect that—given the time—he might have infused more of his own interior life to the story upon revision.

  Since some of Rieux’s accounts are only fragmentary, we each tried to fill in the gaps in his narrative using our own specific skills. Siddhu brought to the story his reporting background as he interviewed the minor figures in this piece and checked details. Tso pored over the literary works that Rieux was reading and quoting from in his notebooks. She overlaid scenes that were originally written in an objective voice with some of Rieux’s more philosophical ruminations. The omission of most medical details was Rieux’s choice, as he found his own work the least interesting (and possibly, the most dispiriting) aspect of this period.

  Any history contains contradictions. This one had relatively few of them. And this was entirely the result of Dr Bernard Rieux and his steadfast eye. We attempted to honour him in our efforts.

  We only resist calling him a hero because Rieux loathed the term. He would say that he could have acted in no other way.

  We are bound to the objective truth: he was a doctor, a son, a husband, and our friend.

  Many histories benefit from distance. Our collaboration to complete this book, while written in spurts, began shortly after the quarantine was lifted.

  The end occurred on the third Sunday that March. When the gates opened at midnight, fireworks were lit across the city—above Coal Harbour, from its highest point in Queen Elizabeth Park, and in backyards, alleys, and unlit parks. Tso was reminded of how loud it was when she’d first arrived in Vancouver that past October.

  Siddhu rode in on the SkyTrain on the following Monday. He kept his gaze fixed on the list of stops, even though he could recite them from memory, eyes closed, backwards and forwards. He walked to the coffee bar by the Art Gallery. In only a couple of days, the city had already returned to normal. There were neither too many nor too few people.

  Tso was waiting for him with a latte. She put down our coffees and we embraced with the gusto of people who no longer worried that physical contact could kill us.

  “How much time do you have?” Tso asked.

  Siddhu’s interview with the mayor wasn’t until the afternoon. Tso would fly out that night. She walked with her coffee in one hand, dragging her suitcase with the other. She suggested an ambitious jaunt, and Siddhu agreed to it after some hesitation. He looked forward to stretching his legs but admitted to being in terrible physical condition.

  She had seen the news alert on her phone as she waited for our coffees. We strolled up Robson Street. Storefronts remained papered over. In some shop windows mannequins were still arrayed in winter clothes from last year.

  We finished our coffees as we entered the Park and walked along the Seawall like proper tourists. There was already a group of people assembled by the Brockton Point Lighthouse.

  “I’ve been waiting an hour,” one bearded onlooker in a jean jacket told us.

  The transient pod, eight whales in total, was spotted early in the morning from Deep Cove and had made it as far as the Second Narrows Bridge. They were hunting seals. They needed to double back to return to the open ocean.

  The air became brisk as we stood by the water—neither Siddhu nor Tso had dressed properly. We spoke about Rieux’s notebook, in part because everything that lay ahead for each of us was so provisional. Like many in the city, we also felt the events of the last few months haunting our consciousness. We needed to talk about it, to inscribe it, to externalize it. Otherwise these events lingered dormant in our bodies, like the bacterium, waiting for an opportunity to re-emerge.

  “Did you really have that conversation in the car with Bernard?” Tso asked.

  “Which one?” he said, pursing his mouth.

  “You know. I can tell you know.”

  His eyes misted over. “It did happen,” he said at last. “Were you surprised?”

  “Does it matter?” she asked.

  We were caught up in this particular speculation about missed opportunities when we heard gasps from the onlookers who had brought their telescopes and binoculars. We took our places along the stone lip of the wall. The whales came porpoising along the surface of the water as if performing for the whale-watching boats that followed them. A drone drifted up above them, looking silly as they always did. When it crashed into the water, we cheered.

  Siddhu had lived all his life in the city and had never seen orcas this close. As a teenager, on a ferry to Vancouver Island, he chose to remain in his seat reading The Stand when the ferry captain announced that orcas had been spotted. Tso had only seen orcas bouncing beach balls on their snouts at Sea World.

  “Aren’t you glad we did this?” she asked Siddhu.

  Tso chose to believe that the orcas were a sign. They arrived to celebrate her last day in Vancouver. She was reminded of one of the final entries in Rieux’s notebooks. It was a definition of a cetacean-specific term used casually by Dr Orla Castello as a metaphor for the final throes of the outbreak.

  A lobtail: when a whale slaps its flukes (the lobes of its tail) against the surface of the ocean, Rieux wrote in his diary. The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

  Megan Tso waited for the whales to swim past them. She waited. She waited. The whales became specks in her vision, only their dorsal fins clearly visible.

  Right before she lost hope, one of those orcas raised its tail in the air and splashed the surface of the water. It was far away, but she could hear the clap in her heart. Goodbye, for now.

  Acknowledgments

  My wife Holly.

  My students at UBC and SFU, but especially my fiction cohorts at The Writer’s Studio.

  John Li, Tom Hunter.

  Arsenal Pulp Press: Brian Lam, Susan Safyan, Cynara Geissler, Robert Ballantyne, Oliver McPartlin.

  The BC Arts Council and the Canada Council.

  Albert Camus.

  PHOTO: ANDREW QUERNER

  Kevin Chong is the author of six books, including the memoir My Year of the Racehorse and the novel Beauty Plus Pity. His work has been shortlisted for the Hubert Evans Prize for Non-Fiction and a National Magazine Award. His writing has recently appeared in the Walrus, the Rusty Toque, and Cosmonauts Avenue. His books have been published in Canada, the US, France, Australia, and Macedonia. He teaches at the University of British Columbia’s Creative Writing Program and The Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser Unive
rsity. Born in Hong Kong, he lives in Vancouver with his family.

  kevinchong.ca